Yes, much excitement happiness and pleasure in the office today. Us Europeans are a bit behind you Americans with this whole iPhone thing, but today – OhhhMyGaud!!! – one materialised in our office, beamed from Boston to Cambridge by beautiful benevolent angels.

The thing I really love about Apple is the way they wrap their stuff. It’s as if Jonathan Ive finished off the iPhone one hour early on Friday afternoon and he says why don’t I just redesign the box before I go home? In its shiny shrink-wrap it looks like a very expensive little box of chocolates. We decided to give Stef (our CTO) the honour of opening it.

Guess what? Unlike every other mobile I’ve ever bought, it powers up straight out of the box. That AT&T activation message was slightly disconcerting though. I’m figuring their nearest base station is about 4,000 miles away. It took Simon just 3 minutes to locate the code on the Web that would crack it open, and we were surfing away onto our local WiFi.

My first impressions: gorgeous hardware design, clever gesture-driven touch screen concept that works well, easier to enter text than I was expecting, and a GREAT microbrowser. Finally you can see the next big evolution step on the mobile internet, the step that’s going to turn it into a mass market. But it’s still going to need optimisation of web sites and web services for the small screen – surfing normal desktop sites on the iPhone is better than my Nokia N95 but still something that I’d only do if I really had to.

Just one other thing – it did feel rather warm after the whole office had played with it – is it a bit of a power hog or was it just our hot little hands?

Some crafty people have been using their mobiles for purposes very different to the usual four: Phoning, texting, mobile browsing and taking pictures. We thought we’d compile a few of the more interesting ones!

• Mobile phone illumination allowed doctors to continue a surgery in a power blackout.
• Steve Garfield and Nina Simonds record together on an N95 a videocast called Spices of Life, in which they talk about good food and healthy living. [via NSeries WOM World]
• Texty singletons can find love around the corner through mobile dating services. Beep beep, time for a drink with a stranger?
• Ever wondered what your neighbourhood looked like from up above? Ricky from Symbian-Guru did too, so he attempted to send his Nokia N95 onto a maiden flight aboard a Wal-Mart $3 kite. The results weren’t as glowing as one may have hoped, but Eirik, who attempted the same experiment, succeeded in getting some great aerial shots of the area.
• In the Friday “Give me one of those!” vein, the Sony Ericsson Car-100 comes high on the list. It’s a Bluetooth-controlled car, which plugs into older Sony Ericsson phones to charge up, and can then be controlled via the keypad. Coolest gadget or what?
• Phones come with more features than ever. Not this one. It doesn’t even come with voice, sms or a camera. It’s a M:ssage “phone”, which reacts to text messages by vibrating accordingly. It’s produced by phone | not phone and we can’t figure out whether it’s a real product or a design project for a Dundee University student. Well, it’s certainly unusual! [via TechDigest]
• And finally, the Finns have embraced the mobile phone culture to its full extent, include a yearly Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, hosted by the town of Savonlinna. Nothing quite says “time for an upgrade” as seeing how far your old phone will fly. See the photos of past competitions in their full glory. [Thanks for the links, Tom]

What are some of the more bizarre uses of mobile phones you’ve seen in the past?

The number of web-enabled mobile devices is growing every day. Worrying about how your site looked on a mobile device used to be a fringe issue, reserved for the geekiest and most niche markets, but it is now beginning to rise on everyone’s list of priorities.

Virginia DeBolt writes an article for Vitamin demystifying how to make your site mobile friendly.

“Making your site mobile friendly can be boiled down to a few concepts. Use validated, standards-based HTML or XHTML, ensure meaningful semantic markup with presentation removed to a stylesheet, and add handheld media rules as needed.”

A number of free services are available to help developers test their websites such as ready.mobi and Bango’s own MobileChecker, with the former providing vastly more detailed information on what caused your site to pass or fail the check.

Some sites simply aren’t mobile friendly yet but will contain RSS feeds, which can be consumed via readers like Google Reader Mobile. [As an aside, I'm a huge fan of Google Reader Mobile and will review it in greater details at a later date.]

If you’re a reader of a blog or website that hasn’t put much effort into becoming mobile-friendly, why not drop them a line and suggest it? Sometimes, all they need is a show of hands to get the wheels in motion for a new lush mobile-friendly site. If you’re a designer, what steps are you taking to make your website more mobile friendly? The changes needed to make a site mobile-friendly can sometimes surprisingly small, but will make a world of difference to readers who is using a device with a smaller screen to browse it.

In case you haven’t noticed the links in the top left, Taptology comes in both mobile and desktop flavours to suit everyone. Bookmark the mobile version (http://www.taptu.com/blog/m/) or sign up for the RSS feed to get your daily dose of mobile goodness.

[tags]mobile web, web design, thinkvitamin, taptu, taptology, google reader mobile, virginia debolt, bango, ready.mobi[/tags]

It’s been a while since I last blogged. Seven years, to be precise. On 1st August 2000, I was in Cambridge, England halfway through a 7000 mile round-the-world bike ride. To be honest, when I was last writing my daily posts, I didn’t even know it was called blogging. I was uploading a daily diary to a website from my Palm Pilot via the infrared port on my Motorola GSM phone. Very last century. Amazingly, it worked.

That adventure started two years earlier when I picked up a book called The Bike Ride in London’s Gatwick airport and was captivated by Anne Mustoe’s account of her own ride around the world at the age of 53. If she could embark on such a journey, as a just-retired headmistress, then why couldn’t I?

The ride had started in San Francisco in June 2000. I thought it would be fun to share my daily trials and tribulations with friends, family and sponsors. It wasn’t clear to anyone back then (least of all myself) that I could cross those two deserts and four mountain ranges, deliver the sponsorship I had promised to UNICEF and get back home to my family by the middle of September. Which I did in the end, but that’s another story.

Today I’m working with a really smart group of people at a new company called Taptu. We’re in a race to build a search engine for mobile devices that’s good enough for mass-market adoption, good enough that YOU would want to use it every day. Most people in the world today don’t use mobile search engines. For the 20% who do, most of them average between one search a week and one search a month. So there’s a long way to go.

Like my bike ride, the real beginning of this new journey was two years earlier. A venture capitalist who previously worked in Nokia told me that he thought Google were following the wrong track in mobile search. They were treating it as a direct extension of desktop search. To be honest, I hadn’t given mobile search a second thought until then.

That day, I started playing with Google’s mobile search service and soon understood the significance of what he had said. My previous startup, Trigenix, had created a market-leading position in user interface software for mobile phones before being acquired by Qualcomm. So I could appreciate the challenge of making a service like mobile search work really well on mobile. The seed had been well and truly planted.

Will Taptu, succeed in this race? We’ve been told that the big guys are bound to win, that we don’t have enough search experts, that we’re too late into the market, and the mobile internet isn’t good enough yet. We don’t care, we’re doing it anyway. Vero and I created this blog to give you a trackside view of the action, the story of one small company’s battle against much bigger competition. It won’t be boring. I promise.

As our phones become more complex, have larger, brighter screens and more features than any other portable device we use, they also munch through more battery power. My current N95 might last 48 hours with normal use, while my antique Nokia 6100 lasted nearly two weeks between charges.

Here are ten tips to help you extend your phone’s battery life that little bit longer, just until you can get back to base and stick it on charge for a few hours.

1. Always make sure you have the latest firmware for your phone, (Some firmware updaters: Nokia UK, Sony Ericsson)
2. If your phone has Bluetooth and WLAN network search, turn them off when not needed
3. If you have a camera, make sure it’s really off - Leaving your camera lens exposed, for example on a Sony Ericsson P990, the camera circuitry is still running and draining your battery. Doublecheck before putting it in your pocket!
4. If you aren’t a regular user of mobile data, turn off 3G - running on 2.5G can nearly double your battery life
5. Limit the length of your light time-out and power saver time-out
6. If you’re using push email, consider changing the interval to less frequent email checks
7. Close unnecessary active applications like IM chat, instead of letting them run in the background
8. Get an extended battery, if one exists for your phone type
9. Get the ultimate in long battery life
10. If all else fails, get a secondary battery and an external charger to keep with you (And if you spend a lot of time in your car, charge it while on the go with a car charger!)