Jonathan Jensen’s mobile day

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It’s tricky to describe my mobile day in about 500 words but here’s a quick run through on the mobile tools that I find invaluable each day. My Nokia E51 never leaves my side during the day. I’ve written before about why I love the E51 but that was all about standard handset functionality. The great thing about the E51 is that being a S60 device I can customise it so it gives me the functionality I need. So, what have I done to my E51 to maximise its usefulness and how does it get me through the day? The key application I use to access everything else on the handset is Handy Taskman. This is a task switcher and short cut enabler that replaces the built in task switcher. It’s much more powerful and allows applications to be accessed by typing the initial one or two letters of the name. It also allows short cuts for calls, SMS or applications to be set up. Saves a lot of time and is a must for every S60 handset.

A lot of my day is spent within reach of WiFi, either home broadband or BT Openzone. I use Truphone for a lot of calls as I still get free calls to landlines in 40 countries on the launch offer. Devicescape is a great tool to manage WiFi connections and avoids the need to log in to each router or service and enter security details. It’s one of those applications you don’t really see – it’s just there!

I ditched regular mobile voice mail a while back in favour of Spinvox. Receiving voice mails as SMS is much easier to manage although it’s not yet possible to divert Truphone calls to Spinvox. I spend a bit of time on the phone to people in other countries and have found WorldMate invaluable for checking the time in other cities. Plus when I travel it’s got an excellent currency converter. WorldMate also reads me a daily weather forecast twice a day so I don’t even need to check the handset! When I need to navigate round unknown parts of London I use Google Maps. Although the E51 doesn’t have GPS, the Google Maps cell site triangulation is good enough to work out a starting position in an urban area and find my destination.

I listen to music when I’m travelling and have recently started using Nokia Internet Radio. I’ve found some great radio stations including Virgin Classic Rock and Riviera Radio. Nokia WOM World has loaned me the Nokia BH-604 Stereo Headset and the sound combination is fantastic.

For checking email during the day I use IMAP4 email to receive the headers for my emails. I download anything that looks interesting and if important reply, although I generally wait until I’m back at my PC. Twitter and Jaiku are also key communication tools for me. I keep an eye on Twitter and post the odd update via Twitter’s mobile web site and for Jaiku I use the S60 native client which makes using Jaiku on a mobile easier.

So during a typical day my handset does so much more than just make calls – and I haven’t even mentioned SMS which I use the whole time for keeping in touch with friends, family and business colleagues! There’s still a long way to go with mobile technology but so much has happened since Ernie Wise made the first call on Vodafone on 1st January 1985!

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Jonathan’s also at Sevendotzero.

You know how we’ve been getting mobile industry execs to write about how they use their mobile in a day, well SMS Text News Reader Jonathan Jensen has a family, and they all use mobiles. So for a bit of a different take on the mobile day, read on to find out what they’ve got, how they use them, and that age old thing called the generation gap.

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Chatting to Ewan the other day we got onto the subject of how people use their mobile phones in the real world. What they use, why they use it and how they use it. It started me thinking about my family and the different ways we all use mobile comms.

My first mobile phone was a NEC P3 (anyone else remember them?) and since then I’ve had at least 21 handsets (those are the ones I can remember)! I’m currently using a Nokia 6120 Classic on 3 and a Nokia E65 for Truphone – a must have service in any mobile armoury. 3 insisted I had a new (free) handset from them when I renewed my contract last month, as well as generously discounting my monthly service charge by £8 (32%) – nice loyalty touch. I asked for a bigger discount and no free handset but it doesn’t work like that! The 6120, despite being an inexpensive Nokia S60 smartphone is a great handset; HSDPA 3G data, improved web browser and faster processor make it a real improvement over the E65, plus it’s very compact. I use the 6120 for a mixture of calls, SMS and web browsing plus lots of useful mobile apps (more on those at a later date). A decent browser is vital for quickly entering Twitter and Jaiku updates when I haven’t got my PC with me. In addition I have a business use BlackBerry and Nokia 6230i for the usual business stuff.

Moving on to the rest of the family; my wife also uses a Nokia 6120 on 3, although her focus is on calls and SMS. She’s a prolific texter, sending 500 to 600 SMS a month! SMS is now her primary communication medium, supplemented by a bit of Skype chat, Facebook and now Twitter. My 15 year old daughter uses a pink Nokia 7373 (she likes ‘fashion’ phones) on the Tesco Value prepay tariff. This is a great tariff for light users who just want to text and call. There’s no data or roaming but why pay for it if you don’t need it. My 13 year old son also has a Nokia 6120 Classic on 3 (3 – your marketing people should hire us!). He’s a prolific talker and texter and loves the ability to customise the S60 software. He likes installing stuff – themes, applications, bizarre ringtones he’s created with his friends! My youngest daughter, who is nine, has an old Siemens handset, that’s all pink (very important, as it’s her favourite colour!). I put a spare Vodafone prepay SIM in it which she uses to text Granny occasionally. She has great fun with it and it costs me virtually nothing.

Being something of a mobile geek I’m fascinated to see how each of them uses mobile technology. For the kids, mobiles are second nature and the idea of one, maybe two, hardwired phones in the house (that you needed a second mortgage on to pay the bill) is another world.

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Jonathan Jensen writes Sevendotzero - Technology stuff you can use

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.

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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.

Have you come across Funambol recently? I’ve been hearing their name quite regularly for a while now (they’ve been giving RIM quite a run for their money recently). Just last night, I found Funambol on my installer.app list on my iPhone so downloaded it to take a look. Very smart. Anyway, first, quick primer on the company:

Funambol provides mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source. The company is the leading provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market. Funambol open source has been downloaded more than 1,500,000 times by 10,000 developers in 200 countries. The commercial version of Funambol has been deployed at service providers, mobile operators, portals, device manufacturers and ISVs including customers such as 1&1, Earthlink and Computer Associates. Funambol is headquartered in Redwood City, CA with an R&D center in Italy.

Now, let’s take a look at the Mobile Day of Funambol’s CEO, Fabrizio Capobianco (that’s a small picture of him, above):

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7:05 - the radio starts, somebody is talking about something stupid as usual. Why can’t I set up a system that wakes me up with the sound of waves like in the movies?

7:10 - wife is back snoring, better get up and prepare breakfast

7:15 - daughter (4 years old) asks for Topo Gigio, an Italian cartoon. I play it for her in my hacked DVD player, which plays movies from every region. The region thing is insane. How would my daughter learn Italian in the US, otherwise? Give us a worldwide open DVD system, please”¦

7:25 - Cappuccino is ready. It is the only thing I do around the house, but I do it with pride. Everything else in my life is done by my wife, who is just putting the finishing touches on my bag (I am flying out to Europe tonight). I would be in Frankfurt walking around in shorts in February, without her.

7:40 - I am in the restroom, where I substituted the classical magazine with the iPhone. I check email and read feeds via Netvibes (I have two tabs, one called mobile with the feeds I care most about. Otherwise, it is too slow on the iPhone, even with wi-fi)

7:45 - daughter comes looking for my iPhone. She wants to check the weather. Swipes it off, asks “is this Menlo Park or Pavia?” (she can swipe but she can’t read yet”¦). Darn, weather is going to be great in Menlo Park this week, why am I flying to freezing Germany tonight?

7:50 - Daughter disappears with the iPhone playing some crazy Mika music. I wish I was still four.

8:00 - On my laptop, connected with my external keyboard and monitor, I check email with Outlook and Skype away with colleagues in Europe (with one-ear headset and microphone, looking like a customer support representative which will be with you in a moment).

8:30 - daughter comes again, this time asking to see Sesame Street on TV. I fire up my SlingPlayer on the laptop, connect to my TV in the other room and select Sesame Street on my TiVo. Without moving from my chair. Laziness forever.

9:00 - drop daughter at the childcare where she tells me I should not go on a business trip for 10 weeks because it is too long. I tried to explain it is 10 days but she still claims it is too long. I promise I will videoskype her the next day and she tells me she can’t hug me through the computer. I shut up and sadly kiss her bye bye.

9:05- get on 101 just when the carpool lanes open. I love my seven minute commute, especially later in the season when I can take the top off my New Beetle (in California, I can do it for seven months in a row”¦).

9:10 - in the office parking lot I check new emails on my Windows Mobile Treo 700w with Verizon (on EVDO, which is 3G). I know it is stupid, because I can walk upstairs and read them on my laptop, but this is my only addiction (together with Nutella), so please do not bother me.

10:00 - I spend some time installing the new Funambol JavaME email client, with mobile advertising powered by Amobee, on my RAZR. I use it only for demos, linked to my Gmail account. The guys in Italy delivered the client this morning (time zone difference rocks!). I see it for the first time. It shows me an ad with La Sagrada Familia and beeps when an email is pushed to it. Awesome, I am ready for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week!

11:00 - meeting in the office, no mobile devices but great coffee. My Lavazza coffee machine delivers the best coffee in Silicon Valley.

12:00 - quick Capri panino at AG Ferrari in Belmont. Love the place and the food. They mix up the orders at least 50% of the times. I feel like home.

12:30 - I leave the office for a meeting at a customer site. To get directions, I take out my iPhone and try the Location feature and get direction to their office. It works smoothly. Who said you need GPS for location-aware services? Can Google give us that API on every phone where they have maps? Yes, they can and they will.

13:00 - I show off the JavaME client to the customer, and I get an “ahhh, if you do it like that it could work: it does not look like spam, the ad is not in the face of the user!”. Bingo, we are on the right track. Open source will finally be free.

15:00 - I am back in the office and I play a foosball game. I haven’t lost one game this year so far. This one is close, gets interrupted by the arrival of my next meeting, but we finish anyway (priorities are properly set at Funambol). Nope, streak still good, maybe next time, sorry Ata.

16:00 - I realize I am missing the notes for my iPhone (which I need for the trip) and I left them on my desktop at home. I use LogMeIn and take control of the remote computer, then use Skype to send a file back to my laptop. Just when I am done, my wife buzzes me on Skype and tells me to leave the computer alone. She got scared when the mouse started moving by itself. That’s life in the technology lane”¦

16:30 - The Windows Mobile phone won’t work in Europe (it is CDMA), so I sync contacts on my iPhone with the Funambol iPhone client. Works like a charm. I am ready to go.

17:00 - time to leave for the airport. Halfway, I decide to use a different long-term parking than usual. Anza parking is nice, with the free valet, but their bus never shows up. I am going to try Fasttrack, because I always use it when I leave from Oakland and their bus is there right when I land. I search for it with the Google Maps application on the Windows Mobile. Found it, got directions. When I need to know where to turn, the damn thing shows an http error and the application quits. Didn’t they hire only PhDs at Google? I want to meet the guy who designed the map application sitting in his office with the lava lamps all day, assuming my phone will keep the connection when I am driving. I bet he lives in London. Dude, here the network sucks. Carrier ads are about “lowest dropped calls””¦ The connection will drop. And do not tell me I should not use the application while driving. The iPhone Google Maps works perfectly, because Steve Jobs tried it while driving and yelled at your team”¦

18:00 - despite missing the exit, I get to the airport on time, and while I check-in, it appears I do not have a ticket for my second leg of the trip (London to Frankfurt). But my email said “Booked and Confirmed”! “Sorry Sir, we’ll fix it”. I am sitting on the luggage scale and I open my SlingPlayer on the Windows Mobile. I am watching the news I taped on TiVo about last night’s election. I won on every proposition, that’s good. I feel I could vote for any of the three candidates left for President. That’s even better. A sad thought goes to the future Italian election, but then the BA lady gives me my ticket and I am off to the lounge (Tip1 for entrepreneur: never keep miles for pleasure trips, always use them to upgrade to business. Tip2: if you want to be Gold on BA, just switch your country of residence to Italy. It requires half the miles than if you reside in the US. Odd). I realize that watching TV on my phone for free, I am violating my contract with Verizon. Why did they give me a 3G phone with unlimited data? For email??

19:30 - I am on the plane. I forward my cell calls to my SkypeIn number. From there, I will forward them to my local cell phone in Europe and I will save a bundle (yes, Funambol is a startup, roaming charges are a rip-off). I call my wife to say good bye and turn off all my mobile devices. In a near future, I will be able to keep them on. My flight will be a nightmare. Flying is about a book, a movie and lots of silence. Please do not allow me to keep the mobile phone on. You know, I am addicted to it.

20:30 - Dinner is served. British are not really famous for food. There is a reason.

22:30 - I am ready to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a short day.

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Genius stuff Fabrizio — thank you for taking the time to record the diary!

Anthony Keyworth, Director of Products at Orange Business Services was good enough to take a bit of time and write about how he uses his TyTN across the average business day. I really like to read and hear of mobile executives ‘eating their own sausages’ — and in today’s My Mobile Day, Anthony doesn’t let us down!

Here we go…

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07.00: The alarm goes off on my HTC TyTN II - giving me a heads up to the day ahead. Although it interrupts my very peaceful sleep, I’m grateful for my faithful wake up call!

07.30: The to-do list pops up; my essential checklist for a manic day ahead. I know today will be busier than usual, meaning I’ll need to be more organised than ever! Passport, check, phone charger, check, socks, check….

07.45:
Checking the train times on route to work with Kizoom, I realise I have quick chance to check out the headlines online, and see what’s going on in the world before my train comes. Luckily I manage to squeeze onto a train carriage and without barging past too many people, I also have a quick skim through the work emails on the way there. The urgent requests always seem to find me early in the day, so thankfully typing emails on my QWERTY keyboard doesn’t prove to be an issue.

08.00: I plug in my 3.5mm stereo headset for the rest of the journey and wish I had downloaded some new music onto my memory card – I’m tired of listening to the same 6 albums I have had on there for months!

08.30: Finally at the office and a chance go through the emails thoroughly and make some important customer calls and also I can dump my heavy luggage underneath my desk.

09.00: Out of the office already and using my Sat Nav to find my way to the next meeting. I know the location is close and in the spirit of keeping fit, finding my way on foot takes no time and is guilt free.

12.30: A chance for some me time and a chance to skim through the pictures taken over the weekend. I am still impressed with the quality of pictures I can get with my 3-megapixel camera. On my walk back I send some the pictures to friends and family.

14.00:No sooner am I back in the office – I am back out again! This time it’s to the airport for a customer meeting in France. I find myself multi-tasking in the taxi on the way to the airport – dialing into a conference call no sooner than I’ve stepped into the cab! Thankfully it’s so easy, it doesn’t make a difference where I happen to be or where I happen to be going.

15.30: Airport lounges aren’t my most favourite places, but it gives me chance to make some calls and tie up a few loose ends (not to mention to trial a few games from Orange Downloads!) The built-in Wi-Fi means that I can work on the go, keeping on top of it all and staying connected is pretty much essential as I am never in one place for very long.

18.00: Now in Paris and have checked into the hotel. Here is a chance to work on some documents ready for tomorrow’s meeting. I plug in my USB modem into my laptop and take advantage of the download
speeds to get the work done before the evening begins!

19.30: I thought it’d be a great opportunity to get onto Google earth and check out my local surroundings for the evenings events.

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Thanks for taking the time Anthony!

I’ve been an avid follower of Flirtomatic for a long time. It’s one of the best examples of a tightly integrated mobile and web service I’ve seen. It’s extremely popular with the youth audience, particularly in the UK. If you haven’t tried it, I strongly recommend taking a look at it, particularly at the sign-up and registration process which is very, very well thought out.

Mark Curtis is CEO of Flirtomatic. Not only is he a friendly and approachable chap, he’s intimately familiar with the mobile platform. So I wondered what his average mobile day would be like. He was kind enough to keep a note of his mobile usage across the 31st of January — so here we go, over to Mark.

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OK so lots of this is going to be complete fiction because I’m terrified (a bit) of looking like a delinquent low level mobile technology retard rather than the power user I should be (like Ben Smith for example who is clearly arc-welded to his device).

So I did not use my phone to wake up – I already have an alarm with much bigger numbers and an easy to hit snooze button.

After getting up with some reluctance I did some exercise. I still didn’t need the phone but did use the digital readout on the bike and a DVD (excellent unpleasant winter exercises for cyclists) on my iMac.

Only touched my phone on the way out of the house when I picked it up and checked for messages from my chairman who lives two hours ahead and has a habit of sending requests for information very early in the morning. Nothing today.

I used to use the phone as a watch but Santa brought me a Suunto Vector so now I check the barometer as I stand at the number 3 bus stop which tells me that it should be raining, and it is! Also check that I am only 15 metres above sea level, and guess what, I am! Not sure when I’ll get tired of that game.

At work I make lots of calls. Not really sure there’s anything interesting about that.

Note that operator contacts appear to be using Spinvox and wonder if “Flirtomatic” gets rendered into text accurately. Decide to use lots of hard words in the future like “concatenation” in an attempt to confuse the system.

I still get annoyed that predictive text in my phone has “Arsenal” but not “Chelsea”.

Spend a lot of time looking at our service on my Samsung G600. Really. Flirtomatic is cross-platform so it’s much easier to reference the service on the web when we are at our desks. It took a while before we got the discipline of looking on a handset routinely when discussing features, functionality and design overall. And of course in meetings if we need to peer at the service to chew over ideas it’s much easier to show the wap site on a projector off a laptop – simply because then we can all see it. Clustering round a handset just does not work, unless you want to get intimate….

We are currently working on an iPhone implementation for Flirtomatic so we have been playing a lot. No question, the browsing experience is terrific but we’re convinced that simple ergonomics dictate most web sites will need to have specific iPhone implementations in order to maximise usage. Why? Because links tend to be clustered too closely together and if your fingers are fatter than an elf’s pinky you’ll struggle to hit them accurately, unless you expand the page to a high level of magnification.

However I used the maps facility last weekend to locate a children’s play centre in south London and took the device with me in case I got lost (I don’t have Sat Nav).

Although the use case is eye-catching, I suspect the number of times I’ll actually need it in one year will be few. There’s a lot of complete tosh written about location based services which is based on compelling sounding use cases (“Hey! Carlos lands in a strange city and needs to buy a pair of boots before booking a nice restaurant recommended by locals….”). These usually star fictional road warriors with more money than sense and poor organisational skills.

I could pretend that I bluetoothed new songs onto my phone yesterday, but I did that ages ago. Writing this is making me realise I’m bored with the current selection but equally not yet motivated enough to do anything about it.

What I did do was check out the user experience of another mobile service – I won’t say who – by downloading it into my phone. I was shocked – not for the first time – by how poor the user flow and communication was in this critical discovery phase. We’ve addressed this issue of provisioning again and again and I still don’t think we have it perfected. But I’m damn glad we abandoned the application download route in 2005.

If I told you I’d used wap to check football scores the savvy reader would know that this was an untruth, because there was no football on Thursday. But I do use this frequently at weekends: apart from Flirtomatic it is probably my prime browsing usage. Browsing of course is the wrong term: it’s highly targeted and specific.

Other uses which did not figure… Train times (quite frequently – the Orange portal service is very good), some e-mail checking (but I’m rarely far from a PC), photos from time to time. The latter are usually triggered by family or compelling place or landscape.

Overall I’m in no doubt at all that as phones become more iPhone like – and they will – I’ll use the mobile internet much much more. When I’ve had my hands on the iPhone (Bill the developer needs it a lot of the time) that’s been the case. Often to solve spontaneous on-the-spot queries such as what kind of reviews has this or that new album or film had….

It’s all about habit. Old ones are hard to break, new ones must be easy to learn. Our usage rates convince me the mobile internet has a glittering future. Now services and experience need to catch up.

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Thank you Mark!

(If you’re a mobile industry executive — or a mobile fanatic — drop me a note if you’d like to do feature in a My Mobile Day case study).

I’m delighted to be able to publish the first of our My Mobile Day features. Building on the excellent reception from the posts by James Whatley and Ben Smith, I contacted a number of industry executives to ask them to outline their mobile usage across an average day.

First up is Dave Evans, CTO of SurfKitchen, the market-leading on-device portal provider. (That’s him above). SurfKitchen just launched SurfKit Phonetop, which delivers an integrated single platform of compelling mobile services — think widgetised mobile desktop. I’m going to see if I can take a look Phonetop in more detail shortly.

A bit of background on Dave: He originally joined SurfKitchen as Senior VP Product Marketing, responsible for evolving the current SurfKitchen products to dominate the emerging DUE software segment.

Prior to SurfKitchen, Dave was VP of Product Platform and Architecture at o2 — and, interestingly, the chap responsible for the development of the O2 Active programme and delivery of O2’s core data services platforms such as Games, WAP, Variable Charging, Music and emerging Service Delivery Architecture. I reckon Dave is one of the people to thank for me getting an XDA all those years ago then. Dave was also part of the core data products group driving O2’s strategic objectives of leading in Data.

Before o2, Dave was CTO of BTLooksmart delivering comprehensive search/directory solutions and associated advertising solutions to major internet portals such as Altavista, MSN and so on — and prior to this Dave held senior IT positions in Encyclopaedia Britannica and Argos.

So, what handsets does he sport? Well, he’s a fan of the Sony Ericsson K800i and he has the obligatory Blackberry for mobile email. On his K800i he points out that he runs SurfKitchen’s Phonetop suite of products — Phonetop, amongst other things, let’s you access a wide range of widgets and device services easily. I really need to get a look at it.

Ok, on with the commentary. Dave’s average mobile day:

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7:00am
Wake up, and have breakfast with family. Check through my K800i weather and news widget to see what is happening in the world, and my blackberry for emails that have arrived during the night – we have teams around the world – a true 7×24 operation.

8:00am
Drive into work – using a Bluetooth headset on the K800i I join our daily conference call with our offshore developers in India to track progress.

8:30am
Arrive into the office and put both K800i and Blackberry on charge

10:00am
Check train times into London for a meeting this afternoon, using the SurfKitchen Widget which gives me the departure times of trains for next 2 hours.

12:00am
Arrive at Reading Station and catch 12:00 fast train to Paddington

1:00pm
Check emails on Blackberry whilst on train, then head to Baker street on tube. On arrival I check Google maps to find the right street for the office.

1:30pm
Arrive in reception, and whilst waiting for customer, check emails, and updates to the news widget on my K800i home screen

2:00pm
Customer meeting – blackberry and K800i on silent

4:00pm
Leave customer meeting and walk to tube. Quick check on rail time widget- next train out at 4:45 arriving in Reading at 5:15, call my wife to let her know I will be able to pick my son up from school.

5:00pm
On the train catching up on email that arrived during the afternoon, quick call to CEO to update on progress with customer.

6:00pm
Pick up son from school – phones rings with call from work – son complains about the ringtone. I pass him the phone and he selects the downloads client and loads up one of the new ringtones.

8:00pm
Take son to football training – I wait for him, and monitor the premier league scores on my football widget, and browse through latest YouTube clips to pass the time.

9:00pm
Son finishes training – I give him the good news that Manchester United won again.

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Heh, excellent — thanks for taking the time Dave!

If you’re a mobile industry executive and you’d like to feature in a My Mobile Day, drop me a note and we’ll sort it out. (PR enquiries welcome too)