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Showing posts from July, 2025

Turns out I didn’t make the 1000!

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Just to announce that, after 17 years and 864 shows(!), I’m stepping down from the Phones Show Chat podcast and retiring. This very week has seen my wife retire and it seems right that I spend time with her, my daughter, my home (and dog!), rather than scrabbling around week after week to gather guests, gadgets, and stories. I'd planned to stop at show 1000, but I don't feel it's right to carry on for almost another three years. So, the obvious questions. Will PSC continue as an audio podcast? Quite possibly, but under Ted’s capable management, either under the current or a new name/form. I’ll put out a short audio form of this on the feed next weekend, for podcatcher subscribers who might not catch the ‘news’. Will I continue in the tech space? I’ll carry on with Phones Show Shorts on YouTube as and when I have something to say. Will the PSC MeWe forums continue? Absolutely. Ted is their creator and they are in his hands. Again, with possible name tweaks if needed. The ...

Why iOS though? 10 Reasons why - for me - it beats out Android

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Following my longer-than-expected ' how I came to iPhone in the 2020s story ' last week, I wanted to list the reasons why its human interface, iOS software and applications also play a part in keeping me from looking too hard at the Android competition... I should preface this list by saying that both iOS and Android operating systems have copied the best features from each other - and from other previous OS, including Windows Phone, Meego, Blackberry OS 10, and Web OS. For 90% of practical use, iOS and Android are now interchangeable and you can certainly set up your home screens and applications to mirror a setup that you might have had on the competing OS.  However that does leave the interesting 10%. So, away from mundanities like launching a web browser, running PIM and social media apps, watching YouTube and Netflix (etc), all of which are nigh identical on each OS, here are some of the reasons why, in 2025, I stay on the iPhone and iOS: 1. Face ID It's easy to say t...

My iPhone story. Enticed into iOS for the 2020s...

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I do get it in the neck from other geeks occasionally for using an Apple iPhone rather than, as many geeks do, an Android-powered smartphone. Now, in truth, I also own several Android phones too, but they're more playthings these days and keeping up with what Google is doing in the phone world, that being (or used to be, seeing as I'm now semi-retired!) my primary trade.  Now, between 2007 and 2015, I was a bit scornful of Apple's iPhones. They were either too small, too limited, too locked down (in terms of apps and files), had too poor a camera (certainly relative to my Nokia Series smartphones), or all of the above. And I maintain that I was right, compared to the competition, and despite the ambition of iOS in aiming for desktop-class performance.  But 2016 saw the ultra-cheap original iPhone SE and I bought one second hand to play around with and was rather impressed by how fast it was and by how well things just... worked. I set it up with my main accounts and had it...