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Dan returned from his holiday to the states with trip to the states with a very special package for me - a little Chrismas pressie for me, from me.  am now the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone.

I've spent the last maybe, 5 hours playing with my new iPhone. I've unlocked it (with Dans help - thanks), used every feature in the phone, downloaded shit-loads of applications and browsed about 30 websites. And the verdict - I love it!

I'm impressively thin. The build-quality is great. The user interface is amazing.

GMail works great. Digg works great. YouTube works great. RSS feeds from Feeddemon work great.

Setting up itunes was simple. iTunes used to be such a piece of shit but it's now pretty good. It also seems that itunes no longers insists on copying all your music to it's own itunes folder, which is all good.

One annoying thing is that it didn't pick up my contains on the sim card. So I will have to use the software with my old phone to sync with Outlook and then sync from Outlook back to the iphone - I'll do that tomorrow evening.

Overall, it's just awesome. Normally I absolutely detest Apple Fanboyism but in all fairness, apple have made a great product here.

Happy as.

Last week, being the most forgetful guy in the world (really! I'm unbelievable - Einstein was too apparently so that's my consolation), I lost yet another phone. I won't go into the details but I felt like smacking myself. Anyhow, the good news is that for only €70 I was able to upgrade to a Sony Ericcson K800i (same as Brimur's).

Now this is class - the phone has a cool post-to-blog feature. I assumed there would be loads of tedious set-up so I hadn't explored this option before. I just tried it and it just worked magically.

I 'clicked' "Post-to-blog", it created a new blog on Blogger.com and posted my photo. Then it sent me a link and password to take control of the account. Then I was able to rename the Blog and change the address.

Now every photo I take can be published almost instantly to my new photo blog. I'll try and integrate the latest photos direct into this blog's sidebar. Stay tuned.

In seemingly unrelated news, you just have to get these rather trendy USB rechargable batteries. I remember the annoyance of looking for batteries for my camera in Thailand. Or dragging a recharger and power convertors around. No more, my friend. Next time, i'll just find an Internet café (easy enough, even in Thailand) and recharge the suckers (literally suckers). Not to mention, on most trips, i'll have a laptop.

Hmmm, but with a 3 mega pixel camera on my phone that can publish straight to my blog, do I need to lug around the old Canon? Do I need these batteries?

I'm a consumer whore, so hell yes, I need 'em!

Unlike others I couldn't mention (some of you know who I mean), I don't often slate companies and ruin their good name too often but enough is enough. Read my little story...

Wanting to get some different Christmas pressies this year, I splashed out on goodies from www.iwoot.co.uk (I Want One Of Those). I ordered presents for my sister, her boyfriend, the lads and of course my good self. That was on the lets see...the  16th of December and I got an email on the 17th saying the order has been dispatched.

I waited and waited... nada, zilch, zip.

I apologised to my sister for not getting her anything for Christmas (apart from a cheap book).

I send an email on January 3nd to every conceivable address iwoot displayed on their site but received no reply. I tried again and again over the next few days whenever I thought if it.

Finally I called them and a polite lady told me she'd get to the bottom of it.

I received an email telling me that the order was with Parceline and I would be contacted within a few days. I said It wasn't really good enough in my reply - I had missed Christmas - and the lady said she'd send me a gift voucher, which, in fairness I received - GP£10 - not bad, but I would have preferred prompt delivery.

It's now the 22nd of January and guess what... that's right Buddy, no feckin' pressies. I emailed the lady who sent me the voucher and got a reply back from "CS Team" saying they were sorry my voucher had been delayed - wtf? - read the bloody email customer support dude.

Aaaaaa! How hard is it to get something posted from England to Ireland. I don't think I'll be ordering from iwoot.co.uk anytime in the near future.

Update

I took delivery of the Christmas Presents on 22th January. Presents, thought to have been merely a figment of my imagination were promptly delivered.