Category: driving seat | 產品試用 | 시험 비행 | 製品トライアル

The driving seat in English has two definitions:

  1. The seat from which a vehicle is operated.
  2. A position of power, dominance, control, or superiority. The second naturally is derived from the first as a metaphor
I used driving seat as a metaphor about being in control, to discuss what a product is like to use. I looked at a range of products:
  • Skype back in 2004, before it became kludgey with a poorly designed interface under Microsoft ownership
  • Veoh – a video platform that was a native client and on the web that went head-to-head with YouTube. The better technology lost out
  • Yojimbo – a great information organisation software app by Bare Bones Software
  • Flip Video Camera – back before cameraphones were ubquitous flip provided an easy way to record and upload video to the web. It encouraged a lot of people to record vox pop video interviews for the nascent YouTube platform
  • The Bing search engine in a direct comparison to Ask.com
  • Sina Weibo
  • A retrospective on the Palm Vx PDA that was my dot.com era ride or die gadget
  • Early Casio G-Shock and Apple Watch smartwatches
  • Hemingway writing software
  • Casio G-Shock Frogman
  • A retrospective review of the Nokia n950
  • The Missing Manual series by David Pogue
  • Apple iPhone 12 Max

I have tried to avoid superlatives and give the perceptions of having lived with the products rather than having briefly tested them. Having run review programmes for Huawei and Palm, I understand how short hands-on sessions can be deceptive. Usually this isn’t by design, but due to supply issues; however it is worth bearing in mind when you read the latest review by professional pundits.

  • February 2024 newsletter – No.7

    February 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my February 2024 newsletter which marks my 7th issue. I hope that your year of the dragon is off to a great start.

    Strategic outcomes

    The number 7 is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on how you look at it. In the old testament, the 7th heaven is where God’s throne is, alongside the angels. It had been considered a place of happiness, hence Gwen Guthrie’s Seventh Heaven. In Mandarin, the number is considered generally a positive thing, the number is a homophone for ‘arise’ and ‘life essence’. But that’s only half the story.

    Chinese Ghost Story

    Indications of 7’s unlucky nature include the seventh month in the lunar calendar being a ‘ghost month’. In Cantonese, it is a homophone for a vulgar way of saying penis. I hope your February wasn’t a dick of a month. 

    For film buffs it’s almost 28 1/2 years since the transgressive crime thriller Seven was released. It was a break out hit and became the seventh highest grossing film of 1995, behind Die Hard with a Vengeance, Toy Story and Apollo 13. It beat out other films like Braveheart in box office earnings, but Braveheart ran away with the Oscars. 

    Let’s hope that feng shui master Michael Chiang is correct in terms of the positive energies from the year of the dragon.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Things I’ve written.

    • FOOH – and the ethical and marketing challenges it presents with a thought experiment harking back to the golden age of pornography.
    • Technonationalism – how current technological developments mirror the cold war and the 20th century Asian economic miracle.  
    • Innovation signalling – how innovation is used by brands for show, rather than for genuine progress.
    • Pipes by Yahoo – a remarkable web service that also causes us to reflect on the post modern web of today.
    • Hong Kong measurements – how something as simple as measurement units are a melding of culture, history, modernity and politics in a time of change.
    • Y2K was always more than a fashion phase, but it seems to have faded from the zeitgeist which means the fashion takes have no context. Here’s a bit of context for you.

    Books that I have read.

    • What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz. Fritz writes really, really well, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to complete his personal memoir about his upbringing, service in Afghanistan onboard an AC-130 gunship and depression. In some ways it reminded me of Jarhead – Anthony Swofford’s memoirs of his life up to the time of being in the US Marines during the first Gulf War. Swofford’s book came out a decade and a half after his service. Fritz’ book feels much more immediate and without the flashes of humour and beauty that was in Swofford’s book.
    • Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher. This was originally written in 2016, but has been updated to incorporate changes over subsequent years. It shows how government policy, ethnographic-nationalism, law enforcement, the legal system, collective punishment and community pressure is applied on modern women. I still find the content covering domestic violence shocking. This isn’t the China of Mao where in theory women hold up half the sky, instead it seems to be on a trajectory that would eventually see it closer to Mao’s view of China’s population, or Ceaușescu’s Decree 770 and other associated pro-natalist laws. This is a world away from the equally oppressive one-child policy, which had been brought in to deal with population related problems from the Mao-era.
    • The Big Book of Cyberpunk edited by Jared Shurin. I am huge fan of cyberpunks better known authors: William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling. This collection of 100+ stories written by authors from 25 countries is a mixed bag, but that’s no bad thing.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    J Walter Thompson Wunderman Thompson VML Intelligence launched their annual Future 100 report. It’s a great read and its continuity over the years makes it stand apart from the plethora of trends reports that get published every year. Their trends which intersect luxury and health are particularly interesting:

    • Althluxe
    • Bioharmonizing spas
    • Longevity resorts
    • Idyllic idleness

    Author Cory Doctorow’s essay for Locus magazine plays devil’s advocate in considering the future of the crypto-based ecosystem and artificial intelligence is well worth a read. Doctorow speculates on what kind of bubble artificial intelligence is likely to become and the effect that its deflation may have. He draws on the outcomes of tech bubbles in the past including the dot com bubble and the telecoms bubble that accompanied it.

    Just Conecting published a report on what seems to work on LinkedIn. It’s an interesting snapshot of what works at the moment, I am sure things will change over time as the algorithm evolves. Much of the focus seems to be orientated towards personal branding over business brands.

    Over at Japan House, I marvelled at the exhibition Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Sara River. The Ainu are native to Japan’s northern islands and have survived for millenia in the extreme cold. Historically they were discriminated against, but now there is an appreciation of their culture. The art pieces on display are unique in their design, but share the attention to detail one sees in other Japanese work.

    The Science Museum has an amazing exhibition on: Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: Clockwork Treasures from China’s Forbidden City. Prior to the opium wars, UK craftsmen created fantastic clockwork-powered creations that were given as gifts to the emperor of China. The exhibition finishes on June 2, 2024. I went during Chinese new year. I came away with a refreshed appreciation of modern watchmaking complications, in particular devices like ‘minute repeaters’.

    NS Lyons magnus opus The China Convergence is read by Regina Doman. Lyons’ premise is that western systems have converged with China’s approach to governance due to the rise of the technocrat. In this respect his perspective is similar to that shared by documentary maker Adam Curtis. Like Curtis, Lyons’ The China Convergence asks uncomfortable questions of us. Are we basically a less extreme version of the same system to the presses of mass and scale?

    While we’re talking China, I can recommend the China Update YouTube account that provides a concise summary of Chinese business news and economic analysis garnered from a wide range of Chinese and western business publications.

    Finally, IPSOS ongoing collection of reports this time reflects on the power of nostalgia. This time focusing on youth culture from cottage-core, Barbie mania, vinyl to vintage technical clothing and streetwear and the underlying drivers behind it. Why Nostalgia Is So ‘Fetch’ Right Now by Samira Brophy is well worth a read.

    2023 Global Trends Report by ACROSS Health is a great census of healthcare professional media preferences and insight into omnichannel communications trends for pharmaceutical marketing. It is good reading and indicates that pharma clients who have an excessive efficiency bias and want to go to digital-only customer journeys will be left behind by peers taking a mixed approach.

    Things I have watched. 

    Agent Hamilton – Carl Gustaf Hamilton is a Swedish answer to James Bond or Jack Ryan. Hamilton was the main character in a series of books written by a former investigative journalist, Jan Guillou, who served time in Sweden for exposing illegal intelligence operations. Guillou wrote the first Hamilton book in 1986 and the last one in 2012.

    Blake and Mortimer – if you’re a fan of TinTin, you’ll like Blake and Mortimer as both come from the French -Belgian comic tradition. This cartoon series is based on the adventures of an eminent Scottish scientist and a British military intelligence officer in mid-century Europe. It’s nice light entertainment and I can recommend the graphic novels as well of which there are now 30+ stories including the Before Blake and Mortimer off-shoots. The authors have also wrote other excellent series like XIII.

    Useful tools.

    Audio Hijack 4.3

    Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack has been a mainstay on my Mac for far more years than I care to mention. It was great for everything from recording conference talks to putting together quick and dirty talk tracks that concepting films can be cut too. Version 4.3 features OpenAI’s Whisper transcription software that can cater to transcribing dozens of languages. I have found it better than tools like Otter.ai for me.

    Krisp

    Krisp.ai is a freemium service providing intelligent noise cancellation, call transcripts and meeting notes all in one. It works with Teams, Google Meetup, Slack and Zoom.

    Obsidian

    Just like Evernote back in the day, Obsidian has become a bit of a cult app for those that find it really useful. At its heart, it is a note taking and writing application. It will sync between desktop and mobile devices, but that costs $8/month – which is expensive. I haven’t been using it beyond a quick trial, as I have a well-defined set of tools that I use and Obsidian didn’t really slot in well. But I can appreciate the value of it to others. One thing I would be leery of, if you are moving to Obsidian is the cottage industry in snake oils salespeople hawking the ‘ultimate’ online course for Obsidian. Instead check out Obsidian’s own community pages of courses.

    Todoist

    Todoist is a shareable to do list that places it somewhere between quick and dirty project management and personal productivity. I am giving it a try following a recommendation from a friend. It’s not about whether products like this are good or not, but usually if it fits into your style of working, so your mileage may vary.

    Personal Update.

    the adforum phnx 2024 jury badge

    More details on the awards here.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements (from the end of April onwards) or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done to date here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my February 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other.

    Don’t forget to share and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • Pebble

    It took me a little while to write this post on Pebble. Pebble was a start-up that looked to build a more civil microblogging platform than Twitter. Unfortunately it closed on November 1, 2023.

    tombstone

    It supported 280 character posts, replies and messages. The staff validated prominent users such as journalist accounts. The service had its own mascot rather like the famous Twitter fail whale; it was a snail called Herbert.

    Pebble.is

    It was the little touches in the user interface that most impressed me when I first started using it, like the ‘radio button’ functionality that showed you what mode you were using the service in. In the screen shot above you can see how the profile icon on the left is filled out to show I was looking at my profile.

    The Pebble community

    The founders set out to build a community that more resembled early Twitter than the reactionary discussion dominated platform of today. Along the way they also looked in improve the Twitter user experience design. The product was launched as T2 and slowly built up a community. There are good reasons for slowly building a community.

    As co-founder, Gabor Cselle put it

    “Twitter, but back to the roots”

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative by Gabor Cell on Medium.com

    Years ago, I got to see George Oates talk about how the community around photography social network Flickr built up. The key was a slow build up of the right people to ensure a community was built with a set of norms that would morph into community rules and culture as the platform scaled larger.

    Which begs the question is Pebble a platform at all, or a common state of mind that bonds the community together?

    The Pebble community was surprisingly diverse from designers, fantasy authors and Silicon Valley insiders to Japanese cat enthusiasts and a few random netizens like myself. It was odd and eclectic like Twitter circa 2006 / 2007. In this respect it certainly met the brief of “Twitter, but back to the roots”.

    This diversity was even more surprising that the platform had about 20,000 registered accounts in total. Media coverage of T2 had garnered an original waiting list of 33,000 interested people.

    T2 is dead; long live Pebble

    Originally the platform was called T2, a not so subtle allusion to the ambition of building a better Twitter microblogging service. One that isn’t full of reactionary content, or the erratic policies of owner Elon Musk.

    T2 rebranded to Pebble. This was to provide a name that was more human-friendly than T2. The move to Pebble pleased investors, but didn’t help attract new consumers.

    Criticisms

    Pebble didn’t work for everyone, my friend Stuart claimed that he found it unusable with Microsoft Edge. Pebble didn’t have an app, which would have taken time to develop and so would APIs.

    If Pebble had started licensing APIs to social listening platforms, this may have driven more brand interest in the platform over time and would have been a clear differentiator vis-a-vis Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and Instagram.

    Scale

    In the technology sector, scale is considered to be everything. But that’s the approach that left us with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter with all of their attendant problems. Yet despite the attendant problems of large technology platforms, trust and safety were not clear compelling differentiators for Pebble.

    Pebble.is

    A second problem that the founders identified was that there wasn’t enough content coming in to make it a daily destination. Like Twitter and Threads before it, I found I had to ‘wind up’ to putting content on the platform on a daily basis.

    My timing wasn’t great.

    The End

    The last post was by Serge Keller, who posted a video of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.

    serge

    “This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

    Winston Churchill

    Pebble didn’t completely die. As soon as news broke of the platform’s demise a few things happened. Participants started rallying around, sharing their details on other platforms and sharing invites for Bluesky and Mastodon.

    Gabor set up a sub-Reddit for Pebble participants, which didn’t get too much take-up. But a Mastodon instance that he skinned in the Pebble UI and put up as a social experiment did manage to take off.

    It provides an improvement on the user experiences I have seen on other Mastodon instances so far. A surprisingly large amount of the Pebble community kind of held together across Bluesky and Mastodon. This indicates to me that to those that know safety and trust might be more compelling than we currently believe. I find myself using the Pebble Mastodon instance more than Bluesky at the moment.

    More related content here.

    More information

    From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative | by Gabor Cselle | Gabor Cselle | Nov, 2023 | Medium

    Pebble, a startup that tried and failed to take on Twitter, finds new life on Mastodon | Yahoo! Finance

    @canongatebooks • It’s been a year (and 3 days) since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Strange to say, part of my profe… • Threads

    Twitter clone Pebble is shutting down just five weeks after a rebrand | Engadget

  • Opel Corsa

    I haven’t been a car owner since 1998. Back then driving a car was a very analogue experience and had been for decades. I grew up reading Car Magazine and was excited to get behind the wheel and drive when I was old enough. The reality of driving was rather underwhelming. The Opel Corsa was also known as the Vauxhall Nova at the time, now it’s also known as the Vauxhall Corsa. The Opel Corsa of the time was known as a good first car for new drivers. This was back when joyriding was a crime wave sweeping the UK and Ireland and vehicles leasing or finance wasn’t as commonplace as it is now.

    Consequently insurance companies penalised car owners with punishing insurance premiums, to the point that my car usually cost less than the annual price to insure it. 

    Last car standing

    I owned or driven a number of the competitors to the original Opel Corsa including the Fiat Uno, the Ford Fiesta and the Rover Metro. Rover went bankrupt, Fiat now makes a retro-futurism of the Fiat 500 rather than a modernised version of the Fiat Uno and finally Ford sunset the Fiesta. So the Opel Corsa remains the last car standing. 

    Convoluted product DNA

    However, that belies the fact that GM Europe including their Vauxhall and Opel brands were sold to the PSA Group and then became part of Stellantis in 2021. Stellantis is the result of a merger between the PSA Group (Peugeot, Citröen, DS, Opel and Vauxhall) with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati and Ram Trucks.

    This generation of the Corsa relied on PSA underpinnings rather than previous generations based on General Motors designs.

    Modern Opel Corsa versus its ancestors

    Opel Corsa-e

    The modern Opel Corsa has a wedge shape with more overhangs that gives it a pleasant look. In the driver’s seat is when the experience starts to change from the original car. The wedge shape and high doors with obligatory side impact protection means that you have significant blind spots in the drivers chair. 

    The original Corsa was a three door car, but four and five door versions came along later. The modern Opel Corsa allows a little more leg room in the back. The boot would hold two carry on cases and a couple of tote bags, which from memory was a little larger than the late 1990s capability of the Opel Corsa. 

    Back to the interior. As a super mini, the Opel Corsa’s seats were one of its better features. The modern car had seats that felt weirdly similar to previous generations of Corsa, even down to the lack of lumbar support and a manual knob to dial in the seat back angle. 

    Because of the smaller windows and higher doors the interior also felt darker, rather than the light airy driving experience that I remembered.

    Dashboard

    The most apparent change in the latest version of the Opel Corsa compared to its ancestors is the dashboard. Digital car systems go back to the likes of Clarion’s Auto PC from 1998. There is no voice recognition, but there is a touch screen. This controls some of the car’s settings such as having the lights come on automatically, the radio and mapping. The digital experience was limited compared to systems from the likes of Mercedes Benz, but that’s no bad thing, as there was less technology to master. This was particularly important given that it was a hire car, that I wanted to get into and drive away with minimum fuss.

    I found its reversing camera invaluable, mainly because of the narrow view provided by the the rear window.

    My car was rented from Hertz. While Opel claims that the car is compatible with Apple CarPlay, I couldn’t get it to work so both navigation and media options were limited. This meant that the car’s information screen was of limited use and a smartphone holder became a must purchase item in order to use a mapping app.

    On the plus side, what was there was intuitive to navigate, which is important to the hire car experience. Maybe the system was restricted at the request of Hertz? I don’t know.

    The button controls for lighting off the screen would be hard to reach for drivers with smaller arms.

    Driving

    The 1.2 litre engine is fine for either motorway driving or in urban conditions. At no point did I feel that I would have preferred more power, to paraphrase Rolls Royce the acceleration and speed were adequate. I managed to get about 50 miles / gallon out of the car through a mix of driving, which surprised me.

    The car was skittish, yet unengaging in terms of its handling, with a steering wheel that was oddly shaped for using during longer journeys. The clutch was very progressive, but the brakes weren’t.

    The Opel Corsa isn’t a desirable car, but it is a perfectly adequate one.

  • Living with the iPhone 12 Pro Max

    iPhone 12 Pro Max transition

    I moved to an Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max from an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max. That’s an important  factor to bear in mind when one sees phone comparisons. Secondly, I don’t earn my living doing phone reviews, so my reactions are likely to be less dramatic than a professional phone reviewer. Instead, I am trying to reflect a view of what its like to live with the device. 

    Smartphones overall

    You would have to look pretty hard to find a dreadful premium or mid-range smartphone nowadays. Some of the lower end Motorolas are sluggish performers, have the build quality of an early Samsung Galaxy and a mic that cuts in and out. But for the average iPhone user, a phone that is five years old is still a cracking phone, that could go another few years with a replacement battery. 

    The cameras are more than adequate for snapshots or document scanning, but no amount of software will make up for the quality of the lens in a smartphone versus a semi-professional photographers camera. And for most people, that’s enough. Performance has reduced to incremental improvements in real world performance. And in this respect smartphones mirror personal computers; as the huge perceived performance gains of the early computers flattened out. 

    I no longer need a Mophie Juice Pack case to make the iPhone last through a work day like I did with the iPhone 3GS. Although for long trips away from my desk, I still a power pack and a cable in my bag. This is as much about having the reassurance of knowing that I can run down my battery with lots of Maps usage if I have to, rather than a real need. Increased battery life is partly a function of screen size. The larger the screen, the larger the battery. Device screen sizes have grown over the years. Secondly, chip design and system software have focused on power consumption as part of a decade plus long focus on computing power per watt. 

    I still miss the keyboard and form-factor of my old Nokia E90; despite its flaky Symbian software. But I no longer miss its superior battery life, or the ability to remove the battery and replace it with fully charged spare. 

    Out of the box

    All of the iPhone 12 models come in smaller packaging than previous devices. The primary reason for this is Apple no longer supplies a USB charger. The excuse that Apple provided was that it was environmentally friendly. The problem with this is there are some awfully unsafe USB chargers available online as an alternative. The second thing that was missing from the box was a set of Apple wired earbuds. Again this was put down to being environmentally friendly by Apple. Though you could also come to two less flattering conclusions:

    • Apple is converting an insignificant amount of Android users, but only converting existing Apple iPhone customers. So headphones with a Lightning connector wasn’t needed and Apple could save on costs
    • It was a cynical ploy by Apple to drive AirPod wireless headphone sales even higher

    I can understand why Chinese netizens considered both moves to Apple shortchanging customers. I agree with them.

    China

    It is also interesting to note that all the main live-streaming platforms in China simultaneously decided to cancel live-streaming of the iPhone 12 series launch.

    Of course the Chinese government / Communist Party of China had nothing to do in coordinating this – honest….

    Handset design

    When you take the iPhone 12 Pro Max handset out of the box, you immediately notice its size and weight.  It has steep stainless steel sides like an iPhone 4 on steroids. 

    Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max
    iPhone 12 Pro Max view from the back of the phone

    Usually the heft of a premium phone feels reassuring. But at first, holding the phone was a dissonant experience. There were a few reasons for this:

    The change in design language from smooth round edges on handsets from the iPhone 6 onwards, to a flat edge of the iPhone 4 and 5.

    It was the first time that an iPhone model has become thicker than the previous generation of iPhone.

    The change in design with its thicker flat sides has little difference in putting on a protective case, but removing the case is noticeably harder.

    After three days or so usage, the iPhone 12 felt perfectly normal as I got used to it.

    Camera

    As I said at the outset to this post, this like other modern premium smartphones, are good at taking snapshots. The main difference between my iPhone 11 Max Pro and iPhone 12 Max Pro was a slight increase in optical magnification. The rest of the mild photographic improvements were available in the iOS 14 software for both new and older iPhones.

    Networking

    The big selling point for Apple on the iPhone 12 Pro Max is its ability use 5G networks. The problem is that for consumers 5G doesn’t have a compelling killer application at the moment.

    In that respect, it reminds me a lot of my time working with Cap Gemini as a client when video calling and Quibi like sports and entertainment clips were thought to be the killer app for 3G.

    The reality is that it took wi-fi and 4G made video to make calls work, even then the product isn’t perfect. Shorter sellable video content is still looking for a market. 5G does have industrial niche market opportunities.  Secondly, 5G network rollout means that there will be probably three generations of future iPhones before the 5G wireless function becomes useful. I still live in a neighbourhood in central London where I often lose 4G coverage. 5G will require many more cell sites to provide the same level of coverage. 

    Cellphone reception seems to be better; I don’t know if this is down to the handset or my carrier building out their infrastructure further during the lockdown.

    My house has never had great cellphone reception during my time living here. It backs on to a railway line with overhead electrification and only had windows the side facing away from the railway. Yet I am now seeing two bars of signal in parts of the house where I previously would only have had Wi-Fi or a single bar of 3G. 

    Conclusion

    Unsurprisingly, the iPhone 12 Pro Max is an accomplished handset. It offers good battery life, responsive performance, a great screen, a good camera and is well made. But there is insufficient reason to upgrade if you have an iPhone made in the last three years. You already have a good well made phone. It has a good camera and will run the latest version of iOS.

    If your battery no longer holds the charge, the way it once did, Apple offers a service to replace the battery at a very reasonable cost.

    More design related posts here.

    More information and selected reviews

    iPhone 12 launching without earbuds or wall chargers is compared to eating without chopsticks in China | South China Morning Post 

    Shenzhen/Huawei: the other Bay Area | Financial TimesThe impression of military manoeuvres by alternative means was reinforced by Tencent, another Shenzhen resident. It was among big Chinese social and video platforms including iQiyi and Weibo, that simultaneously cancelled the livecast of Apple’s iPhone 12 launch

    Kibbles & Bytes #1122: Apple Releases Four iPhone 12 Models and the HomePod mini – Don nails the assessment of 5G in the latest edition of his newsletter.

    Daring Fireball: The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro – interesting thoughts on the iPhone 12s. What Gruber doesn’t touch on is the radio improvements, particularly in 4G

  • Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar

    The Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar is an accessory that allows you to charge and listen via headphones to a modern iPhone at the same time.

    Apple’s move to the Lightning connector leaves a lot to be desired. It was designed primarily for its cosmetic benefits. Apple got rid of headphone sockets just to allow them to make iPhones even slimmer. Lightning is a triumph of form over function. But as an iPhone user; you have to work with what you have. Apple often isn’t great at providing solutions. If they were Apple would have made the Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar.

    The anonymous white dongle now has a permanent place in my computer bag. It has come in handy listening to voice memos, audio books and miscellany whilst I’ve been working at client offices. It has come in handy when I have been on conference calls, without disturbing people around me. When I moved down to London, I said in a cubicle with an open back which added a certain amount of screening to calls that I made.

    The offices I have been working in are long white featureless bench tables with seating canteen style. Which is barely adequate for working, let alone listening in on a conference call, even with a judicious use of the mute button.

    Untitled

    I started off by trying an alternative product that I bought on Amazon. It the sound was barely audible, full of noise and clicks. One of Amazon’s challenges is the lack of quality control of products featured in marketplace. This has become stuffed with Chinese vendors whose products vary considerably in quality.

    Untitled

    It was rather like listening to a numbers station shortwave transmission. Except the static was induced by poor product design. Rather than the distance, frequency jamming and atmospheric conditions between the listener and an anonymous low power shortwave station in the Middle East, Cuba, North Korea or Eastern Europe.

    By comparison, the Belkin Audio + Charge Rockstar, adds nothing. No cracks, no hisses, no white noise that wasn’t there beforehand. And it charges. More related posts here.