Luckily, I had resisted upgrading the firmware on the phone to version 1.1.2 and was still on the less secure 1.1.1. With this version ‘jailbreaking’ is unbelievably simple. Just visit www.jailbreakme.com on your iPhone, click a link, and a web-based program breaks into the phone using a particular vulnerability, downloads the all-important ‘installer’ application. I had been a little nervous about doing this, but was surprised at just how easy and trouble-free it was. After a reboot, I had an extra icon on the iPhone’s home screen for the installer, and was able to browse lists of utilities, games, etc written by third party programmers. So far so good.

Breaking the SIM lock was where things got a bit hairy. There are quite a few possible scenarios for people wanting to perform the unlock, and having an iPhone legitimately activated with AT&T in the US, then wanting to unlock it for a European network, is only one of them. People start with different firmware versions, different versions of iTunes, and often with unactivated phones. As a result of this, the tutorial I followed on the web didn’t work properly with my phone, and I found myself suddenly locked out of my phone altogether.

Luckily, someone on the Macrumors forums was able to point me in the right direction and, after a couple of nervous hours, I managed to get everything working. So I now have a fully-functional, unlocked iPhone, on which I’m using my old pay-as-you-go SIM. Data costs on pay-as-you-go have come down a lot over the last year, so the email and mapping functionality of the iPhone are pretty viable in this setup. And I’ve found EDGE coverage in the UK to be good.

Of course, having a hacked phone is not all roses. When the new firmware version comes out, probably with all kinds of new features, I’ll be unable to upgrade without locking my phone up again.

Pros

• Great User Interface. It’s simple to use and everything just works.
• I can now check my email where-ever I am
• The maps application is genuinely useful and usable, even with slower EDGE network speeds. You don’t really miss GPS that much, because you can usually work out where you are. The ability to zoom in on maps is good.
• Browsing the web is fine for short tasks. Frustrations are minimal. I can check the news, type a few comments on basecamp, that sort of thing. You obviously won’t want to do hours of research or work on it.
• Using the web over EDGE (rather than Wi-fi) becomes more feasible if you are a bit selective with sites. For example, yelp.com is horribly slow, but mobile.yelp.com gives you all the functionality you need, and is fast and light. Using an RSS reader works well (I use Newsgator mobile, which syncs with my laptop).
• The included headphones come with a microphone embedded in the cable. If you are listening to music and a phone call comes in, the music gracefully fades out, and you hear the ring tone. Squeeze the mic switch once to answer the call. Squeeze again when you’re finished. The music fades up again, resuming exactly where you left off. All without removing the phone from your pocket. Great user experience design!

Cons

• Camera is very poor in low light or abnormal light, and there are no settings or controls.
• iCal items are merged from all calendars. If you have synced a calendar from someone else over the internet on your Mac, on your iPhone you’ll see their events as if they are your own.
• TV show syncing in iTunes lets you select ‘3 most recent episodes’ but not ‘3 earliest unwatched episodes’. Don’t most people want to watch episodes in the correct order?
• Can’t update podcasts on the iPhone; no podcasts accessible from the mobile version of the iTunes music store.

So I bought my iPhone and proceeded to activate it. After some nervous moments where AT&T’s clunky registration site forced me to enter a US address located in ‘United Kingdom’, I was slightly surprised to find that it actually worked. I’m now charged $52 per month for 300 minutes and unlimited data over EDGE (another $10 per month would give me 1000 minutes).

I’m actually pretty happy with this. I can cancel at any time – i.e. when I go back to the UK – and hopefully unlock the phone and put my Vodafone SIM in there… assuming someone cracks Firmware version 1.1 by then. In the meantime I get unlimited data, which is handy, and enough minutes to get by on. The only negative is that I have to pay for incoming calls and texts too out of my minutes… I can’t get used to this particular US practice.

And after playing around with it for nearly an hour I can say that it although it is phone-sized, the experience is a lot more like using a real computer. The screen is bright and clear and so responsive as you flick your finger to scroll through lists. The UI is almost flawless and I was able to adapt to using the virtual keyboard in a matter of seconds. This thing makes every other phone I’ve seen look completely primitive. It feels like using something from a science fiction movie, it really is that good.

Of course I want one, but being locked into a 2-year contract on AT&T, and with a SIM-lock as well, it’s not really feasible to bring one back to the UK. Still, should be only a few months to wait before they appear there too.

Appearance

The drive is good-looking, coming in smooth black case, looking something like an overweight black ipod. It has a really cool blue light that indicates network traffic. It feels very sturdy.

Connecting

It seems that you need a special helper application (called the ‘Iomega Discovery Tool’) to help your computer talk to the drive. It would be better if the operating system could just interface with the drive directly instead of having to install an extra piece of software. However, the Discovery Tool is set to run automatically at startup and seems to work well in both OSX and Windows XP. The only annoying thing is that if you turn on the drive after starting up your computer, you have to run the tool manually before you can use the drive, which makes things more cumbersome than using a standard USB/Firewire external hard drive.

Transfer speeds with the drive seem to be fine, considering I use it over a standard Fast Ethernet connection, so I guess I’d be lucky to get more than 80 MB/s anyway.

Noise

Things are looking pretty rosy so far. Unfortunately the drive has a critical flaw. It is extremely noisy. When you first start it up, everything seems fine – in fact the drive is completely silent. However, after 10 minutes or so, a cooling fan comes on for about 1 minute. And it sounds like a hairdryer. And this happens again after another 10 minutes. And so on. It is disruptive.

I can’t understand why Iomega have designed the drive in this way. It is squarely aimed at the home market, with various ‘media jukebox’ features. But who is going to be happy sitting in their living room with the hairdryer going off all the time? If it was wireless I could hide it in a cupboard. But my router is located in my living room, so I’m stuck. I contacted Iomega about it and they pointed me to some small print about the fact that the drive may make some noise during normal usage.

More problems

Over the past few weeks I’ve been having another problem with the Storcenter Network Hard Drive. It sometimes fails to connect to the network when you first turn it on, often requiring two or three restarts before it can connect.

Conclusion

So basically, this drive is not a good buy. The promise of Gigabit Ethernet seems very tempting. The build quality is seductive. But the noise is frankly unacceptable. And other reliability issues seem to be emerging. Try something else.

The W1S has a really nice 1600 pixel 15” widescreen display, which thankfully has a matt finish, instead of those shiny coatings you seem to find on almost all ‘multimedia’ laptops these days. They may be nice for watching movies but not so good for long-term working

Actually the 1600px wide resolution is a bit too high for everyday use because everything looks a bit small. For web surfing I think 1280px is a better resolution for a 15” screen. But again, for proper design work, say with Photoshop, the high resolution is a great advantage because you can spread out your tool palettes and still see the document you are working on.

The build quality on the Asus is exceptional and it is a very good-looking laptop. Actually the build quality is better than my Powerbook. The Asus is made of black brushed aluminium and carbon fibre and nothing seems to flex.

Overall in terms of hardware the W1S is the best PC laptop I’ve seen. With a 1.8GHz Centrino chip and 100GB hard drive it is fast and has a good amount of storage space. Battery life is not particularly great, but it does have a built-in Digital TV tuner and remote control.

Unfortunately the software is not up to this standard. For a start there is Windows XP. If you’ve used OSX for any length of time then XP is just pretty horrible. Added to this Asus has installed a bunch of utilities which are loaded up on startup and slow things down a bit. I tried to uninstall some of them using msconfig, which resulted in all sorts of errors and in the end I ended up reinstalling the whole thing from the rescue disk.

Where things really go downhill is with the Asus take on Microsoft’s Media Center, ‘Mobile Theater’. It is one of the clunkiest, most badly designed pieces of software I’ve used (OK some web applications are worse). It likes to pause for a second or so between each mouse click. It invites you to sign up (and pay for) for an Electronic Program Guide subscription, which then doesn’t work. Channels sometimes disappear and the only way to recover them is to rescan all the channels.

Having said this, it is possible to adapt to the program if you have a bit of patience (I wasn’t very patient at first, having just spent £1400). Once you accept that the software is just like this, and that Asus doesn’t know anything about software engineering or interface design, you find that the quality of the TV and the recordings it makes are really excellent. The sound from the speakers is also great (it has a good sub-woofer underneath, to give it quite a full sound).

Overall the Asus W1S is an impressive PC laptop. Weight and software shortcomings mean it won’t match a MacBook Pro. But the build quality is better and it has a built-in digital TV tuner. If you have a spouse who doesn’t want to move to a Mac, and suddenly find yourself with some money in your bank account, the W1S is a great option.