Well, I thought I had been here before, and heading back into the mists of blog-time I’ve found that I was raving (or was it ranting?) about them back in April 2003. As I still like and listen to the guys, I believe they are very worthy recipients of the band of the week award.
Here’s what I said about them back in April 2003
The Eye Bent Grape Spasm
Yes, erm, well I think they rock.
Today's listening is The Eye Bent Grape Spasm's seminal 1993 classic album Large Scary Nasal Hair. Personal favourites have to be Steenkin' Bandito's and Serious Jazz. What more can I say, excellent stuff, especially the Hendrix-esque excursions into previously uncharted sonic domains.
Something else to check out in a similar vein are the other bands on the Very Concerned Records site – Pompillion certainly look like a future candidate for band of the week!
So, Matt has finally got his 6682, but all is not entirely well in the land of Dorothy and the Tin Man.
Not content with being very late to the game (the N70 is now appearing in European shops), Cingular also appear to have hamstrung the 6682, you’d think the US networks would have started learning some lessons from the V710 debacle, and the subsequent class action.
I’ve got nothing much against operators changing the firmware on the phones they sell to improve the customer experience, I quite like the Orange home screen on my Nokia 6680, but I’m less than impressed when the networks take things away. Here’s one example of how the 6680 works for emailing an image taken with the camera.
Nothing too contentious there, open the gallery application, select an image, and choose to send it via email. Now, try this on a 6682 that’s been hamstrung by Cingular, and you won’t see the email choice. This may seem crazy, because Cingular are going to get your money anyway for the data traffic if you choose Multimedia (MMS) instead, with the major proviso that MMC images are frequently brutally cut down to size by the operators gateways, so your 1.3 megapixel image will look like a 256 colour vga sized image, hell you might as well have taken it with a RAZR…
After a few attempts at doing this, most people will take the smart route, they’ll either send pictures from their phone using bluetooth or by using a memory card reader, and the Cingular will have cut themselves completely out of the loop. I thought 3-UK took some beating for absolute stupidity, but Cingular are heading that way.
Update: Looks like I’ve got this a little wrong, for
all 6682s (and 6680s I guess) the
"Send via e-mail" menu option is hidden until you’ve
configured an email account on the phone, whoops!
However, Cingular still keep this menu item disabled.
