Seems they need a new website though.. or a website at all.

Just like I want to be one day! This bad boy is as rich and smooth as it is dark, a superb imperial stout with a little bit of a whisky afterglow. A very nice dessert to mull over.

Balmain Brewing Company are obviously very much local to me, so it was about time I put them up here. I’ve also tried their pale ale, which is terrific. Suggest you pick up a quad pack of each and give em a go. Let me know, and I’ll come ’round to assist with the appreciation of them!

Picture reference, this is the first uplourde using my new phone and the wordpress software on it. For reference, here’s the exact same photo uplourded to skydrive. Seems less grainy..

- Accidental clicking when scrolling seems to be pretty common for me.. not sure if I’m doing it wrong, but I find that I look for empty space to scroll through my ‘what’s new’ feed. The feed itself however is rather grouse, though it’d be nice if there was a way to ‘share’ facebook junk on there. Given that that doesn’t seem possible in any mobile facebook thing though, I’m thinking that might be an API issue more than anything else. Also in my notifications feed it’d be nice to see the tweet that someone’s replied to. I keep forgetting.
- Custom notification sounds. I like that I can do custom ringtones, but I like to pair them with custom sms get tones as well. It’s a curious omission for a Nokia, given they’ve had that option forever, but obv. that one’s on Microsoft to add. Hopefully for WinPho8 anyway.
- Ringtones that loop without a gap would be a nice option to have, if only because that makes ‘tones formatted for iOS work properly. That one’s a minor one really.. it’s easy enough to just loop it yourself in Audacity for 30 seconds… probably.
- The last firmware update (12070) has basically doubled the battery life. Now I charge it every second night rather than every night. It also seems more consistant in its usage – No more sudden drops in life remaining. Very handy. It’s also apparently changed the white balance in the photos, which was a little off. I’ve not played mugh
- I have somehow managed to leave a giant scratch across my screen. Boo. :(

All in all I think it’s great. It does the core smartphone things very well: social networking, taking photos and sharing them, emails, basic internettery… it’s even a competent phone! Where it falls down is app support. There are some great ones, as highlighted last time, but there’s some pretty big gaps – large name apps like Instagram and such aren’t on there, even Skype (owned by MS now!) is missing. If you’re not a big user of specific apps then there’s probably something that’ll fit your needs, but hopefully there’ll be more support from devs in future.

Also games. There should be ways and reasons for devs to link xbox gaming to it easily.

The Metro UI is a suberbly coherant thing, perfectly content to present an electronic device rather than being reminiscent of a notepad, casino, wild west saloon and three other things at other times. No drop shadows, no foofaraw, just a super clean no fuss look. I really like it. I’ve heard some gripes about the back button being odd here and there but I’ve no idea why as it immediately clicked for me. Back goes back, funnily enough. If you want to multitask you hit start again to start again, and to get to the other tasks you simply hold back and select the other thing. Simple. It is a little funny to have a ‘search the web using Bing’ button present at all times, especially when there’s an additional soft search button that pops up for things like your contact list. Not sure I need to have Bing available to me at all times, but that’s really a minor thing. There’s hardware buttons on the right side for volume (also functions to silence the ringer, it’s a press and a tap), lock and camera (tap the screen to take the shot (I can’t take the shot!)) so that’s all covered nicely. Battery life is edging into two days, though I’m assured by The Internet that the latest firmware will up to triple it. Even if it doubles it, that’s pretty good.

As for using the thing, it’s all pretty simple. Import your contacts over bluetooth from your previous phone (super easy to get em from my old Nokia N97) and they’re uplourded to Windows Live, which is apparently what MSN is now. I found that it was a lot easier to sort them out from there on the win Live website as I had the capability to merge contacts together. Given my contacts list traces its way back to single entries per phone number stored on the (old, I had to get a micro-SIM for this) SIM card, I had a bit of merging to do. Also it was a good time to clean up my MSN contacts list. It would be nice to be able to merge similar contacts on the device rather than just link them, especially given one of the drawbacks of the live site – 25 contacts displayed per page and no way to select contacts from two pages to merge. Bleh. Once that was sorted though it was plain sailing to link my twitter and facebook accounts, then link all those contacts together. The nice thing about that is that the phone will grab pictures for each contact from either site, and if I pinned someone to my start page it would keep me abreast of their latest internet based witterings. As it is I have a news feed that can be set to any or all sources and a notifications page that doesn’t seem to be able to give me direct messages from Twitter. The official app can take care of that, but it seems to be an oversight that could be easily fixed. Speaking of the Twitter app, it’s been given a great Metro design – I think I prefer it to the iOS one.

As for other nice apps, I’ve found that AU Weather Pro is great for weather related things, Fuse is a great looking RSS feed dealie (and works with Google Reader accounts) IRC7 seems to be a nice IRC app and there’s a WordPress app for updating this thing on the fly. Fuse I will choose to gush over, as one of the themes available straight up is called Ipsum and I really like it – the names of the feeds are used to indicate unread messages and such. Check it before I wreck it:

I really like it, though I’ve not used it a whole lot yet. It just looks cool, so I’m going to next time I’m wanting to read my feed while away from a computer.

Lastly, here’s a sample picture. It’s not bad, given it was overcast and evening times. I imagine I’ll photog a bunch more things, so keep an eye on my tweets if you want to see more.

Now, to finish on a downer, here are some gripes constructive criticisms:
- The search button could be more useful
- It has Nokia Maps as well as Maps, Nokia Music as well as [Zune] Music + Videos, and a Nokia Blue as well as a just plain Blue colour scheme. If Nokia are going to integrate it should probably be one or the other – seems that Nokia wins for Maps and Blue, but not sure about music as I’ve not put any on there.
- The apps list (think ‘all programs’) could be unwieldy with a bunch more apps on there, even with the start menu to collate my selection of them. Might be nice to be able to nest similar things in sub menus.
- I’m not sure if there’s a way to cancel an autocorrect before it happens. There should be. Otherwise the keyboard and suggestive text is great.
- No wireless hotspot. This isn’t a phone limitation actually, it’s Optus that need to enable it. When I bugged them on twitter their guy said it ‘should be released with future updates’, so hopefully that comes to fruition.

In closing, I think I made a great decision to try something new, especially when (I choose to be hopeful) the wireless hotspot is opened up and I can link my ipod touch to it. I’m reckoning that the Metro UI has some great advantages over iOS and I’m looking forward to see where it goes. Hopefully the team there can stay on track with it and keep it going from strength to strength, especially given its newly found integration into Windows 8. More on that one later…

So anyway, the point is that they’re lovely up there and they know what I want as soon as I stagger in. If I want only coffee then I’ll go upstairs to the cafe in the work building and get one there.. they have bacon/egg offerings as well, but they’re not as good [7/10]. My favoured way to coffee in the mornings now is to stop in at True Religion in Balmain and pick up a coffee and savoury muffin [it's good for you!], wodge the cup into the holder upon the Bonnie or in a pocket of my bag if it’s a beastie day, and have it at lovely drinking therms when I hit work. On them, their bacon & egg rolls are actually the greatest. Lovely free range eggs, delicious herb’d roll, nice bacon.. mucheo recommendato [9/10].

So anyway, the point was missed again there. The point is that there’s no coffee section because most of the time I go to a nearby coffee place that has nice people with nice coffee, it’s not just for the coffee. Or something. Basically I’ve selected my coffee places either because they’re close to work and good enough, or close to home and serve excellent coffee. The Balmain crop are Bertoni and True Religion, the work picks are unremarkable so whatevs. If you want a pick of the cafes in Balmain for stopping in for a sit down meal, go to Bar Contessa. They pretty much round out the trifecta of food, coffee and place better than the rest. Tell em I said ‘hi’. The puzzled looks will be amusing.

This lovely brew is the Mikkeller portion of the Black Tokyo Horizon, a delectable stout raved about earlier. I’ve also tried the Tokyo part, which is from the wonderful chaps at Brew Dog. They’re quite similar, though upon recollection I’d say the Brew Dog might just edge it. Either way, I can think of little better liquid accompaniment for a nice slow evening. Now if you’ll excuse me, I might have to go and see if Bitches Brew is on iTunes.