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When I was a kid growing up in southeast Asia, I was fascinated by the bizarre native nepenthes pitcher plants I’d see on rainforest walks, not to mention the dramatic time-lapse sequences of David Attenborough documentaries. Yet even in those ideal, year-round tropical conditions, I could never get the damn things to grow. A frustration that was made even worse by a visit to Kew Gardens on holiday, where I saw the most magnificent specimens tumbling out of hanging baskets and trained over trellises. As they say, desire plus frustration equals obsession, so – 30 years later – I think I have finally cracked it. To share the love, here are my secrets (many of which are the opposite of what the textbooks say) to growing these spectacular plants indoors .
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Almost anyone who has bought a nepenthes, laden with pitchers, and brought it home will know the story. It looks great for a couple of weeks, but soon after, the tips of the pitchers start to turn crisp and brown, eventually it works its way down to where the trap joins the rest of the leaf. This was my experience for years, creating plants that, despite being sort-of alive, didn’t have any traps or make any new ones.
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Trap formation and retention on pitcher plants is directly related to humidity. As UK homes lack these sky-high moisture levels, this can be difficult to recreate outside of a terrarium. Yet, even in the sweltering conditions of southeast Asia, the same thing can be a problem. So what can you do?
The secret is simple: water. A lot of water. I keep my plants in pots without drainage, in growing media that is permanently saturated. Once a week, I fill the pot right to the top, so the water reaches the brim, about 1cm above the level of the compost – and never let it stop being as wet as a bog. Thanks to this I now have four nepenthes growing away happily, all of them outside the sealed confines of a terrarium. Despite living in an area with very hard tap water, I ignore the advice of only using bottled water and have had zero problems.
When I started ignoring the advice about never feeding them, as doing so resulted in them exhibiting yellowing leaves (a tell-tale sign of nutrient deficiency), their growth rate almost doubled. I don’t feed them heavily, just a half-strength liquid houseplant feed once a month, but the effect is dramatic and to me essential to success. And no, I don’t run around trapping insects to feed them. They don’t need it.
Finally, these plants are light hungry, so only grow them on a spot within 1m of a window, ideally a south-facing one as these are exposed to more sunlight. Don’t have a spot like that? No problem, just set up a grow light. There are now energy-efficient LED bulbs, which are very affordable and will fit into any desk lamp. But you do have to have one or the other to give them the light they need. After decades of trial and error, I have found if you do these three things, the plants are easy to keep and surprisingly fast growing. If only I’d known this back in 1989!
When I first went to Chile 30 years ago, I interviewed a television weatherman. Every evening after the six o’clock news, this fellow had to say : “Tomorrow it will be very hot in the north, pleasantly warm in the middle, and perishing at the bottom.”
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What a shape. That was what attracted me to this long, thin country. Could a Chilean woman at the top possibly have anything in common with a man born 4,270 kilometres (2,653 miles) below her? How can a country function when it is 25 times longer than it is wide? I went to find out. This is the story of a love affair with a land where I spent six months travelling from the Peruvian border to Cape Horn; it is also a story of return; and of the ever-changing past. The working title of the book that resulted from that first journey was Keep the Mountains on the Left. If I did that, I couldn’t get lost.
The Juan Fernández archipelago, 650km out in the Pacific off the coast of Chile, was, at the time my first visit, occupied by 550 people and two cars. The largest island was called Robinson Crusoe, as for four years it had been the home of the man on whom Daniel Defoe based his character, in real life the mercurial Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk. Most of the men, when I pitched up, were called Robinson or Alejandro, and they fished, collectively, for langosta de Juan Fernández – large red crustaceans resembling pincerless lobsters which fetch high prices in the fancy restaurants of Santiago. I went out fishing for langosta with a Robinson and an Alejandro across the bay where the captain of the fabled German cruiser Dresden blew up his magazine in 1915 after the British warships Kent and Glasgow cornered his vessel. We ate langosta for lunch cooked over a fire in the boat, and I managed 13 hours without a bathroom to use.
I stayed at the tip of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost police station in the world, with three policemen who were on the lookout for Argentinian invaders from Ushuaia, the lights of which town we could see twinkling opposite. When I asked my new friends what we would do in the event of an invasion, they didn’t have an answer. But they often put the generator on to watch Argentinian soaps. Prevailing south-westerlies had twisted the beech trees into alphabet configurations alongside the cold Beagle Channel where Yaghan people once paddled their canoes. The Yaghan – long gone – lived off shellfish, and had a monosyllabic verb meaning “to unexpectedly come across something hard when eating something soft”, like a pearl in an oyster.
Solitary confinement: a fisherman’s cottage near the coast in Tierra del Fuego.Photograph: Getty Images
To reach Cape Horn I accompanied a coffin on a 100ft supply boat heading for a north American cruise ship on which a passenger had expired, a round trip of 16 hours. The black curve of a finback whale broke the surface of the grey water, and uninhabited islands dripped from the end of the continent like water from a leaky tap. In the Roaring Forties (westerly winds) we had a hell of a time getting the coffin off our deck, into a Zodiac and on to the cruise ship.
The book I wrote about that journey flourished, and this month is its silver anniversary.
On my second visit to Chile, 13 years after the first, there were no vats of pisco sour, no strange men and, disappointingly, no bad behaviour of any kind. I took my eight-year-old son, Wilf, with me. I had caught my first fish in Chile, and I wanted him to do the same. We made a three-day horse trek from Cochamó to La Junta in the region of Los Lagos – the lakes – following an 18th-century trading route over the Andes. (It was there that I realised I was too old to travel on small horses up steep slopes.)
How had Chile changed? In the south the salmon industry had ushered in prosperity. You could get decent coffee almost everywhere, and people didn’t hate the Argentinians as much as they had on my first visit because of the spectacular collapse of that neighbour’s economy. Bolivia seemed to have taken up the baton of public enemy number one. While my son and I were there, Chileans returned their first female president.
And then there was Pinochet. On my first trip he was no longer at the helm, but I sensed him everywhere, stalking the national imagination and permeating life itself. Memories were fresh, and the wily monster was still crouching in his lair. In the intervening years the world had witnessed the bizarre sequence of events surrounding Pinochet’s detention in London and Surrey from winter 1998 to early spring 2000. I had gone down to London’s Devonshire Street to stand with protesting Chilean refugees, holding candles to the white curtains of the private hospital where the old man was being treated for a spinal hernia.
The icing on the cake: the Pia Glacier, in the Beagle Channel.Photograph: Lucas Vallecillos/Alamy Stock Photo
He was finally spirited home and, back on Chilean tarmac, rose from his wheelchair, Lazarus style (perhaps Ernest Saunders is a better example than Lazzers). History will judge both Pinochet and his UK supporters.
I saw Wilf learning to love Chile as I had done. It was deeply gratifying. I was one step away from Chile that second time: you don’t have the same sense of the open road when you travel as a parent. Responsibility is a roadblock.
Wilf and his brother were adults when I made my third visit a few months ago. I was free again. To prepare for a Patagonian road trip I fished out my old notebooks and, re-reading them, met myself coming back.
I said I’d travelled to Cape Horn, but on my original journey I had spotted something like a slice of cake suspended from the bottom of every map, even those on boy scouts’ arms. This turned out to be Chilean Antarctica – for Chile is one of the seven claimants of Antarctic territory (claims not recognised by anyone). It was actually illegal to publish a map without this triangle of ice. It made me realise what territory means to a young country. So I had hitched a lift south from Punta Arenas on a Chilean air force plane. At the first iceberg, I saw my next book in front of me – the first ever travelogue about the Antarctic. What happened next is another story.
New horizons: a settlement on Robinson Crusoe island.Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Travels in a Thin Country is a young woman’s book. Re-reading it now from the misty vantage point of middle age, I hardly recognise the solitary figure who shouldered a carpetbag for 4,185km. But she was me once. And now the past is all there is for a writer like me: the present isn’t around for long enough. Would I do it differently? Yes. There would be fewer passive tenses in the book and way fewer adjectives.
As for the weatherman, he told me that the real difference in his country is east to west, from the Camanchaca sea mists that creep across a narrow band in the north to the mountains joining the Andes and the coastal Cordillera like rungs on a ladder. I saw for myself that people got shorter and darker as one climbed inland. The country surprised me at every turn. Let’s give the last word to the Chilean Nobel laureate in literature, Pablo Neruda: “He who does not know the Chilean forests, does not know the planet.”
Sara Wheeler’s book, Chile: Travels in a Thin Country, is published in paperback (Abacus, £9.99). On Monday 7 January she is giving a talk about her return to Chile, at the Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 (rgs.org)
Three more books to transport you to another world
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin(published in 1977) Still viewed as one of the most influential modern travel books, In Patagonia combines personal anecdote (Chatwin’s childhood fascination with his grandma’s giant sloth skin inspired his journey) with a vivid interest in everything from Darwin and the Welsh to a log cabin built by Butch Cassidy.
Venice by Jan Morris (published in 1993)
Widely acclaimed as the classic evocation of Venice and the best book every written about the city, or any city. Not quite a history book or a guide, it’s more an immersion into every aspect of Venetian living.
Siberia by Colin Thubron (published in 1999) Thubron charts his 15,000-mile journey into Siberia after the fall of communism. He depicts a land of strange, often bleak physical extremes, from the ice-bound graves of ancient Scythians to the world’s deepest lake, Baikal, which reaches depths of a mile.
At the beginning of 2019, as at the start of 2018, Margrethe Vestager remains the most powerful woman in tech. The EU competition commissioner has the world’s biggest companies walking on tiptoe, afraid of her habit of enforcing competition law where the US authorities have refused to do so.
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In 2018, Google was the subject of Vestager’s cold gaze, receiving multibillion fines for its anti-competitive practices around its Android operating system, its shopping service and Chrome browser. But in 2019, it’s likely to be someone else’s turn. The only question is who.
In the US, Amazon has been the odds-on favourite, thanks to a combination of a hostile president, a direct negative effect on commercial competitors and the rise of the doctrine of “hipster antitrust” (broadly arguing that monopolies can be harmful even if consumer welfare appears to be boosted). But in the EU, with a greater focus on privacy and data protection issues, Facebook looks vulnerable.
The release by the UK parliament of internal Facebookemails appearing to show, among other things, Mark Zuckerberg authorising a hostile move to shut down access by Twitter’s video app Vine won’t endear the company to the competition commission. And, for many, Facebook still represents the great failure of competition commissions over the past 20 years, for rubber-stamping its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp – two of its greatest potential competitors still in their infancy.
The powers of the EU are limited – it would take the US to break up Facebook – but another multibillion fine won’t go down well at the already troubled company.
2 The app stores begin to falter
Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, is taking on the big app stores.Photograph: Epic Games
It isn’t just Facebook that might be feeling the hot breath of a regulator on its neck. The EU’s ruling against Google’s dominance of the Android app store could be the first domino to fall in a sweeping change that will reshape the consumer technology industry.
Since the birth of the iPhone, a huge amount of digital commerce has been filtered through a few platforms, which have taken a hefty chunk of the revenue they handle. Apple takes 30% of app revenue, whether it be the purchase price of the software or the digital goods bought through it. Google, on Android, and Valve, for PC games, does similar. Each earns huge profits through being, essentially, the single point of entry for an industry.
Now that’s starting to wobble. Regulators are chipping away at one corner: Google’s aforementioned fine in the EU and a court case in the US accusing Apple of abusing its monopoly over the iOS app store show the unease governments have over that centralisation of power. At the other end, slowly, power is shifting through external causes. Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, has become one of the few publishers to rival the power of the platform owners themselves and it is wielding it effectively: launching a new app store for Android devices and another for PCs and offering to take a substantially lower cut of game revenues on both.
Not many brands have the following to pull off such a shift, but as many a parent will attest, Fortnite can move children where few others can.
3 The first driverless taxis won’t change the world
Not changing the world just yet: Waymo runs a driver-supervised autonomous taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.Photograph: AP
There are two schools of thought surrounding driverless cars. One is that the technology is 99.9% complete and that soon “level five” autonomy will be reached, meaning that cars can safely drive themselves in any situation. When that happens, the world will undergo rapid change, as driving jobs begin to disappear, urban spaces are reshaped and road travel becomes safer by the day.
The other is that the final 0.1% is harder than all of the previous progress put together. And so we’ll remain, for years, with cars that work well enough to demonstrate, to put on the streets with safety drivers and continue being tested, funded and improved – but not quite well enough to actually build a business around.
Both views may be true. In the meantime, however, a 99.9% good enough car is good enough to run a taxi service – as Google is showing in Phoenix, where Waymo One, the company’s Uber competitor, is launching. What’s most interesting about the service is how… uninteresting it is. The taxis aren’t significantly cheaper than the competition; the journeys have the occasional glitch, as overcautious algorithms get stuck at T-junctions.
Maybe one day driverless cars will change the world, but not yet.
4 We can stop thinking about bitcoin
Bitcoin: ‘Will this be the year the industry starts putting substance over hype… or the year it slowly suffocates?’Photograph: Chesnot/Getty Images
Only a fool would predict the death of bitcoin, let alone the wider industry it has spawned. The community has repeatedly shown an impressive capacity for survival against gigantic crashes, crippling hacks and severe legal roadblocks, and the nature of the blockchain is such that, if even one diehard is still mining bitcoin in an attic somewhere, it can never be said to be truly over.
But the price of bitcoin has been falling for months and now stands at a fifth of its all-time high. Ethereum, an even techier alternative, has fallen almost three times that. These prices are not only a vague reflection of the interest the wider world has in cryptocurrencies – at least in so far as they can be used as a speculative asset – but also a very real reduction in the amount of money knocking around the ecosystem, funding startups, paying salaries and subsidising customer acquisition.
That means that the number of actually useful creations (as opposed to white papers, test networks, experimental trials or proofs of concept) to come out of the sector – a number already hovering somewhere in the region of zero – is likely to stay low for a while.
Maybe this will be the year that the industry puts its head down, starts putting substance over hype, and emerges in 2020 with something to show for more than a decade of speculation; or maybe this will be the year it slowly suffocates, deprived of the attention it needs to live. Either way, at least we can take a break.
5 Photography blurs with illustration
Apple’s iPhone XS Max camera in action.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Smartphone innovation has stagnated in recent years; screens have got as good as they’re going to get, battery life is hitting the limits of physics and processors have become so fast that developers are already struggling to use all the power at their fingertips.
But one of the last areas of competition is in the camera on the back of the phones. For Apple, that has meant moving to two lenses on the back of its top-end phones, investing in sapphire glass to minimise scratching and putting a hardware “neural engine” inside the phone to handle some of the more complicated elements of “computational photography” – using machine learning to manipulate images.
For Google, the approach has been entirely about software. Like Apple, it has focused heavily on computational photography, but it has taken it further than anyone else. Nowhere is this more evident than the stunning “night sight” feature released towards the end of 2018, which uses a neural network to brighten low-light shots, turning grainy, grey stills into stunningly bright and clear images.
But what’s most interesting about night sight is that the feature doesn’t just brighten images and reduce grain. It adds in detail that was never captured by the sensor in the first place, effectively “guessing” what the image would have looked like if it were better lit. It’s less photography and more computer-aided illustration, creating an artificial image based on reality that is more real than real. And that’s only going to intensify as other companies attempt to copy Google and Apple, or surpass them with their own features.
6 USB-C finally starts to make sense
The USB-C connector: will the promise of ‘one cable to rule them all’ finally be met?Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
In theory, the USB-C connector is better than its predecessor. The standard has some obvious physical benefits: a smaller plug that works in any orientation; the ability to transmit more power, more data and more standards; cables that can be used in either direction, across domains.
In practice, however, the transition has been exhausting. For one, there’s been the standard pain of chucking out cables, chargers and accessories built for a now obsolete format and replacing them slowly – and expensively – with new versions.
Also, USB-C’s flexibility has been a weakness, not a strength. Take Apple’s laptop line, for instance. If you have a MacBook with one USB-C port, that port can transmit data using the USB 3.0 protocol. If you have the latest MacBook Pro with four USB-C ports, those identical sockets can also transmit data using the Thunderbolt 3 protocol, a significantly higher-bandwidth system that can be used to power high-resolution external monitors and graphics cards. But if that MacBook Pro was bought in 2016 or 2017, only the two ports on the left side of the computer actually had full Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth. The two ports on the righthand side – again, visually identical – didn’t deliver full bandwidth.
Even the cables are baffling. Just because a piece of wire has a USB-C plug at each end doesn’t necessarily mean it can charge a device at full speed, let alone transfer data at maximum bandwidth.
Over 2019, these ridiculous situations will hopefully even out a bit, allowing the promise of “one cable to rule them all” finally to be met.
7 Another ‘I told you so’ moment for the worriers
The closure of Gatwick airport has fuelled worries about drones and aviation.Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
It’s rare for world-changing technological events to come completely by surprise. In 2017, the WannaCry cyber-attack that shut down the NHS was largely foreseeable: it exploited a vulnerability that had been patched by Microsoft months earlier to combine an example of crypto-ransomware, first seen years earlier, with so-called “worm” mechanics that allowed it to self-propagate, first seen decades earlier.
But despite that, WannaCry changed the landscape permanently. Before, we all knew that a major malware attack could cause real-world harm; but Wannacry revealed that the “we” was a smaller group than it had thought, and what it “knew” was less useful than it had hoped.
Just last month, we saw another example of the same sort of unsurprising surprise, as a drone was used to shut down Gatwick airport for 24 hours. Again, the ingredients had been in place for years before – as had some of the tools necessary to prevent such an attack – but the chaos that ensued proved the difference between knowing a threat exists and internalising that threat to the degree that you build useful plans to tackle it.
This year will be the same. Some of the big events that subtly alter our understanding of how the world works won’t involve megadeaths and cataclysmic destruction. But they can still be horribly disruptive anyway.
Perhaps a massive botnet is used to overwhelm the servers of a supermarket’s logistics division. Or a cyber-attack on the maintenance department of a big US tanker firm paralyses petrol and water distribution across a huge swath of the American south-west. Or a vulnerability in a smart speaker lets an eager prankster wake up millions with 100dB sound at 2am.
The only thing we can be sure of is that, whatever it is, someone will be able to say “I told you so”.
Price £39,640 Top speed 114mph 0-62mph 10.8 seconds MPG 44.9 CO2 167g/km
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We all have certain codes by which we live. These are mine: always go upstairs on a double-decker bus; always order crème brûlée if it’s on the menu and I always, always drive through a ford if at all possible. This has led to some hairy moments, like when water poured through the boot of an old Fiat 127 or a posh Audi A6 was left spluttering for days after gulping filthy water when I nosed out of its depth.
But there was no danger of that happening this week. The word “car” doesn’t really do the Nissan Navara justice. It is a colossal mountain of metal – and this latest model, the AT32, is the most extreme, most pumped-up, most gym-honed version of the 4×4 yet.
The AT stands for Arctic Trucks – an Icelandic firm famous for building properly uncompromising and resolutely indestructible all-terrain vehicles to cope with the wilds of its home country. Now it has gone into partnership with Nissan and converted the Navara double-cab into this jaw-on-the-floor pick-up. Arctic Trucks are graded by their increasingly outrageous tyres: the AT32 has whopping 32-inchers. Conversions done for Isuzu and Toyota are even chunkier, with 35-inchers which, even in this muscle-bound off-road universe, seems a little over the top.
As well as the huge wheels, compared to a regular Navara, you get boosted suspension and improved ground clearance. To keep the more delicate workings of your precious baby safe, much of the underside of the AT32 is armoured with steel skid plates, so that no matter how scenic the route you choose your engine, fuel tank and transmission will be protected. With its massive arches and glinting chrome roll bars, the AT32 is an intimidating spectacle. It’s more gladiator than service vehicle. But what really sets it apart is the optional snorkel air intake which winds itself up the right flank of the car like a giant black periscope. This costs an extra £1,440 and means you can wade through water up to 800mm deep. Its high position also helps filter out dusty air in more arid environments.
How necessary is wading for your average motorist? It’s totally irrelevant – unless you happen to be a game keeper or maybe a reservoir engineer. But you’ll be surprised to learn that in the UK there are 2,214 fords. Wetroads.co.uk lists all of them. The site is a work of lifelong dedication by Professor Lee Chapman and his directory is a guide to every identified ford, watersplash and tidal road from High Glenadale in Argyll to Coombe Bissett in Wiltshire. It was this last one that I sailed across in the Navara, stopping midway to marvel as the waters of the swollen River Ebble flowed round us.
The AT32 is bursting with aids to make life easier and safer for you and your passengers. There’s hill descent control and hill start assist. It has active brake limited slip which boosts grip by braking slipping wheels which transfers power and torque to the wheels that do have traction. There’s three-mode 4WD modes and full parking cameras. All of this is powered by a mighty 190hp 2.3-litre twin-turbo diesel. It’s built to tame green lanes, rocky trails and craggy passes, but copes well with smooth roads, too. During a week in which I covered more than 800 miles, my real-world consumption was over 38mpg which, in a fully loaded vehicle of this size, was impressive. And how many other cars have you driven which you can take for a drive and a swim?
Two years after its inception, 10,000 bitcoin was just about enough to buy a couple of takeaway pizzas. Today those bitcoin would be worth nearly $38m (£30m). That is a huge increase, but just a fraction of their $180m value only 13 months ago, because since its creation a decade ago this week, the digital currency has been at the centre of one of the biggest economic bubbles in history.
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Bitcoin has had a wild ride since its birth on 3 January 2009. Created as a digital currency to sidestep the traditional finance industry using encrypted code, it took until May 2010 for the first reported purchase using bitcoin to take place: those two large Papa John’s pizzas worth $30 for 10,000 bitcoins.
But in recent years bitcoin has become less useful as a medium of exchange and more famous for its boom-bust tendencies – drawing parallels to the Dutch tulip mania of 1637 and Dante’s Inferno for its ability to lose investors millions of pounds.
It surged by more than 1,000%, sometimes gaining $2,500 in a single day, to stand at almost $20,000 just before Christmas 2017. But the digital currency then crumpled over the course of last year, and yesterday stood at just $3,780, having wiped out many investments on the way down.
Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists to predict the 2008 financial crash and a former White House economic adviser is one of Bitcoin’s most vocal critics. He has called it the “mother of all bubbles” and tweeted last month that it,and other crypto copycats like Ethereum and Litecoin, should be ranked in a “2018 Shitcoin Hall/Pile of Manure Shame”.
But despite the cautionary warnings from mainstream economists, as well as the finance industry labelling bitcoin a vehicle for scammers, crooks and terrorists, there are still legions of cryptocurrency fans, with an online cottage industry of news websites, blogs and podcasts.
The digital currency launched as more than just an opportunity for investors to make millions (before losing them almost equal amounts). The technology underlying it has excited businesses, while the growth of cryptocurrencies promised another future for its fans outside the traditional financial system.
At its launch a decade ago, the very first block of bitcoin was etched with a subversive statement: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
The message from its creator – an unknown person or group of people going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto – was clear: bitcoin would exist outside of a system that had failed badly and could no longer be trusted.
The idea came straight from the Austrian school of economics with a pinch of left-wing anarchism thrown in for good measure – offering individual liberty and a way to avoid the grasp of government, while sidestepping corporate power and the banking system.
The birth of the digital currency represented a return to the days of private money in the earlier stages of western economic development, with a parallel to wildcat banks in the mid 19th century as the US expanded westward, when railway companies and construction firms issued thousands of banknotes between them.
Scores of bitcoin copycats have emerged, hoping to ride the wave of euphoria evident in 2017, launched through initial coin offerings (ICOs) that in several cases turned out to be fraudulent scams.
As with the age of private money, which led governments to create monopolies over currency under the auspices of the central banking system, in order to gain state control and to protect consumers from firms and individuals unable to repay the holders of their notes, bitcoin also appears to be heading for a more tightly regulated future.
The UK government is poised to give sweeping new powers over digital currencies to the Financial Conduct Authority, after MPs warned that it and other cryptocurrencies were akin to the “wild west” and exposed consumers to various risks. Central banks including the Bank of England are examining cryptocurrencies, while some countries have looked to create their own.
Despite losing some investors millions of pounds, the bitcoin boom and bust has also attracted attention to its underlying technology – the blockchain – which may be used to revolutionise the way companies handle payments or transfer information.
Kiran Nagaraj of the accountancy firm KPMG said company executives increasingly ask about how they can use digital currencies or blockchain technology. “Credit to bitcoin, it created an awareness. The 2018 bear market will help create better quality services and products for the whole space overall,” he said.
There are fears however that the institutional wave of investors that rushed to buy cryptocurrencies last year may slowly melt away. JP Morgan has warned that more professionals are ditching bitcoin than investing. After the launch of bitcoin futures on the Chicago Board Options Exchange a year ago – viewed by enthusiasts as its arrival in the mainstream – trading interest has slumped.
Wild estimates were made for the future value of bitcoin a year ago. John McAfee, the software security company founder, predicted it would reach $500,000 by the end of 2020. The Winklevoss twins, who have invested significant sums in bitcoin, argued it could end up matching gold in value, meaning a price above $320,000 and total market capitalisation of at least $4tn.
The argument went that prices only exist for any given asset because society agrees it is worth that amount, and why should bitcoin be any different, even if it lacks physical properties. But while gold also has limited utility to justify its value, unlike bitcoin the precious metal has been held in high regard for millennia.
At the start of its 10th year, predictions for Bitcoin’s future are modest. Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia Pacific at the currency trading firm Oanda, is moderately optimistic: “A bit of risk is still in the air but I’m starting to warm up to the upside now … we could see $5,000 and even a push to $6,000 on a convincing enough break of the key $5,000 mark.”
Clement Thibault, senior analyst at Investing.com, reckons investor confidence has been shot for the time being: “I believe too many would-be early adopters got burned badly last year, and once an asset has been labeled a bubble, a gamble, or a speculative investment, it takes time to rebuild the trust and appeal needed to push the asset forward.”
There are still those, like Roubini, who believe bitcoin could – or should – be wiped out entirely, while Teunis Brosens of the Dutch bank ING, reckons it will just disappear into relative obscurity: “This time last year I wrote a note saying [bitcoin] will become a niche asset,” he said. “I’m happy to say I think that view aged well.”
I have a Moto 3 smartphone and my wife has a similar earlier model. We are right on the edge of reception from EE. I can just get a very weak signal if I attach my phone to a selfie stick and lean out of a window, or walk up the bank behind the house. This is not ideal.
Away from home, sometimes my wife’s phone can get a strong signal whereas mine can’t get a signal at all. This made me wonder if there was a measurement to assess how good a mobile phone is at receiving signals in areas of poor reception before you buy it … and if there is an easy way for an ordinary punter to understand it. Paul
Phone manufacturers and others can and do test their phones, usually for certification purposes. The performance test results you want, if you can get them, are the Total Isotropic Sensitivity (TIS) value for reception and the Total Radiated Power (TRP) for transmission.
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These probably don’t qualify as easy for an ordinary punter to understand. Also, they are derived by testing performance in ideal conditions with a simulated base station in an anechoic chamber, not with a fading signal on a wet and windy hillside.
Either way, I don’t think phone manufacturers are likely to use TIS in their marketing. There are too many variables for it to be a reliable guide to real-world reception. For example, studies have found significant differences between holding a phone in the left hand and holding it in the right hand, which I assume is connected with the way manufacturers position their antenna(s). The size of your hands and the angle at which you hold the phone also make a difference.
The tests were created by the CTIA – originally the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association – to certify wireless devices’ over-the-air performance, and a brief glance at the 591-page PDF will show how complicated it is. For example, you could measure peak performance with a directional aerial, but then users would have to orient the phone towards the unseen transmitter for the best results. Instead, the CTIA requires the “average spherical effective radiated receiver sensitivity (TIS) to be measured”. This should mean a phone works equally well in all directions, but it’s complicated to calculate and still a compromise.
Another problem is making antennas work with different 2G, 3G and 4G phone networks that operate at different frequencies. A phone that works well with GSM 900 might be terrible with UMTS 2100. The downside of having a phone that talks to most networks is that it won’t be optimised for the one you actually use.
Also, because human bodies have not been standardised, TIS and TRP measurements are made with dummy heads and hands filled with liquid. Results may vary if you use real people.
In the end, the only measurements that matter are the ones you get with your head and hands with the specific frequencies used by your EE network. We are left with “ask a friend” and the not-very-helpful “try it and see”.
Just testing…
Some dual-sim smartphones and non-smartphones can take two sim cards at once allowing two different mobile phone networks to be used simultaneously.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
I couldn’t find much public research into mobile phone reception with commercial phones, presumably because of some of the problems mentioned above. Professor Gert Frølund Pedersen tested nine phones in Denmark in 2012 (PDF), while in the UK, Ofcom used the CTIA test to check 10 off-the-shelf phones in 2016 (PDF).
Ofcom withheld the names of the phones it tested because there weren’t enough samples to show statistically significant differences – it tested three of each device – and because “no handset outperformed the others across different frequency bands and technologies”. Knowing the names would therefore not help consumers.
However, Ofcom did point out that the non-smartphones outperformed the smartphones, and that “some of the smartphones tested required over 10x (10dB) more power than the best performing non-smartphone”.
You could always buy a cheap Nokia for making voice calls.
Last year, Ireland’s ComReg (Commission for Communications Regulation) tested 71 mobile phones that were available on the Irish market in June 2017. The aim was to “quantify the minimum signal level(s) required to make or receive a mobile call and to stream data” (PDF).
ComReg names names and gives results, but only for TRP (active transmission) not TIS (reception). It doesn’t explain why. The CTIA test recommends that TRP and TIS are tested concurrently, because a phone’s internal components (processor, memory and so on) generate electrical noise that affects reception.
StellaDoradus has published a table of the results, which includes some strikingly low numbers for some popular phones. I wouldn’t use it as the sole basis for a purchasing decision.
Sample variations
Most tests assume that all models of a particular phone will perform in the same way, but Ofcom found differences. As with other products, phones that look identical can vary. In some cases, they may have been assembled in different countries, and use slightly different components. In others, the circuitry may have been revised between editions. Even if the internal components seem to be the same, there could be some sample variation, without a phone actually being faulty.
This makes me wonder if your Moto 3 is below average in reception performance. In most cases, no one would ever know, but you are literally an “edge case”. With a new phone, it might be worth asking the supplier for a different sample, but it may be too late for that.
Hands off
It would be interesting to know what would happen if you swapped phones and sims with your wife. You may have a bigger capacitance than your wife, electronically speaking, and possibly much bigger hands. Both can and do affect reception. If your Moto 3 works better in her hands, then either you or your sim are degrading the performance. It might be worth getting a new sim.
As you already know, using your phone on a selfie stick can improve performance. You may also get better reception by not touching the phone and using the built-in speakerphone.
You could also try using a signal booster or repeater. These used to be illegal, but on 12 April last year, Ofcom approved the use of some models in homes and road vehicles “but not in boats or static caravans”. However, check carefully because illegal signal boosters are still available.
Signal Box, or switch
Vodafone’s Sure Signal femtocell boosts 3G signal locally using a broadband connection.Photograph: Vodafone
Otherwise, your best bet might be an EE Signal Box – which converts any broadband service into a local 3G mobile phone network – if you can get one. EE doesn’t list them for sale on its consumer website, though you might still be able to persuade a customer service agent to sell or even give you one.
EE does promote the Signal Box to business users, and you can buy them second hand on eBay.
Alternatively, switch to Vodafone. Not only does this provide a better signal in your area, it will happily sell you its own femtocell, the Vodafone Sure Signal V3, for a very reasonable £69. You could certainly discuss this with EE’s business retention team.
As Apple’s shares tumble after its cut in forecasts, the company is laying the blame squarely on the economic slowdown in China. But that is only part of the problem.
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Never before has Apple faced such fierce competition from a multitude of rivals from around the globe, all vying for a slice of the lucrative premium smartphone market. Matching or exceeding Apple’s iPhone on hardware quality, these phones are arguably more capable, often cheaper and, perhaps crucially for China, made by local firms, not only those from the US and South Korea.
The iPhone X broke the mould in 2017 but 2018’s iPhone XS and XS Max, while very good phones, were only iterative improvements even though Apple pushed the top asking prices to an extraordinary £1,449 in the UK, $1,449 (£1,152) in the US and 12,799 yuan (£1,480) in China.
The firm also launched a lower cost iPhone XR, which had the same processor and overall design of the iPhone XS, but dropped the quality of the screen, the materials used in its body and the dual camera system on the back for £749 in the UK, $749 in the US and 6,499 yuan in China.
The iPhone’s biggest – and sometimes better – rivals are:
Huawei Mate 20 Pro
With the Mate 20 Pro, Huawei showed it could not only match Apple’s iPhone but exceed it.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The top of the pile for 2018 comes not from Samsung or Apple but China’s Huawei, which overtook the iPhone maker to become the second largest smartphone manufacturer by volume in the world.
The Mate 20 Pro is something rather special, combining more cutting-edge technology than any other into a well-rounded, long-lasting, beautiful device.
It has a huge curved 6.39in OLED display, IR-based face recognition matching that available on the iPhone, a fingerprint scanner embedded under the display, and a fantastic triple-camera system on the back and battery life near double the competition. It can even wirelessly charge another device, a trick never before seen on any smartphone.
While certainly not cheap, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro also undercut both Apple’s top models – costing £900 in the UK and 6,799 yuan in China. The Mate 20 Pro is not available in the US.
The S-Pen stylus sets the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 apart.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The perennial thorn in Apple’s side in its battle for domination of the market since 2010, Samsung’s latest is a different beast.
The Galaxy Note 9 has the pre-requisite massive 6.4in OLED display, top of the line processor, wireless charging and a dual camera on the back. But it also has a powerful stylus that slots into the bottom of the phone and sets it apart from anything else, making it a real productivity powerhouse.
You can draw, annotate, sign and handwrite on the large screen, and even use the stylus’s button as a remote control for things such as the camera, for the perfect hands-free selfie.
The Note 9 is the do-anything phone and it costs £899 or less in the UK, $999 in the US and 6,999 yuan in China.
Google’s Pixel 3 puts the software experience front and centre in a way other Android smartphones cannot quite manage.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The third iteration of the Android maker’s own-brand smartphone, the Pixel 3 and 3 XL offer Google’s vision of what the software on a phone should be.
In the same way Apple makes both the hardware and software, the Pixel 3 benefits from Google’s synergy to create an Android experience that is second to none. It may not have all the whizz-bang features of rivals, and may have a fairly dated screen design, but its AI smarts and gamechanging camera software offer something different.
The smaller Pixel 3 costs £739 in the UK, $799 in the US and is available in China from around 7,400 yuan.
The OnePlus 6T proves that premium smartphone technology and experience does not have to cost £1,000.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
High-cost rivals to Apple’s iPhone are one thing but there are also phones such as the brilliant OnePlus 6T that offer cutting-edge technology and great software at literally half the cost.
The OnePlus 6T is a very fast, high-performing phone with top-of-the-line processor, a massive, beautiful 6.41in OLED display and excellent battery life. But it also has a tiny teardrop-shaped notch that makes the giant bar-shaped notch of the iPhone XS and Mate 20 Pro look stupid and an impressive in-display fingerprint scanner.
The dual camera on the back is not quite as good and there is no wireless charging but the OnePlus 6T costs only £500 in the UK, $549 in the US and 3,499 yuan in China.
The Honor Magic 2 is one of a small collection of Chinese smartphones exploring what is possible with tricks such as slide-out cameras.Photograph: Honor
Of course, in China the competition from local rivals is even more fierce. Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Huawei’s Honor sub-brand and Meizu are just a few of the top manufacturers.
And many of the most ground-breaking smartphones are only launched in China, such as Honor’s Magic 2, which is all screen on the front with a back half that slides up to reveal a camera.
Xiaomi’s Mi Mix 3 does a similar thing with the back sliding up to reveal front-facing cameras, while the top of Oppo’s Find X pops up to reveal both front and rear cameras on command.
Where hardware innovation was dominated by the US and South Korea, China’s many smartphone firms are looking to lead the pack.
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