I’m continuing to look at Nokia’s Ovi services this week. Having taken a first look at photo sharing and gaming, it’s the music store this week which continues the trend of being a ‘mixed bag’.

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So, it’s the end of my first week with an N81 8GB testing the suite of Ovi services. I wrote here about the first impression of Ovi Share (picture and video sharing) and N-Gage (the gaming platform) and in the last few days I’ve been looking at Nokia Music Store.

It’s hard not to compare the Nokia Music Store with iTunes Music Store - they provide the same service. There’s a substantial catalogue of music (all the current artists I looked for where present and correct - I suspect less mainstream ones may be a bit more hit-n-miss, but we’re talking about a ‘mass-appeal’ service here) with the option to download via PC or direct to mobile. Unlike iTunes, both the PC and mobile variants of the Nokia Music Store are web-based (the mobile client wraps it with an icon, but the interface is all browser), but the functionality is broadly the same. Two key difference I noted were that Nokia Music Store only allows previews via the PC interface and it adds an unlimited streaming of the catalogue (also PC client only) for a monthly fee. In the UK prices are closely matched (79p per track for iTunes v 80p per track for NMS) and both employ DRM - Apple’s Fairplay system and Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM respectively. Apple also provides non-DRM content via iTunes Plus, which Nokia don’t, but the Windows Media DRM system is supported by a range of vendors (although notably not Apple) potentially giving more choice over other devices to play you music on.

So how does it work?

OK, but not great. This image tells you all you need to know about the PC version:

The service is clearly badged beta, but I’d expect better from such a large firm. OK, so I’m on a Mac in this instance which, quite apart from marking me out as a genius style guru hipster, isn’t really such a minority platform any more. But even when I am on a PC, I wouldn’t choose IE as my browser - or expect a modern website to demand it - so I’m locked out. I did grudgingly fire up IE6 and poke around. It’s functional and quick with al the features you’d want for music, but it lacks a bit of style in the presentation and there’s no podcasts or video content (yet). The usual Ovi annoyances exist here - a yet another logon ID and password to remember and no tie-in with any of the other services, but you’ve come to expect that from Nokia now… haven’t you?

However, Nokia have been actively pushing the service giving out PIN codes and marketing so I’d expect things on the usability front to improve. This was a promotion at Waterloo Station in London recently:

The mobile client, however, I think leaves a great deal more to be desired. Accessed from a menu icon it gives the impression of being a dedicated application, but in fact just loads the standard browser. This in itself isn’t a serious problem, but means the entire experience relies on good wireless coverage. On poor connections I found myself unable to navigate the interface on several occasions as graphics failed to load. The site itself may also have some reliability problems as it seemed to break more frequently than other sites, but further testing is needed there. The other drawback with using the browser without making it clear to the user that they’re browsing the web is that the soft buttons do ‘browser’ actions which don’t always make sense through the flow of the application… The ‘back button is a prime example - when the final download screen broke it took me ‘back’ to a page that told me I had already downloaded the song - not the actual page I had come from.

The other annoyance is the number of clicks it takes to purchase a song… It really does feel tortuously slow and if a page fails to load or is broken having to repeat steps of the process exacerbates that glacial sense of progress. Take a look at this sequence where I’m downloading one of the free ‘Green Room’ promotional song

Arghh…. click… click… click…

Once downloading, the window can be hidden (finding it again is buried in a fairly unintuitive location though) and tracks automagically appear in the music player. Failed downloads are alerted via a pop-up message, but it self-cancels so if you miss it or have put the phone out of sight whilst it downloads you’re no wiser. Crucially though there is a ‘re-download’ option for such situations.

On that basis I was more than ready to give Nokia Music Store a C- and move on - it’s good enough as a default offering, but it won’t be hard for any other provider who can produce a more usable interface and pleasent experience to better it - Vodafone’s Musicstation service stands out as a prime example, but there’s no reason it would be restricted to network operators. Access to the music catalogue is the main barrier to entry hear…. BUT…

I think Nokia may have a shot at the beginnings of a successful effort here. Their soon-to-be-launched ‘comes with music‘ initiative has been widely derided in the press and cost a few executives their jobs, but I think it’s the sweetener that could get people hooked… Effectively from mid-2008 when you purchase certain Nokia handsets they will come with one year’s allowance of free music from the Nokia Music Store - not streaming access, but unlimited access to the catalogue of downloads to keep even after the year is up. Of course, this could be financially crippling for Nokia as they have to pay the record labels for every track downloaded, but if they can stay the course I think a good-sized music library they have downloaded will keep people on the Nokia platform and might just be enough to get them hooked.

Watch this space.

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I’ll be wrapping up with an overview and look at Nokia Maps next week, so drop any questions you have into the comments and I’ll do my best to cover them.

It’s the end of day 2 with my new Nokia Ovi-equipped phone. Over the next fortnight I’ll be giving the various services a workout, but this time it’s just about first impressions.

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Ever since I first posted about it I’ve wanted to take a proper look at the Ovi services- Nokia’s online service offerings for media sharing, gaming, music and maps - as a complete unit, but unlike many other contributors I’m not a daily N-Series user or even equipped with a camera in my S60 device, so the nice people at WOM World have leant me an N81 8GB and a set of bluetooth headphones to give it a work-over.  There’s no conditions or talking points - just a device capable of running all the services on my everyday tariff.

Talking of the hardware, whilst this isn’t the focus of the article, I should give some background… Launched mid-2007 the N81 8GB is by no means a class-leading device - it’s bested by the N95 and N82 easily on specs - but launched at the same time as Nokia’s music store with dedicated music and gaming keys and it’s obviously intended to complement these services.  The large internal storage is well suited to media use and the built-in stereo speakers are also strong indicators of its intended use. The H903 headset (a pendant-syle) features a similar keypad layout and finish and looks a good way to test the music services.

Unboxing the handset, as ever, it’s good to note that the Nokia automatically notes the network I am connected to and sets up the data and MMS access points automatically.  Similarly, the download icon on the main menu presents a nicely familiar list of S60 applications and I quickly download a few old favourites I can’t be without - Ovi aside, this will be my main handset for the next 2 weeks.  So far so good - I’m up and running with minimal fuss.

It’s not all good news though, the gloss plastic feels cheap and hollow - disappointingly so for a handset at the more expensive end of the market - and the many, poorly distinguished buttons on the front fail the ‘girlfriend test’ early on.  The presentation is confused and a bit intimidating - with a little explanation (in lieu of reading he manual) she happily navigates the main menus, but it’s too easy to hit the small silver media button and switch the view to a completely different view.

Ready to try some Ovi I search the device for a menu… nothing.  I look through the ‘downloads’ and ‘catalogue’ items… nothing.  Oh well… I suppose the service is still in beta, but I expected Nokia to be pushing it a bit more.  ‘Beta’ is a tag we’re all used to seeing on everyday web services, but I guess this is staying below the radar despite the bells and whistles launch.  No problem, I open the phone’s browser and navigate to www.ovi.com speculatively having seen the full-browser version.  That does the trick and although the main site is a bit light on details that I’d like I find a link to the N-Gage gaming site, create a login and download the client.

I’ve not been a regular gamer for many years, so am a bit apprehensive, but N-Gage immediately feels like a well polished product.  From within a single well-presented client I’m able to create my profile to utilise the social features and browse a catalogue of games.  There’s some big names listed with current titles and everything is available for a trial play.  I’m really surprised by the quality of some of the titles - it’s not going to embarrass a dedicated handheld but the responsiveness and video quality is much better than I would have expected.  Even my first game of Tetris for a good few years is well presented and makes good use of the dedicated gaming keys on the ear-piece which feel well placed and make gaming an involving two handed process.  I can see myself ditching some of the usual video podcasts on the train next week and getting back to  few games.  Kudos Nokia.

The other feature I decide to try out at a friend’s party is the photo sharing feature.  Before I leave home I access it via the Ovi website again and am disappointed to note that one of the earliest criticisms - the need for separate accounts for all of the services - is still the case… when you have a name as common popular as ‘Smith’ finding something consistent and memorable can be tricky!  Still, the process is slick and the site itself feels very simiar to Flickr.  I note it’s still using the Twango (pre Nokia aquisition) name despite the Ovi branding.  Over the course of the night I snap away pictures and am impressed to see the Share application will use Flickr and Vox as well.  Less good is the need to individually upload each image as taken.  It works, but during the evening the process begins to grate.  The image quality of the 2MP camera is also really poor - the phone has a bright flash, but it doesn’t seem to be able to use it well.  I ditch all of the pictures I take during the evening - in the poor light of the bar they’re worthless and pixelated.  The next day I take a few snaps in good daylight - these are better and it’s nice to be able to select the public or private channels for sharing from the phone with a greater range of embed codes than Flickr.  However, long-term I’m not sure I could live with the click-intensive client… we’ll see.

This morning I quickly played with the music store as I sat on the train.  However, of the free tracks available, only one would download and the clumsy client together with Shaggy informing me that it is a ‘mad mad world’ was enough for me to decide to give up and look at that more closely later…. not a good start though.  Sound quality through the buetooth headphones was very impressive though.

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More as it comes during the weeks.  Please let me know if there’s any features or questions you’re particularly interested in via the comments!

The nice people at WOM World are sending me a handset to try all of Nokia’s OVI services which will form the basis for a few reviews over the next few weeks. If you have any questions about any element of the service please drop me a note in the comments and I’ll be sure to cover it.

This week, through a haze of man-flu, I’ve been thinking about how mobile services and operators bill for their services and why it’s all a bit backwards.

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In the UK at the moment there is a big fuss about bank charges - the fees you pay to a bank if you exceed an agreed overdraft, bounce a cheque or similar. The law says that whilst it is OK for banks to charge fees on these occasions to cover their expenses, they cannot charge a penalty (apologies to anyone with any actual legal knowledge who will probably be wincing at that over-simplification). Campaigners have now realised that it doesn’t cost £30 to issue a standard letter and so the whole thing has gone to the High Court. A lot of banks are beginning to look unpleasantly greedy and unsympathetic to their customers.

Although clearly not a legal issue, I think other service providers - mobile network operators particularly - would do well to note what is going on at the moment though and realise that quite aside from anything else penalising customers for wanting to consume (this does not relate to the consumer’s ability to pay - it isn’t a credit issue) more of your service isn’t going to win hearts and minds…

Take 3UK’s mobile broadband offer as an example - in all other respects an excellent value service, but a typical case. Additional megabytes over the pre-purchased bundles cost 10 pence:

1GB per month costs £10 - effectively 1 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?10 times that rate.

3GB per month costs £15 - effectively 0.5 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?20 times that rate.

7GB per month costs £25 - effectively 0.3 pence per megabyte. The excess use charge is ?30 times that rate.

So the highest monthly-rate subscribers pay a penalty of a 30-times multiple in price if they exceed the bundled amount and this is typical across all the network operators.

Clearly excess use can’t be free - but there’s not a good reason for this sudden hike. It has been argued to be a capacity issue - the operators want to prevent excess use to ensure quality of service for all - but a consumer can simply buy several connections if they wish… their supply is not limited by network capacity.

Certainly pre-paying for service should make it cheaper and guaranteeing to purchase larger blocks of service should provide a cost saving - even my schoolboy economics can grasp that, but once exhausted why should the best customers - those who provide the most predictable revenue streams - be punished for attempting to purchase even more service? Cynically, I suspect firms build their pricing models to scare consumers away from maximising their use of the bundles, which increases margin (AMPU).

So what’s the answer? I think it’s the ‘per month’ element that is skewing things here. Back in the ‘bad old days’ it made sense to bill ‘line rental’ by month, but now we also pre-purchase quantities of service within these monthly payments and there’s no need. If bundles of messages / data / international calling were identified separately they could simply be charged as needed…. Used up the 200 text message bundle you purchased before the next billing cycle? Just purchase another at the same price - it lasts a month too, starting today. It could be a manual process or automatic with the usual ‘maximum spend’ controls to protect against unexpectedly large bills. Firms really looking to attract and retain customers could go further - offering to retrospectively upgrade the bundle to a higher one or allowing it to last longer than a month in low-use periods, but now I just want to have my cake and eat it…

What do you think?

I really don’t make many phone calls. At all. I’m not doing much mobile e-mail of-late either.

It’s not that I’m a particularly anti-social sort (honest!) it’s just that my current project keeps me in an office surrounded by the people I need to speak to routinely. Similarly as I’m commuting by car to this client I’m doing less browsing on the move (they really frown on that on the M25).

Not much of a start to an SMS Text News post, but there is a point here… My work-day has changed and I’m appreciating a different side to my mobile day: specifically calendaring. The project I’m working on is just starting up - there’s literally hundreds of clients, suppliers, sub-contractors and team members arranging meetings, briefings, reviews and interviews and it’s a challenge to remember where I should be and when. My E61’s home screen maps out my day and I furtively glance at it during meetings to see if anything new has been added since I was last at my desk…

So?

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt, but e-mail and browsing by mobile no-longer really feels like a second-class experience as it did a few years back with my first company-provided XDA. Sure, it’s different to the big-screen laptop experience, but not worse or (much) slower. So it’s frustrating, as I come to rely on it so much more, to feel so limited by my mobile calendaring…

The basics work well - either the E61 or the iPhone both present clear and useful views and manipulating individual items of my primary calendar is simple enough, but I feel like I’m wearing blinkers… I have calendar tunnel-vision. On the desktop I have my team’s calendars side-by-side on screen - I can see who’s going where and can often tell more about a meeting from the cluster of diary bookings than the published agenda. It’s a kind of crude visualisation of my data. Outside of work too, I’m a bit of a calendaring nut pulling in all the information I need… My Mac has all the obvious stuff added in - public holidays downloaded from Apple’s own repository, but also stuff more specific to me: school holidays and the local college’s term dates are useful to know when the local roads and trains will be busy (it makes a huge difference). Also, I’ve also got the match calendar of the local rugby team (who’s stadium is opposite my home) and the events schedule of the Twickenham Stadium - an 80,000-seater venue which is a popular music venue and the home ground for English Rugby which is nearby - when it’s an major event day the roads are closed and you can’t go anywhere fast…  Flights, hotels and travel bookings are also imported directly from my Tripit feed.

All of this information is imported into my desktop calendaring programs by subscribing to iCalendar feeds - the calendar equivalent of a blog’s RSS feed. Much of it is published directly in that format - Google Calendar has been a saving grace here allowing people to easily create and publish community event details - and for the remainder I use Yahoo Pipes to scrape web pages and transform data into iCal format.  With more and more services adding the feature I’m increasingly able to subscribe direct - to friend’s availability (from a Plaxo ‘busy’ feed) or their travel plans from Dopplr.  It’s becoming mainstream…!

So why can’t I handle these feeds properly on my mobile devices? Exchange synchronisation on my E61 (via Roadsync or Mail for Exchange) can’t process or add this type of data. iTunes sync for the iPhone does copy this data (if selected), but it’s presented indistinguishable from my regular calendar items.  I want the same choices of presentation and the option to subscribe directly…  I want options to import reminders or just to view reminders. I want it done… properly.

Dear Jim,

Please could you fix it for me to have proper calendar support in my mobiles. I’m not really sure what’s going on at the moment.

Regards,

Ben

It’s struck twice three times recently… (Is there a vehicle in North America not sloshing about with Ewan’s consumer electronics?) the ‘curse’ of the SMS Text News contributor has seperated bloggers from their beloved devices by loss and destruction. And it’s got me thinking - none of my handsets are insured other than any unintended coverage I have via home-contents or employer’s travel insurance and none of those policies are designed to facilitate a very rapid replacement. Both James and Ewan are Vodafone customers, opting to take the insurance offered as an add-on to their airtime agreement, but who should I use? My network operator(s’) or an independent, and how can I be sure that I get cover that suits me?

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[This is where I would have normally put a picture, but you try and illustrate something that's gone missing!]
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Ignoring my ‘pub phone’, a 3 Skypephone, which I specifically selected in part for its low cost, my two everyday handsets have retail replacement costs of £239 for a Nokia E61 and and £269 for an 8GB iPhone respectively (although it seems I would need to re-start my O2 contract to get another ‘official’ UK iPhone - higher figures are quoted elsewhere for handset replacement only, but I can’t find O2 or Apple’s confirmation of this). Not a patch on the £330 for an N95 or a whopping £624 for an E90 (apologies to international readers - these costs are likely to vary substantially internationally, but I’ll just use my local pricing to demonstrate the point), but enough to put an upsetting-sized dent in my Visa card if I lost them and there would also be costs for replacement SIM cards and potentially unauthorised call costs before I could cancel the account.

So that’s the cost of the cost of the phones, what about the cost of insurance? Looking across the market it seems to range from about £4 per month to £8 per month for a single handset in my price range, which is considered ‘mid’ or ’standard’ by most insurers and notably all the network operators contract out their insurance to 3rd parties, so independently-available policies can often match their terms (their prices generally fall in the middle to upper end of the price band). Annoyingly, some people are obviously cashing-in on the iPhone name though charging £8 per month for ’specialist’ iPhone insurance when identically-priced handsets on the same policy terms cost less than £6 per month…

What about the policy detail? [I've omitted some 'common sense' or universal elements]

[UPDATED: with thanks to commentators who noted my error]

NatWest, Ulster Bank, LloydsTSB and Barclays all sell policies from Lifestyle Services Group.  These are all associated with ‘extras’ packages complimenting banking packages and cover repair or replacement of a phone (2 phones for joint accounts) to a value of £300 (Ulster Bank) /  £500 (Natwest, Standard LloydsTSB) / £2000 (premium LloydsTSB accounts and Barclays) per phone, the SIM card, loss / theft / damage from attended or secure places, unauthorised calls up to £1500 (all except Barclays) / £2000  (Barclays) accessories to the values of between £200 and £250 (varies between policies).  A £25 / £50 excess for the 1st / subsequent claims (Natwest and Barclays), £30 (LloydsTSB),  £30 / £50 excess for the 1st / subsequent claims (Ulster Bank) is payable and  claims are limited to 2 per  year.   Notably Ulster Bank’s variation of this policy also excludes ‘Devices with a PDA and/or Qwerty functionality’.

Three also offers a similar policy from LSG: £25 excess, up to £500 for phone and SIM, covers loss / theft / damage from attended or secure places and includes some accessories. However, it doesn’t appear to cover unauthorised call costs.

Vodafone’s insurance is also offered by a 3rd party, but appears to be specific to them. It offers a £25 excess, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (may be re-conditioned) up to a value of £600, covers loss / theft / damage from attended or secure places and includes up to £200 of accessories. Notably it excludes loss or theft not reported to them within 24hrs or to the police in 48hrs. It doesn’t appear to cover unauthorised call costs.

CPP Phonesafe offers its own policy via what appears to be its parent company and T-Mobile also re-sell it. It offers a £50 (£25 via T-Mobile) excess, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (may be re-conditioned) up to a value of £400, covers loss / theft / damage from attended or secure places and also acts as an extended warranty. It excludes accessory cover but provides for unauthorised call costs up to £1000 for the 12 hours prior to reporting it to the network. Notably it excludes phones without a SIM card in.

Orange’s cover is provided by Allianz. It offers a £15 excess, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (may be re-conditioned) without any maximum value, covers loss / theft / damage from attended or secure places and also acts as an extended warranty. It excludes accessory cover and unauthorised call costs.

O2 offers 2 policies, both from ACE European Group Ltd. They offer a £25 excess, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (may be re-conditioned on standard policy) without any maximum value, covers loss / theft / damage from attended places, covers accessories up to £200 (premium) or £25 (standard) and unauthorised call costs up to £3000 (premium) or £1000 (standard). Notably the premium policy also provides for replacements overseas and guarantees a new handset.

Talkcover, Insurance4mobiles and Cover4phones all re-sell Equity Red Star’s policy. They offer a £25 excess (for theft / damage) or £50 (for loss), provides for repair or replacement of a phone (a handset of similar age or ‘equivalent value’ ) without any maximum value, covers loss / theft / damage from attended places, excludes accessories and covers unauthorised call costs up to £100. Notably it excludes convertible cars, but the various firms offer discounts and benefits as a ‘no claims bonus’.

Insurance2go offers 2 policies, both underwritten by a Lloyds syndicate. They offer a £100 excess (for months 1-3 of the policy) and £50 (from month 4) for 3G phones - half that for 2G phones, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (to it’s value at the time) with a maximum value of £750, covers loss (premium policy only) / theft / damage from attended locations, excludes accessories and covers unauthorised call costs up to £1000. Notably claims in the first 3 months require payment of all 3 monthly premiums before the claim can be processed and thefts / losses not reported to the police within 24hrs are also excluded.

JS Insurance offers a policy from AXA Insurance. They offer a £50 excess for 3G phones - half that for 2G phones, provides for repair or replacement of a phone (to it’s value at the time) with no maximum value, covers theft / damage from attended locations, excludes accessories and covers unauthorised call costs up to £1000 for 24hrs after the loss.

Foneshield offers what appears to be their own custom policy via a provider called Albion.  It is a theft-only policy (from attended places and occupied vehicles) with an excess of £50 and provides for repair or replacement (possibly with a refurbished handset). Accessories and SIM cards are exluded, but a loan phone is available (£50 fee).  Foneshield also offer a Sharia-compliant policy, a first in Europe, but this is not described on their site at the time of writing and it is not clear if this describes the current product or a new one to be launched.

Carphone Warehouse (no carphones, not a warehouse) offer 3 policies via Norwich Union, but there are so many bands, exceptions and exclusions (not least the entire ‘3′ network) I got fed-up reading their website and gave up. Sorry.

Other things to note are that the mobile operators only cover phones sold on their contracts and although many advertise replacement handsets within 24 or 48 hrs none of the policies I read made any mention of this so it is firmly in the ‘if it suits us’ camp.

So, a mixed bag, but definitely a few options that look reasonable to me. Cost-wise, taking the life of my phones as 18 months (the normal life of my phones and the duration I’m committed to on both my current air-time agreements… ‘new toy’ purchases don’t really count here) that means it will cost between £72 and £144 over the life of handset to cover it - £108 on average, a round of drinks short of half of the handset replacement cost. The miser in me says that I haven’t lost a phone in more than 3 years, so it’s not worth it, but I have been stung with £100 of unauthorised call-charges on a lost SIM and I’ve had enough near misses (thank you to the man on the train who passed me my phone out of the window as it pulled out of the station - you are an anonymous hero) to know it’ll happen soon enough. So, yes, I think it makes sense… just. Especially if I can get the cost below the average via one of the multiple device policies which pushes price towards the lowest end of the scale. So which one shall I go for?

None as it happens… What I didn’t mention above about the policy terms is that even the most ‘generous’ policy I can find excludes devices older than 6 months and whilst my iPhone is 5 months old, my E61 is too old and apparently un-insurable! I suppose there is a thriving market on eBay for new-ish phones where I could get a replacement for a lot less than the retail price, but I wanted a more rapid replacement and cover for the other bits too… Oh and the last eBay phone purchase I made left me well out of pocket - it really is a scammer’s paradise (thank you West Midlands Police for all your no help… but that is probably a story for another time).

So what do I do?

At present I’m considering taping them to my hands…

I managed to miss most of the launch coverage of O2’s new combined backup and blogging platform ‘Bluebook‘ (technically a re-launch, as another service had existed under that name previously), but spotted the beautiful advert on TV and decided to try it out.

The marketing majors on the backup feature - all your text and picture messages either sent or received will be backed-up, you can also backup your contacts (as offered by Mobyko and others) and share some of this content with friends. On the site itself, ‘Blueblog‘ has a little more prominence offering a Moblog-like mobile blogging platform. On the face of it this is excellent - a network operator is embracing mobile blogging and content sharing whilst providing a really valuable ‘zero-effort’ backup medium for texts and content… However, it’s not quite that cut and dried - I’m giving this a ‘C+ Must try harder’ grade at present.

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Sign-up: O2 are really marketing this at the moment and there’s a large advert on O2.co.uk. I follow it and a fairly standard sign-in / register screen awaits. I missed the small-print on the bottom left that explains that if you already have an account on the O2 website (I do) I can use those credentials, so I create a new account. I’m really impressed when I notice the prompt: “You can register any mobile phone for any network”… Good show O2!

I decide to try this and enter the details of my Three handset - it has more content to be backed-up any way. It beeps receipt of a validation SMS and all is going well…

Damn. It appears that ‘any network’ means ‘any network that is O2′. Great. There’s no way around this so I have to start over with my O2 handset. Not impressed - and I’m not the only one. On a second try it completes, but not without a few odd errors:

It also later gives-up on handset selection for contacts backup. This only works for certain Nokia and SonyEricsson models (I am using the iPhone), I’m guessing using the ubiquitous SyncML approach. Disappointing - especially that no other options are available over this (admittedly easier) approach other than manual entry via the website.

In use: Having resigned myself to being without contacts backup (I can iSync, it’s not a worry) the initial screen is pleasant with a Flash animation that, as I add content, shows the pictures and messages I have stored. I immediately flip to the messages tab to test out the backup feature - as a network operator this is where O2 can stand out from the crowd. I send and receive a number of messages and wait… nothing. I send ‘forward’ some older messages to the O2 shortcode (not possible on teh iPhone that lacks a ‘forward’ feature so I just create new messages and pretend) - this works:

Several hours later the ‘automatically’ stored messages still aren’t shown. Perhaps it’s just slow… the whole site grinds along at a painful pace, but it’s not confidence inspiring at all.

‘Albums’ can contain groups of images (naturally), but also text messages too. Content can be from stored messages or uploaded via the web interface. It all works smoothly enough, with 1GB of free storage enough to be useful, and testing the sharing feature also works well, albeit the feature set is ‘basic’ at best and the lack of an option to bulk upload or upload via e-mail is frustrating. Any moderately demanding user is going to find Shozu with a service like Flickr a much slicker experience. Reading the Bluebook product manager’s ‘blueblog’ I see a post about a Facebook application and give that a try too. Initially it errors and once refreshed refuses to find my one shared album. I’m getting pretty fed up with this by now. It could, of course, be me doing it wrong, but I manage to do this sort of stuff day-in day-out, so if I am it should be more simple… just sayin’.

Continuing the theme of ‘good idea, executed badly’ Blueblogs doesn’t fail to disappoint either. On the plus side, posts can be made from browser or via SMS. However, any shared content is moderated… I don’t object to that in principle if this is a platform designed for ‘family friendly’ use, but it appears to be a manual process which is slow. Mobile-blogging with an hour’s delay? Hmmmm. Not to worry though, because there’s no RSS feed or e-mail alerts anyway so your friends will have to return to your blog again and again. Comments, the personal profile and the option to have multiple blogs is nice, but given even the featured blogs have only a few posts it doesn’t look like a platform that makes life easy. Oh, and whilst I’m complaining… the layout, particularly for commenting, is grim.

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So overall, that reads like a pretty savage kicking for O2 and really I don’t want it to be. I just can’t help thinking that if they’d put a bit more of the money spent on the advertising into the actual product it could have been so much better. The concept is great and continual backups of text and picture messaging is one of the things that only they could do, but it’s executed so poorly (and with a previously documented security gaff that makes me wonder if I really want all my messages logged by this system) I wonder how it launched… and on further reading I wonder how Newbay, the Dublin firm who’s Lifecache product this is based on, feel about this as the product spec seems to suggest O2 have really loused up this well-featured tool in the implementation.

My suggestions:

1. Speed it up and fix the bugs
2. Refine Get some designers to completely re-do the interface a bit
3. Make the blog a proper blog (use Lifecache’s features!)
4. Get your moderation done electronically (if you must have it)

…and I reckon O2 might have the beginnings of a winner here. Otherwise it’s too clunky and limited to have long-term appeal. Shame.

Today Skydeck, a California-based start-up came out of ’stealth mode’ and launched what is on the face of it a consumer-focused call log analyser - according to their blog the site daily retrieves calling records from the user’s mobile operator (US only at present) and its main feature tracks usage of inclusive minutes and texts displaying them in a browser toolbar and enables some calling analysis. Useful to monitor tariffs and spending, but so far, so what…? Although new to the consumer space this kind of feature is widely available to businesses already. Consumer use is an evolutionary step that fills the time until all tarrifs are ‘unlimited’… useful for minding the pennies.

What really excites me about this new service though are the other features: the ability to search calls, a ’smart’ address book and the ability to view your ’social network’. Setting some of the buzz words aside, this got me thinking - my phone calls are now the only part of my regular communications that I don’t have any information about… Every month I stare blankly at the meaningless pages of unfamiliar numbers on my phone bill, but I can’t see the detail it hides. For e-mail I have spotlight (Mac) or X1 (Windows) to discover lost content. Tools such as Xobni or LinkedIn’s toolbar add varying sorts of social analysis to Outlook for business or Facebook, Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed provide news streams for personal use. I can even now analyse my voicemail with my e-mail tools thanks to SpinVox’s delivery by e-mail. However, this data, the analysis I can do on it and all the mechanisms I can use to share it with those who (may) be interested is missing a major component - my phone calls - which for me are almost exclusively mobile. My phone’s call log presents a little of this data, but it’s view is a chronological one and there’s no function to analyse what it records (although possibly Nokia’s Mobile Web Server shows some promise in providing access to this information)

To understand my calling pattern, not by cost but by person is the key: Which client haven’t I updated recently? Who’s being left out of the planning discussions? Who do I rely on for help without realising it? Who calls me most?

Initially, the ability just to tag and analyse contacts would be a huge leap forward… but imagine if this data could be integrated with the existing tools. I could finally have a complete picture of my communication - recalling phone conversations and e-mail exchanges easily and truly understanding my real ’social network’… One based on actual contact, not just the need to politely accept my colleagues friend requests (although I do like you guys!). Daring to dream a bit more widely… this data could be integrated with my contacts list, made available on my phone, used to change ring tones or to inform client billing…. Or it could just help me identify when my boss called me the other week so I can find the right diary notes I made (less exciting, but possibly more career-sustaining!)

So bravo Skydeck! Keep developing the network analysis tools, get integrated with some UK carriers and let’s see what magic happens… this is a rich untapped vein.

—-

Of course, in addition to calling analysis, total communications enlightenment would require call transcription too - a kind of ‘always on’ SpinVox, a personal Echelon. Which leads me to close with an old joke:

Q: How do you let the NSA know you want a job with them?
A: Ring anyone and tell them.

I thank-you

Bonjour!  Hello from the French Alps, where I’m doing a bit of ‘end of season’ skiing (quite badly). I’ve bought the usual array of hardware with me and a couple of normob friends have added a Blackberry, bog-standard SonyEricsson, Motorola PEBL and a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone between them.  This is our mobile (holi)day:

Leave the house: I’m getting a lift to the airport, but my friend’s TomTom Sat Nav is being slow to get a signal so I check the journey duration on Google Maps; we have just enough time. During the journey as the conversation lulls (it’s 4am by now and neither of us are feeling chatty) I try the location sensing service on the iPhone and even at speed it’s uncannily accurate. I find myself using it much more frequently than I thought - in this case it’s just to check the remaining journey time (we’re dropping the car off at another friend’s house and getting a taxi to the terminal - a brilliant plan for free parking except that we need to be there before the taxi driver to prevent an unrequired wake-up call for our parking host!) but it’s also saved me from getting lost on a few occasions recently.

Gatwick airport: I’m always pleased to get through security unscathed (the chap on the x-ray machine looks twice at my bag, but there’s no extra search). I’ve learnt to divide my electronics evenly between a few trays and it seems to draw less attention… Having checked (thoroughly) that there wasn’t much that needed buying in the duty-free electronic shop, my iPhone automatically jumps onto a Cloud hotspot and I look up some last-minute details - I wish every handset’s connection switching was this seamless. Previously I’ve also used this time before a flight to download new music to keep me entertained, but I’m well stocked with podcasts for now so there’s no need on this occasion. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more tie-ups with hotspot providers and the iPhone networks internationally. I would never have considered a hotspot subscription previously, but having had it for ‘free’ I can really see the benefit now and would subscribe in future.

As we wait normob friend #1 taps enthusiastically at his Blackberry. The device is barely 2 months old, but he’s well addicted. He travels a lot and wanted to stay more up-to-date with his e-mail, but I fear it’s an opportunity wasted as he doesn’t use the phone, contacts or calendar functions. I’d talked him through getting a hosted Exchange server and an E61i, but the T-Mobile lady did a sales job and he came away convinced anything other than a Blackberry would be too hard. Perhaps it’s true but it pains me to see the device so under-utilised.

On the plane: Disaster! No mobile devices to be switched on… even in flight mode. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, but this is part of the safety briefing script so sounds like it’s a regular feature. No music for me. I get the laptop out to kill the time and wonder what the airline hopes to achieve by this. It seems too inconsistent - I don’t have one, but my laptop could easily contain a 3G card or even have it built-in yet I’m allowed to use it. On landing phones are beeping and chirping long before we’ve taxied in to the stand or the engines are stopped, but the crew (bar scowling at us) don’t say anything. If ever you wanted a clear demonstration of how universal mobile ownership is watch people leave an aircraft.

Collecting the baggage: It dawns on me - for the first time in a while I am without any mobile data. 3 don’t have a network in France so I can’t benefit from using my x-series inclusive data (via ‘Three like home‘ as I do in Ireland) and this airport doesn’t have any WiFi. I double check all my roaming data is switched off on the E61 and the iPhone - I can’t justify the pounds per megabyte 3 (£3) and O2 (£7) want. Normob friend #1 is tapping away at his Blackberry again. I ask him what the roaming costs are - is it inclusive? He has no idea…

On the bus: We have a 3 hour transfer… It’s too tight in here for the laptop and Google Reader doesn’t yet have a version of Gears for Symbian or iPhone so I’m pretty fed up. I’m also unable to settle an argument about whether the other airport we were offered is closer as Google Maps won’t identify its location without data switched on (it seems) and predictably there’s no mapping of France cached so it would be an expensive download. I find myself becoming irritable about not being able to use my devices and worry if this is really a good thing. All I can think of for the next hour is that I’m going ‘cold turkey‘ and it’s not pleasant.

At the apartment: More disaster! They don’t have WiFi as promised (yes, I checked before booking)… it’s only in a nearby bar. Shame - I had Truphone setup on the E61 and was looking forward to keeping in touch with the other half using this cost-effective way. I toy with the idea of getting a French SIM for mobile data, but a quick examination of the local airwaves shows no 3G networks at all so it feels pointless. I consider getting the ski lift to the top of the mountain and making a dash for the Italian border which is barely miles away and where there’s a Three network, but it’s the important weekend of the 6 Nations Rugby so we set off on a search to find a bar showing the games instead. I’m impressed with my 2 normob friends though - in the time it’s taken me to check us in they know which networks are available and where there is (and more frequently isn’t) WiFi…

I top up the various phones using the excellent Proporta USB charger. I haven’t brought any power leads other than for my laptop - the multi-headed adaptor with the Proporta covers all my devices and the battery will probably last the week. This is a big improvement - even from the iGo system I used to have - with its many cables, plug adaptors and transformer which required a travel bag all of its own. This new charger from Nokia is similar and possibly a bit more robust, but the Proporta’s multiple connectors win it for me.

In the bar: No-one can remember the order the 3 games are due to be played in this afternoon - back to the mobiles and the BBC Sport website. GPRS seems unreliable for all the networks we try - we have 1 T-Mobile, 3 Vodafone, 1 O2 and 2 Three handsets with us… The T-Mobile Blackberry gets there first and we settle in for an afternoon hoping English pride can be restored against the Irish. I glance at the E61 from time-to-time and it’s having a really hard time, jumping between networks… still searching for that non-existent 3G signal. It seems to be struggling the most of all the handsets.

Skiing: We all decided to take handsets with us. I swap my main Three SIM out of the E61 and into a Skypephone. I’ve no intention of using the Skype features (I can’t - it doesn’t work on roaming other than on Three’s networks) but it’s a great-sized handset with a decent camera for pictures on the slopes and USB charging means no proprietary adaptor is required. Also at £50 I won’t be too distressed if it’s damaged. The iPhone stays in the apartment - it’s the best phone of all the ones we have with us to use in the glare of the snow with its excellent screen, but I worry about falling on it and the touch interface doesn’t work with gloves on.

During the day I’m further surprised by the normob friends - picture messages are being sent to friends at home and the Walkman phone provides some music when we stop for a break. Once again I’m reminded how useful Spinvox is as I’m able to review my voicemails without incurring any call costs back to the UK. None of them need an immediate reply so I can get on with my holiday - brilliant!

I’m considering if my definition of normob needs to be redefined, but when normob friend #2 takes a picture and the SonyEricsson offers a ‘blog this’ option he wonders aloud what the point of that would be and I feel the balance restored. It’s also notable that neither of them use any features on their phones other than the built-in ones - it’s something I take for granted.

When we get back to the apartment, normob friend #2 connects his Archos video player to the TV - none of us are a big fan of French TV. I’m frustrated that I have a similar amount of video on my iPhone, but it doesn’t yet provide video out as regular iPods do [update: It does - how behind the times am I??? Shame Apple wants £70 for a Universal dock and AV cables though...]. It would have also been cool to watch some of the video clips we’ve taken during the day on our phones - it’s the first time I’ve appreciated the value of the N95’s capability to do this. This new ‘video over USB / WiFi’ technology seems like the next logical step for this - I hope Nokia adopt it across the range.

—-

Overall it’s been strange moving back to a basic device. I just can’t do T9 anymore - I’m out of practice - and it’s been good to see my friends reaching for mobile services routinely at times I never would have expected them to. I worry that we’re in for an unpleasant surprise when the Blackberry bill comes in, but I think this demonstrates that people aren’t well informed about roaming data… perhaps I’m a little closer to understanding those thousand dollar iPhone roaming data bills when they were first released.

On the wish-list for me is definitely a better camera on a handset. The Skypephone’s 2MP is good enough resolution-wise, but the images are often fuzzy or poorly exposed… Also, as it’s not a smart-phone there’s little I could do with them except sync them to my laptop (via OS X’s excellent bluetooth utility which I discovered when I realised I’d brought a faulty USB cable). I really want to stick a few on Facebook so Shozu would do an excellent job here. However, some reasonably priced roaming data would also be called for… I hope Maxroam or a similar service offers this soon - they don’t yet.

In addition to the iPhone, the E61 and my ‘pub phone’ (a little-used Skypephone) there’s another couple of phones in my life and I’m coming to resent them more and more. It’s my home phones.

They’re rubbish.

I didn’t want to buy a new landline handset. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t do landlines at all - they feel pointless. Personal communication shouldn’t be tied to a location - I don’t want someone to have to think about where I am before they call me. But there’s a couple of services we can’t have without it (the entry phone to our apartment block, for example, calls our wired phone when someone presses our buzzer) and it still feels rude to ask overseas friends to pay higher rates to call our mobiles (not everyone has discovered the joy of VOIP) . So I can’t yet reach this state of nirvana and having resigned myself to this, I paid £70 for a pair of Panasonic DECT handsets with a simple answer machine and received them this week.

Being the nerd I am I did, of course, start to read a load of reviews before I bought them, but I grew bored of the limited feature-set and ended up just buying something that looked passable and featured somewhere near the top of Amazon’s sales ranking. It’s not that the budget was terribly tight… it’s not unlimited by any means but I would have spent more for something exciting. It’s just there really doesn’t seem to be much out there. Particular complaints are:

• Ni-MH batteries (I didn’t realise they even still existed).
• No contacts synchronisation (and no, similar models with a ‘copy from SIM’ feature don’t count… who keeps their numbers of the SIM any more?)
• Three (yes three!) wallpapers (one usable) without any option to disable it on a ‘glorious’ 1.5″ screen.
• A UI that makes my first ever mobile’s interface (the Ericsson GH868, since you ask) look like that whizzy glass / touch thing Tom Cruise had in Minority Report.

OK, so we’re a couple of hundred words in and I’m still not really to the point. Sorry about that.

What I’m driving at is not just that I want more a more capable handset, but that the existence of such a big gap is ludicrous - my Skypephone has a feature set that’s far superior, can be extended further, attaches to my computer for syncing and cost about the same - but that there’s no need for a difference.

I’m ready for my femtocell now please that makes my mobiles usable at home. And none of this dodgy BT Fusion rubbish either - something that works with all our phones, no lock in. Perhaps even with the girlfriend’s non-smartphone.

Or a GrandCentral-eque service that allows geographic and mobile numbers to be added, calls to roam and hunt whilst still retaining the better pricing that’s typically available for consumer landlines.

Sure, I might be able to cobble something together with existing services or ‘roll my own’ with an Asterisk box at home or similar, but this has to be reliable and normob-friendly. At least I’d like proper spec handsets with bluetooth and contacts syncing… that’s not too much to ask. Is it?

Why can’t all my phones be like my mobiles?

At the long-awaited SDK roadmap announcement in Cupertino today Apple released details of the iPhone SDK and a number of new enterprise features. Key points in the announcement were:

• Full push-sync to Microsoft Exchange of e-mail, calendar and contacts. Also supports global address list and admin features like remote wipe.
• Enterprise improvements covering VPNs, certificates, authentication, WiFi authentication.
• Full SDK and development suite with remote debugging tools and device simulator. Games, business applications and an IM client were demoed with presenters stressing the graphical power of the platform and speed / ease of development.
• An application store icon will be added to phones to distribute applications (the only way, although they can be obtained albeit via both ‘over-the-air’ or iTunes sync). The store application will also notify user when applications they have installed are updated. Revenue split is 70/30 developer / Apple for commercial apps. Free apps are to be distributed for free once approved. Apple are also working on an enterprise tool for distributing firms’ internal applications.
• Parental controls are to be added to allow blocking of features such as web browsing or the application store.

The SDK will be available to developers immediately for free ($99 entrance to the developers’ programme to publish applications to the store).  Version 2.0 firmware for iPhone and iPod Touch, including these new features and support for 3rd-party apps, will be released internationally in June as a free upgrade for iPhone customers (Touch will be a paid upgrade as before).

The VC firm KPCB have also announced a $100m ‘iFund’ to support development and establish a ‘few Amazons or Googles’.

See these live-blogs for the full announcement ‘as it happened’: Engadget, Macworld, Wired.

My initial thoughts:

1. Exchange Activesync makes this an immediately viable business phone and use of this protcol offers the widest fit without excluding the smaller businesses who use Zimbra or Kerrio (which also both support this sync protocol).
2. The VPN and WiFi authentication features are nice, but really only fixes to what was broken previously. At least Apple were listening to the vocal minority who needed these things. That bodes well for the future.
3. The SDK appears capable and the applications demoed show a full range of capabilities. As a consumer there’s an exciting range of possibilities presented including some attractive games and IM (at last!). It’s probably worth reserving judgement on the developer’s side for the moment though regarding how far into the iPhone they can tap… there’s no detail yet on any capability to enhance or modify the UI or low-level functionality. Also, with no change to the Bluetooth stack use of peripherals with applications is likely to be limited to those that plug-in via the existing connector specification or utilise WiFi connections as now.

Roll on June!

A little bit of silliness to brighten the afternoon… My girlfriend (name hidden in the image below to protect the innocent) is amazed that I can tell when she’s arriving home and be at the door to meet her (sometimes with the kettle on for a restorative cuppa). Can I tell her footsteps as she walks down the corridor? Is it the jangle of her door keys? Do we have special ESP?

Nope! Our apartment block is a new construction that doesn’t seem to block wireless signals much and her phone connects to my PC as soon as she’s outside, 2 flights of stairs away…

After Singapore’s most wanted terror fugitive escaped detention on 27th Feb the mobile phone networks were called on to support the massive man hunt:

“The three mobile phone operators here - SingTel, StarHub and MI - are also sending out messages with pictures of the fugitive to 3.9 million subscribers, police said. “

Link: The Straits Times

Having mentioned Ovi in passing with Donna and Richard from WOMWorld at Whately’s Mobile Geeks meet-up this week (he’s uber-connected, don’ t ya know!) I’ve been thinking about it some more, having not looked at it since launch, and I have to say I’m confused. So this is an audience participation opportunity - please post your thoughts in the comments.

When announced, Nokia’s Ovi seemed to me to be an excellent idea… a suite of services that would add another ‘power of the cloud’ dimension to smart phones, whilst simultaneously giving the network operators a wake-up call. It consists, currently, of:

Nokia Share - A free online media gallery with (surprise!) sharing features as well as options to publish to Flickr and Vox.

Nokia Maps - A mapping application with a pay-for routing capability.

Nokia Music - A straight-up iTunes music store competitor. The store is available via full browser or mobile device and music can be downloaded over-the-air or ’side loaded’. Also provides a streaming option.

N-Gage - A mobile gaming platform with an online catalogue of games to buy and some social networking features.

Nokia Sync - An over-the-air sync utility between your phone and computer with the option to manage contacts and calendar data via the web.

However, beyond the Ovi launch page the entire effort seems disconnected and unfinished. There’s no single user-profile or identity between them and no interfaces between the applications. Share and Maps are probably the most mature, but Share still directs users to the Twango URL - the service Nokia acquired - and Maps still wears its beta tag prominently. Music is actively being marketed (see right - this was London’s Waterloo station) with free music codes being distributed and demo handsets, but whilst on the spec sheet there’s much to recommend it (it uses Microsoft’s DRM solution so supports other capacble devices and adds streaming and re-downloading options, which are missing from iTunes) it’s a Windows / IE-only affair at present and even the Nokia reps I spoke to couldn’t explain what it could and couldn’t play. N-Gage again looks promising with big-name games firms behind the platform, but is in ‘first access’ mode supporting only the N81 handset at present. Sync is not launched yet.

Has Nokia cast its net too wide? Are they trying to do everything and achieving nothing?

Certainly the individual services will mature, but what is the aim with Ovi? Will it be a just a catalogue of services or is it destined to become more integrated? Can they be usefully integrated? Will gaming consumers, for example, be interested in mapping? And just how is Nokia going to explain to what Ovi is when most of its sales are via network operators many of whom offer competing services already?

[UPDATE: This is obviously a very current concern as The Register reports today that T-Mobile in Germany are banning Ovi-capable handsets]

Another consideration is what’s not in Ovi: Widsets (Nokia’s widgets platform), Search (on-device and internet searching) and Mosh (a sort-of mobile content sharing social network thing…), Podcasting (a podcatcher / player) and Sports Tracker (a training diary with location features). Are these destined for the scrapheap or is it Ovi that’s been left behind?

My take:

1. Nokia needs to get some focus quickly and deliver some of these products finished to the market - nothing here is ready for the Normob and so they’re not really contributing to the brand or sales.
2. The difference between free and premium features needs to be made more consistent and a single billing relationship created for all applications.
3. The Ovi brand needs some explanation or an early bath…

What do you think?

====

I’m going to take a hands-on look at the Ovi services over the next few months drop me a line at if you have any questions or suggestions you’d like included.

4 months later than I wrongly predicted last September the iPhone is coming to O2 in Ireland for €399 / €499 for 8GB / 16GB respectively (the same price as other Euro countries). It’s without visual voicemail and has a 1GB data allowance. Some commentators have described this as being ‘without an unlimited data plan‘ which, whilst technically true, is rather ungenerous as I defy anyone to exceed 1GB of data usage per month over EDGE.  Also, other operators define 1GB as being the limit of ‘fair use’ for handset downloads on their ‘unlimited’ data tariffs.

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

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’.

The elephant in the room: Have Google missed the mark with Android so far?

Now Mobile World Congress is over the flood of news is slowing enough to step back and assess what we’ve seen. S60 got a pretty consistent ‘C-’ grade for their Touch demo, but I’m a bit surprised no-one has taken Google to task for their poor Android showing… OK, we saw a few prototypes and even a demo running on some production hardware, but aside from some gripes about the interface the reviewers singularly failed to call Google out on the biggest issue… Android at the moment is looking like ‘just another mobile platform’.

This C|Net piece hints at the problem, asking if we really need 4 mobile platforms: Windows Mobile, Symbian, Mobile Linux (not sure I’d include that one yet) and now Android? But the question should be “What innovation are Google offering over the competition?” I’ve no doubt it will be a great open platform, making it easy for new hardware to come to market and encouraging a whole raft of applications, but that really should be a given… With the hind-site of watching Symbian’s development alone over the last few years it should be possible for a half-competent organisation to produce something more elegant and Google has the brains to do a cracking job. But I was hoping for so much more. Where’s the support in ‘the cloud’ that Google excels at that would make an Android phone more appealing than the alternatives?

Take a look here. It’s the ‘Google APIs and Services’ section of the Android site. What do you see? A Google Maps interface and (effectively) a Google Talk interface… and that’s it. Where’s the advertising, calendar, contacts, online storage or YouTube interfaces? Certainly all of those things will be available via the browser for the consumer, probably customised like the current iPhone ones, but that’s not new. Android could have really shaken things up by providing interfaces so that application developers could utilise these services right from the start.

I appreciate Android phones purely tied to Google services would lack appeal, but there’s no reason for any of this to be either mandatory or exclusive to them. Google just need to capitalise on what has already made them world-leaders in so many other areas. Still, here we are - Google are giving away $10 million for the best applications developed for Android and they seem determined to do this with one hand tied behind the development community’s collective backs for no apparent good reason…

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Android is dead, but someone needs to shift it up a gear.

SpinVox ‘top trumps’

I win the right to be smug on this one… It’s also made a passable effort at someone singing recently.

[Wikipedia link]

Despite the organisers’ less than enlightened attitude to bloggers at last year’s 3GSM, absolutely everyone who’s ever put keyboard to Wordpress is off to the newly re-christened GSMA Mobile World Congress this year. Except me. I have to stay here and work.

Humph.

Still, the mobile news will be pouring out of Barcelona like un-released Nokia product specs from a German website so here’s a quick round up of a few of the major themes and products that we’re likely to see this year.

The handset manufacturers:

Nokia will probably only announce a couple of handsets as they have other S60-fish to fry this year, so we may see an N96 (the next increment of the N95 line) and possibly the E71 (an E61i successor). An N78 (replacing the N73) and an E66 (an E65 replacement) have also been rumoured.

SonyEricsson have hit the ground running and already announced a pile of handsets that develop ther range with G-series ‘touch-screen organisers’, splash resistant and GPS-enabled C-series camera-phones, W-series high-capacity Walkman-phones, Z-series web and e-mail phones. Much of the coverage, though, will go on the attention-grabbing X1 - a new Windows Mobile-based touch screen and QWERTY keyboard web / multimedia device that is going to make you very happy if you got the phrase ‘QWERTY iPhone’ in the MWC buzzword-bingo draw. For the first live pictures see here.

Motorola have hinted at mobile TV-related launches, but little else.

LG has already launched a high-spec Symbian QWERTY device, possibly a Nokia E90 competitor, but so far have forgotten to release any pictures of it.

Samsung are bringing an additional mini-touch screen for navigation to their existing small form-factor slider handset range and may also be launching a premium, high-spec, Symbian-based N95 competitor.

Modu will also unveil their tediously over-trailed mini-phone thing with ‘jackets’ for differing functions. We generally try to keep the tone fairly positive round here, but can I be the first to say that if this is innovation the world’s gone mad. An easy way to access you phone’s data contents or access mobile data? Bluetooth. Welcome to the 1990’s.

New technologies and first looks:

S60 will give more details on its ‘Touch’ user interface for Symbian phones with a Nokia demo and more details on support for a wider range of sensors for movement and orientation.

Android, Google’s entry into the mobile OS world, will be demonstrated for the first time publicly on a prototype device from ARM. We may also hear more details on possible enterprise uses from the likes of Cisco.

Femtocells will be everywhere with Motorola and Netgear demoing 3G femtocells, demonstrations of up to 3.5G cells connected only to ADSL and products intended for consumer residential use. A GSM ‘in a box’ solution that takes 5 minutes to deploy will also be demoed.

Full web browsing on mobile devices will als obe a hot-topic with Opera making their new 9.5 release mobile browser available for the first time. Nokia too will be updating the native S60 browser, promising a more ‘full web’ experience.

Trends:

Microsoft could well be everywhere as they make eyes at Nokia, launch handsets with SonyEricsson and the continuing Yahoo saga unfolds after what seems the now-inevitable rejection by Yahoo’s board of their offer.

Britain will be well reprented with 150 firms attending - the largest number from one country.

Location services will stay in the limelight with richer mapping / location guides and ‘pedestrian modes’ being common themes. The Nokia Maps beta release features updates in both these areas and Navteq has announced location guides and information for pedestrians (including public transport). Improved location sensing via A-GPS (or something better) will also feature as will WiFi-based location sensing and location-based social networking.

For more reading take a look at the predictions made by the Head of O2’s R&D lab to Mobile Today. And finally… if you damage your phones a lot take a look at a tough phone with a serious guarantee.

Oh yeah and Whatley’s there with SpinVox so watch out for ‘news from the front’ from him if he can drag himself away from the free tapas… Humph.

Left: The famous Gaudi-designed Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona - under construction for almost 150 years, but it will be nice when it’s finished…

Confirmed with the manager of an O2 store. The Engadget rumour is correct.

Handsets are in the stores being ‘checked in’ now. Available from 1:30pm.

Update: Still no news on the UK Apple or O2 sites, but the US stores have them listed at $499 which confirms the price leaks were also correct.  No new features, just a second model to run in parallel with the existing 8GB model.  iPod Touch also gets a bump to 32GB too which may indicate this form factor still has space for more…

My thoughts?  16GB is nice, but £329 isn’t going to have the people who haven’t already bought one flocking to buy one.  Other than a price drop, 3G is the only thing that will do the job here…

For S60 users there’s been two choices for some time over how to get push e-mail and synchronise natively over-the-air with an Exchange (or Zimbra!) server using the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol (as opposed to adding a third-party application as Blackberry or Good Mobile Messaging does). Dataviz’s Roadsync product was first to the market, but costs, and Nokia’s home-grown Mail for Exchange product which was added more recently, was free, but initially more feature-limited. After more-recent releases of Mail for Exchange added a number of key enterprise features and meeting invite functionality a number of commentators suggested Roadsync may not have much of a future. I’ve been testing them both in daily use for the last 9 months and these are my thoughts…

Product capability

Both products offer push e-mail with calendar and contacts sync to an Exchange server. Meeting invites are also supported by both products so they can be responded to from the phone. Only Mail For Exchange offers task syncing, but Nokia’s standard calendar application displays these either mixed in with the standard calendar view or in a single inflexible list making the use of this data less than convenient.

Roadsync allows all mail folders (either root or sub-folders of the inbox) to be synchronised and also allows messages to be moved between them [see right]. Mail for Exchange only allows access to the Inbox and does not allow messages to be moved.

Both products support the Exchange administration function ‘remote wipe’ in case of loss or theft, but only Mail for Exchange enforces the handset lock feature requiring an unlock code to be entered and performing a wipe if it is repeatedly entered incorrectly.

Both product also support access to the Exchange Global Address List although Roadsync’s approach provides a slightly better presentation.

Roadsync is the only product to support any Exchange 2007 features such as e-mail flags, online searching, UNC file share access and faster message retrieval, but I was unable to test this as I didn’t have access to an Exchange 2007 server.

Both product support N and E-series devices from Nokia, but Roadsync supports all of both ranges (plus some S60 3rd edition FP1 devices and some non-Nokia devices such as the new Samsung SGH-i520) whilst N-series support from Mail for Exchange is limited to more recent models.

Winner: Close, but Roadsync just. It has more features and differentiates in other areas through better interface. Administrator control of handset lock is likely to be a significant concern to enterprise users though.

Program status screens

[L: Roadsync, R: Mail For Exchange]

Mail for Exchange presents information on the sync mode in use, status, last sync and what is being synced. Roadsync just displays the last sync time (the other information is available from the ‘Options’ menu).

Winner: Mail for Exchange

Settings and configuration options

[L: Roadsync, R: Mail For Exchange]

Connection settings for the two applications are virtually indistinguishable.

[L: Roadsync, R: Mail For Exchange]

Synchronisation control is also identical, allowing separate peak and off-peak settings.

Winner: Neither - near identical controls

Mail reading and writing

[Top Left: Mail For Exchange, Others: Roadsync]

Roadsync offers three viewing sizes and compresses message details into less screen space than Mail for Exchange which only offers one text size. As can be seen the smallest Roadsync font is still easily readable but requires much less scrolling.

Winner: Roadsync

Pricing

Roadsync is US$50 (around £25 at the time of writing) per device. Mail for Exchange is free.

Winner: Mail for Exchange

Stability and reliability

Roadsync is rock solid - over more than 6 months of use I never experienced a crash or an error. Mail for Exchange crashed several times over 3 months use and occasionally refused to send messages giving a ‘try later’ message that required a phone restart to work. It also interfered with Three’s Mobile Mail application causing the read/unread status of messages not to be updated correctly if they were changed remotely.

Winner: Roadsync

Overall

It