Everyone’s got their favourite iPhone apps and so do we, so here (in no particular order) are ours (both free and paid):
What are yours?
Last night I headed over to an event being put on for the new Palm Pre in Covent Garden at The Hospital.
It basically consisted of free booze, two talks and then queueing up (with lots more free drinks) for a free unlocked Palm Pre to take home.
Whilst I have an iPhone 3GS and think it’s truly great (except no Flash, crap camera, no camera flash, and a battery that never seems to last long enough) I was very curious to see what the latest “iPhone killer” would be like. Especially after reading articles / reviews on both Mobile Industry Review and over at The Really Mobile Project so in to central London I headed (running late as per usual).
– The Talks
The first talk was by Charlie Luxton, you may well have seen him as the good looking chap hosting architecture shows on Channel 5. Anyway, he gave a really very interesting talk all about how technology, architecture and new thinking could improve society. Looking to nature for ideas as to new building materials / shapes (eg: self cleaning windows, 3D printers) such as the Lotus leaf, with a prickly surface (as opposed to smooth) it actually allows rain water to clean it and wash away dirt / fungus / etc…
The second talk was by Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital who are a VC company. Her talk was about how entrepeneurs are the way out of recession and for future wealth growth and job creation. She also believed that big government and a social state were bad for individuals and the country (although personally I think she couldn’t be more wrong, I see it as the sign of an enlightened society to look after those that are struggling). They invested in / involved with companies like Spinvox that was recently bought by Nuance after a lot of PR / press coverage that appeared to make their technology look rubbish, with the shareholder getting about £600 between them. Ouch. They were also involved in Ecademy which is a networking site for business. From my personal experience (a few years ago I accept) it seemed to have an awful lot of Life Coaches there and a lot of very desperate people that seemed to have not a lot and look like they were going to lose it very soon. I felt very uncomfortable at the events and stopped going after 2 or 3 of them (it then took me months to unsubscribe / delete my profile from the site and to stop getting all the emails) but that may well have all changed over the years since then.
Anyway, the first talk was the best (IMHO) by far, so if you see that Charlie’s going to be talking anywhere near you I’d recommend heading over to hear him speak.
So, on to the Palm Pre.
They have a rather nice little lifestyle website and I quite like the ‘Palm’ logo. After queueing for a little while (it was a popular event) we got to sit down and look / play with a Pre and ask a Palm person all about it. On my table it seemed to be very popular with the girls, especially if they currently had a Blackberry rather than an iPhone. And from listening in to others conversations it seemed that it was going down very well with the girls, they liked it’s size and feel, the Blackberry like “real” Qwerty keyboard and especially the mirror on the back that you see when you slide the phone open (although as it’s convex it’s not great, and this is a real wasted opportunity, and yes I appreciate it would’ve required the phone to be re-jigged slightly in terms of build but it would have been worth it).
The key feature they also wanted to see in it related to Facebook, “Is there an app for it like on the iPhone that allows you to use Facebook Chat?” – the answer, “at the moment no” but you could access it through their website, but this is far less slick than on an iPhone and didn’t seem to go down well at all. Again, a real wasted opportunity.
It does however have a camera that seems not bad at all and a reasonable Flash.
Flash (the internet plug-in not the bright light) itself doesn’t appear to work at the moment but we were told that an update coming in the next month or so should fix that – which would be nice to see. The Pre comes with 8GB memory, not a whopping amount by any reckoning but will at least hold a few tunes and pics.
The phone itself looks and feels really nice when it’s closed, but just looks ugly when you open it up. Pressing the physical keys make the plastic on the back of the handset move and it just feels cheap. But closed, it’s really pretty and fits in the hand really well.
The downside is the phone is really competing with the iPhone in terms of cost (on an 18 month / £35 contract it’s still £100 up front, with an iPhone at £189 upfront for the same monthly package – 600 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data). So basically it’s only £89 cheaper than an iPhone (and has half the storage as the iPhone starts at 16GB) and at that price difference you’re definitely going to just stump up the extra cash as the iPhone is just so much better.
I think personally it’s on a hiding to nothing as it won’t replace a Blackberry for the corporate warrior and it’s not nearly as good as an iPhone for those who aren’t lawyers.
Aimed squarely at the female market either as an alternative to the iPhone (that certainly feels bigger) or the Blackberry – or probably as their personal phone alongside their work Blackberry. With those changes in place I think it could have taken market share from the others and really could have been a contender, as it is, it isn’t.
It’s a nice phone, it’s just not nice enough to make you pick it over it’s big two competitors – so I’ll be sticking with my iPhone for the time being.
// Image: screenshot from the Palm website
Recently finished reading ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the science of persuasion‘ by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini – a great book in general but especially useful and interesting for those working in the marketing industry.
It’s a really easy read, with each of the ’50 Secrets’ taking up about 3 pages, so it’s perfect for dipping in and out of when you only have a few spare minutes (similar in style to other recent books like Freakanomics, also a great read). Each ‘Secret’ is both very interesting and has ideas and lessons that you can take away and implement easily in to your day-to-day work, and at less than £7, a bargain.
One of the constant joys of commercial life is sitting through PowerPoint presentations. Oooooh, I’m excited just thinking about the prospect of sitting through a 30mins+ presentation.
The reality is that PowerPoint is used because it’s ‘standard’ and people have no idea how to present information in any other format. It’s often used as a desktop publishing package to create content that’s more like a book than a presentation, which means that there’ll be far too much text on each page and it’ll be sleep inducing.
Whenever we’re putting together a PowerPoint presentation for a client, it’s got to be special – you want to excite and interest people, not let it blur in with all the others they’ve seen.
If you have to use PowerPoint for your presentations or top 5 tips would be:
Or in essence – Keep It Simple Stupid.
But also think if there’d be a better (more interesting and more memorable) way of presenting your information, in an unusual place or in an unconventional way (as long as it’s in someway connected to what you’re saying). PowerPoint isn’t the be-all and end-all of presentations.
There’s a great article on the problems with PowerPoint on the BBC website.
And also a great book about PowerPoint ‘The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within‘ by Edward R. Tufte.
Mmm… price aggregator sites (you know the ones I mean, where you can ‘compare the prices of every single car insurance vendor on the planet’ or similar) – don’t you just love them. For each sector, they all have the same companies / brands that they list, with practically no strategy for differentiation from their competitors (their sites also tend to look interchangeable apart from a logo). Love? Brand loyalty? Engagement? You must be joking, they’re a necessary evil.
That was until the ‘Meerkat’ strategy for ‘Compare the Market’, when all of a sudden someone (hats off to them) decided that they were fed-up of crap adverts for their industry (and brand) and created (along with their ad agency, VCCP I believe) something rather nice – and low, Aleksandr was born. Bye bye rubbish, super-cheap, nasty, boring adverts. Hello charming, funny and very very catchy ads that roll-out in to a campaign with real legs. Completely redefined the market’s advertising and branding (and I hope and suspect is very profitable for ‘Compare the Market’ too).
Now, everyone is trying to do something that might actually interst TV viewers (although ‘Meerkat’ works incredibly well across a whole range of media, especially engagement via digital – eg: Twitter, Facebook). All of which means I’m currenty seeing the new advert for ‘Go Compare’ in every single ad break on every channel I seem to be tuned in to. Sad to say, it’s not great (in fact it’s rubbish and very annoying to be precise, especially the ‘Tenor’ joke – groan), and the brief to the ad agency was clearly we want a ‘Meerkat’ – I feel for them I really do. I suspect my eyeballs will be fouled by more of these ‘Meerkat’ wannabes in the coming weeks / months, I only hope they’re better than this…
Claire Beale’s take on this over in the Media section of the Independent.
And follow the funny little critter himself on Twitter: @Aleksandr_Orlov