Carphone Warehouse don't lock their PAYG phones, so they are effectively SIM free. Although you do have to buy a £10 top-up, which you'll probably end up wasting.

Re: Android Android Android

Well Android is the rival at this price point. And dominates the market. So it's what this phone's got to be measured against. If you're going to do a review, then the big question is 'do I buy this phone'. And to decide that - you have to refer to the alternatives.

Re: Now, this is more like it...

I've gone the other way. Cheap Nokia Lumia 710 (on WP7) to iPhone 5. This is for the work phone, and I bought the Nokia myself because the Android on the contract was too annoying. I like the OS, but the lag was pissing me off. I definitely think that the really cheap 'Droids are to be avoided. If you need a cheaper one, buy last year's (or 2 years ago) top of the range. Although if Android security starts to be a real problem, you could end up a bit sad and lonely with less likelihood of security patches. Lots of the mid-price 'Droids look pretty good, but I've not seen a £100 that I liked.

The biggest downside of Win Pho is the apps. Unless that's massively improved in the last 6 months. There weren't very many, and lots of them were poor quality. That also helps with the modest hardware. The OS seems to be pretty light on that, whereas I've seen lag just navigating round the home screen on cheap 'Droids. But if you care less about apps then you'll be less worried about low processor/RAM as you won't be doing much multi-tasking.

In my opinion the built-in email and contacts management are better on Win Pho than iOS or Android. Though with Android you can just install better ones. If you mostly use your phone for email and calls, then a cheaper one is a good plan and for that Nokia looks pretty good to me.

One big note of caution though. The lack of Gorilla Glass. I'd wonder about going up to the 720, if it's not too expensive, just for that. Although a decent case also solves that problem.

Re: Short term doesn't count

Khaptain,

Well I certainly agree that being more informed about the world around us is a good thing. And so listening to people from the poorer bits of the world would be a great idea.

But most people who live under the £1 a day line don't deal in a cash economy. So that figure of £1 a day is misleading. A lot of them won't be paying for services in the same way, or buying all the food that they eat. The lack of money really shows up when it comes to things like healthcare, because then cash is important and something they don't have.

It's pretty hard to get people to vote, or follow the news so they can make an informed decision when they do so. And that's for elections that directly affect them. So it's going to be even harder to get people to listen to voices from other countries. Therefore a bit of harmless publicity in the form of getting people to eat less food seems like a good thing. And perhaps puts into perspective that whole debate in the UK last week about living on £53 (which ignored housing benefit anyway). I do agree you can't pretend to be poor.

It would also be interesting to see whether we could get a debate going as to solutions. Getting the EU (and the US) to stop subsidising our farmers quite so much for example, or at least doing so in a different way. That alone would probably help more people in Africa out of poverty than any amount of aid we could plausibly give. This might also be a time to sing the praises of globalisation. Something that's not got a good press with the current economic crisis. But there's a lot of people in Asia who're a lot better off because of it. Even if it's made 'the West' a bit poorer, partly because finance and politics hasn't adjusted fast enough for the economic changes. But it's probably still a huge net gain to world happiness/wealthiness/less-dead-poor-people-iness.

Re: It's getting to be very apparent that ...

That only works so long as China get the balance right. If they decide to kick the big US corporates too much, or the Japanese for a particular example, then their economy might become a lot less shiny suddenly.

The reason big companies have power isn't because they're evil, greedy or politicians are stupid or corrupt. Though all of those things may or may not be true... The reason is that they have something that governments want. They create value, jobs and shinies that people want.

Russia has a powerful and rich government. But its economy is still massively biased towards mining and petrochemicals because the government have fleeced (or allowed to be fleeced) a few too many Western (and local) corporations - who now are wary of investing into their economy. It's an example China need to be wary of. There's nothing wrong with beating up on companies for breaking the law, as long as it's broadly done to foreign and domestic firms alike, and isn't too arbitrary.

Re: Short term doesn't count

It's an awareness exercise - which is a perfectly valid kind of stunt. If taken seriously then you'd have to look at purchasing power parity. People who live on £1 a day, but also live on farm land and don't have jobs, are going to spend some of their time growing stuff to eat, and their £1 is going to go a lot further than it does in Spain or the UK. Not that I recommend subsistence farming as a lifestyle, but it's not the same as trying to live in an industrial society on the same kind of money because you're in a different kind of society with barter and cooperation.

If you look at the industrial revolution you'll find an awful lot of nostalgia for the 'good old days' pre-enclosure where villages were very inefficient at growing crops and most people were still basically subsistence farmers, supporting a few specialist trades. It was a much more cooperative society, as it had to be. The village would share tools, labour, and expertise. As well as some big parties. All things that in a modern industrial society you might need to use money for. So they'd be massively financially poorer, but that wouldn't capture their actual standard of living.

The idea is that it's supposed to make you think. The world is complicated, and people are busy so this is a perfectly fine idea.

Re: Playing with new toys...

It could be an app for Google Glass I suppose. You're wearing them anyway, so it would naturally overlay extra content onto what you're seeing, and is in position to photograph it as well.

Not that I see this being anything other than a cumbersome idea. If you want this at breakfast, read your paper on a tablet.

Re: "Provides liquidity"

No. Say I bought £100m of BP stock a year ago. I'm now happy with my dividends and profit and want to sell on to invest in something else. Or just to spend the money on beer and hookers...

So I could put those shares up on the market and wait for other people who want to invest in them to buy them, a bit at a time. But that means my money is tied up, and I've seen a short term opportunity in shares in Acme Badger Culling Ltd. If I don't buy that now, the shares might rise before I can buy them - when other people realise the profits to be made.

So the market maker comes along. He knows that loads of people will want BP shares in the future. So he buys the lot off me, at a bit under market price. That's his profit. I get all my cash straight away and can invest it in what I want. I've made a tiny bit less profit, but that's made up for not having to wait to get my cash.

Other people will pick up the shares off our market maker, and so he gets rid of his stock at a slower pace. This is less of an issue with big companies, with stock that's frequently traded. But if you've got a smaller company it's very important, as you might wait weeks to shift a decent number of shares.

HFT does the same thing. It will buy up blocks of shares to sell off at tiny profits. The difference is, they probably won't trade in the unpopular stocks, because they're interested in constantly recycling trades at tiny profits. So one risk is they'll take the easy BP type money away from the market makers, who might not then be able to afford to hold stock in less frequently traded companies.

Another risk is that HFT programs will start interacting with each other in feedback loops, and break the market. Or if one trader's HFT model has a weakness and analysts for another see it, they can possibly use their HFT pooter to start siphoning money straight off the first companies by exploiting it.

Then you've got the flash crash. And that screw-up at Knight Capital to worry about... But anyway, by making it easier to trade quickly in stocks you're increasing liquidity in a market. Even while taking a small profit out of it. You are making the traded assets more liquid, i.e. easier to sell quickly.

Re: How dumb those Wall Street guys can be...

to swallow a tweet and wet their pants because of that ? It is sad to see such a bunch of idiot muppets being given the reins of the world finance!

It's not so much that. I think what happens is something odd happens, so the high frequency traders turn their boxes off. Don't use the complex computer program when you don't understand what's happening. They also make other errors, which is another issue.

The problem with this is that the HFT programs are providing a lot of the liquidity in the market. So I go to sell a share, and normally some HFT box would happily come along to snap it up to sell in a few minutes for a tiny profit. I don't mind this, as I wanted to sell for other reasons (I've already made my bigger profit from this stock over a year, and I want my money now). So everyone wins.

This is what market makers do. They don't take a position in particular shares, they just buy anything you have to sell with the plan that someone else will want it in the next few days. They make their profit from a small mark-up on each trade. By doing this I can sell my shares now, and get the money instantly to wander off and do my next trade. I don't have to hold the shares until I can find a buyer, or sell them slowly over a week. The market maker does that. One worry is that if HFE does this, but less reliably, then markets will be less liquid. If you can't reliably sell an asset then you'll have to be more cautious about buying it.

Remember that if all trade in Apple in the market stops and I sell a few Apple share at $100, the price of Apple stock has dropped from $400 - $100. Wiping out a few hundred billion. But this isn't really true if everyone else holding Apple stock sells theirs for $400 for the rest of the day. So you could argue that hundreds of billions have been wiped off the market for that few minutes, or just that I foolishly lost a few thousand, and everything carried on as normal. The same's true for the whole market. If prices drop for a few minutes then bounce back, the only people who lose are the ones that sold at that lower price. And they're matched by winners, who bought low.

Re: @TeeCee (was: This is a new one for us.)

jake,

I've noticed a lack of downvotes on some of your recent posts. Has your stalker finally abandoned you? Do you not feel all lonesome and sad, now that some nerd-in-a-basement no longer feels a compulsion to anonymously disapprove your every post?

I really hope they had a script to do that. It would be truly tragic if they were doing it by hand.

Re: Maybe HTC could focus on

Eadon,

I believe Nokia have got $10bn in their cash-pile. Or perhaps, given where they're from, hoard would be be the word... So they've got enough cash to dump MS and go the Android route, if they fancy a last throw of the dice.

One of their problems is that it's not just smartphones where they're failing. From the figures I saw a while back they only made half their phone profits from smarties, and the other half from the larger number of cheap dumb-phones. That's before Elop joined. The Chinese had finally caught up with their brilliant supply-chain and started beating them on price a few years ago, and I'd guess one of the reasons they went with Elop and Windows may have been that they wanted some higher profit smarphones to counter the loss of the dumb-phone market share, and they saw MS as the better chance to achieve that than Android or fixing Symbian / Meego.

As for their hardware being a generation behind, I think that's utter bollocks. They may be using lesser chips than the top 'Droids and iPhones, but most of that stuff is bought in anyway. They can always put in better ones and faster RAM if required. But Win Pho doesn't seem to need the top hardware, MS may actually have written some decently efficient code. Although it may equally be that there aren't enough demanding apps to make the multi-tasking in WP8 break sweat. I've not played much with WP8, so I've no idea how it handles heavy loads of simultaneous running apps.

Also, they've got some excellent camera hardware/software. Possibly some of the best amongst the mobile lot. That may even be a reason they dump Windows. If MS don't make OS changes that allow them to do their full Pureview goodness, I'd have though Android would be a more flexible option.

The phone is killing off the mp3 player, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't kill the cheap compact camera market as well, in a few years. Obviously if you want a big lens, then it's bridge cameras of SLRs you need - but if you can have a 3x zoom fold out lens on a tiny camera, why not on a phone? Or if the Pureview thing means you can get almost as good results without, then so much the better.

Hmmmm. Apple got a bunch of people to shift from slide-to-unlock due to lawyers, I believe one of the routes gone down was that you had a 'ball' on your lock screen that you dropped into a hole for the app you wanted the phone to launch into. With goatse as the lock image, I'd hate to think what gets launched when you drop it there...

Re: Android permissions design

Aoyagi Aichou,

Unless Android has changed recently, then it and WinPho are very similar. Both list the permissions required at the bottom of the app's description page on Play Store or Marketplace. You then install them. Unless you root Android you don't get to pick and mix with permissions either.

iOS allows a bit less leeway for apps. But leaves the user a lot more in the dark as to what's going on.

Re: Android permissions design

Windows Phone lets you set permissions. The app store has a little blurb on each app saying what permissions it wants (next to a link to an explanation of what those permissions are). They're no more granular than Android ones from memory.

Apps then have to ask for permission to do certain stuff when you launch them, like phone home with data or use location services.

As I recall iOS only has pop-ups for allowing access to your addressbook and location services. Although it may also have the same for accessing the phone function, I don't recall ever using an app that required this.

Re: IPCC?

Well you see, the global climate was just helping us with our enquiries, when it accidentally fell down 2 flights of concrete stairs... What do you mean our police station only has one storey?

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

I can't help thinking that the majority of people who buy into a [closed / walled garden / DRM-saturated hell] type device will be perfectly happy with it. It's only us techies who expect to root our devices who might be unhappy, or those who are miss-sold devices on a false basis who will be unhappy.

I have to agree with this. I recommended a Kindle to some very non-techies a while back. Just because I'd heard such awful things about Adobe's DRM. So my suggestion was that Amazon lock-in, and paying for books, was better than the alternative of wrestling Adobes Digital Editions into submission sufficiently to be able to take advantage of free library books.

I turned out to be correct. Since they ignored me, and took someone else's advice at Christmas they have read zero library books. And given the hassle it took me to get one downloaded for them to show them how, I am entirely unsurprised.

Adobe Digital Editions is an enormous pile of shit by the way. I enjoy incomprehensible user interfaces as much as the next man, but that was just silly. Also, I could find no way to authorise the actual device you're running it on, and its built-in reading interface is also shit, especially if you're trying to get large print for someone who's visually impaired. But it doesn't want any other (competently written) reader program on said laptop to be allowed a look-in.

I personally want only DRM free media. And I'm willing to jump through the hoops, and perform the required backups to support my choice. To anyone who isn't, there's iTunes or Amazon. Haven't looked at Google Play recently, but that's obviously got the same potential. This allows you to buy a device that links everything up, and makes it all easy. Sure you're locked in, and your media is at risk. But if you buy your own and don't back it up, it's probably worse. And there's nothing wrong with paying a bit extra for convenience.

Re: Grossly misleading chart

I haven't looked in detail at the figures, or legends on the tables to see what they're measuring. I don't really care enough, as I don't take other people's tablet choices personally... Although your link was a bit short on details.

But Even if Android have 50% of current sales, some of the iPads sold when they had most of the market are still in use. Also you have to be careful about sales figures, as Android could have 50% of sales into the channel, but Apple still a majority of sales to consumers. Also different organisations measure sales differently, so they never quite agree. YouGuv do a lot through online surveys - they have a panel of regulars they survey, I don't know if they top that up with on street or phone interviews. Apparently 8m Brits have never gone online though.

Re: cost

Im sure I will be heavily down voted, but other than games, internet, social sites and watching movies I see no real benefit in an ipad... or tablet for that matter.

but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads, and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... What have the Romans ever done for us?

You are right, it's a luxury. I really wouldn't want to live without a computer, and access to the internet and all the entertainment and practical goodies which all that brings. And I could perfectly happily live without my iPad. Although since getting it, my PC at home only gets used 2 or 3 times a week now, and I can read stuff on t'internet while sitting in a comfy armchair. Plus I can listen to the BBC iPlayer (radio mostly), without having to have my PC in my sitting room. And use the thing as a remote controller to drive music and podcasts through my speakers. Plus play the odd game, look at any of my photos, check my diary when I'm on the phone, take the odd note in meetings, read or play games on the train... It's a long list. All of it can be done with a laptop, but not as conveniently or comfortably.

Re: Am I the only one that thinks this is good?

Let me guess, You work for Google?

Why? It's a perfectly valid comment. It's what I assumed, that the $1,500 prototypes are supposed to be for developers, and they want feedback and apps written. Remember people were actually selling invites to Google+ on eBay, when it was invite only. Bizarre, but apparently true. Sorry, I should say offering. I hope no-one was mad enough to pay.

This is common with tech now. Scalpers make cash on getting iPhones into China, before Apple release them there. The same happened with the original Raspberry Pi's. Google would like to try to stop it, which is fair enough.

Obviously I'll have to eat my words if this is Google long-term policy. But as it's almost certainly illegal, I rather doubt that. This being a developer program, I'd imagine consumer law doesn't apply.

Oh, and downvoted for being childish and accusing someone of being a shill. Which is my pet hate.

Re: Bubble bursts

That's the problem. It's not that Apple have got worse, they still make more money from iPhones and iPads than they ever have. They're gradually losing iPad market share, but in a still growing market, so actual sales are still rising.

The problem was that the markets priced them as if they'd got new, growing, markets to enter still, and so could continue with their massive growth of the past. Which isn't currently the case. It's not a problem with lack of innovation, or a fault from Apple, it's that Wall Street got the price wrong.

A successful Apple TV would struggle to compete with iPhone/iPad type growth, because TVs are a mature market with lower turnover than personal, mobile gadgets. There just ain't that many markets growing at over 100% a year with yearly or 2-yearly replacement cycles in the consumer sector.

Re: Combine the two?

My Dad cycled the Tour de France. In his gym... His exercise bike remembered his progress along the route, and gave him a cheery, you have now cycled 5% of the course. Which took several months. Obviously he wasn't doing 100km a day, like they do.

So you could set up treadmill satnav to do the London Marathon course, and it could tell you, you're now turning onto Westminster Bridge, now onto Embankment etc. Could even give you pretty pictures.

Re: Pathetic

The Chinese aren't bailing us out! They're one of the major reasons for the current crisis.

By artificially holding the value of their currency down, when they're the 2nd largest economy and largest exporter in the world. This has caused massive global financial imbalance, and is one of the reasons for the huge bubble that got inflated over the last 10-15 years. This was partly done to keep them competitive against foreign competition, but also to hold real wages down for their own workers which both keeps them competitive and holds back the development of a middle class (who tend to be trouble makers and demand rights).

For an example of this in microcosm, see the effect of sharing a single currency with Germany on other members of the Euro. Exchange rate fluctuation puts a flex in the system that allows an economic system to move towards equilibrium.

Re: I solemnly promise

Isn't the law in Japan that all phones have to make a loud 'shutter noise', to alert women of upskirt photos? I've no idea if they have a similar warning noise for video though.

Re: Oh dear...

Supposedly Socrates had a sudden interestingly philosophical thought in the middle of a battle, and stopped to think about it for the rest of the afternoon. Which, surprisingly, didn't get him killed. Can't remember where I saw that now, but I think it must have been Thucydides. If he had been killed, it might have saved me from having to read all that Plato at school.

Once Hannibal had got his elephants over the Alps, he said, "I love it when a plan comes together."

Re: And if I already wear normal glasses?

Nuno,

That's not much good if you need prescription lenses in order to be able to see the HUD though.

Re: Starting to be excited about this ...

I'm certainly interested.

a "25-inch high" screen seen from eight feet away.

For me it would depend on the text size. I guess they're talking about a 30" widescreen telly equivalent. I couldn't read subtitles on that from 8 feet away. So I'd be OK for icons, arrows, status lights, or very large text that covers most of the screen. Otherwise I'd be stuffed.

But then, for context, I use 5x magnification to read normal 8-12pt type. So a relatively bad case.

You could make something up with a nicer camera, or at least one with a zoom lens, and a slightly bigger display that could be excellent for me. SatNav display where I can also magnify road signs and train departure boards. I can read these if I stand close enough, but in cities they tend to be placed 20ft up in the air, so the only way to get close enough would be to carry a ladder.

Still once the tech is mainstream, it then becomes much cheaper to make up modified versions. So I have hope for shiny things to come.

Re: Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?

Now there's an interesting question. I think we have to say no. I think the current clusterfuck that is the Euro has to win this one hands down. It's the policy that has the greatest chance of destroying the EU, and the economies of every member.

But then we have to look at the horrible consequences for third world economies and agriculture of the Common Agriculture Policy. That one's a real doozy. We increase poverty within the EU, by redistributing cash from poor consumers (and rich ones too, to be fair), to relatively rich farmers. Of course there are also some really poor farmers who get help too, but sadly the policy gives most of its cash to the rich ones. To make this work we also slap import tariffs onto poor developing world farmers, so they can't export to us in an area they can compete in. All the while we also increase inefficiency in our own farming. And at one point we were even paying one lot of farmers to over-produce subsidised crops, then paying a bunch of bureaucrats to either store or destroy the surplus. Biofuels isn't working, but I think CAP beats it even in the area of agriculture.

Oh, and I forgot the Common Fisheries Policy. Which even when it sees the need to reduce catastrophic over-fishing, to save the fish stocks that are being systematically destroyed, does it in such a way that it still kills massive numbers of fish that decimate the stocks, but now throws them back, so we can't even eat them as we destroy them. That's probably slightly madder than biofuels too.

The Financial Transactions Tax might come in there too. Although it's hard to know unless they actually do it. But the Commission's own figures say that the 11 countries who try it are expecting to raise a total of €38 billion in tax per year. But it's expected to cost 0.1 - 0.2% GDP growth per year, which will work out to several hundred billion Euro per year. Also, while the money you raise is an annual amount. If you lose a percentage of GDP growth every year, you get compound effects, so each year you get smaller growth from a total smaller than it would otherwise have been. Also they may destroy the market in their own government debt, in the middle of a crisis in confidence in Eurozone government debt. Oh and it may also break the Repo market, i.e. interbank lending, during a crisis in confidence in Eurozone banks. So it's possible it could bring down the Euro, even if they do enough to otherwise save it.

Re: Chatham House independent?

That story about Chatham House is pretty thin. They've got a pretty decent reputation, and I don't think that does anything to particularly undermine it. And once you chuck in the lazy generalisation of 'have been criticised for links to the energy industry', something your link doesn't actually back up in any meaningful way, I begin to suspect you're playing the man and not the ball.

Biofuel might be a brilliant idea. Certainly using waste products makes sense. But once you're using food crops, which consume massive amounts of energy to farm and even more to convert, then you're on to a losing game. Particularly given the knock-on effect this has on the world food market. Andrew Orlowski isn't knocking this because he's some evil agent acting for the evil fuel evil evil evil evil evil industry lobby evil conglomerates evil evil evil. Well he might be (who knows?), but in this case he's knocking it because it's a shit idea.

Wrong when it comes to Nokia (WP8) too. Cloud backup restores text messages, settings & apps. Photos are generally auto uploaded but I don't think it pulls them automatically.

GBL Initialiser,

That's good. I was specific when I said WP7, which didn't do any kind of proper back-up. So it's nice to see they put it in the new version.

Not that I care about texts particularly, but my sister-in-law had about 100 un-backed-up MMS messages with pictures of their kids. A decent OS ought to have a way of backing those up. Android 2.2 didn't. And even most of the apps which claimed you could save them didn't work.

I'm interested to see comments that modern versions of Android now do proper backup. I'm certain that there was nothing available in Android 2.2/2.3, which is what I put in my post and got all the downvotes for. There have always been individual ways of doing stuff, synch the photos with Picassa, use GMail etc. But I'm positive there was no way to do it before. Unless it was in stock Android, but removed by HTC Sense.

Anyway Apple got this one right from the start. Even if they did force you to use iTunes until iOS 5, when you could back-up to iCloud. And I don't think Android or Microsoft did - though I'm glad to be told they've now corrected themselves. I don't know about Blackberry, it's the one OS I've not used.

Re: Just wondering.

Anyone can set up their own thinktank. So yes, it's a self-bestowed title. However there are definitely 'elite' ones that people actually listen to. You can get adopted by a political party, or a particular politician. New Labour had it's favourites, for example.

Or you can just be consistently interesting for years, like Chatham House, and build up a decent international reputation.

Re: Stop the FUD

Well Adobe do try and punt some sort of McAfee thingamijig, but only when you go to their website for Flash. Then again, the last 2 times I've used the Flash auto-updater, it's not actually downloaded the patch, but taken me to their website to download it - and then I've had to untick the bloody McAfee box. Still Flash has improved a lot, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too much... Otherwise your point stands.

Certainly Oracle need to sort out Java patching. Whenever I come to look at a friend's PC (if I've not already uninstalled Java for them), there's always that orange square in the system tray with a pending Java update in it. Don't know whether that's because they never update it, or just it's always being bloody patched.

El Reg must have a macro now for headlines and half the story of Oracle issues millions of Java updates, desktop Java really sucks for security etc.

Re: normal apple

Nah. It's just dull now.

Re: traffic shaping for leccy companies?

Ledswinger,

That's the whole point of smart meters. There are lots of demands that are instant, but there are plenty of other predictable loads that aren't time critical. If I put my dishwasher on last thing as I go to bed, there's no problem with it running at midnight, 5am or any time in between. All you need to know is how long the process will run for, and how many of them are going round the country. At which point the smart meter idea comes in. Theoretically National Grid could run a central system to calculate all this, and load the evening's demand nice and easily.

In my opinion, there are too many things to go wrong. It it's not easy, customers won't use it. If it gets it wrong, they won't either. I think there'll be too many variables, and it would need some pretty good load-balancing central servers. What happens if they keep falling over? People will stop using it if they keep waking up to dirty breakfast bowls and un-run washing/drying. Or something goes wrong and everything runs at once, won't turn off, and takes down the grid?

Re: i should know better by now

Danny 5,

I seem to recall there being various bugs/driver errors with the original 920 on launch. So it's possible that some of it is true. Certainly they had battery life and some sort of call receiving bugs. All fixed after a couple of weeks.

They had similar problems with the Lumia 800 in 2011 too. Personally, I suspect Nokia were in a serious rush to get to market, and cut a few corners on QC.

That post still sounded like BS though.

Re: Android, but not sure which

My brother had an iPod Touch. So he'd got a WiFi scanner which he was allowed to keep - so he may even still have it. But by the time I got the iPad 1, Apple had killed them off. I think it was in the update to iOS 3, they were all taken out of the store, for 'using an undocumented API'.

Basically, Apple didn't think it would be a useful app. So didn't bother making the functionality available. Or it might be that their WiFi drivers were so flaky at the time, that they were having to update them frequently. Hence they didn't want the hassle of supporting apps wanting more than just an internet connection.

I've got the iPhone 5 from work. It's perfectly fine. It does some things better than other phones, some worse.

Personally I don't think there's an overall best OS/phone combination any more. It's horses for burgers courses now. Depending on what you want the thing for, and what price you want to pay.