So I’ve just had an epic fail of my HTC desire. Honestly though, its been my fault, I broke the USB connection at the bottom of the phone. As a result of this, I’m left with having to make do with the collection of iOS devices I have kicking around. First need, a night stand clock with alarm, like the one that comes as standard on Android. Is it built into iOS? No.

Quick hunt round the market and download a few of the top rated candidates. They all have 1 major failing, they don’t seem to be able to dim the backlight on either the iPod or the iPad, therefore are totally useless when sitting next to your bed. I guess I’m not surprised, Kindle on iOS doesn’t seem to be able to dim the backlight either.

Solution? Go to iOS settings, brightness, disable auto brightness, manually set brightness to minimum, then launch the night stand app. Wow. Such a pleasant user experience. Got to remember to adjust the brightness back in the morning.

I’ll make these kind of annoyances and limitations imposed on users by iOS the subject of a later blog post. A friend commented that I should get an iPhone to replace the HTC, while its a nice phone, its just that, a phone. I need a computer with me, something that does what I want, not what some guys in Cupertino want.