Paul Hammond's Blog

I’ve posted before about Sara Bareilles and how much I love her music.  Last night, I had the chance to see her perform live at Scala in London.

The evening was opened by a guy called Rod Thomas.  He played solo, and used looped recordings of various instruments to build up songs as he went, recording each one live, there and then.  Rod’s a great singer with some very well written songs, and I am always impressed with a solo act who can create such a full sound all by himself.  I particularly liked his layered harmonies in some of the later songs.  Actually, he reminded me of a singer I saw when I was on vacation in Lake George, NY this summer – Rich Ortiz – who did similar things with looped and layered recordings.

Anyway, on to the main event – Sara and her band.

Let’s start with the sound quality.  It was awesome.  Everything was the perfect volume and the sound guys created a great mix that made every instrument and vocal nice and clear.  The only criticism was that the band’s microphones were a little too quiet for the harmonies to cut through like they do on the record.  The drums were mic’ed superbly, with a huge bass drum that you could feel in your chest, and excellent clarity from the snare and cymbals.  Usually I am left disappointed by the drum sound or mix, but not on this occasion.  The bass levels matched those of the bass drum perfectly to create a nice fat bottom end.  The guitar stack was on the same side of the stage that we were standing so very occasionally the guitar was too high in the mix, but that didn’t matter at all.

The set list was a little shorter than I would have liked, but was excellent.  Most of the tracks were from the album, with one Beatles song thrown in for good measure.  The songs are so well written; they sound great on the CD, and easily as good live.

The band was awesome.  Sara was backed by Javier Dunn on guitar, Josh Day on drums and (I think) Brian Allen on bass.  All three are excellent musicians, and I particularly liked Josh’s work on the drums.

And Sara.  Well, what can I say?  Sara has such a fantastic voice.  She has complete control, singing subtly in the sensitive phrases, open up to be strong and powerful when the songs build.  There aren’t many artists today who sound this good outside of the protection of a studio, with all of its sound tools and multiple takes.  There were certainly moments in the show where I had goose-bumps…

If Sara Bareilles tours in a town near you, do yourself a favour and go see her.  You’ll love it.

…the taste of it’s cherry chapstick (Thanks Katy Perry - song reference here).  Sadly though, after a month of use, I have reverted back to my Windows Mobile phone.

My wife bought a first generation iPhone and then upgraded to the iPhone 3G when it was released.  This left her first generation handset sitting on my desk, nothing more than a tastefully designed paperweight.  My mobile account is with another provider, so at first I couldn’t use the phone with my SIM card.  A short session with my Mac Mini and the Pwnage tool soon had my phone unlocked for use on my own network and running the iPhone 2.1 software.  All in the name of research you understand…

Anyway, on the whole I like the whole iPhone experience.  The handset itself looks and feels great, with a nice “solid” build quality, and a satisfying weight when held in the hand.  The touchscreen is bright and responsive, and again the firm feel of “finger on glass” has a more solid feel than the stylus on my Windows Mobile PDA.  Some of the applications available from the App Store are pretty nice too.  I was particularly impressed with the MLB At Bat software, the Apple Remote software that can control iTunes over a wireless network, and the dual spirit level was fun and actually useful (who knew that the accelerometers in the iPhone were so sensitive!?).

So why did I switch back?  There were a number of reasons.  Some things were just small niggles, other things downright frustrating, and all combined to make my old phone a better option right now.  A few of them are below:

• No ability to cut and paste text.  There are plenty of comments around the web on this.  Only qualifying as “mildly annoying” for the most part, but it was definitely something I missed.
• General instability of applications.  More often than I would have liked, an application would stop responding (hanging the whole phone while it did) and after some timeout period it would crash you back to the home screen.  The most annoying times this happened was after typing some lengthy email replies but before getting a chance to send them.  I lost quite a few emails this way.  Grrr.
• I actually found some of the applications very slow.  Opening my SMS inbox would display a blank screen for a good few seconds before displaying my text messages.  Ditto for the messaging inboxes.  Going back to my Windows Mobile phone seemed positively lightning quick in contrast.
• No “true” multi-tasking for applications.  In Windows Mobile, I can load IE and start a page downloading, then switch to my inbox, or some other application, and switch back and forth happily.  Some iPhone applications appear to remember where you were, but do seem to load afresh each time you enter them from the home screen.  For example, the At Bat software would reset to the home screen of the app (instead of just redisplaying the page I was on when I flipped over to my inbox). This didn’t suit my need for truly doing more than one thing at once.
• A question mark over my Exchange Calendar entries.  After syncing with my iPhone, I have been getting some odd behaviour with Calendar entries.  Deleting an occurrence of a recurring meeting now doesn’t work correctly (it leaves the meeting in my Calendar, but with the time marked as Free).  I’ve done nothing else to my Calendar in this time so I am suspecting iPhone-Exchange functionality, but I cannot confirm this.

My Windows Mobile phone is a couple of years old now, running Windows Mobile 6.  Even so, it still does as good a job as the iPhone for most things I need, and in many ways it is better.

I will be watching future iPhone software and hardware revisions closely, as I feel like it could eventually become my phone of choice.  Not right now though.

I have but one regret - if only my HTC looked more like the iPhone instead of a brick, I could retain at least some street credibility…