No Reservations

Yesterday we went to the movies for the first time after a long time. Being extremely turned off by the flood of blockbuster franchises this summer, we even skipped "Pirates", even though there's Keira Knightley in it. But we wanted to make a point to watch one of the few romantic comedies this year and went into the "No Reservations" on its opening weekend.
However, before we actually went to the theatre, we had to endure a barrage of bad critics, as usual with a romantic comedy. TONY gave a single star, because Melissa Anderson just didn't like its star Catherine Zeta-Jones. That's okay by itself, but Transformers got 5 stars. This has to be disheartening for any actor these days: a story, whose heroes are (CGI-generated) robots is considered 5 times better than one that evolves around two real, human characters. And EW considers "Ratatouille" the far better movie on the ground that both mostly play in a kitchen. Maybe, but, personally, I still enjoy seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones more than a computer-generated rat, no matter how cute it is.
It seems that many critics just gave up and try to make their peace with what Hollywood considers the movie of the future. Really, "No Reservations" is not the greatest movie and has many flaws, but it is at least a story about real people in a real environment and it deserves at least for that some credit.

iPhone Wishlist

So far, so good: the iPhone is certainly a lot of fun to use. Yes, the Internet over EDGE is slow, but at least I'm used to it: my Treo 650 wasn't any faster. But most of what I'm missing, can be done with a software update, which are supposed to come often and quickly, according to Steve Jobs. Here's my wish list:

• I have not problems with the on-screen keyboard, which I think it's not worth than the one of the Treo. As long as you type in English. In other language, I guess, the built-in intelligence works pretty much against you and even worse, the custom dictionary would fill up with non-English words, which hamper typing in English as well. So please come up with installable dictionaries in other languages. I can imagine that this is high on the priority list, not only to roll out iPhone in other regions, but also to support a large bi-lingual market in the US.


• In the sparse pre-launch information about the iPhone that came out of Apple, the calendar was always suspiciously missing. The reason is now obvious: the calendar application has the bare minimum functionality, far sub-par to what Palm and Windows Mobile are offering. No to do lists, no multiple calendars. I would expect at least the functionality of the iCal on the Mac.


• There's no way to put files on the iPhone, despite the fact that it can display PDFs and office documents. This means no attachments to e-mails and no reading on the go.
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• The iPhone would be an excellent e-book reader, if there was some software for it.


• For some inexplicable reason, e-mails cannot be read in landscape mode. This would help reading some HTML-formatted e-mails.