The video above is an example of what has happened to every call I’ve received so far on my iPhone 4. From three bars to “call failed” in 20 seconds flat.

Actually, that’s not entire true. I managed to receive one brief call by holding the phone by the tips of my fingers, but nearly dropped the phone in the process. But I can consistently replicate the effect shown in the video above simply by lying the phone on the table and touching the outer rim with my fingertip.

Yet Apple refuses to admit this is a hardware issue. Instead, they’re planning on releasing a ‘software fix’, which will do nothing more than lower the number of bars shown on screen in the first place.

Will it stop the phone from dropping calls? I’m not convinced.

I’ve already tried to get a refund on my iPhone, but Carphone Warehouse have outright refused. They are willing to admit the hardware may be faulty, but simply will not give a refund, as the phone is tied to a non-refundable two year Vodafone contract. So it looks like I’ll be stuck with a phone that doesn’t work as a phone for the next two years.

I could of course spend £25 on a “bumper” case. But that’s not the point. You wouldn’t buy a luxury car, then expect to have to pay extra for a special ‘steering wheel adaptor’ if you don’t want it to automatically drive into walls. The point is that this is a phone that simply does not function as a phone.

Interestingly, in the same press release where Apple offers a software fix ‘within a few weeks’, they also offer to refund the full price for anyone who wants to return their phone. That’s a luxury I’ve been denied.

I may not be able to do anything much to improve things for me, but I can at least offer some useful buying advice:

1. Do not buy an iPhone 4, unless and until Apple releases a fix that’s proven to work and/or recalls the phone.
The problem appears to be a design flaw in the phone and affects pretty much everyone to some extent. People in areas that have particularly good coverage may not notice it, but the problem is still there.

2. Never, ever, ever buy anything from Carphone Warehouse.
Once they have your money, they’re simply not interested in helping you in any way. I learned the hard way.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m not some mindless Apple hater. This is my second iPhone, I have three Macs and several iPods. I don’t hate Apple – I just want a phone that works.

Update: You can now download this from the Google Chrome Webstore.

Having completely failed to find a Google Chrome theme that looked how I wanted with the new Ubuntu 10.04 look, I decided to create my own. All I wanted was something simple and minimal that looked good with the default dark title bar when maximised, as that’s the way I normally browse on my netbook.

As it turns out, this is very easy to do and only took a few minutes. This is what it looks like:

If you want to use the theme yourself, click here to install it.

If you want to tweak the theme, you can download the unpacked files here. To edit the colours, simply tweak the manifest.json file and the images in the ‘i’ folder. The “ntp_” entries refer to the browser home screen – everything else should be fairly self explanatory if you’ve ever edited a basic CSS file.

You can install your theme by going entering chrome:extensions in the address bar, enabling developer mode and selecting “load unpacked extension”.

Feel free to play, edit, redistribute, sell this, if you so desire.

I’ve been meeting a lot of bloggers at various events lately, and one thing I’ve noticed is that their seems to be more and more ‘affiliate marketing bloggers’ around. You know the kind of person – they usually blog about products in a specific niche and their posts come packed with (often disguised) affiliate links. The blogger makes money when you, the reader, clicks through and buys the product they’re writing about.

The problem with this should be obvious. It’s in the blogger’s interest to talk up the product and make a sale, even if they’re not that into it. Even the most honest writer is going to find it difficult to resist saying something nice about a product when there’s money to be made. No sale, no payment.

And make no mistake, there’s big money to be made in affiliate blogging. There are many people making thousands of dollars a month from very little work. Sounds great, huh?

Well no. In the vast majority of cases, affiliate links on blogs aren’t marked as such. After all, why would you tell your readers that the whole point of your blog post was to try to sell them something? So most of the time, readers don’t even realise they’re just reading one giant ad. It’s a questionable practice at best. In some cases, it may even be illegal with new FTC rules in the US requiring all ads to be clearly marked as such.

Merchants, of course, love affiliate marketing. It’s an absolutely risk free way to sell more product. You let someone else do the selling for you, and you only have to pay them if they make a sale. But for us, the publishers, it can be an altogether more frustrating experience. Inexperienced bloggers often find themselves making no money at all, unless they’re prepared to really get their hands dirty. Experienced marketers can make big money, but it’s a shady, underground practice. There are plenty of ‘secret’ ‘underground’ exclusive clubs where you can find the best way to promote products, but the more you get into it, the shadier and more blackhat it becomes.

One particularly annoying offender is Darren Rowse of Problogger fame. Darren gives advice on how to make money blogging. He will regularly mix useful, interesting content with posts that ‘review’ a particular product. Embedded in these posts are links to buy the product. Affiliate links, of course. Rather than being actual reviews, the posts are simply unmarked ads, and the average reader has no idea. Here’s one example of that, and here’s another. My issue with this is that Darren does not disclose these affiliate links, and the one thing he never talks about on his own blog is that he makes a significant percentage of his revenue from tricking his readers like this.

And people wonder why bloggers are rarely taken seriously as journalists.

Most bloggers never take things that far though. Even I use affiliate links on Chocablog to some extent. But I don’t like doing it. Even when a staff writer has written a post and has no idea what ads will appear around it, there’s still that nagging feeling that it looks as though we’re trying to sell them something. We’re not – we just want to provide a link to the source, and if we happen to be able to make some money from that, then all the better.

But can you imagine a mainstream media source using affiliate advertising to generate revenue? A newspaper? Magazine? Maybe a film review TV show, perhaps, that only made money from people who actually went to see the film after seeing it? They would quickly learn never either to lie or simply never review anything bad. Even if the reviews are accurate and honest, the audience loses out, because they’re not getting the complete picture. But in the long run, the producers lose too. Advertisers have a greater influence on the range of content that can be produced profitably, and often the best, less-profitable content, gets left behind.

The same is true with blogs. Most of us want to make a bit of money from blogging, but if you’re using affiliate ads on your site and not telling your readers, you’re misleading them. You might not care. It’s your blog, not theirs. But if you do happen to care about your audience, you’ll think twice before doing it.

Picture Credit

You’re probably well aware of Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo buy now, but this morning I read Google’s official reaction to the bid, and I’m a little stunned.

Google are clearly scared by the very notion of Microsoft being in control of Yahoo! This sentence in particular made me fall off my chair:

“While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”

This, coming from the company that has a total monopoly on web search at the moment and frequently abuses that position. And let’s not forget that all these “open technologies” that Google so thoughtfully invests in are really just more ways to get access to your personal data, so it can show you more ads. Every last one of them.

Sometimes I think that Google has become so self obsessed that it’s losing track of reality.

Having said that…

I can’t think of two worse companies to be involved in right now than Microsoft and Yahoo. MS have failed to make the web work for them time and again, and Yahoo, while having wonderful intentions, have absolutely no sense of direction and just can’t seem to get their act together.

Yahoo constantly launch new products that never quite work with their existing products, yet manage to replicate 50% of the functionality of other parts of their network. They still make a fair amount of money from advertising, but I’m quite sure that’s simply because nobody can ever find what they’re looking for on Yahoo and end up just clicking an ad to get away from all the madness.

If MS and Y! do get together, you can be fairly certain that the result will be chaos. Whether or not the resulting company will survive long enough to take on Google remains to be seen. But I really don’t think Google have anything to worry about for the next couple of years.

Just a quick note that I’m giving away my very own iPod Nano (8Gb, 3rd Gen) in a competition over on Money Blogger.

If you want to enter, all you need to is blog about Money Blogger. The competition ends a week on Friday and full details are available here. Good luck!

…but will succeed anyway

[Note: Before you comment on this, please note that it was written in March 2007. Twitter has changed, and so have I.]

If you haven’t heard of twitter then you’ve either been living on another planet for the past few months, or you’re the kind of person that has a life.Unfortunately, I’m neither of the above.

Twitter describes itself as “a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives”, but really the best description is a “micro-blogging” site.

You see, unlike a typical blog, twitter wants to know “What are you doing?” 24 hours a day. You have a text box with 140 characters, and the idea is that you give a running commentary of every moment of your life.All messages you send automatically appear on all your “friends'” pages, and all their messages appear on yours. Horrifying, isn’t it?

But it gets worse. The thing that makes twitter stand out is that all messages can be sent and received via your favourite instant messenger.. or on your mobile phone. So what you end up with is a service that’s half way between a blog and a “group instant messenger”.

So why is this so bad?

Well it’s partly down to the kind of people that are using the service. You see, twitter is very popular with the geek community on the West Coast, and has kind of spread out from there. So what you see on the site is a combination of techie messages, dot-com-geek-wannabes trying to get noticed and a whole load of stuff that’s so mundane it just makes you wonder why you didn’t spend the last ten minutes doing something constructive instead – like maybe shooting yourself in the head.

Call me old fashioned, but I really have no interest in the fact that Leo Laporte is eating his lunch, Cali Lewis is drinking a coffee with Splenda Flavor Blends, or even whose couch Kevin Rose happens to be trowing up on today.

You see, unless all your friends are on twitter the noise-to-signal ratio on the site is enough to make you want to go out and pull the legs of kittens to relieve the boredom.

And that’s why twitter will succeed.Because it only works if all your friends are on it, the only way to have any real fun is to invite them all. Then you can be the one inflicting the tedium on others! Yay!Now this ‘model’ has been used before – and what we ended up with was MySpace. The largest and most pointless thing ever created in the history of humanity. And now twitter is going the same way.

For the casual observer though, there’s something a little odd about twitter’s business model. You see, they don’t have any ads – and they let you send and receive updates via text message for free. So how dow they expect to make money, let alone stay in business?Simple. Once they reach a critical mass, they’ll start charging for sending text messages. Already, a lot of users are using their phones so they can “stay in touch” while out and about. Many of them are finding they can’t live without twitter on their phone. (Yes, they are sad, sad people.)

But imagine twitterers are sending a million messages a day between them (which is easily achievable) and only 5% of those are sent from a phone. Now imagine twitter makes 50 cents from each of those messages. That’s $25,000 a day or $9,125,000 a year in revenue without even trying, with very little required in the name of network resources and a site so basic it hurts just to think about it.

What I’d really like to see is a twitter competitor with more functionality and a clearer delineation between real friends and people think they’re cool and somehow get off on telling the whole world every time they go to the toilet. Unfortunately, it may already be too late…

(Oh, and my twitter username is domr – add me and feel my contempt.)