Well, sod Bikefix then. They had some and sold them.

My new hope (because if I do mail order they won't come any quicker) is Bicycle Workshop, who say they'll order some pluses for me - which is what Bike fix should have said 2 weeks ago.

I see a high proprtion of civil servants on this petition. I wonder if that suggests that proportionally, more us us are cyclists?

I've read some reviews of the SLVR saying that the sound from the speaker when playing music, is tinny. It certainly is if you hold it in the air, but if you put it on a table or cup it in your hand, you get a much fuller sound.

Tags: Schwalbe, SLVR

Big disappointment, no Bluetooth support on a Mac.

Hmm, what else? You've got to turn on Discoverable each and every time you want to receive something by Bluetooth. You can't access the card memory from the address book (e.g to add a photo to a contact). The card isn't writeable outside of the Phone.

Bascially, I need a cable for the prividege of slow USB 1.1 uploads.

The font is too big (and ugly) and only the top level of actions are represented by icons, so e.g. bluetooth control on Nokia is an icon (that you can move to the main icon grid, and on Moto, it isn't (so you can't). When using WAP, I can store a link to a page, like a favourite. But those links aren't accessible from the menu button, bizzare! Luckily, Orange agree. They have put a 'home screen' on the phone, which is an overlay on the main screen with all the main phone functions with little notifications (calendar, messages, address book). This means I can put my two shortcuts (bluetooth and WAP shortcuts) onto the two shortcut buttons (previously occupied by Message and OrangeWorld) on the phone.

So, some relief. It's a shame they couldn't just put this on it, it looks much nicer.

Update: Woo! My camera's mini USB cable works, so I've sync'ed and even better, the music player supports songs direct from iTunes in M4a format, although it seems to ignore all the tags - iTunes this is not!.

Tags: SLVR

I got a call from a company offering me a phone upgrade. This is the nth time I've had one of these, but this time it was a friendly English voice so I thought I'd play along. I asked which phones could I upgrade to? Well, only one caught my interest. I went to an Orange shop to look at the phone, and I asked if these callers were scammers: apparently not, and I was due an upgrade, so I got one from the shop.

And here it is charging on my Apple Keyboard. It's a Motorola SLVR L7. It has all the features that were state of the art two years ago (MP3 player, Bluetooth, Quad-Band, high-res colour display, VGA camera). So, in this mega-pixel, 3G, WiFi, hi-fi world, it's not exactly cutting edge, and its got the old Motorola interface (although when I tried it in the shop it seemed OK, and friends with Motos thought it was OK too). It has one feature though that got me:

It's just so THIN. I know, the RAZR was thin, but I hate flips and this is even thinner. It's less than half as thick as my old phone (Nokia 6600). My Housemate thinks I should have got a Nokia, and I would have, if they made a small thin phone that's free on Orange upgrade. Maybe next time.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it also comes with headphones and a 64MB card for music. Reading on web forums, a fair few people got this phone thinking it was the iTunes phone. It is the iTunes phone, of course, but only on Cingular in the US.

It doesn't matter anyway, because I found iTunemywalkman, which I'll be testing out tonight. The key feature of this program is re-encoding, although I think my phone does some form of AAC.

Just turned on comments, if that works, and hope you like the new theme.

Tags: SLVR, Thin