It’s been a busy old week here at Syntagma Towers.

We’ve been refurbishing the office with new laptops, installing a giant HD screen with digital television, and throwing out a pile of junk.

We’ve also been optimizing our sites for the new PR Crunch era, and working on our latest projects for specialized information products.

It never ends. Blink and the world moves on without you.

But would we have it any other way? Never! Mind you, a good night’s sleep would be very nice.

Friday, and it’s the first cold day of the season. Heavy morning frost on the rooftops and a biting wind. Central heating full on, and winter woollies at the ready. It could be a cold one this year here in our northern latitudes.

Do we care? Not a jot or a tittle! Business is too good for that. Here’s what we’ll be thinking of :

Brigitte Bardot in her prime

The sun, I mean.

Mind how you go.

Syntagma Media apologizes for a rather long server outage which began on Sunday and has just ended.

I won’t go into the details but it was not a happy experience. We’re now back and raring to go — once we’ve mopped up all the midnight oil and spilt milk.

Good to be back. Mind how you go.

It came, we saw, it went … er … POP. The Apple iPhone hit Britain yesterday with all the force of a gentle breeze from the Azores.

The Apple store in London was hardly beseiged with eager geeks and fashionistas (see pic below). As the “crowd” was let in at 6.02 (O2, gettit?), they were easily outnumbered by Apple store staff and bouncers, all in dark suits, and forming a snaking double-line honour guard for the hapless hopefuls to march through.

The first bunch ran through like Olympic athletes winning Gold. In fact they looked just like actors straight out of Chariots of Fire. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were.

Less that ravenous hordes outside London’s Apple emporium

Make no mistake, this piece of kit will sell on price. Strip away a few poor little rich girls who “must have” it — for ten minutes, and a handful of geeks, the big numbers will come from ordinary Johnnies who will balk at the price. If you buy the top of the range locked-in deal it will cost you $2,654, plus call charges, over 18 months. No way, Jose.

The experts are telling us to wait for the iPhone to be launched in France in a few weeks where French law bans lock-ins. Jonathan Morris of What Mobile magazine said, “People who don’t want to be tied to contracts can simply wait until the iPhone comes out in France. Under French law there has to be an unlocked version so people would be able to bring it back buy a Sim card and use it like any other phone.”

Although the codes are different from the U.S. version, we’re told it’s already been hacked. Most geeks will get this done within a week. It’s interesting that the first thing the BBC reporter did when he got his was to head off to the hacker’s yard to boot out O2.

Steve Jobs is making criminals of us all.

It’s here at last. After all the hype and the raves from across the Pond, Britain is to be let into the iPhone secret tomorrow, Friday, at 2 minutes past 6pm on the dot.

As forecast here in Syntagma, the contract has gone to former BT-owned — now Telefonica-owned — mobile giant, O2. They seem to have paid through the nose for the privilege.

The 8GB iPhone comes in at a whopping £269 ($565), way above the new lower price in the States. But there’s more to pay : you have to take out an 18-month contract with O2 costing £630 ($1,323). That’s a commitment of $1,888 just to get you into a locked-in deal.

On those terms, you would normally get the handset free. BT is offering a free BlackBerry at under £40 a month — $84. The Vodaphone deal is £5 cheaper still.

So are we Brits going to buy this? A couple of weeks ago I wrote that we have a new Apple store opening here in Exeter, the capital of distant Devon. Here’s how it looked yesterday :

I doubt they’re going to get that open by tomorrow. And even so, my instinct is that we’re not going to pay a Spanish telco that kind of money for gimmicky technology that just does what can be got elsewhere at a fraction of the price.

My brilliant Sony Ericsson does the MP3 bit, has the same camera, logs on to the internet and even takes phone calls. The only thing missing is the touch screen.

Am I going to pay nearly $2000 for a touch screen? Do I have to answer that?

It’s also known to be slow accessing the internet (no 3G yet) and has to be sent back to change the battery. Yikes, talk about built-in obsolescence.

Message to Steve Jobs — Apple CEO
Steve, it may be a great piece of kit, but it’s a novelty product that will appeal to a small audience here with more money than sense.

Those of us who like a bit of bang for our buck will avoid this pretty bauble. You should not have asked for such a large slice of the action from O2, and they should not have premiumed up the device so far.

I’m afraid this is going to be one massive turkey here in the UK.

I’ve never really thought that Warren Buffett (pictured left) would want to invest in Syntagma Media, but an entrepreneur can dream.

Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and one of the top two or three richest people on the planet — heck, he even owns a hedge fund, is known for making shrewd investments. Where Warren burrows, others follow — like rabbits.

Like all good business folk he’s noticed that the dollar has been on the slide for quite a while, agonizingly compensating for America’s huge foreign trade deficit. Meanwhile, the poor old pound sterling is about to hit the starry heights of $2.10, making the greenback worth all of 47 pence (45 on PayPal).

For those of us paid in Uncle Sam’s Monopoly money that’s quite a hit we’re taking over here in the UK and Europe. We’ll be reduced to Dickensian conditions by year end, mark my words. We may even apply for Marshall Aid.

Anyway, back to Warren Buffett. He’s now announced he is NOT investing in any business whose income is designated in dollars.

Shrewd? Yes.

Scrooge? You said it. That’s why I say Buffett has rejected Syntagma Media.

On top of all that we have the credit crunch? Is that a new breakfast cereal? It’s the result of American banks giving mortgages to the trailer-park poor who couldn’t afford to repay them. They then sliced, diced and packaged them into “collateral debt obligations” and sold these to banks around the world.

Now banks don’t trust other banks — or their own balance sheets — so lending short-term funds to other financial institutions is at a standstill. Result? The world suddenly has an acute shortage of liquidity.

The U.S. used to be good at banking. What happened?