Le iPhone

I was moved to write about taking my iPhone to France after reading Christopher Phin’s column in MacFormat, in which he describes how his wee companion proved particularly useful on his trip across the Channel.

I was heading for Paris with my wife and youngest child, more specifically Disneyland. Having got engaged there some 10 years ago, it was nice to revisit it since the new Studio Park was built. Gadget-wise, I took the iPhone. Oh, and a Nokia N95 which I still haven’t managed to completely shake off. Just for backup you understand.

Although I had a reasonably well-specced compact camera to hand, this seemed to disappear every time something good came along and I resorted to the iPhone to take pictures.

Now i say ‘resorted’ but by the end of my second day in Mickey’s place, i was choosing it over the camera.

Despite serious lack of controls over exposure, no flash, and difficult to hold, it actually produced pretty damn good pictures. Lovely vivid colours, sharp and very little shutter lag.

Sending them any place had to wait till I got back to the hotel, but the wifi was priced a little more enthusiastically than I had expected and probably would have cost me more than the Orange network my phone had defaulted to.

But I had an ace up my sleeve and that was the N95. It boasts a little app called WalkingHotSpot that turns a 3G phone into a wireless access point. And for whayever reason, Vodafone’s continental partner was offering me a generous 25Mb of data for just £4.99 and, most importantly, a text before rebilling me. A bargain compared to the £2.35 a Mb I think I would have paid through the iPhone.

Ony one drawback… no charger for the N95. As a backup phone, it left the UK fully charged, but WalkingHotSpot sucks on power like a Dyson sucks dust off lino. If I turned off Bluetooth, Exchange, and everything else I could think off, and switched the phone off between sessions, I could probably stretch it out over the four days we were there. And I did.

Christopher made far better use than I did, employing it as a translation device. I discovered you don’t need much translation in Disneyland. You can get by with ‘excusez-moi’ when you want to get past someone, ‘pardon’ when you tread on someone’s foot, and ‘ouch’ when someone treads on yours. But he did impress me by geo-pinning the location of his car so he could find it in the airport car park on his return.