For those that are not aware, Guiness Surger is the ultimate Guiness gadget.  It allows you to get an almost perfect pint of Guiness in the comfort of you own home.  When it was originally released the Surger cans were distributed soley through Tesco's Extra stores, now it would appear that they no longer do them.

Am I just unlucky or has Surger finally died a death?

For those that haven't seen it in action here's a video I posted to YouTube a while ago.

I'm definitely not the first to blog this and certainly won't be that last, last week saw freelance web develop Jason Roe get into a row with staff from Ryanair when he blogged about a bug in their web site.

The thing is when I was reading this comment:

Ryanair Staff #1 Says: 
February 19th, 2009 at 5:25 pm

jason!
you?re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you?ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they?re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

All I could hear in my head we the voice of Roy from The IT Crowd ranting away.

Anyway it's a great article that really brightened up my day yesterday, thanks to @veloce for the article RT.

Yesterday Google released Google Mobile App for the iPhone an application that provides a central point to launch all your Google applications from, it also features a search facility that is location aware and boasts voice recognition.

TechCrunch featured an article First Look At Google Mobile App For iPhone: Great But Not Second Coming which examples the applicaiton features and compares it's results to those shown my google in their demonstration video.

I this article I'm going to look at how well the application performed when I tried some basic searches in the office this morning.

Google Mobile App: Settings

My first observation was the the voice search button was not on the search dialog, slightly deflated and wondering if the feature was not available on the UK version I headed to settings to see if there was anything there that could be done.  A quick review of the settings revealed that Voice Search was not enabled by default and needed to be switched on.

 I also noticed that there was a caveat stating that it worked best with North American accents, so considering the number of accents there are in North America I thought let's see what if makes of a proper Northern accent

The Test

To make the test a fair one I decided to pick some common things that people are likely to search for... or at least I would search for  I picked four broad categories Food, Drink, Entertainment and Travel and tried to search for things within them, so my chosen search terms were:

• Food
  Pizza, Chinese Food, Indian Food, Supermarket 
• Drink
  Pub, Beer, Lager, Vodka 
• Entertainment
  Cinema, World of Warcraft 
• Travel
  Train Station

Six out of the eleven searches returned the right results, well actually six and a half, Vodka initially returned Monica but I decided to try again and got the right results.  Here are the screenshots of the search results for each search in no particular order.

Let's see if my status get's updated

So there I was looking at not only my first post but the first posdt from my iPhone when I started to pay attention to the images I had posted.  When I posted it I took it to be just a standard picure of the iPhone screen assuming it came pre-installed, but the layout looked oddly familiar... hold on that's my iPhone!  How the hell did I manage that?

A quick it to Google lead me to an article on On a Mac: Taking iPhone screenshots which revealed that it's one of the funky new features that came with the 2.0 firmware.  I showed it to a guy a work and we wondered if it would work on the iTouch with the 2.0 firmware, OK it doesn't have a camera but WTF let's try it, and it does indeed work.

I can't see me wanting to make huge post using the iPhone but let's see if it works.