I’m going on a phone hunt.

I’m going to catch an iPhone.

It costs almost £1000!

I’m not scared.*

In truth, I am scared because I have never bought a Steve Jobs product directly, except things like the movie Toy Story. That doesn’t count because I think it is true to say that Pixar got successful when Jobs was looking the other way trying to recreate Apple at NeXT and only partly succeeding. iTunes is free, so that does not count either, and I would have bought the two album downloads and two individual tracks anyway.

My current MP3 player is in my Windows smartphone, so unfortunately I have to be geeky enough to figure out Media Player and its odd syncing protocol. I am, for now, an iPod-free zone.

For a long time I operated what you might call a “Best Nokia Heuristic”, i.e. just buying the best phone that Nokia makes. This was a business decision that started when I bought the earliest GSM phones to equip my team of reporters at Opec meetings (there goes another Opec reference, folks!).

It had been preceded by another heuristic — the “It Must Work in a Lift Heuristic”. Only Nokias did at that time. Eccentrically, I would also test them by descending into the basement area of the Espree Health Club behind Fleet Street. The staff at Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse, still in the early days of its emerging success story, was always very obliging with demo product. This particular rule of thumb derived from a most extraordinary moment Continue reading ‘i’m going on a phone hunt’

Zimbabwe’s president does a good turn to journalists by grabbing the hand of politicians and royals, making major news out of so-called “gaffes” by UK home secretary Jack Straw and even Prince Charles. But what happens when a journalist seeks out the hand of a war criminal?

The BBC took credit this week for uncovering Afghan warlord Faryadi Zardad, who was living in London under a false passport. Tracked down by John Simpson, its star correspondent and the self-styled liberator of Kabul, the broadcaster repeatedly showed a clip of the journalist arriving with a TV crew at the non-descript terraced house in which Zardad was holed up before his arrest and unprecedented prosecution on English soil for crimes committed abroad.

Seeking to show how its intrepid reporter unmasked the truth in an “exclusive” for the BBC’s flagship news programme Newsnight, every broadcast reporting Zardad’s 20-year conviction showed Simpson in a handshake with a man who, the broadcaster delighted in explaining, kept a human “dog.”

The point is not that Simpson made a mistake. It’s just that accidental handshakes should not distract reporters and editors, especially when such actions mean nothing more than juvenile embarrassment.

There has been a consistent bias in the reporting and analysis of the latest terrorist incident that the source of the crime is “somewhere else.” That extends both to the human and technical resources deployed. So there is a great “shock” when the terrorists are discovered to be young local men living in relatively tight-knit communities, and a similar reversal when the explosives used are “home-made” rather than of an industrial/military source.

Still, we look for identity cards, and controls on the movement of suspect foreigners, when already we should know different. The two shoe bombers were both home-grown and with home-made explosives. Only their arrest avoided last week’s catastrophe occurring earlier.

The bias on display is that ordinary folk live in a safe well-ordered and relatively low-tech society and the bad stuff is extrinsic. The truth that we are discovering about globalisation is that threats that used to be foreign are now indigenous, and this may be much more of an issue of technology and media than immigration, religion or multi-culturalism to which the right will point. Necessary discussion of the latter meanwhile is hampered by the liberal bias of political correctness, and dare one say it, the ostensible quality of Muslim leadership in the UK if those put up for interview are anything to go by.

In any event, the underlying cause is probably one of cultural alienation and despair, probably involving some level of mental illness, and independent of religion. After all Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma bombing was no immigrant, or Muslim. Nevertheless, this does not let the religious communities in which these terrorists live off the hook–quite the contrary.