Stephen Fry ... Gadgethound!

Who knew? John Gruber points out Fry's extensive survey of the smartphone market.

The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto. UIQ promised something, the actual GUI is reasonable, in fact quite delightful, but it needed refinement, it needed acceleration and it needed flair. Instead we’ve got a very, very slow device that eats power, is difficult to use in varying environments and frequently hangs and crashes. In a word unusable. And I can just hear them hiding behind the excuse of “price” and “sectors of the market” and other bullshit. What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better. That was once true of Sony too.

You can find John Gruber's post here, and Fry's brilliant post "Devices and Desires" here.

[via Daring Fireball].

P.S. If you haven't already seen it, check out the Voco clock, it even went Creative Commons.

[via boingboing]

UPDATE: I take it back, a gadgethound by his own implication, a brilliantly eloquent and knowledgable tech historian by my perception. I particularly liked the following passage from Fry's wonderful post:

Bandwidth and memory ceased almost to be an issue and those of us who had once spent hundreds on a 256MB Compact Flash looked in amazement at the cheap 2Gb thumbnails hanging in blister-packs from any old airport Dixon’s.

This morning over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel Johnson likened the article to "a mental massage"