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What Goes Best With the Meursault Les Narvaux 2007?

Never let it be said that gadget lovers aren’t sophisticated. There was a time when perhaps this was true – if you had the latest tech to hand, you were probably a neck-bearded old techie playing with cutting edge technology that was ultimately inaccessible to anyone without eyes as square as their social standing.  Nowadays, everyone who is anyone has a smartphone, maybe even a tablet. If a gadget is easy to use and it makes our life easier, why not bring it into your life? So Sommeliers everywhere are tooling up with the latest gadgetry, and the wine world looks a lot less stuffy. Wine Appreciation? Of course there’s an app for that. In fact, there’s several, and across multiple platforms too.

Hello Vino – Android and iOS

Currently the most popular and well reviewed wine app on the android store, Hello Vino is a comprehensive wine recommendation app that is also available for the iPhone app store. It allows you to select a wine based on the meal you intend to have, the occasion or recommends wines based on your taste preferences or from certain places of origin. It also allows you to find suitable foods for wines you’ve already bought!

Pair It – iOS

Never sure when to pair what wine with what food? Got a Fantastic Chardonnay Wine you want to share over dinner, but not sure what to put it with? Pair it is a $4.99 wine app available on the Apple App Store that will tell you not only how to pair each major grape type, but the sub-varietals too. With over 1000+ dishes and a course by course breakdown, it’s very comprehensive, even telling you irrelevant facts like how to pronounce each varietal. Shame it’s not multiplatform, mind!

R-Vintage Lookup – Android, Blackberry, iOS

The year a wine is produced can have a profound impact on both its value and its quality. R-Vintage Lookup is a handy app that advises you on the critical opinion and commercial value of a number of high profile wines, so you can make an informed decision about what you purchase, especially if you’re dealing with older wines. It’ll even tell you how long a white wine should be stored for before consumption (though I’ll give you that one for free – drink it after you buy it at the supermarket!) You can even get it on Blackberry devices (remember them?) as well as smartphones that people actually like (oooh, burn).

Google’s Android mobile operating system has become increasingly popular over the last 12 months, with an increasing market share and a growing adoption (and availability) of the Android App Store. Android has been gaining ground on the iPhone for months now, even seeing a higher market share than their old rivals in certain areas of the world.

Add this to Google’s dominance in the search industry and their movement into numerous other areas (shopping, maps, internet browsers, applications, document sharing – the list goes on and on) and you’ve got a company that’s a major competitor to some of the biggest companies in the world (including Apple, Microsoft and numerous others).

However, could the growing popularity and subsequent adoption of the Android mobile OS pose a genuine risk in terms of personal data management and overall security?

Many people are predicting that Android will become the biggest and most widely used mobile platform in the world within 12 months, offering a real incentive for developers of malicious software and criminals to try and attack the network. Whilst this could in theory be levelled at Apple and any other popular service or software, what makes the Android platform a higher risk (in terms of IT security) is the open source nature of the platform. This means that developers worldwide have access to the Android source code, making it easier to develop malware for the plaftorm (with nothing to stop them distributing it on the Android App Store).

Whether or not Google will take steps to reduce this issue remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting that there has already been a 400% increase in malware on the Android mobile operating platform since the same period in 2010.

Post by Phil, who works for a distribution and logistics company in the South West.

So, here’s a question for all the gadget fans: is Android unfashionable? At first it would seem like something of trick question. After all, the numbers most definitely tell us otherwise. Android is now the operating system installed on the majority of phones out there currently. But let’s backtrack on that a second: does ‘installed on the majority of phones’ mean the same thing as ‘fashionable’? After all, Android isn’t overtaking iPhone or Blackberry to take number one positon, it’s overtaking Symbian. Symbian is the operating system behind most phones from the last decade. Your mum probably has it on her phone. Your grandmother may even have it. That’s not especially ‘fashionable’, is it?

The Case of Blackberry

RIM’s mobile devices were most definitely fashionable, and you know what? I can’t explain for the life of me why this was the case. Ok, so the Blackberry messenger application kept many a financially unsound user from racking up bad credit over their text message bill, but the time of restrictive messaging allowances are now truely over. Everyone surely gets three thousand of the things. And when it comes to one important factor – the aesthetics – I simply cannot understand why people every found these ugly things attractive enough to swing them around like fashion accessories. Oh wait, the trend setters (reality show stars, pop-starlets) were probably paid to.

Regardless, Blackberries are kind of on the way out, but a much heftier opponent approaches.

Apple, the Undisputed Kings of the Smartphone?

Android has only one thing on iPhone. Fortunately for the members of the handset alliance, it’s the only thing that matters to most of us: Price. Want an Android, you get out your Credit Card. Want an iPhone, and you may as well ship in the gold bullion.

The problem is though, the iPhone does and always has looked like a million dollars. Its design philosophies are so radiant that they’ve seeped into every crack of the machine. Only Apple could sell you a device without an accessible battery and make you love it precisely because there’s no ugly seams to make your 2001-esque monolith of evolutionary thought look less striking.

Aesthetics

One of the most common criticisms (and arguably benefits) of android is the split nature of the platform. Most manufacturers have a high end version of their devices, and a low end version. You get whichever one your Vanquis card can stretch to. Some (like HTC) have high end, mid, low end devices and then just keep expanding upwards with variations on their most expensive models. By aesthetically? On the screen, the android UI ranges from pleasing (HTC sense) through ‘ok if you like blue’ (Sony Ericsson) through dull as dishwater (the default, as seen on the Nexus One). As for the cases of the phones themselves? There’s always some weakness or other. The HTC legend has a beautiful aluminium shell, but flimsy looking buttons. And the Galaxy S? Can you Say ‘Overgrown iPhone 3 Rip-Off’?

Conclusion

At the moment, I’d say that Android is at a crossroads. People who don’t care how their phones look have them, and people who love features AND aesthetics have them. But there’s no ‘wow! You have THAT phone’ factor. They’re not specifically fashionable, but they’re not yet unfashionable either.