Proving the Obviously Untrue

Swan Heated Tray repair

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:40:51 +0000

We have a nice Swan Heated Tray courtesy of my Mum. It's useful for lots of things, heating plates for dinner and then placing serving dishes on it, or for keeping a stack of pancakes warm on Sunday. Unfortunately it stopped working recently. The red power LED still lit when power was applied but no heating. Google produced no answers (which is why I'm writing this for anyone following a similar trail). The helpline couldn't help, and theoretically the tray was under warranty, but with no receipt we couldn't follow their advice to return it to the store. So I had to fix it myself.

You should obviously think twice before messing around with something (a) electrical and (b) which generates large amounts of heat. Please don't kill yourself or burn your house down, that will make us both feel really bad.

The tray is fitted with triangular screws which reinforces my comments above, but not having previously purchased some triangular screwdrivers, these were next to be acquired. I figured they might come in useful for something else in the future.

Taking the device apart shows that basically it's quite simple, there are some blocks through which elements do the heating, a lot of glass fibre (so wear gloves) to protect the underneath from the blocks.

The inside of the tray. You can see the connections on the two right most blocks where I removed the section of cabling that was not working.

There are also a number of polythene covers to hold the corners of the blocks, though it seems a few were missing. There was no obvious fuse much to my surprise and irritation. A bit of testing with a continuity tester showed that a particular loop of cable was no longer doing its job. I pulled it out, and pulled back some insulated sheathing to reveal the culprit fuse.

The culprit

Replacement fuses can be obtained here. I teased upon the crimps with a precision screw driver and fitted the replacement, crimping it very firmly back in place. Then it was a matter of putting it all back together and testing it was appropriate safety measures in case of problems. All working again.

Gnome 3, or Gnome Shell issues

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:35:36 +0000

I use the Debian operating system on several computers. My "main" computer (Imladris) runs Debian unstable (Sid) while the others mostly run on testing. I've been anticipating the Gnome 3 upgrade for some time, mainly because of the switch to Gnome Shell which is a completely new way of using the desktop. I had played with Gnome Shell a while ago, and was kind of impressed and worried by it in equal measure, I decided it wasn't ready for prime time so stopped using it. Naturally I assumed it would be much more impressive upon release; especially since Debian is not (by far) the first GNU/Linux distribution to include Shell.

A while ago a big upgrade came through on imladris, and it was clear it was the Gnome 3 upgrade. I share this computer with three other users, two of which are children for whom I have implemented password less login (locally only). I can only say I think Gnome have significantly mishandled the upgrade. Here are some reasons why.

Login is seriously slow

The display manager can take up to a whole minute to display the list of users (and often doesn't display the icons). There are some bug reports about a possible race condition that causes this, but seriously on a reasonable spec computer this is unacceptably slow. The same problems occurs when switching user.

I couldn't login

My, admittedly old user account simply wouldn't launch a working desktop. I had to (at a command prompt) delete configuration directories to get my account working again.

Absolutely zero support for the user in transition

So the average user does the upgrade and suddenly their entire desktop has changed. But when they first login there will be some guidance about where everything is gone... right? No. Having already used Shell, I knew, but I had to try and show everyone else how to use the machine again. It's not that spectacularly intuitive.

Actually, a lot of functions have just gone

There's a huge removal of existing functionality. All your carefully tweaked panels: gone. All your applets: gone. And bizarrely often with no working alternative.

Not friendly for children

It was possible to set up a Gnome 2 account to make it easy for kids. Low res graphics, and big panels with big select icons. The new paradigm completely ignores all that in favour of a sleek minimalist environment which is probably not that easy for young children to understand.

Dictatorial design choices

It's been decided that we don't need minimise buttons or maximise buttons. It's been decided not to honour old desktop backgrounds. It's been decided not to honour existing resolution settings. It's been decided not to show anything on the Desktop (much to the confusion of many users). It's been decided we can't right click on the desktop.

Some of this kind of nonsense is exactly why I don't like some other operating systems who believe they know what's best for you with Messianic Zeal (I'm looking at you Apple).

All in all I find this transition very disappointing. There are lots of basic things no-one seems to have thought of, and years of desktop customisation have been swept away with an extraordinary arrogance. Don't get me wrong, I support the idea of trying a new Desktop paradigm: but, for instance, if people used to have applets on their desktop for the weather, or for system monitoring, it's because they needed it. Rolling out a new desktop that simply ignores these things in favour of how some people thing everyone should use their desktop is exasperating.

I'm seriously hoping that Gnome Shell improves significantly and fast. I won't hold my breath.

Multi User Sound in GNU/Linux

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:42:28 +0000

For some years now, basically since Aimee became old enough to use a computer, I have had a need for decent multi-user sound. Specifically I would often have intricate work open in multiple work spaces on my desktop, and Aimee would want to do some artwork.

I guess Aimee was about two when she started using my computer a fair bit, and I immediately had a separate account for her with lower resolution graphics, easier menus, simple shortcuts and the like. I also had a graphics tablet for her, which she mastered very quickly. Another important reason to have a separate account was that if stuff got really badly messed up I could just nuke the account and start again, and she couldn't really hurt my configuration.

As you would imagine, lots of the excellent free software for children, like GCompris, and Tuxpaint is very rich in its sound effects, and sometimes the sound is not just desirable, but essential for the activities. So a very annoying persistent problem has been that, once in a while, something in the sound stack in my login would stop Aimee's sound from working.

Now I share my main PC with two other people, Tamsin and Aimee, and soon Matilda too, so this recurrent problem is more of an issue, it's also very hard to nail down. Despite protests to the contrary the default ALSA setup still has this problem; ConsoleKit on its own doesn't seem to get it quite right. I tried PulseAudio for a while, and generally it was an improvement, but the problem did still occur sometimes. I even made sure all the users were members of the right groups including pulse-rt.

Then I found this entry in the PulseAudio FAQ.

Sound doesn't work when switching users

PulseAudio works with a single user, but when an additional user logs in (fast user switching), sound/audio does not work for the additional user.

Check that no users are part of the "audio" group.

In simple setups (e.g. singe user, without PulseAudio), users must be a member of the "audio" group to access the sound devices (/dev/snd/* (which have group "audio" write permissions)). Switching users will not automatically stop programs using those sound devices though, so those sound devices will not be accessible to a new (faster user switched) user's programs.

By removing all users from the "audio" group (the PulseAudio server still runs in the "audio" group), PulseAudio is able manage access to sound devices (/dev/snd/*) amongst multiple users with the help of ConsoleKit.

It would never have occurred to me to remove the users from the audio group, but doing so seems to have solved the problem. I almost don't want to say that, because every "solution" up to now has been partial, but so far no problems, so maybe this will be the fix.

Rooting and Upgrading the HTC Desire

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:23:00 +0000

I have been asked by a few friends to document how I did this. All the information is derived from elsewhere and its currency may be limited. Trying to root and flash phones is potentially dangerous. You need to take your time and consider what you are doing carefully. If you break your phone, you own the pieces. This worked for me, but I can make no guarantees. You get the idea.

Read the whole article before you start please.

The HTC Desire is a lovely phone, but it has two pretty annoying flaws. First of all the battery life isn't great, but that's not what this article is about, and secondly, the internal memory is very limited. I thought when I got the phone that Froyo would save me because it had apps2sd. Apps2sd allows you to move applications from the internal memory to the SD card, but it has some serious limitations:

apps with widgets and some other bits won't work properly from SD
many apps only partially move to SD
some huge apps won't move at all (I'm looking at you Google).

The ROM images I was getting, from Google to HTC to O2 were out of date, and they clearly didn't even care about fixing some significant issues (like the broken authentication in the HTC Peep program). This wouldn't matter because you could install a decent twitter client if you had the memory... oh... you get the idea. I was rapidly having to remove apps hand over fist with every upgrade, and my Daughter was complaining about their absence. So I decided to sort it out.

Some ROM images have the rather different data2sd. This allows you to treat part of your SD card as the internal memory of the phone. This makes a crucial difference, no messing about partially moving to "SD", but allowing a large amount of memory to be treated as internal.

Step Zero: You will need

This process will take some time, during which you won't really be able to use your phone. Make sure you have time. If it works you will have to do some work setting some things back up, it will to some extent be like having a new phone; some work can be done to minimise this. See below.
For this to work you will need a half decent SD card. Mine is a class 6, 8G card. The class information is written in the card in a number with a circle on it, and has to do with the speed of the card. Class 2 will apparently be painful. Class 4 is apparently fine. But I already had class 6. Get a decent card.
Some means of mounting the card on your PC, usually an SD to micro SD adapter.
Possibly a blank CD, and some spare Hard Disc space for backups.

Step One: Backup Your Phone.... Really

Even if this all works it will be like having a new phone to some extent, so expect to do some setup again. If you don't have time, don't start. Backup your phone. I had Backup PRO which I used to backup everything. I did this to the SD card this time, but actually, I should have done it online instead (or as well). I'll explain why later. Backup PRO wasn't free, but it was cheap and has been more than worth it for me. I've used it several times.

Now backup your SD card. Either mount it as a drive or take it out of the phone and put it in your adapter or whatever. Copy everything to your PC as files (in the past I've used dd, but this is not needed).

Step Two: Root Your Phone

At some points in the past this has been very tricky, but this was easy this time. I went to the Unrevoked website, and downloaded the software to flash the phone. Follow the instructions carefully and read all the guidance. Click on the Desire, and your OS, and download what's needed (some extra drivers for Windows please note). I was using Debian GNU/Linux at the time.

Turn on "USB Debugging" (Menu >> Settings >> Applications >> Development) on the phone, and then plug the phone in (leave it as charge only when it prompts you). Run the software, wait, and in a few minutes your phone should reboot with ClockworkMod and root access. Note some people suggest you need to run the program on your PC as root, I did need to do so.

Step Three: Check you can access recover mode

For some reason I couldn't do this with the volume buttons on power on, so I did the following. Power off the phone. Hold the "back" (hardware button) down. Now press power on. You will get to the Bootloader screen. By using the power button you can run the Bootloader. This brings another menu and (after some patience) allows you to move up and down with the volume buttons until you pick "Recovery". Now press the power button again. When the phone reboots it will be into recovery mode. Peruse the options, see that you can navigate with the optical trackball and the back button.

Step Four: Possibly install a ROM manager

Now you can pick an alternative ROM of your choice. But this article following on below is specific to the Supernova ROM.

I installed ROM Manager (and it's cheap but not free upgrade) to allow me to download ROMs and flash them, and I flashed Cyanogen... but I didn't like it. I did it for old time's sake and much as I tried to bring myself to like it I found I missed the HTC Sense stuff (that surprised me). You can experiment with all of this. I strongly recommend you opt to wipe user data on a major ROM change, the phone will probably hang if you don't when you reboot, and you'll have to get into recovery mode anyway and do it there.

Step Five: Get the ROM files

The ROM I went for was Supernova since essentially it's a good, HTC Sense oriented, Gingerbread based ROM with the data2sd extra. In other words, you get newer Android goodies with much the same user experience, but don't have to worry so much about the memory. You need to sign up to the website and then go to the download links and get the ROM and data2sd installer. Copy them to your hard disc for now.

Step Six: Prepare your SD card

For the data2sd to work, you need to prepare your SD card with a FAT32 partition (for general use) followed by an ext4 partition (for use as internal memory). Don't panic if you're not a Linux user. There is a way to do this for you.

In Debian, I installed gparted. I then put the SD card in its adapter and in the machine. The machine may mount it automatically... make sure you unmount it before proceeding. Run gparted and follow on below.

If you are using another OS, get the GParted live CD.

Follow these instructions carefully.

Make sure the GParted is accessing the correct device in the pull down before you start, make sure the disc space in front of you looks correct. YOU DO NOT WANT TO ACCIDENTALLY REPARTITION YOUR COMPUTER'S HARD DISC. TAKE YOUR TIME. Personally I went for about 7000 MB on FAT32 and the remainder for my ext4 partition.

Get out of GParted, back into your regular environment (close GParted, reboot or whatever). Now copy your SD card backup (remember that, right?) back onto the card. Finally copy the two ZIP files from the Supernova website (the ROM and data2sd installer) into the root of the SD card. Dismount the card and put it in your phone.

Step Seven: Install the ROM and data2sd bits

I recommend you read and follow the official instructions carefully from here in. Note I didn't bother with the radio code because I was confident it was already very recent. Follow the instructions very carefully to be sure the data2sd will work correctly... note there are a few very specific things you must do and must not do in between boots.. Basically you need to use reovey mode to do a factory reset, navigate to the ROM ZIP and install, reboot, change a few settings, back to recovery, navigate to the data2sd ZIP, install, reboot.

Step Eight: Restore as needed

You should now have loads of space in internal memory. Check in Menu >> Settings >> Applications >> Storage.

I then put in my Google credentials and restored everything after downloading Backup PRO again. Because my backup was on the SD and it was copying to SD, it was slow. I recommend using the online option. Be patient, if you are restoring call logs and SMS messages it will take time, do not navigate away. Wait for it to finish and immediately restart. Think twice about copying "settings", I always worry it will cause the newer ROM to cease. Your mileage may vary.

Tau versus Pi

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:32:15 +0000

Today, two of my friends independently sent me a story about Tau Day which I had hitherto never heard of. One of them asked for me comment about whether this had any point to it. At first I thought the article was just mathematical trolling, thought about it a bit more, thought there might be a real point to it, thought some more and concluded it seemed rather silly.

The argument is about whether the mathematical constant pi, would be better being replaced throughout mathematics with an alternative tau, which is just twice pi (in other words, replacing pi everywhere with a half of this tau). It's suggested that formulae with tau will be more simple.

Basic Geometry

So this is all about the fact that pi was defined historically as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of the circle, a very old classical reference stemming back to Greek geometry (incidentally pi is also known as Archimedes' constant since he attempted to calculate an approximation to it). Once upon a time, the formula used in schools would have been:

related the circumference C to the diameter D. But generally now, we use the radius r rather than the diameter. And so that gives us (for circumference and area):

The argument for tau begins by observing the extra 2 in the first formula, and wouldn't be nicer if we just defined tau to be twice pi so that these formula would be so much nicer. Would they?

Set aside for the moment the fact that pi is probably the most recognisable Greek letter in the world that speaks languages based on the Latin alphabet (aside from those that are, or appear to be the same). Set aside the fact that tau is used for other specific purposes in much of modern Mathematics, and in particular in the discipline of Topology. The first formula might be nicer, but the second one is probably worse, and by enough to make the improvement of the first rather parlous. OK. But the article talks about this being the problem behind radians, so maybe that's where we get the big gain. Let's explore that.

Radians instead of Degrees

There's nothing particularly clever about using degrees. It's an arbitrary choice (360 degrees in a circle) that probably owes a lot to do with historical factors in one civilisation. It is true that when you start to do some significant mathematics with degrees, it starts to look quite unwieldy. The classic two formulae to consider are the length of an arc and area of a sector.

Suppose we have a circle of radius r and we want to work out the length of an arc (a part of the circumference) where the angle subtending this arc is theta degrees (don't panic, no more Greek to come). Then in degrees the formula will be:

The reason why is that the fraction on the left is the fraction of the relevant angle out of all the angle available, multiplied by the total arc length available (the whole circumference). The formula is not beautiful, and the similar formula for sector area is also a big ugly.

You will note that in both cases there is a 360 on the bottom of the fraction and a 2 pi on the top. This looks like nature's way of trying to tell us something. What would happen if we used an unit of angle so that, instead of having 360 of them in a circle, we had 2 pi of them in a circle (proponents of tau will just say tau of them in a circle)? The formula, derived using the same logic, become much nicer.

So we get

Now these are beautiful, elegant formulae, and the underpinning of why radians (the unit of angle we are talking about here) are used instead of degrees in much of higher mathematics, the formula are much simpler (particularly true when using calculus). Also, look at that first formula, it has all the resonance of F = ma. 1 unit of arc length is found in a circle of radius 1 unit with an angle of 1 radian. So beautiful is this that it used as the definition of the radian in many books. So far, so good. Did we really need tau to produce these? Does it matter that it it tau and not pi that cancels out? I can't see why.

Fourier Series

Another example owes to the work of Fourier, who showed that repeating patterns can be broken into sums of the most basic repeating functions, the ones that are most simple are the sine and cosine functions. These are used to model waves of any sort which are of course ubiquitous in nature. It turns out you can build up more odd shapes like triangular and square waves out of these sinusoidal ones. Being able to do this is important in many aspects of Science and Engineering, and eventually this theory leads to all sorts of cool stuff like the way data is compressed in photos and more.

The graphs of Sine and Cosine (sin t and cos t)

This graph is labelled in degrees, so you can imagine if we change it to radians as we should then the 360 would become 2 pi. This is where again, proponents of tau will argue that replacing the 360 with a simple tau makes things easier. And it does, if all you want to do is to label that diagram. But the foundation of Fourier theory is building functions up in combinations of these:

The formulae you need to be able to deal with to do this are (among others):

which I grant, strike fear into the hearts of many. But they don't look nicer with tau (and are a little more awkward):

Remember, the people arguing for tau are claiming it simplifies formulae, not making them look worse.

Euler's Identity

Finally, I cannot leave this without talking about Euler's identity considered by most mathematicians (including myself) to be one of the most beautiful results in Mathematics.

This result can be written in a few ways, but this way is very commonly used. This is because in this form you can see how this identity connects the five most important numbers of Mathematics: 0, 1, pi, i and e. With tau, it just doesn't have the same beauty:

so I will stick with pi. Thanks all the same.

The Academic Descent to Me

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:29:17 +0000

How interesting, today I learned that Derek Burgess, the PhD supervisor of my PhD supervisor (Brian McMaster) was himself supervised by Frank Smithies. With a little help from the Mathematical Genealogy Project this has helped me work out my academic "parentage".

Colin Turner, Queen's University of Belfast, 1997
Brian McMaster, Queen's University of Belfast, 1972
Derek Burgess, University of Cambridge, 1951
Frank Smithies, University of Cambridge, 1937
G. H. Hardy, University of Cambridge
Edmund Whittaker, University of Cambridge, 1895
Andrew Forsyth, University of Cambridge, 1881
Arthur Cayley, University of Oxford / University College Dublin / Universiteit Leiden, 1864,1865,1875
William Hopkins, University of Cambridge, 1830 (Note his many famous students)
Adam Sedgwick, University of Cambridge, 1811
Thomas Jones, University of Cambridge, 1782
Thomas Postlethwaite, University of Cambridge, 1756
Stephen Whisson, University of Cambridge, 1742
Walter Taylor, University of Cambridge, 1723
Robert Smith, University of Cambridge, 1715
Roger Cotes, University of Cambridge, 1706
Isaac Newton, University of Cambridge, 1668
Isaac Barrow, University of Cambridge, 1652
Vincenzio Viviani
Galileo Galilei, University of Pisa

I think I'll stop there. I found this absolutely fascinating, many notable figures, and Hopkins supervised many famous figures. It's a shame I could never hope to live up to such a line!

Heaven gets an Audit

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:27:39 +0000

This is a whimsical storyline I knocked out this morning. If you don't know much about HE (Higher Education) or the QAA it may not mean anything to you. Indeed, you might need to know a little bit about the Metatron. and some other Judeo/Christian theology to follow this. Absolutely no offence is intended to anyone!

There was a polite knock on the door. The Metatron looked up from his desk and bade the guest to enter. And so Michael, Field Marshal of the Heavenly Host entered the room, a troubled look on his normally serene face.

“Peter says we have an unusual guest at the gates. He claims to be from something called the … QAA”, he said.
“The QAA?”
“Yes, some sort of Quality Assurance Agency.”
“And why are they here?”
“Apparently”, and here Michael paused for a moment, “they want to audit just how heavenly Heaven is...”
“What?”
“They say that there are some metrics which cast some doubt on the issue apparently.”
“But Heaven is the definition of perfection. How could anything be found wanting?”

Michael looked wretched for a moment.

“He's asking if this is so, how was it that we had... the Incident...?”
“What?”
“Well,... he's saying that if everything here is so great and perfect how come we have a … what were the words he used again? Oh yes.... a retention problem.”
“Retention?”
“Apparently yes, this is one of the metrics they use. They are apparently concerned that our “First Output” showed an “attrition rate” of a third”.
“Did you tell him about Free Will? That it's up to sentient creatures to choose their own path?”
“Yes”
“And?”
“He says everyone uses that excuse.”

The Metatron paused while he considered this.
“OK, so what next?”
“Apparently they want to see the figures to see if this is a one time “blip”, they are asking for our “Academic Plan” for the next output.”
“Oh dear...”
“Is that a problem?”

The Metatron thumbed through some documents on his desk.

“Apparently we only intend to “retain” 144,000 of our second output”.
“Out of how many?”
“Well, sort of, um, 100 billion and counting so far”.
“Isn't that an attrition rate of over 99.999%.”
“Yes,... do you think that will present a problem?”

The two angels considered for a moment, after a while, the Metatron cleared his throat again.

“Do you think we could classify purgatory as an exit award?”

HTC Desire versus Apple iPhone 4

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:29:13 +0000

I have both these phones. The HTC Desire is my personal phone, and runs Android (in this case Froyo, Android 2.2). I've been using Android for some time now, and regular readers will know I haven't been shy about commenting on its problems in the early releases. I also have, and have had for about the last month, an Apple iPhone 4, running iOS 4, for work. I've been promising some people a comparison.

Disclosure: I'm not really an Apple fan. From the moment I started to play with some in QUB, I disliked the single button, the cotton wool interface that kept you from "harming yourself", or doing anything deep. But I know that has changed somewhat, the latest Apple computers, while still having that fluffy exterior now have a decent operating system underneath. So I'm going to try to be as fair as I can be.

First a comment about the build quality. Both phones feel very similar both in the hand and in the pocket, the iPhone feels like it has a better build quality, but then you do expect solid hardware from Apple. Both phones have a button on the top to "wake" the device. Both have volume controls on the side. The iPhone has a nice feature of a slider button that mutes the device at one go; the Desire requires you to put the volume slider to zero (there are other ways, I know). The iPhone has one big button at the bottom, reminiscent of the one button mouse, and this is an area where the Desire wins hands down, with more physical buttons including the search, back button, the menu button, the home button and the optical trackball.

A note on the intuitiveness of the interface. Apple claims that their interface is so intuitive you don't need any instructions. I must say I find the Android (Desire) interface more intuitive, and when you start that phone for the first time, it walks you through the basics. Very helpful for beginners.

Anyway, time is short and some people are waiting on this review, so here's a potted comparison.

Feature	iPhone	Desire
Basic Interface	Uncluttered, but uninformative, no widgets, no live wall paper, no active folders. Dull, one size fits all. Switching between tasks and back again is inelegant. Notification of outstanding items is cleaner than standard Android.	Very rich, combinations of apps on the desktop, widgets and all the things mentioned by their absence for the iPhone. Much more personalised. Task switching, particularly the back button, is much more elegant. HTC Sense is nicer.
Phone	Disastrous. Frequently won't connect calls when my Desire will. There seems to be something else at play here and I've reported it. Both phones are on the same network BTW. It's more awkward to change numbers on the fly and many other things. But it's very pretty.	Much improved in Android over the last few versions, the ease of dialling, changing numbers is much better. Finding contacts to dial is much easier and faster. Oh, did I mention it works?
Voicemail	Fancy. Asks me to set it up every single time I turn on the phone. Recently while travelling, I couldn't pick up a voicemail because of this for about an hour, by which time I was sitting with the caller.	Not Fancy. Works all the time.
Workplace	The stock mail client is very pretty, and for example, links to appointments easily (but makes it hard to see if you are free). It has limited threading support which is really nice.	The Android exchange support is, in my opinion, superior. It lacks threading, but does have follow up support, which I take to be vastly more important.
Apps	Legendary, but there are relatively few free quality apps. For example, I struggled (still haven't) found a decent calculator (not the built in one) that is free. I find the market app rather clunky. Can't find any decent external exchange apps that work.	Many problems with the Market were fixed in Froyo, the apps available seem to be broader in nature, and many more are free (my perception). Choice of several exchange apps, more fully featured than iOS.
Software Keyboard	Simple, elegant, but frustratingly difficult to type complex content, having to change layouts all the time.	More cluttered, but actually as easy to use, better word prediction, less switching between layouts.
Battery Life	Initially winning hands down, but now hogging battery like no tomorrow, can't make it through an average day. I don't know what's causing the problem and so I'm just deleting apps all over the show.	Vastly improved over other phones, still an issue, but actually appreciating it more after the iPhone
Music	Very pretty. iTunes integration. This is also the problem. A cheap player I bought for my Daughter allows me to just dump music on it and it works. What I had to go through to get Music onto the iPhone because of my unusual setup, well, it wasn't easy. Oh, and by the way. iTunes sucks. I mean really... disastrous, but with no alternative.	Bulk device, you can just copy the music on and it works. Plays music just as well as the iPhone, in fact better because the former occaisionally and inexplicably stops. Wide variety of music players.
Video		Flash.
Web	Browser is probably prettier than Android's and allows more Tabs, seems to be slower though.	Native Flash is an advantage here too.
Notifications	Really dreadful, and a well known problem in the Apple community. Poorly handled, and when they pop up, and you go to use the phone the notification is just gone.	Elegant system that allows multiple notifications each of which take you straight to the issue. Persist, unobtrusively, until dismissed.
Calendaring / Time	Automatically setting the time to the wrong time since the clocks changed. Manually fixing this makes calender entries wrong. Setting it back to automatic makes the time wrong again.	Google Calendar back end more open than Exchange. Exchange functionality built in too. Minor quibble, cannot change the colour of the Exchange calendar. Date / Time works. Minor quibble, on a non rooted device you can't use ntp for ultra correct times. Can't on the iPhone either as far as I know.
Oddities	My laptop supplies power out of USB while it's off. I use this to charge my Desire if need be. The iPhone requires the whole machine to be on for it to charge the phone.	The power connector on my Desire seems to be a bit stretched, so if I'm not careful, it's not being charged. The Desire asks, when plugged in, whether it should charge, act as a disk, do internet tethering etc..

I'm honestly struggling to find an area where the iPhone wins hands down against its competitor. I can't think of one. I imagine if the iPhone is the only smart phone you are used to, it seems miraculous. It probably seemed that way against Android 1.1. But Android has grown up now, and it makes the iPhone look just stupid by comparison. I couldn't recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sorry.

By the way, I fully accept that perhaps when I get used to the iPhone I might come to love it more, but I'll be surprised.