TechnoCloud

A couple of weeks ago, a terrible thing happened to my favourite gadget. Yes, I dropped my iPhone in a sink full of water.

Initially all looked fine and it worked as normal. However, the next morning the water that had penetrated the phone started to corrode its components and the Home button stopped working.

The rest of the iPhone worked as normal, quite an achievement after a full immersion in water.

An iPhone app developer suggested putting the phone in a bowl of brown rice to draw out the moisture. Worth a try if you can do it straight away, but unfortunately the Home button was too far gone in my case.

The beauty of the iPhone is the simplicity of its user interface, with the touchscreen requiring only two addition buttons. Of course the drawback is when one of these buttons stops working you are in trouble.

My iPhone had passed its one year warranty date, so Apple were unable to replace it for free. My phone contract only had a few weeks to run, so it seemed too expensive to buy a replacement for a few weeks only when a lower priced subsidised device was on its way, particularly as I was looking to upgrade to a 3GS.

Over time, I’ve learned how to use an iPhone without the Home button:

- Move from app to app, as most apps allow you to open at least the browser (especially ‘terms and conditions’ usually contain hyperlinks). Email contains hyperlinks which open the browser. Contacts and Calendar allow you to put in a URL which opens the browser. Open a ‘purchase app’ link within the browser and then download a free app and you are back to the starting point (or incorrectly enter your password to avoid downloading lots of unwanted apps).

- Of course, some apps are dead ends. In this case, you have to restart your phone.

- If the phone gets stuck on the Apple loading screen (about 1 in 5 times for me), then you have a problem. As you need the Home button to force a restart you have to wait for the power to run down. Fortunately, the loading screen uses up lots of power, so it normally powers down within a day. The trick is not to fully charge the phone, so you don’t wait all day if this happens.

- And most importantly of all… Don’t drop your iPhone in water!

HarperCollins is the latest publisher to say that it will delay the eBook verions of some of its new titles. From next year the News Corp-owned publisher will delay the online release of five to 10 new books each month for between four weeks and six months.

This will give it a chance to sell hardback copies of new releases at far higher prices than the $9.99 that most new eBooks cost.

This raises several questions. Will readers wait for the eBook version leading to less critical mass in the sales charts and less visibility? And will having no eBook at the critical launch time hurt overall sales, given Amazon’s incredible stat now that according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:

“For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.”

Time’s gadget of the year may well have been the Droid Android phone, but the iPhone still retains its place as my gadget of the year.

However, for all the iPhone’s improvements in graphics, the PSP Go gets special mention for delivering high end gaming experience on a handheld. The iPhone has been great for snacking, but the PSP remains my leading device for mobile game feasting!

Small fry to The Sun, which reckons it’s been the UK’s best handheld for the last 40 years with this wonderful parody of Apple’s iPhone advertising.

Spotify’s premium music service, which includes its offline playlists, is coming to the Symbian operating system (owned by Nokia).

The new version mainly supports Nokia phones, including popular models like the 5800 XpressMusic and E72, but also supports Samsung’s Omnia HD and Sony Ericsson’s new Satio.

The premium service, £9.99 a month, is already available on iPhone and Android phones.

What would be very interesting to see would be the take-up to date on their iPhone and Android offers, as I’ve yet to see any figures. With tendency to pay on mobile higher than on desktop internet, and the offline playlists a valuable feature to those accessing the service on a mobile, can mobile be the tipping point to monetising their service?

With an awful pun worthy of this blog, UMG are releasing an iPhone app, Mariah Carey-Oke.

Fans get to sing along to four of the her songs and are awarded points if they match her vocals - Singstar in an app, an interesting way to tie in the iPhone’s microphone functionality.

In addition, the app includes news and tour information, as well as integration with Twitter and Facebook, and links to buy songs from iTunes. It costs $3.99 in the US a premium on the cost of purchasing the songs through iTunes, but is as yet unavailable in the UK.