It’s the little things that annoy you on a daily basis. Just missing the train, waking up to find out you’re out of tea bags or having to pay stupid data rates.

We here at SMS Text News find a few things annoying in the mobile world, therefore we’ve created the Annoyances Page where we can let them out of our system. (It’s like therapy, only cheaper)

Do you have something mobile related that annoys you? Just email it over to Krystal (that would be me) and we’ll get it added to the list.

LONDON, 16:00 —

I’m sat in a Big Red (Vodafone) Shop right now. Saj, the sales chap, is briefing me…

Very annoying. Today I took two phones out with me. Busy day. Lots of meetings, first day back and what not.

I took out my fancy unlocked iPhone and my o2 Blackberry.

The Blackberry is email/data only £10/month. The phone doesn’t work. I didn’t want yet another phone number to deal with.

All was good until I answered a phone call in the early afternoon and couldn’t hear the other person. I then realised that no sound *whatsoever* was coming from the device. They, interestingly, could hear me. No sound, no music, no video, no alarm sound, no *phone* audio. Deary me.

That screwed me.

First day back and I had lots of calls to make and receive. SMS Text News reader Gaylene, from Hill & Knowlton, was a bit confused. I’d been trying to meet her but she was wondering why, every time she called, I didn’t answer and texted back. I ended up having to type an enormously embarrassing “hi, my iPhone’s audio has just stopped working, so, er, could you text me?” explanatory message.

Deeply, deeply unimpressed. Couldn’t use the Blackberry to call anyone, obviously. So I spent the whole afternoon texting. And surfing at the speed of slow. There is, perhaps, nothing worse than sitting using an iPhone fandabbydosey (”good”) browser next to a chap on a boring but 3G Samsung — and note that he’s getting better browsing speeds.

It is a seeeerious let down, the data speed. It’s even more annoying when you can’t use the handset’s primary function — voice.

Reflashed it with 1.1.3 and unlocked it again with ZiPhone and piff, paff, poof, the device is fine. But my confidence in Apple is chipped, ever so, ever so, ever so slightly chipped. How annoying. I hope it doesn’t happen again.

This experience, by the way, combined with a few other experiences today, pushed me into a Vodafone shop…

Oops. I bet the execs at O2 are not best please at the moment, after Ofcom has delivered a severe slap on the wrist - a slap on the wrist that could be worth up to £40 million.

The problem? 3G network coverage. When 3G licences were doled out in 2000, O2 dug deep and paid £4 billion or so. One of the conditions it signed up on buying its licence was to cover 80 percent of the population with its 3G network by the end of this year - a figure the regulator says it’s failed to meet by around 5 percent or 2.5 million people.

If O2 doesn’t get the network out to the full 80 percent by the end of June this year, it could see its 3G licence cut short by four months, a sanction worth around £40 million. With that kind of cash at stake, I reckon those 2.5 million people can expect to get their 3G any time soon.

Industry analysts Gartner have released the latest set of data on the top ten most popular mobile makers in the world: while old faithful Nokia still tops the list and Samsung is still keeping Motorola from its old home of second-place manufacturer, there are three new entrants in the top ten.

The lucky threesome are Apple, RIM and ZTE - an interesting bunch, or as Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi puts it: “On one hand, we have aggressive pricing and a focus on emerging markets (ZTE), and on the other, RIM with targeted functions and Apple with brand and design.”

Gartner also gives a hint on where manufacturers should be directing their efforts: Nokia should work on improving its user interface and work on some interesting form factors (sounds good), Samsung needs a bit of colour and diversity in its line-up (definitely) and LG should be thinking about strengthening its high-end portfolio (absolutely: remember how gorgeous the Chocolate looked compared to the competition in its heyday? It would be good to see LG create that kind of buzz again.)

While AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were all introducing unlimited voice plans last week, Sprint kept quiet. Now it’s unleashed its own unlimited offering and, to put it simply, it sounds great. For $99.99 a month, new and existing users can get uunlimited voice, data, text, e-mail, web browsing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS navigation and more for $99.99 a month.

Considering the best equivalent offer from rivals has either unlimited voice or unlimited voice and data, Sprint has one-upped its competitors in a big way. That said, it really needs to - the new offer comes on the back of the company’s latest set of financial results which show a massive loss after the operator took a writedown on the value of Nextel, which it bought in 2005.

Sprint has a hard road ahead of it but if anything could turn users’ heads, it’s offers like this.

To all the iPhone users reading… now that my iPhone is unlocked and usable again, I’m hunting around for new iPhone applications and services to play with. What are your top three? Any suggestions?

Ever since I returned into the UK, I’ve been suffering from a mild to semi-annoying panic issue regarding what mobile operator to standardise on.

It’s an excellent opportunity, I feel, to reexamine my mobile network of choice. When I left the UK, I maintained accounts on every UK operator except Orange and Vodafone. I’ve been no particular fan of T-Mobile UK when my calls were actually dropping regularly in the centre of London. That just wound me up more and more — and recently, I’ve been going nuts at the way their billing system works. The biggest issue that’s causing me to consider swapping from them is their data offering. Brilliant prices, yes, but they block instant messaging and various other arbitrary ports. Can’t hack that. Just can’t hack it at all.

I used to be a heavy Orange user, especially with their SPV Windows Mobile handset range, but the moment they launched a piece-of-shit ‘iTunes Killer’ service for their Windows Mobile devices (300,000 tracks at really crap quality and expensive prices — why even bother? — the service was ‘retired’ quickly), I recognised it was time to take a break from them.

Vodafone, well, historically, we’ve never got on eye-to-eye when it comes to pricing. I’m happy to pay for quality, but not stupid rates. 35p a minute to another mobile handset in the UK (after bundled minutes) doesn’t work for me and never, ever will.

Sat on the plane to Dublin this morning I was contemplating just who I should standardise on.

Truth be told, I don’t actually want to buy services from a single mobile operator limited by geography. I found it just plain stupid that I went to America and that Deutsche Telecom, owners of T-Mobile UK and USA couldn’t get their shit together to continue taking money from me. Instead I swapped to Sprint (and was delighted with service). T-Mobile UK and T-Mobile USA are individual group companies — and for some ultra DICKHEAD reason, even though my T-Mobile UK sim card is roaming on T-Mobile USA — the SAME GLOBAL COMPANY — I’m being billed international roaming rates. I’m passed that. I’m passed all that geographical rubbish. I recognise that roaming to another carrier costs money. It just does. So if I roam on Orange Italy with my T-Mobile UK handset, I get that — I get and recognise I should pay a (small) premium for using their infrastructure.

But T-Mobile? Stupid. The executives should sort it out. But why bother, eh?

For about six months or so I’ve been feeling and thinking that I don’t really want to define myself by a small, geographically limited and technologically limited mobile operator.

I’d like to have a relationship with one operator. A global operator. It’s something I’ve been mentioning now and again to Pat Phelan at MAXroam (also SMS Text News sponsor). I want one primary phone number and a series of localised numbers. Tick. MAXroam does this. I don’t want to pay to receive calls wherever I am. Tick, generally speaking, with MAXroam. I want mobile data, wherever I am — and I want 5c/5p/min calls to anywhere at any time. (Not quite possible as yet). Or I want to pay someone $100 or £100 a month for my basic mobile and data requirements, no incremental billing or surprises. Again, not quite possible from a global perspective.

So I swap back and forward in my mind.

Then on the plane I think, Vodafone. It’s about time, I reckon. Let’s hit the Vodafone frequency and swap to them.

That works for a few minutes while I work through my mind with the possibilities. Last year I felt that Vodafone was playing a smart strategy. While the rest of the industry is going Flext-style and beefing up price plan offerings, their billing team have steadfastly stuck to their guns. Yes it’s still 60p for a video message, 36p for a picture message and 12p for a text message (out of bundle) — and of course, 35p/min to other mobile networks. Last year this felt like they were dragging their heels. Stop the clock. Yeah. Vodafone Family. Yeah. The odd innovation. But when your average Vodafone customer opens their bill each month, there’s always a ’shit… shit…’ moment when they’re reminded just how expensive the service is. Now, however, I think it’s just cheeky, if anything I think it’s dated. Smart strategy though. If customers are silly enough to continue to pay outrageous 35p/min charges to call another network in the UK… take their money. And their wife.

So that’s the broad issue I have when I’m flirting with buying service from Vodafone. I don’t want to be too much of a mug, especially when you’ve got good innovation and excellent offers from the likes of 3UK… and even o2.

I arrived back at my parents house (a strategically located lay over). They’re in Billericay, Essex. Billericay is the archetypical London city commuter town. Lots of people mortgaged to the hilt, Porsche Boxters, a High Street filled with Estate Agents and one of the first commuterville towns to get it’s own gents personal grooming salons (it’s opening next month, I gather… back, sack and crack, anyone?)

I’ve been in the country 10 hours and I still haven’t made the call to T-Mobile to get a proper price plan and data service put in place. Why? Well… every time I phone up customer service, there’s a menu item on the IVR asking “if you are thinking of leaving T-Mobile press 3″ right in amongst the “press 2 for price enquiries”. I’ve called three times, heard that IVR item and wondered if I should be connecting to that department and working out a wicked deal. Hmmm.

As I marched up the High Street hunting for the Waitrose, I flirted outrageously with the concept of walking into a Vodafone shop and signing up there and then. I almost did. I spotted the Carphone Warehouse (opened in Jan 07) and crossed the road toward it. Only when I was nearby did I remember that they don’t handle Vodafone any more. Then the reality hit me. I couldn’t get a Vodafone account anywhere, for love nor money, in Billericay. I’d need to drive to a bigger town nearby. So that put a spanner in the works.

I did look extremely closely at the iPhone in the Carphone Warehouse window….

So what to do?

Well…. in the cab back from the airport this afternoon I actually found myself NOT making phone calls because I was worried about the call quality. I can’t stand calling people when my audio signal is patchy and I’ve always regularly had an issue with T-Mobile call quality on the train, in the car, or even walking down Euston Road in Central London. Strange, though, it was perfectly fine in the car today. GAHHH. What to do… what to do…

(Update: I had a few enquiries about the term “All over the shop” — it’s a British way of saying “All over the place” or “in disarray”.)

On this day in 2006…

You could MMS your baby’s ultrasound scan to your friends, we found out that lovers in the UK sent 120 Million Valentine’s messages, Google.com was banned by Hutchinson 3g UK just as Sony Ericsson was putting it in their handset menu and Ewan was contemplating buying a normal phone.

In 2007…

Imified still rocked, All Free Calls launched in the UK and Nokia is going to tell you when the E61i is available.

Want to read more? Check out the links below.

AAAAAAAND BREATHE. DEEPLY.

WOOOSAHH.

WOOOSAHH.

That’s be back in mobile civilisation. I’ve just arrived into Dublin. Got a few people to meet here then I’m off to London later today. All of a sudden I am back in (a degree of) mobile nirvana.

No vegetarian breakfasts (I’m trying to be healthy). They’ve run out of vegetarian sausages. But, I was offered a real sausage instead. I had to do a double take. This, after waiting 20 minutes for a table at the breakfast brasserie here in Dublin airport. Oh how I miss proper service.

The beeping, chirruping began before I got off the plane. Top of the range Blackberries mingled with high end Nokias, Samsungs and Sony Ericssons. Mobile data is everywhere. I’ve spotted four people using laptops and data cards or USB modems here in this restaurant alone.

After spending almost three months on the American West Coast where mobile handsets are almost universally used for talking.

I’m enjoying the contrast, I really am.

Not a RAZR in sight either.

Japan will get itself a new mobile operator next month and it doesn’t look like the more established players have any intention of sharing their toys. The new operator, EMobile, is the brainchild of KDDI founder Sachio Semmoto and will change no monthly subscription fee. Instead, customers will pay a per half-minute price for all calls, according to the FT, or a one-off payment per month for unlimited calls.

DoCoMo, which will initially provide the network for EMobile, has hit back with some new plans in an effort to stop its users’ heads being turned. One of the offers will see domestic voice calls between family members become completely free from the start of April - mimicking an offer announced recently by KDDI - while others give corporate customers subscribing to two services free voice and 60 percent off videophone charges for domestic calls to lines within the same group.

This looks like the start of a price war in Japan - and while that might be excellent news for mobile users, I wonder if the big operators will be quite so pleased if they’re forced to continue cutting prices for a long period.

If you’ve been wondering where the iPhone SDK is, you’re probably not the only one: Apple had promised to have it out by February, but the month is almost over and no SDK. It looks like Apple watchers won’t have that much longer to wait, as the company has sent out an invite to journalists (US journalists, naturally) inviting them to take a look at the “iPhone software” roadmap on 6 March.

No guarantees, sadly, that the SDK will actually be available then but at least we’ll be able to hear more about how Apple is planning to open up the iPhone.

Another interesting element to the invitation is that it promises Apple will reveal some exciting “new enterprise features” - since when did the iPhone fancy itself as an enterprise device? Enterprises are notoriously fond of Windows Mobile devices and keeping costs down - both of which the iPhone precludes. I can’t wait to find out what those features are and if Apple is planning a change of direction for the device.

Opera has decided to switch allegiances, making Google the default search engine on Opera Mobile and Opera Mini and ending the browser maker’s previous relationship with Yahoo. Google will make its appearance on Opera from the start of next month.

The announcement is not the first time the pair have worked together: Google has been the default search option on Opera’s desktop browser for seven years. According to Opera, the new union will cover all global territories except Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, and includes all of Opera’s standard mobile web browsers.

The deal is good news for Google’s mobile ambitions: Opera users are a browsing-hungry bunch: Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages. What’s more, Opera has shipped on 100 million mobiles and Opera mini has been downloaded by another 35 million.

I read this article last week entitled “Why 2008 won’t be the breakthrough year for Mobile Advertising”. It was originally published in the middle of Mobile World Congress.

It makes for very good reading and clearly outlines the one caveat that is currently preventing the mobile advertising boom that has been promised for the past seven years: Advertisers simply don’t have the money to buy mobile ads. Nate Elliott also goes onto theorise that interesting things may happen in 2009 and the real (European) breakthrough will come in 2010.

After spending a few days digesting, I have to say that it is one theory that I buy into… It’s nearly here and the recently announced Mobile Ad deals laid out in that piece show this. Combine that with the consistent month on month growth rate of companies like Blyk - who have bet the farm on this particular return of investment - and you can see that we’re almost at tipping point. But, again, as the article points out, we’ve been almost at tipping point for just shy of a decade.
By way of comparison, in the UK there’s a TV programme called Skins, (it’s young, a bit good, knows its audiences and once you’ve watched a few you’re hooked) and recently E4, the younger, digital sister channel of Channel 4, started airing Season 2.

This in itself is really no big deal. However the amount of cash spent on the blanket marketing is.

You can’t get away from it!

And not in a bad way either. The TV spots are stylised; hinting at character development and yet still keeping the dark, surreal undertone that flows throughout the show. The ’skincasts’, Podcasts containing interviews with the cast members are there for you to download to your MP3 player of choice, the community is there.

One of the interesting side effects of the first season, and something the UK media like to jump when there’s a slow news day, is the amount of young teenagers throwing themed ’skins parties’ and, if you’ve ever seen the show, they don’t leave much to the imagination.

The new campaigns around season 2 are aimed at these people. Tapping into this (youth) market, this mindset is a genius move that has (probably) done wonders for their ratings. And it’s not just TV ratings these days either. Other KPIs include web hits, unique visitors, content downloads, podcast listeners, community members etc… There’s a lot to be measured.

So what about Mobile? Is all the money in mobile ads? Probably not.

Is there money to be made from mobile ads? A little, although not the billions that everyone thinks. Not yet anyway. Not without some joined-up thinking around context vs content etc…

2yrs ago I was told ‘Content is King’, I said then what I still say now. Context is King. You can send me as much content as you like but if it doesn’t speak to me, I ain’t buying.

I digress.

Taking a look at the E4 mobile proposition.

Simple, optimised content which is easy to consume – Basic Mobile Web 101 (but I’ve talked about this before)

Taking a closer look – There are three tabs: Telly, Goss and… SKINS!

Brilliant - Not only that but you can watch a clip from Skins Episode 3 right now – one click away.

That’s great. Not just for the end-user experience but it speaks shedloads about the level of internal buy-in from all parties within the offices of E4.

Skins is clearly their ‘hero’ show for this season and is one of the channel’s better IPs.

This is a fantastic example of a blanket marketing campaign.

Mobile advertising needs to adopt similar thinking. You can’t just throw something into the mobile web and just expect it to work. You need strategy and process. Without this mobile advertising will never be the goose that will lay the golden egg. But it could well be a part of a few select bronze egg laying battery chickens.

The point I’m trying to make with the Skins example is that agencies and big media brands are finally coming to realise the amount of potential that lies in digital media. Mobile is part (albeit a new part) of this space.

And it won’t be long until they catch on. It just needs someone, or something, to make that first leap into the unknown.

The Metro newspaper in London is reporting that if you see anyone carrying more than one mobile phone, you might well be a terrorist.

People should report anyone suspicious who owns more than one mobile phone, a counter-terrorism campaign launched on Tuesday is urging.

All well and good.

However, an increasing amount of people are carrying two handsets — one for work, one for personal — particularly given the fact that no one handset does ‘everything’.

I generally don’t leave the house with less than three handsets.

Goodness knows what that will make me in the eyes of the Great Unwashed British Public.

I’ve got visions of being backed into a corner in some tube station by a horde of growling normobs, whilst I yell, with no small amount of pleading, ‘THEY’RE ON CONTRACT, THEY’RE ON CONTRACT!’

You see, the campaign points to the fact that bad people often carry lots of anonymous pay-as-you-go handsets:

One poster says: ‘Terrorists need communications. They often collect and use many anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, as well as swapping Sim cards and handsets.’

So, when you’re out and about with your N95 and your iPhone, beware the newly suspicious normobs.

(Thanks for the link Mark)

As a postscript to yesterday’s post bemoaning the state of Westminster Council’s ‘pay by mobile’ parking system, I got a surprising text from Virgin Vie today about an order for some home furnishings.

“Your VIRGIN VIE AT HOME parcel will be delivered today.  If you need your delivery on an alternative date reply to this text 1= 28th Feb 2=29th Feb 3=3rd Mar”

Genius!  A one character reply to re-schedule… On the actual day of delivery when I know if I’m available!  I might just buy some more stuff, I’m so impressed.

Why can’t every delivery be like this? Very normob-friendly

It’s not often that I’d describe a mobile handset as ‘a piece of sex’ — indeed, it’s probably a silly thing to do in the heat of the moment. Reading through some parts of the SMS Text News Annual 2007, I sometimes have to quickly flick a page out of embarrassment (especially when I’m sounding off about some issue or other).

This evening I took delivery of a new Nokia N95 8GB.

I’ve got a history of going-off-on-one about Nokia. I sometimes get a bit despondent when it comes to their (apparent) lack of innovation. That viewpoint is, of course, entirely subjective. I am annoyed, for example, that my mother was able to pick up an iPhone and start using it immediately — and that we didn’t even THINK about giving her a Nokia. It would have been lost on her. However, the company continues to hoover up market share, particularly in the newer markets around the world.

The N95 8GB is a joy. It’s what the N95 should have been. Better, faster and… yes… very, very sexy. (The N96 looks even better.)

I’m off to go and load it up with applications and play.

Since the iPhone was first announced, Australia has been asking ‘when are we going to get it?’ While the country is no closer to finding out the answer to that question, it has discovered that a deal tying the device to a single operator would be illegal under the Aussie Trade Practices Act, according to a group of legal researchers from Queensland.

“If Apple enter into an exclusive agreement with any particular carrier then it would be a matter for the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) as to whether that agreement was anticompetitive and contravened the trade practices act,” The Australian quotes one of the researchers as saying.

Does this mean Apple could be end of the lawsuit if it decides to launch Down Under? Possibly not, if the company uses the iPhone model of iPhone selling as a template for Australia. There, consumers can buy a handset locked to T-Mobile or they can buy an unlocked device, and pay through the nose for the privilege. I’d say it’s more than likely the same idea will be recycled when the iPhone finally does make an appearance in Oz.

China is to get its very first English language ‘mobile newspaper’, according to China Daily, which will produce the content as a partner of China Mobile. The paper reports it will send “multimedia messages” to subscribers phones twice daily: once in the morning, once in the afternoon.

The service will cost 5 yuan a month, or around 35p, a month and will send users all the latest updates on business, health, celebrity and other news, as well as cartoon in the multimedia package. China Daily and China Mobile hopes the service will be taken up by oreign officials, embassy representatives, members of chambers of commerce and foreign companies, and students, among others.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say how long the minimum subscription will be, which is a bit of shame - I could definitely see a market for visitors coming over for the Olympics this year and seeking a news fix.

Everyone’s favourite mobile Linux lot, the recently-acquired Trolltech, is now adding support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile into its Qt development framework. The idea behind this latest move is that developers can code an application once and then deploy it on a range of operating systems.

The addition of Windows Mobile and CE will also mean coders can take any programs made for desktops that have been developed in Qt and port them to mobile devices without hassle, as well as creating programs that will work across Linux, Mac and Windows platforms without having to recode everything for each operating system. Simple. If this sounds like your sort of thing, you’ll have to hang on til May to get your hands on it, when the additional functionality will make its appearance in Qt’s 4.4 release.

It’s a solid move. Windows Mobile doesn’t have the weight of numbers of Symbian, but it does have a significant user base among enterprises and one that’s likely to keep growing - and Windows Mobile support will be just the sort of thing that could tempt an IT department to get into Qt. And, for that matter, it’s a handy way for Nokia to inveigle it’s way on Microsoft’s hardware. Clever Nokia.

With apologies to those seeking analysis or a product review (what are you reading my rubbish for anyway?), this week’s piece is a self-indulgent rant about a mobile payment service gone wrong… a ‘how not-to’ guide if you like. My interest in the matter? An £80 ( $160) ‘penalty charge’ notice sitting on the table in front of me for just over 2 hours of parking that I paid for in full.

—-

Let me explain…

Central London is a place where, frankly, you need to have suffered a serious head-injury before driving around it seems like a good idea. However, in December it was unavoidable and I found myself crawling through the West End traffic, the streets thronged with Christmas shoppers. Having taken several hours to make only a few miles progress we decided to drive directly to our destination rather than parking at the hotel as planned.

Unusually quickly we located a road-side parking space close-by and I braced myself for the cost… £12 ($24) for the 3 hours we needed. My heart sank - we had enough money with us, but not in the coins usually required for on-street parking. Good news - this street was within the area where Westminster Council had replaced traditional parking meters with a ‘pay by phone’ system. This, surely, was a genius idea… and where it all went wrong.

Problem 1 - Register by text: The nearby signage presented two options… pay by call or text. However, paying by text required sending a message including the full credit-card details and car registration. I decided against this, unhappy with the security implications. It was also disappointing I needed to use a credit-card at all - why couldn’t I pay by ‘premium text’ like I do for other services? I rang the number instead.

Problem 2 - The call’s not free: I’m about to pay out for parking that’s about the most expensive I’ve ever seen, but to register for it or speak to customer services an ‘0870‘ number is provided - that is a number that is charged at a premium by most network operators (20p a minute by O2) and cannot be taken from bundled allowance of minutes.

Problem 3 - “Press 2, then 4, then 3, then something else”: I navigated through the interactive system’s voice menus in the usual fashion. It was slow, but not the worst I’d used. Then came the worse bit:

“Enter credit card number” tap tap tap… [16 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter expiry date” [4 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter the car registration plate.  For A to C press 1.  For A press 1, for B press 2… etc” [14 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

“Enter the location code” [4 digits]

“Is that correct?” [1 digit]

42 key presses, just for the basic information for the transaction! With only one correction for a typo, I’d now been on the phone for just over 10 minutes listening to prompts and entering information.

Problem 4 - You’re charging me for a receipt!!?!: The next question surprised me. Did I want to pay for a text confirmation? Well, no, I didn’t want to pay, but I certainly wanted to be sure the transaction had completed so I opted to pay 10p each for a confirmation and a warning towards the end of the paid period. Not much I agree, but I’m not in the habit of paying for a receipt from any other organisation! Oh and the call’s cost me almost £3 by now too…

Problem 4 - It needs to be simple, dummy: So having paid my 3 hours, spent what felt like a good portion of that time negotiating the payment system and been charged premium calling cost we headed off, my iPhone buzzing in my pocket as the confirmation came through. When we returned to the car I was surprised to see it had been ticketed… It turns out the location code to be entered is quite specific to the group of spaces it is posted by and in this case is only on one sign. I’d not seen it (8 feet in the air and facing away from the pavement) and misread a second sign entering the example location details in error. The system accepted this without any apparent validation and so I paid for a space that doesn’t exist. Excellent… and I’m not the only one.

In summary: A mobile transaction should be quicker, more simple and cheaper than a cash-based system. This wasn’t and hasn’t paid much (any?) attention to the user experience. It’s likely much of this may sound familiar to people far away from London too - the suppliers of this system appear to operate similar services around the world and although I’m not sure I can blame them for any / all of this, it is a stand-out case of how not to provide a mobile service. Westminster Council’s press information bangs on about ‘ease of use’ and ‘encouraging e-government’ but in one go it’s put me off using mobile payments for anything (financially) important in the future. Note the numbers here: over 200,000 people use this system and over a third of those surveyed were not satisfied or did not find it easy to use.

I have, of course, lodged an appeal, but 2 months of letter writing and form filling wasn’t what I anticipated when I decided to ‘quickly pay by phone’.

Late last year, Jangl turned on text message services and plugged in to both Facebook and Bebo — meaning that Jangl phone numbers could be used to send and receive texts, voice calls and voicemails.

Well, I’ve been waiting for news as to how the great unwashed (that is, the social networking users around the planet) have responded to Jangl’s offerings. Phenomenally well, it seems. I just heard from Jangl’s Tim Johnson that sign-ups and message traffic is going wild. I asked Tim for some specifics to publish:

* A five-fold increase in the number of sign-ups across these sites;
* An almost ten-fold increase in the number of messages exchanged;
* On one recent day, user registrations totalled more than 10,000

What’s more, at their current rate, Jangl reckons they’ll do at least 1,000,000 message during next month. Excellent. Plus, their recent update last week also enables text-capable numbers in the UK and Canada. If you haven’t checked out Jangl recently, get yourself a Jangl account and start playing.

SMS Text News reader Olly has been giving a lot of thought to the platform vs browser phenomenon rapidly developing across the mobile industry (and, actually, the desktop industry too — I move friction free between PC, Apple, Nokia, iPhone, HTC). Take a read…

- - -

There’s a weird, but not entirely unexpected, phenomenon happening in the “platform wars” in the computing space… and it’s extending it’s reach into the mobile version of those very same wars: the platforms themselves are becoming less and less relevant.

You may have recently seen the article by Peter Harboson on the S60 blogs, detailing his attempt to do the maximum possible “smartphoniness” using only the browser and phone functions of his handset. His result, that basically with the exception of the camera almost everything else could be browser based, is telling — the web, in all of it’s confusing spam filled, troll infested glory, is becoming the platform.

And here’s my confession: I have started to not care about what platform I’m on anymore, as long as the browser itself is up to snuff. That’s right, I’m no longer the Linux or Symbian zealot that I used to be (at least in practice, though I still feel that tribal/philosophical urge to defend them wherever possible). This year I began using another OS on my desktop (OS X) for the first time in years (though I still maintain my Ubuntu partition, even if I find myself using it less and less), and I’m perfectly happy with it for the most part.

On the desktop side of things, the progression of browser technology has gone far enough that the platform, at least for many things, has truly become irrelevant — mostly because you are always ON the same platform anyway. Don’t believe me? Think about it: it’s called Firefox. I run the same browser, with the same extensions, on OS X, Ubuntu, my wife’s Vista laptop, and my XP desktop at work. All of my bookmarks are sync’d up via del.icio.us — really nothing is handled locally anymore (other than hosting the browser itself). My email is in the ether (even my work email, thanks to Outlook Web Access) — my word processing is handled through Google Docs for the most part — even my main source of music consumption is on every desktop platform, through Last.fm.

Yes, I truly don’t care what platform I’m on from a practical day to day use standpoint — and this is beginning to extend to the mobile space as well.

I’ve been a die hard Symbian user for years now. Oh, I’ve had my dalliances with other mobile OS’s (Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry — even Linux on the Nokia Tablets). But in the end, I keep coming back to Symbian, and do you know why?

The browser (and more recently their camera). It’s not the third party apps (since just about anything you do on Symbian can be found comparably on any other platform), it’s that great webkit based browser which has managed to stay light years ahead of any other mobile browser (perhaps you iPhone zealots will disagree — I haven’t used mobile Safari enough to know one way or another). That being the case, you’d think that I’d be perfectly happy on my N95, right?

Well, I switched my sim into a Blackberry Curve yesterday and I noticed something. I love the Blackberry OS in many ways. Behind Symbian, it’s my favorite mobile OS. Oh sure, it has it’s quirks and can be frustratingly slow sometimes — but then so can Symbian. However it is also customizable to a degree (as far as alerts and whatnot) that Symbian can’t touch. With past blackberry experiments (7290, 7105t, Pearl) there was always the element of “not quite”, and that was largely due to the browser.

But after this afternoon’s install of Opera Mini 4, that may no longer be true. I’ve tried Opera Mini many times in the past, and I’ve always hated it. I found the interface clunky, the lack of true full screen annoying, and the way things were formatted just down right ugly.

OM4, on the other hand, is as close to the Symbian browsing experience that I’ve ever had on a mobile (Nokia Internet tablets excluded). It’s that good. And it’s faster.

Think about that article that I mentioned earlier (Ricky shares his own thoughts on it here). Then start to think of this: if the browser was the same, across every mobile platform, would it REALLY matter what platform you were using? Sure, there will always be preferences as to how sms are handled, or the actual phone functions themselves — and for the near future, there are favorite apps that people have on EVERY platform that don’t have their duplicates.

But in a world where more and more of our day to day activities, both mobile and on the laptop/desktop, are moving to the web — could a company like Opera (or Minimo if it ever gets it’s wings unfolded), be the app that ends the platform wars? It’s already happening on the desktop, where virtualization technologies and comparable products (Photoshop to the GIMP, as an example) make your choice of OS all but academic in all areas except perhaps stability and security… is the mobile space next?

What happens when someone comes along and makes the phone functions themselves simply well designed web pages — will Symbian vs WinMo vs iPhone vs Blackberry REALLY matter that much anymore? Hardware differentiation will always exist — Nokia’s camera is an example of this. But the “brand loyalty” to any particular OS may be dying, and I can’t say I’m too sad at seeing it go.

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Thanks Olly. You know what? That’s just what I’ve been experiencing too…

The PR Blogger himself, Stephen Davies, was given an XDA Orbit 2 a week ago and he’s quite enjoying the experience. I asked him if he’d write an overview to tell us what he thought of it — and here it is:

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I’ve been playing around with the Xda Orbit 2 given to me by VCCP on behalf of their client, O2, for just over a week now and I’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty impressive phone. In all honesty, I’ve never been particularly fond of phones that come with a stylus. To me, they appear as an additional thing I just don’t need. Besides, I’m a master of predictive text (using either hand I might add) so the idea of using a little rod to poke in my letters is a complete turn off and, knowing me, I’d probably lose it within a matter of days.

So, as you might imagine, my first thoughts were I wasn’t really going to favour the phone from a usability point of view. However, after playing around with it on the first and second day I found the stylus is not really needed as you can change the option to TouchFLO and a much bigger touch keyboard is provided in QWERTY style. As fat as my fingers are (and they are pretty fat) I was able use them pretty easily to write text messages or input web addresses in the mobile browser.

The touch screen seems very similar to the iPhone and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple product was an inspiration for the Orbit 2. It’s definitely a selling point of the phone.

Next up is the mobile browsing. Being a frequent user of the mobile web, the mobile browsing experience plays a significant part in my mobile phone purchasing decisions. The Orbit 2 runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional so uses Internet Explorer. Admittedly, I’m not a user of Internet Explorer on a PC but I have used it on an Orange SPV I used to own a few years ago. It was pretty useful then and still is today in my opinion. All my favourite mobile sites (Gmail, Bloglines, Twitter, BBC, Sky News etc) work fine on it. Although it did take some time to get used to the way it’s operated but I think this has more to do with me being more familiar with the browser on my Nokia n73.

The Orbit 2 also comes with ‘News Hub’ installed. Basically, News Hub allows you to subscribe and read RSS feeds on the move. You can also listen to and download podcasts, watch video blogs and schedule downloads. You can also import an OPML file too. Pretty cool.

I tested the internet browsing using wifi and was very impressed also. Believe it or not, this is the first phone with wifi capabilities I’ve actually used (how very old fashioned of me) so maybe it was the novelty of it that impressed me so much. Either way, it was quick and responsive and the next phone I have will definitely be wifi enabled.

Syncing the phone to a computer is a doddle and transferring music over was easy too. The phone comes with a 1GB memory card but the memory can be expanded up to 32GB apparently. Windows Media Player performs well as does the built in radio. A good radio is always a plus point to me. You just never know when you’ll want to hear a bit of Chris Moyles.

The phone’s 3 mega-pixel camera is adequate, although it doesn’t have a flash. What’s more impressive is the camera album which (again like the iPhone) can be used to sweep the photo thumbnails side to side. In all honesty, I think the camera could have been a bit more powerful given that Nokia’s producing 5 mega-pixels these days. Maybe I’m just being picky, I don’t know?

Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to play around with the sat nav yet. Will probably do so in due course and report on it later, but so far so good. Like all new phones it takes some getting used to but I’m liking the Orbit 2. In the beginning I wasn’t so sure.

Definitely a grower.

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Thank you for that Stephen. I’ve always had a place in my mobile heart for the XDA. I got the very first XDA from o2 ages ago when the data rates were 4 quid a meg. Heh. No, wait! Four or five years later and… Oops, they’re still 4 quid a meg (unless you manage to persuade o2 to give you an unlimited option… or buy an iPhone). But anyway, I’ve always had a place in my mobile heart for the XDA so it’s good to see the next iteration, keeping the faith.

I took the 101 down from San Francisco this morning in the glorious sun and arrived at the Techmart Centre for today’s Virtual Mobile Worlds conference.

The keynote this morning is from Anders Nancke-Krogh, Head of Development for Nokia’s Point&Find business program. It’s going to be an interesting one, I suspect.

I’m moderating the final panel in the afternoon titled ‘Paths for the Future: Success Stories and Learned Lessons’ and it’s featuring these four:

- Paul Anderson, Veepers
- Rob Osborn, Gemini Mobile Technologies
- Tomasz Wojtowicz, WiFi Army
- Mandar Shinde, Smith Micro