One usually reserved the phrase ’sickening angle’ for limbs. Perhaps that makes this not entirely inappropriate. Even without removing the earphones from my pocket, I can tell that something has gone horribly wrong. My mind flashes back to when, 10 minutes earlier in the car, I had removed the phone from my back pocket. Something about the position of the earphones had felt wrong. I realise now what it was.

I remove the earphones from the pocket and my fear is confirmed. The jack does not jut straight out from its white surrounds, instead it is bent in a way that doesn’t look natural. Immediately I work at forcing it back into shape. I hope this hasn’t damaged the insides.

It has. Later, in a coffee shop, I plug the earphones back into the phone. They fit all right but when I put the buds into my ears no sound comes out. I strain to listen over the background noise. I can barely make out something coming from the left hand side.

The intelligent thing to do would be to buy a cheap set. You can get pairs for ¥1,000 in any convenience store. But I want the proper ones, the ones that match. The ones with the clicker and the microphone. Their sound quality is not supposed to be good. I can’t tell the difference. Or I don’t care enough to learn. If I didn’t care about what they looked like, I probably wouldn’t have bought the phone.

I am surprised at how uneasy I feel. I can’t listen to my music. It has been one hour and I have been sitting here unable to listen to my music. I have heard these songs all before. It is not so much the music as the knowledge that I could listen to the music that I want. That I don’t have. I need to go and get another pair. It is worth ¥2,800. I need that knowledge.

I imagine that I use my iPhone home screen differently to most people. Here’s a screenshot:

As is quickly evident, I keep the home screen basically filled with Apple’s default apps. The third party apps I use the most are actually on screen two:

Why this setup? There are two reasons.

The first is that I have a thing for things being in ‘factory condition’. I don’t take it to the extreme of leaving my living room furniture in plastic wrap, but I get close. When I was a child, I would not play very much with my toys in the traditional manner, preferring instead to construct diaromas where the toys were put into their ’natural state’ and left to be admired.

The second, and more practical, reason is that having my second screen be my ’real home screen’ means I have 27 ’icon slots’ of iPhone real estate within a single swipe (31 if you count the four slots in the iPhone’s dock). This is because if I go left to the first home screen, I have nine slots and if I go right to the third home screen, I have nine slots. These together with the nine on the second screen equal 27. This compare with just 18 if you do things the traditional way.

I imagine for many people this might seem silly. Why not just use folders if you’re so worried about the number of icons you can fit on a single screen? Well, the problem is that I much prefer the look of an icon rather than a collection of folders. I am often aghast when I pick up someone’s iPhone only to find row after row of folders.¹

I’ve yet to meet anyone that uses their home screens like this but figure there probably are some other second screen weirdos out there.² But what about you? How do you use your smart phone home screen?

First, the screen. My thoughts on the screen differ from most of what’s likely out there and I feel it’s necessary to put them into the appropriate context.

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPhone 4. While I had seen, and briefly used, iPhones and iPod Touches prior to this, the 4 was my first real experience using iOS. Furthermore, I bought it in October of 2010, by which time every app that I could find had been updated to use Retina display graphics.

As such, the Retina display that Apple first shipped on the iPhone 4 is my baseline and it’s what I’ve measured all screens against since. Other screens have not fared well, and this includes the iPad 2.

This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed using the iPad 2. I certainly have. I used it on average once a day for at least 30 minutes or so (and often far longer). It has travelled with me to other countries, been a tool I use at work and entertained me with video, text and more.

But the screen has always been a disappointment. Nowhere is this more apparent for me than with the loupe tool that’s used when you want precise placement of the cursor in a text field. Sometimes it feels as if this tool was created especially to demonstrate just how low the resolution is.

The new iPad fixes this problem. The screen is brilliant (in the literal sense of the word). However, I will admit that I wasn’t blown away by it as others sound like they were. For me, the screen is not so much a revolution as the fulfilment of the iPad’s promise. It is what I have always wanted the iPad’s screen to be. I am happy that it has reached that point but I would not call it a life-changing event.

The second thought is about Internet connectivity. While I purchased the ’4G’ model, I’m not referring to the download speeds or the antenna or whether the lower left corner gets hot through use. What I’m talking about is the ability to get on the Internet.

Much has been made of the differences between post-PC devices and traditional PCs (both laptops and desktops). Post-PC devices emphasise touch over other forms of user interaction, they generally enforce a simpler conceptual model of an application, they abstract away the file system.

But I think there is another important difference between post-PC devices and traditional computers that I didn’t fully appreciate until using the new iPad: post-PC devices need to be on the Internet.

Again, some context. I purchased the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model of the iPad 2 thinking that, while I obviously wouldn’t be able to use the Internet everywhere I went, I’d at least be able to use it in places that had public Wi-Fi. Before I had this thought, I should have considered more carefully where I live. Japan, for all its reputation as a technological wonderland, has not jumped on the free public Wi-Fi train with gay abandon. Or, indeed, any abandon. I have seen free public Wi-Fi spots in select places but it’s really been in very, very select places.

Private Wi-Fi networks, however, are everywhere. Mostly these are deployed by the mobile phone carriers. I’m not sure exactly why this is although I assume it’s to offload some of the capacity from the cellular networks. Whatever the reason, it means that, while there’s plenty of Wi-Fi around, if you don’t have an account with one of the carriers, it may as well not exist.

There is perhaps no more frustrating (#firstworld) problem than trying desperately to maintain a connection to the free public Wi-Fi network in Kansai International Airport before you get on your plane so you can download a book from Amazon to read on the flight. Well, no there is. It’s trying to desperately to maintain that connection while your phone happily jumps on SoftBank’s Wi-Fi network at McDonald’s. And Starbucks. And the airport’s train station. And numerous other locations.¹

When the time came to purchase the new iPad, I knew that this time I didn’t want to have that experience again. So I purchased the iPad through SoftBank and, in return for a small monthly fee, I now have access to their very extensive network of wireless hot spots. And it is glorious. It is easily my favourite part of the new device (even ahead of the screen). Again, having Internet connectivity is not so much a revolution as it is a step closer towards the perfect iPad. It feels silly to talk about iterations of the iPad as a progression towards some Platonic ideal but, well, I just spent $680 on the new iPad when I already own the previous model so let’s not get into semantics about what is and isn’t absurd.

Which brings me to the third thing. The New Yorker app on the iPad sucks ass. To be sure, 1) it has always sucked ass; and 2) this is not Apple’s fault. But these are my impressions and this left something of an impression on me.

For reasons that one presumes can only make sense to people that never actually use the app, the New Yorker on the iPad does not display content by getting the iPad to do the relatively straightforward task of rendering text on the screen (that’s exactly what they’d expect us to do!).² No, instead the kooks at Condé Nast have decided that they’ll serve the New Yorker to you as a gigantic series of compressed images. This bloats each issue out to 110 MB, an absurd amount for a publication that is mostly just words on a screen.

The decision to do this is bone-headed for any number of reasons (you can’t adjust the text size, you can’t select text) but the stupidity really comes into its own on the glossy 9.7″ Retina display. Unfortunately (for paying customers), the Retina display and its crazy high resolution doesn’t do the New Yorker’s flat images any favours. They’re blown up to fill the screen and, although the pixels on the Retina display are too small to create the pixelated effect you sometimes see on PCs, it nevertheless results in an image that, well, sucks ass.

I want to make clear that I love the New Yorker. It is literally my favourite publication and I think one of the three or four most important English-language periodicals in the world today. But fucking BusinessWeek has an app that doesn’t have this problem. BusinessWeek. The (rich) poor man’s Economist.

Please, for the love of God, I know you aren’t part of management, but Jason Schwartzman, you star in that delightful video telling us all how to use the New Yorker on our iPad. Please use your magic powers to solve this problem once and for all.³ I am begging you.

Consider Vlad Savov’s recent review of the Sony Xperia S for The Verge.¹ Savov gives the device a 7.1 making you think this might be a phone worth getting. Not the best of the best, but something you wouldn’t feel bad about buying. However, in the slick video² that accompanies the review, Savov signs off by saying:

Overall, the Xperia S is a well-spec’d, well performing device that seems like a phone that could have been released three months ago. It has the same processor, display specs and base operating system as the HTC Rezound but comes so much later. I can’t advise anyone to go for the Xperia S today when the HTC One X and One S are set to arrive in early April with Ice Cream Sandwich, far better processors and, some might argue, even prettier design.

(Similar comments are made in the wrap-up of the text of the review itself.)

So we have a comment that this phone cannot be recommended for any one and then a score over 7? Sony isn’t a 5-year-old finger painting for the first time, Vlad. If their product is not one that you can recommend, then it should be by definition not a good product.

Would Savov have copped a lot of shit from Sony fans if he’d given the Xperia S a score of, say, 2? Probably. Worse, would he have been cut off by Sony PR from receiving future review units? I wouldn’t be surprised. But you know what the alternative has produced? A situation in which I no longer trust Savov’s reviews.

The good news is that I have a simple solution for The Verge: change your scale. Instead of using one out of 10, make it 5 (and only use whole numbers).³ Having a far narrower range of possible scores will focus the mind and help you to avoid this type of issue in the future. Does anyone think that if Savov had only the numbers from 1 to 5 available to him he would selected 4? (7.1 divided by two and then rounded up.) He would have at the very least gone 3 and, if he’d been game, maybe even 2.

(via One Thing Well.)