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[Edited slightly 'cos it's a family blog -cvj]

I think they have priced just that bit out of reach. Watch me be wrong.

-cvj

elliot

Thanks damtp_dweller and pedant. I will look at it!

Cheers,

-cvj

Maybe you’ve been gone from these fair isles a bit too long to be aware of this, but the Beeb makes the great majority of their home-grown programmes available online once they’ve been broadcast on air. There may be some download restrictions depending on the area you’re trying to download from, but I had no difficulties watching Newsnight in Cambridge MA while I was there at the start of December.

The Newsnight piece about mobiles in Africa was actually excellent. I’d like to see some more specific data but it seems that a relatively simple piece of technology really has made a huge difference there.

Now if only we can get more Europeans and Americans donating their old phones to Africa instead of throwing them out as rubbish…

You can also conduct text-message conversations that appear as a continuous chat thread. And like any smartphone, the iPhone can download e-mail from standard accounts at regular intervals. In fact, Yahoo will offer free “push” e-mail — that is, messages will arrive on the iPhone in real time, just as on a corporate BlackBerry.

The iPhone is not, however, a BlackBerry killer. The absence of a physical keyboard makes it versatile, but also makes typing tedious.

Instead of raised alphabet keys, you get virtual keys on the screen. They’re fairly small, and of course you can’t feel them. So typing is slow going, especially for the fat of finger.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be especially precise. Even if you hit the wrong “keys” accidentally, the super-smart software considers adjacent keys — and corrects your typos automatically. If what you actually managed to type is “wrclme,” the software proposes “welcome.” You tap the Space bar to accept the fix. It works beautifully.”

-cvj

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SRSJJTR

Excerpt:

“…(from The Economist) Companies are being started and successfully built in many African countries, especially in banking, retailing and mobile telephones. The region’s economy is growing steadily (see chart 1) and could expand by 5.8% this year. In part this is because of a commodities boom and debt forgiveness. But more peace, political stability and better economic management have done their bit, too.

…When Celtel, a mobile-phone operator, set up in Zambia eight years ago, it concentrated on the densely populated corridor between Victoria Falls (on the border with Zimbabwe), Lusaka and the industrial copper belt. This was thought to be the only area in which to do business. Yet in 2003, the company decided to invest in rural services, too, and was astonished at the result.

Although most rural customers had never used a telephone, they were keen to have one. This encouraged more people in the cities to obtain mobile phones to talk to relatives in the countryside. The introduction of Me2U, a service that allows callers to use text-messaging to send airtime credit to other mobiles, provided a further boost. Most people do not have bank accounts and the service has become a convenient and cheap way to transfer money. In villages it has also emerged as a substitute for cash, with people using airtime to pay for their shopping. Shopkeepers cash in their accumulated phone credits with people who make money by offering callers use of their mobile phones as a sort of public phone. Within the past two years, Celtel’s Zambian customers have grown from 70,000 to over 1m…..”

No, I have not seen it because:

(1) I’d have difficulty watching a program of that name, and
(2) I live in the wrong country to get BBC2’s Newsnight and I don’t have the channel BBC America (if that channel gets Newsnight) in the cable package I get. (The next level up is too expensive.)

However, I am aware of those developments, and it has been fascinating to watch this happening… I’m hoping for a good long New Yorker (or other) article on it to digest it properly. (Editors, take note: I’d be happy to make the trip and write the story myself…)

Cheers,

-cvj

Have you seen the ‘Geek Week’ spot on BBC2’s Newsnight this week. The contribution on Monday was, if true, one of the most cheering things I’ve seen in a long while. Mobiles are catching on bigtime in Africa (charge ‘em up using solar power); in Kenya their spread through the country has been matched by a remarkable upsurge in economic activity, as people are empowered by long range vebal communication and take advantage of a novel mobile-banking form of money transfer. There was talk of leap-frogging a century’s irrelevant tech advance etc. If this isn’t hype, it’s great news. Doubtless even better with iPhone.