It’s annoying when you’re watching… so it must be hugely, hugely irritating when you’re actually acting.

The Telegraph is reporting that Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman where deeply unimpressed last night when a phone rang in the stalls.

A smart person in the upper circle managed to capture the moment on video (sounded like a Blackberry ringtone to me).

Every handset has a ‘quiet’ mode… and many have a ‘vibrate’ mode. It’s not difficult to use it!

I’m trying to pay my sodding T-Mobile bill.

I’ve been trying to pay it for the last 5 minutes.

The LAST thing I want to do is phone up and read off numbers on a credit card. That, to me, seems highly, highly ridiculous in this age of connectivity.

Or apparent connectivity.

The first time I tried to pay, the page timed out because the statse.webtrendslive.com server wasn’t responding. So they can’t manage high availability.

And neither, it seems, can the people behind cap.securecode.com. Whoever they are. This is a system that pops up whenever you’re processing a UK-credit/debit card transaction to further verify your identity.

Which is great when it works.

But when it doesn’t, I’m left looking and feeling highly stupid for trying to pay.

And T-Mobile are feeling my private wrath. Because they’re the brand in front of the screen right now.

Have we, in this marketplace filled with high availability clusters, cloud-managed virtual self-healing networking capacity, still not got things working?

On the 8th time, it actually all worked. I verified myself with the securecode system.

Aaaaaaand then the transaction completed, handing me back to T-Mobile who promptly failed the payment on instructions from my card issuer.

Why?

Because I’d tried the transaction 7 times too many, unbeknownst to me.

Total bollocks.

Five-nines. My arse.

The where-are-you question is very, very relevant in the context of business so I’ve been trying to solve that with the use of a Where Am I function on my personal site, Ewan.net.

I was previously using BlogLoc for this function… but it was getting a little bit annoying having to manually update every time I remembered.

So instead I’ve decided to try out Google’s Latitude facility. Latitude allows you to see the locations of your friends on a Google Map (either on your phone or online) and it works pretty well.

Recently the Google Latitude team announced that they’ve added a public ‘badge’ facility that you can place anywhere on the web to show off your current location. This definitely isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re a little bit suspicious or concerned about your privacy. But I like the concept myself and I thought it was worth a try. Google have been particularly direct with their warnings — which I heeded — so I haven’t displayed by actual street level GPS location. Instead I’ve displayed my general ‘city level’ location.

Here’s what it looks like on the blog:

Nifty.

If you’d like to do the same, get your Google Latitude Public Location Badge here.

I’ve been using my Android G1 a lot since I arrived in America because, conveniently, my US T-Mobile sim works perfectly with it (even though it’s a UK device). I didn’t have to do any configuration since HTC thoughtfully included the T-Mobile US web settings on the device already.

So I’ve been taking pictures.

As you do in a city as nice and as varied as San Francisco.

I’d like to send them directly to Flickr. Since there’s no ShoZu service on Android at the moment (and I haven’t re-installed Pixelpipe yet) I thought I’d have a look around the Marketplace on Android.

Unlike others, I take it upon myself to buy as many applications as possible. I did a certain amount of evaluation on ‘Flickr Upload’ when I came across it. From memory it was $0.99. Or perhaps less.

I scrolled down to the comments.

On the 28th of April, ‘Matthew’ commented:

Works wonderfully. Well integrated.

.. and he gave it five stars.

I suspect Matthew is referring to the share option. When you take a photo on Android, there’s a button that pops up called ‘Share’. Click on that and you get the choice of sharing by Email, by Google Mail or — to Flickr (enabled by this application). Smart. I was warming to the concept.

I noted that it’s had between 100-500 downloads. Ok. Not a brilliant well-trodden path. I continued with the comment review.

On the 21st of April, ‘z0mbix’ commented:

Will not authorise with flickr on t-mobile/G1. Can’t get any reply from the developers em[ail]…

Er.

I’d gone off it right away.

The final comment on the app’s frontpage was a day before z0mbix’s one from Benjamin:

Exactly what I was looking for works perfectly

Hmmm.

Z0mbix’s comment put me right off. But I reasoned there must be a reason, maybe he/she didn’t know what they were doing? Afterall if Benjamin and Matthew each had a good experience, I should be ok?

Right?

As I walked out of the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco I spotted an advert I wanted to write about. I decided to download Flickr Upload there and then, configure it and get moving.

I paid the money, the app downloaded and within seconds I’d got to the main prompt, asking me to authorise my Flickr account to work with it. Fair enough.

I typed in my Yahoo account username and password and hit ‘login’.

Nothing happened.

Nothing.

The screen went blank.

Er.

‘I’ve just paid a dollar for this,’ I thought, rather disappointed. I was experiencing the pain of fellow user, z0mbix.

I tried again. Maybe I typed my details wrong?

Again it failed. The app just sat on a blank screen like this:

Rubbish!

I ended up sending the photo to my email account and walked home, rather annoyed with myself.

I was annoyed because I thought I’d obviously got my Yahoo password wrong.

What self respecting developer would allow an application to go live — a chargeable application at that — which doesn’t actually work?

Then I reasoned that it must be a Yahoo screw-up and spent a good few blocks cursing them in my mind.

I got back to my desktop and immediately changed my Yahoo password to check I had it correct.

Again I tried authorising the app.

Nothing. Nada.

I’ve bought a dud.

I don’t know who is responsible. It COULD be Yahoo, entirely. But one assumes that the two other recent commenters on Android Marketplace aren’t lying and they got it to work.

I’ve tried a few times over the past few days to activate it to no avail.

So I looked up the developer online.

They’re called Macrospecs and they’re a privately-owned startup in the bay area.

Ah hah! They’ll have a GetSatisfaction page, right? Or a forum or something?

No.

Nothing!

It’s a one-page website and — ultra annoyingly — the ‘contact’ page goes straight through to their email address.

Confusingly there is absolutely no reference to the Flickr Upload application on their site.

I then had a look back on the Android Marketplace and saw that the ‘developer site’ is listed as FaceofMobile.com/Flickr. Ah hah!

No, hold your excitement.

This is the entire site:

Yup… it’s one page. It consists of three screenshots and a macrospecs logo, with no link. No contact details. No support option. Nothing.

In fairness to the developer, one wouldn’t expect that many support enquiries from an application that simply sends a photo to a Flickr account. It’s not rocket science and there’s hardly any failure points.

Except the authorisation process.

And, of course, macrospecs don’t control that, Yahoo do.

Tough luck for me and z0mbix, right? If it ain’t working, you can try contacting macrospecs but it’s rather clear they don’t want to know — and are not expecting to support any enquiries.

I hunted around and I found a support forum for macrospecs’ Face of Mobile application, a $1.99 Windows Mobile Facebook app.

I suppose I could try posting there.

But I’m not feeling very welcome — or smart for buying the app. Indeed I’ve paid a dollar for the privilege.

It’s perfectly fine for it to happen to me, I have a good understanding of the trials and tribulations of mobile development — but if this is the experience of your average consumer who’s just picked up a G1 or G2 and is expecting 100% friction-free total quality-assured service from the Android Marketplace, they’re not going to be at all impressed.

Like the ringtone marketplace a few years ago — you’ll pay once and if the experience sucks, you definitely won’t ever pay again.

What’s the right response?

Is this a FAIL on the part of the team at macrospecs? Is it a Yahoo FAIL?

Or is it an Android FAIL?

Would this have happened on an iPhone?

I’m basically satisfied.

But only basically.

I like the point-and-click setup. It’s always been rather smart. I like the fact that it *just works*.

But I’m being billed over-and-over for stuff that I am not using. I couldn’t find out how to close some of my accounts. Not all of them, I still retain a few accounts, but I’ve got a lot I just don’t use.

I scanned their reasonably good online control panel. There is NO ‘close’ or ‘remove’ option.

There’s no ‘stop billing me for this bit’, no cancel button.

Eventually, after a few months, I decided to contact support and ask them to stop some accounts.

Nope.

No can do.

Here’s the email I got back from them:

Dear Ewan,

Thanks for you email,

To close your packages you will need to call our customer care team on 01452 561858,

Please call them between 9am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday.

They will be able to talk you through the closure procedures.

If you wish to make sure your domain does not renew, please set the domain to expire using the guide below:

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/knowledge-base/?article_id=193

Regards

[name removed]
Customer Support
Fasthosts Internet Ltd.

Absolute bollocks.

If I can start a billing relationship with you in just a few clicks, you should let me terminate the relationship too.

But no.

I have to waste more time phoning up. And there appear to be ‘closure procedures’.

CLOSURE procedures?

Isn’t it just a click?

WHY isn’t it just a click?

And why do I have to abide by your business operating hours? Ridiculous.

Rubbish.

What a mistake I made. I should have just signed up with some other Exchange provider who understands that making it EASY for me to do business with them is right thing to do.

Speaking of which, who do you recommend?

Who should I swap to for my existing accounts?

Coracle Group…

That name rings a bell? They’re the high-integrity communications specialists!

Yes. It’s run, in part, by Richard L. Purcell. He’s the Executive Director that’s been mailing me demanding we edit some posts on MIR Company News.

If you’re not familiar with MIR Company News, it’s where we stick the press releases that we are probably never going to cover. A while ago I felt we should do something with the tons of releases we’re sent every week.

Anything remotely mobile related, we’ve been sticking up on to MIR Company News. I’ve been meaning to then integrate an RSS feed on to the main MIR site. Whilst it’d be a feed of straight press releases, sometimes the releases can be quite useful.

Michelle has diligently been cutting and pasting the releases into the WordPress window for MIR Company News. Our policy is to cut and paste everything. Although the site already has quite a bit of traffic, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand. It definitely isn’t news. It’s just a resource we’ve been creating, mostly for our own benefit. I have, for example, used it a few times for some searches.

We cut and paste the whole lot. Even the PR note at the bottom with the contact details of the PR company or the company’s marketing team contacts.

Mr Purcell took exception to this practice. I’m not sure why.

He emailed during the height of Mobile World Congress, thus:

Hi Ewan,

We were pleased to see the Feb. 24 posting of “Bluegrass Cellular Deploys Hosted CSC Gateway from Interop Technologies.”

http://www.mircompanynews.com/2009/02/24/bluegrass-cellular-deploys-hosted-csc-gateway-from-interop-technologies/

We do have a request to make. In the distribution email for the release, there was information below the traditional closing notation of “# # #,” that was meant for the journalists receiving the email. That information has gotten posted along with the press release.

He continues:

As soon as time permits, please kindly remove the following information from the bottom of the posted release:

This is the bit he had a problem with us posting:

We make every effort to send news and information that is within your area of interest. To ensure that you receive future news from us, please add news_for_media@coraclegroup.com to your “safe senders” list. If it is best to redirect releases to another journalist in your organization or you prefer to have your address removed from our distribution list, please let us know by responding to this email. You will receive a confirmation message. Thank you.

I recognise that if you’re a client — in this case, Bluegrass Cellular, it doesn’t look that good to see a PR boilerplate on the bottom, not if

For example, this story here is listed as ‘press coverage’ achieved by Coracle Media: TCM NET: Interop Technologies to Offer AdaptiveMobile Parental and Enterprise Controls .

It’s a press release. How do I know? Well, here’s the actual release posted on AdaptiveMobile’s site. It’s the same copy. One has TCM Net branding on it, the other is the AdaptiveMobile release.

They’re exactly the same. But obviously the boilerplate press release stuff isn’t included on the TCMNet ‘article’.

The trouble is, you couldn’t easily use MIR Company News posts as ‘press coverage’ articles because we do a cut and paste of everything.

Surely Coracle should be pleased that, at my own personal expense, we even published the post?

Anyway.

Two days later, whilst we’re still in the midst of handling Mobile World Congress, Richard was back on the mail with a follow-up:

Hi, Ewan.

I’m sure you must have your hands full right now.

We would appreciate you removing posted information that was not part of the press release sent to you earlier in the week.

Thank you.

Richard

I starred it. I’ll sort that soon, I thought.

The 9th of March arrived. I confess I still hadn’t got round to dealing with the request.

Richard was back with a simple one line statement:

Hello Ewan.

Please remove the non-news portion of the press release content appearing on your site.

24 hours later, Richard was back. I should, I suppose, have stopped everything and sorted it all out. But no. We’ve doubly-wound him up, unfortunately:

Ewan, in spite of our best efforts at removing you from our mailing list – considering the lack of response to previous requests, you have not only received our latest press release, but your site has once again posted information that was meant for journalist recipients only.

“SkyCross Unveils iMAT Antenna Products for Access Points and Routers”

http://www.mircompanynews.com/2009/03/10/skycross-unveils-imat-antenna-products-for-access-points-and-routers/

The press release uses the traditional closing marks of # # #.

If you are unable to make an adjustment in your processes, please let me know what email address delivers press releases to you. I have already removed ewan@smstextnews.com from our lists.

Thank you.

Richard

Goodness me Richard!

Is it really that much of a faux pas?

What a bore.

I emailed Richard and explained that he should remove anything from your mailing list that includes mobileindustryreview.com or smstextnews.com. That way we’ll avoid winding him up. And he’ll avoid cluttering up our inboxes.

I have to take a step back now and again and wonder what the point is of Michelle posting rubbish about Skycross or Bluegrass or whoever. I actually did think I was doing folk a small favour.

I’ve removed all the Coracle Media stuff from MIR Company News. And I’ve set any further mails from them to go straight into the glorious Google Trash.

Goodness me. What a trauma.

We met some smart folk and we captured some good footage. That’s ANOTHER 3 hours of video to edit!

I had quite a lot of people querying why they heard more or less nothing from me via Twitter (I’m at ew4n) during the weekend. The answer is simple. I trusted in my technology and it spectacularly failed, before I’d even arrived in Prague.

If I’m Twittering, I prefer to do that via two mediums: iPhone Tweetie Client or Blackberry GoogleTalk Client hooked directly into Ping.fm. ‘Pingdotfm’, the Ping.fm user-gateway name for the service has been continually offline for days. It’s super when it works. I just type in a sentence as though I’m chatting via the excellent Blackberry GoogleTalk client and … woosh, my message is echoing across tons of services in seconds.

But that’s not been working for some reason. So my fall back plan? Tweetie. I expected to do a few Twitpics, a few updates now and again and so on.

But no.

Here’s what went wrong.

I stayed in a hotel at Heathrow the night before we were due to depart. Instead of the Yotel, I picked the Sofitel which is actually *at* Terminal 5. It’s nice and new and efficient. I placed my fully-powered Blackberry and fully-powered iPhone 3G next to my bed, set both alarms for 05:45 and went to sleep. I said I’d meet Dan and Ben for breakfast airside at about 06:30. Plenty of time.

At 04:20 I woke up suddenly and saw the time. No bother. There was time for maybe one more REM cycle. At 6:40 I glanced at the hotel clock, just to check the time.

And then I started effing and blinding. Oh the language that came out of my mouth.

I’d turned to my devices to query why the alarms had not worked — or HOW I’d slept through them. Arse, arse and thrice arse.

The answer? Well, there’s next to no signal in this hotel — for SOME reason. Perhaps it was the area my room was located in? My Blackberry had NO power left, my iPhone was displaying the ‘power me up please’ screen. As I cursed my rubbish technology — I was *depending on it* — I swapped to the other fully charged Blackberry that I’d brought with me. That worked. No such luck for the iPhone.

And of course I hadn’t brought a charger. Instead I’d brought a camera and all the gubbins that you need to film reasonably professional in a European city. No space for ANOTHER charger.

What happened to erase the power on both of my handsets in about 6 hours?

Simple. Because there was SOMETIMES mobile service but generally NO mobile service in my room, both handsets spent 6 hours doing this:

* Logging on to the network
* Trying to setup 3G services
* Oh no, no 3G services available
* Falling back to 2G
* Oops lost signal
* Hunt for signal
* Found the signal again; logging on
* Logged on

.. and repeat.

The net result being they’d sat and drained themselves. Completely.

Come on. How *annoying*.

I should have put both of them in ‘airplane’ mode.

I had a fully powered Blackberry, thanks to the spare battery I brought along. I *should* have brought my iPhone charger. Fat lot of use it’d have been whilst I was walking the streets of Prague though.

I think I need a Proporta.

I thought we’d sorted out all the rubbish, I really did.

Do you know how I fixed the problems I was having ALL last year? Every single month, no sodding payment mechanism apart from a direct-from-my-bank-transfer would work. Nothing. I tried adding direct debits. I tried getting to bill my card every month. I even spoke to customer services who, after a good 30 minutes of thumb twiddling, suggested I ‘just wait and see’. Or get another bank account.

Seriously, that was the suggestion.

Since I already had another account with T-Mobile — which works perfectly fine — their system couldn’t handle the same bank details on a different account. No sireeee.

So every sodding month I have been logging in and arsing about with their dire, dire system. If it’s not entirely switched off after midnight for ‘servicing’, it’s spewing bollocks messages at me about my BAN account IDs or something.

I fixed this by taking out another contract.

Genius idea.

Well, I had to get a G1.

The added THAT to the existing account. And they took my direct debit details.

All is good.

Everything went through fine in December.

At least I thought it did.

Same with January.

Turns out it didn’t.

Turns out the direct debit was never actually set-up.

And they’ve been taking the monthly payments out of the 250 quid balance I mistakenly paid after entirely misunderstanding the idiot instructions on the site. I was -100 quid in DEBT to them. At least that’s what I thought.

Only, -100 means, of course, that I’m in credit. But the WARNING WARNING messages all over the account convinced me to stick another 150 quid on.

After doing so I then noticed the billing system was telling me I was -250 in DEBT.

Oh come on.

So despite taking out a NEW contract and giving my direct debit details to the chap in store — the chap who, sensibly, WOULD NOT let me open another account with these details — the direct debit never actually ‘worked’.

Which is why T-Mobile have been chasing me. They’ve been phoning my mother at all times trying to get me. I haven’t updated my ‘home line’ number.

At no point did I get a text from them.

Or an email.

No. I just switched on my G1 and tried to make a call to check if my account was stuffed. That’s the best way of checking things.

It is.

110 quid and it’s now going to be unlocked.

And every sodding month I need to remember to login manually and make a sodding payment. Meanwhile as far as their system and the credit reference agencies are concerned, I’m about as bankable as a 3 year old with a million quid mortgage on a house now valued at 58k.

You’d think this stuff was easy. You’d think the company would be keen to get me on to direct debit so that I forget about the bills and they get their money like clockwork.

Surely it’s not my problem? Surely it’s not incumbent upon me to have to set a diary entry — to be ultra organised and make sure I track my spending on my T-Mobile account every day and arrange to transfer full payment once a month?

I’m the one that’s saying, ‘within reason, bill me’. I’m the one that’s saying TAKE the cash. PLEASE.

Despite the rant, I do enjoy this. I enjoy it because I’m frequently in meetings where smart consultants in exceedingly sharp suits and very sharpened pencils tell me that operators have ‘evolved through the billing paradigm’ and that ‘having resolved the billing challenges of the 1990s, operators are now seeking ways in which to diversify their revenue pattern’. It’s at that point that I thoroughly, THOROUGHLY enjoy putting up my hand and and pointing out that, no they haven’t. No they haven’t got past it. No they haven’t sorted out their billing systems.

The sharp suit will smile. Cough a bit. Look at his other suits for comfort, shuffle some papers and try and challenge my interruption. And it’s that that point that I typically explode into a puff of annoyance. The human equivalent of a T-Rex snarl from Jurassic Park and vent forth my direct and recent experiences.

Yes, I do walk into these things. Yes, I can’t be bothered to spend 40 minutes on the phone again to T-Mobile billing. And yes, every time I write about my T-Mobile billing issues (usually once or twice a month), we get around a 5% uplift in traffic on that issue and a gentle avalanche of ‘me too’ emails and DMs via Twitter.

So in a round-about way, it does suit my purpose.

Until T-Mobile employ one of those James Whatley sort of chaps to reach out, stick some virtual arms around me, ask for my direct debit details *just once* and sort out the internal billing rubbish on my behalf, we’ll keep up with the once-a-month T-Mobile-Billing-Is-Shite cheer.

Annnd relax.

Nominally known as the premium rate industry regulator, they typically hand out fines to companies that have made a huge, huge amount of money from spamming the mystified UK population — and who, have conveniently costed a fine into the profitability matrix.

I describe PhonePayPlus to anyone who enquires as one of runt dinner ladies. The dinner lady that, despite the huge sign saying KEEP OFF THE GRASS outside the Headmaster’s office, will strategically ignore the 14 or 15 ugly oversized teenagers sprawled across it. That’s because, earlier in the term, she once walked over and insisted they get off the grass — to which the teenagers just stared briefly at her and then carried on listening to their headphones.

So the PhonePayPlus dinner lady continues to patrol the school playground and conveniently ignores all the bollocks going on until whilst, now and again, putting some of the teeny kids — the ones who haven’t learnt that disobeying has next to no effect — in detention.

The mobile industry in the UK is completely screwed in the context of premium billing. How is it possible for me to get an unsolicited text like this one…

… INSTRUCTING ME to reply STOP if I’m not interested?

Where’s the register that allows me to unsubscribe from all unsolicited bollocks like this? And I mean a register that works and is adhered to by anyone sending marketing messages?

Why isn’t there a differentiation made between folk who send you marketing texts and service text messages?

If I’m a hairdresser and I want to text you with an appointment update — that’s entirely non-premium, right? So when I sign up with a mobile aggregator, I should choose the NON PREMIUM option.

If I want to make money from a premium marketing service, shouldn’t I have to sign-up for a different account — that, when I send messages out — runs them through a country-wide ‘unsubscribe and don’t market me’ list of numbers before the promotional messages are even transmitted?

It’ll never happen.

So I’ll just keep getting woken up by stupid texts like that one.

And until the country moves away from the money making CASH COW that is the premium text messaging scam.

And by the way here’s the latest ineffectual news from PhonePayPlus:

- Prior permission: providers offering mobile subscription services charging over £4.50 in any given week or applying pay-per-page charges on the mobile internet must first apply for permission from PhonepayPlus;

- Active confirmation: as part of the prior permission undertaking, any consumer joining a subscription service must first receive a free confirmation text message detailing the cost and conditions of the service. The consumer cannot be charged until they have confirmed their subscription by replying to that text.

Will this change anything? Yeah. The ‘nice’ providers will observe it. But everybody else? Nah.

Watch as the naughty kids on on the grass don’t even bother looking this way.

Those new rules, by the way, are off the back of this:

PhonepayPlus’ review of the premium mobile sector was prompted by a worrying 108% increase in mobile-related complaints received from 2006/7 to 2007/8. This was accompanied by anecdotal evidence of consumers, including young people, being charged several thousand pounds in some cases as a result of bad practice by content and service providers.

Next.

DRM-free to me means I can play my iTunes tracks on my Nokia. Or LG. Or any other music-capable device.

But I can’t quite get a straight answer from anywhere as to whether this *will* work.

So in the interests of the Mobile Industry Review audience I thought I’d find out.

Here, then, is the first screen that prompted my interest:

So, £98 to buy stuff I’ve already bought. But without DRM, apparently.

I hit buy. This message appears:

Yes, yes I am indeed sure. Take the cash off me please. The next prompt was a surprise.

I have to wait for an ‘electronic mail’.

What the hell is this bollocks?

I’m conditioned by iTunes to expect to press BUY and for it to START downloading.

So now I feel like a total pleb.

A total unmitigated idiot.

I press the BUY button. I didn’t press the BUY AND GET NOTIFICATION IN A FEW DAYS.

Fuming.

Absolutely fuming I was.

That’s £100 of JOY that’s only valid when you give me immediate satisfaction. Give me time to think about it and I start to think negative.

How shit is your bollocks back-end operation that you need to do some kind of manual processing that requires an ELECTRONIC MAIL to be sent to me with ‘instructions for downloading’?

I bet Steve Jobs wouldn’t have allowed that if his mind hadn’t, obviously — and understandably — been on other more important matters.

Bollocks Apple. 100% bollocks.

So.

We move on.

I avoid throwing machines out of windows. And a few days later, a day later, I really CAN’T BE BOTHERED COUNTING because I don’t actually KNOW how long the delay was (I kept pressing the BUY button repeatedly) — anyway, I got this email from the geniuses:

Right. So my account’s been working perfectly with the billing information you’ve had on file for ages. I’ve been buying tracks RIGHT UP until the moment I hit the BUY button.

And all of a sudden, after making me WAIT all this sodding time, you send me out a flucking note to tell me my account details aren’t correct?

You, er, did see the fact I BOUGHT stuff whilst I was waiting?

So much so that the £98 I was spending jumped to £102.93:

This is exactly — EXACTLY — what I’d expect from Microsoft.

Not from Apple.

It’s a stupid, rubbish and highly ineffective fix to have to ask me to wait an UNSPECIFIED amount of time to get an email. What the fluck is the point in having iTunes running on my system if I can just hit BUY — give you AND THOSE IDIOT RECORD COMPANIES more cash — if it doesn’t download immediately.

That’s how it worked the last time I bought iTunes Plus. I clicked buy. It downloaded them all.

No sodding email.

I’m still waiting for my ‘update’.

A whole load of emails just ‘leaked’ from my phone to an SMS recipient,  impossible surely?! They were deleted emails (the full content)…  my deleted emails are set to auto-empty normally. The handset is an O2 XDA Orbit 1.

[For those not familiar with the XDA, it's a re-badged HTC Artemis (HTC P3300) also marketed by T-Mobile as the MDA Compact III.]

Apart from ‘never ever touch Windows Mobile with a barge poll’, can anyone offer any help?  Is this (could it be) a known bug?

I’m going to politely ignore the ‘human error’ option for the moment as this chap knows his tech…

I wonder if it’s the fact that she, “dodged questions about what happens next and asked for those outside the company to give it some “friggin’” breathing room.”

Further, she commented that, “For a great company and a great franchise” had been a mistake, and the company need to “get outward-looking and kick some butt”.

This sounds good. I’m hoping that Carol is someone who won’t take no for an answer and will kick the company into shape.

I hope Carol is a Google user.

Because that’s the only way Yahoo will get better. Whenever a bright spark tries to defend the bollocks that Yahoo has dribbled out to the planet recently, I point them to a post I made a while ago about Yahoo Mobile Search. Or Yahoo Local. Or something like that. So BAD was my experience that I really can’t be bothered to invest the time into finding the sodding post.

It went something like this. I fire up Yahoo Go on my phone. I type in ‘Cinema Times’ and hit search.

I do this with an open mind. A really open mind. You know, I want them to be successful. More than anything I want a decent result so I can find out what’s playing at my local cinema. I wasn’t arsing around. I was testing — but I wanted results.

Flucking piece of rubbish.

What did it come back with?

Times Cinema. Milwaukee.

I kid ye not.

Mil-flipping-waukee. In the United States.

It was, in a sense, accurate. The domain name of the Times Cinema is http://www.timescinema.com/.

At LEAST look up my sodding IP address. Come on. Spot that I’m using a Vdoafone UK data connection. I mean that’s HALF a clue right?

What are your mobile search developers smoking? It must be good stuff to allow that tripe out the door.

Where do I go?

Well I shut down the Yahoo Go rubbish and head straight to Google and get the cinema times on the first search.

Geez.

Yahoo Go used to be very, very smart. Terry Semel had it right when he stood up on stage and introduced the Yahoo Go app. Then some bright spark dumped the application and converted it to a link to Yahoo’s web properties. Removing the photo sync, the contacts integration, the push email — this was amazing stuff and very much ahead of its time.

I haven’t taken a look at Yahoo Go recently.

I simply can’t bear it.

Not until someone else can tell me that it’s decent. That they’ve thought about it. That I’m not going to be immediately disappointed.

Moving to online, I am a paying user of Yahoo Mail Premium. I set it up because I thought I should kick a bit of cash over to the failing giant. I also reckoned it would be a good idea to send a copy of all my email to my Yahoo Premium account. Just in case. I use Google Apps for my personal and MIR email — so it’s rock steady and 100% available — but, well… I thought it would be cool.

As a result I’ve got 203,380 emails in my inbox. No kidding — here’s a screenshot from this evening:

And that’s where it’s time to get super annoyed. I thought I’d try and organise it. You know, strip out all the newsletters that I don’t need. Strip out all the alerts and various emails that I need on a day-to-day basis but not as an archive. To try and reduce down that 200k email.

The first thing I did was try and organise messages by sender. Error 4:

Nothing flippin’ works.

Ok, I’ll try and do a search for The Times. I get their newsletter every morning. I should have at least 300 copies of them that I can happily delete, right?

I type ‘The Times’ into the search box:

I wait.

I wait.

There’s a little ‘loading’ icon whirring away in the corner whilst the system works out that it can’t be arsed and wasn’t made for any sort of professional use.

I recognise that 200,000 emails is certainly an unusual amount. But, you build your stuff scalable, right?

Fail again.

Rubbish.

So.

What do I do now?

Do I keep sending mail to this account and hope that Carol will sort this out?

Or recognise that it’s probably a lost cause…

What d’ya think? And have you used many of Yahoo’s mobile products recently?

I picked the Holiday Inn in Brentwood, Essex — near the M25 motorway. Convenient for everyone to get to — does ‘ok’ food and it’s got all the basics — including the obligatory and stupidly priced ‘high speed’ ibahn WiFi internet. That I can put up with.

I paid £150 for the hire of the room to seat 8 people. Again, I can put up with that.

I asked for an LCD Projector so we could have a browse about online. I didn’t ask for the cost. £45 quid, I expected. Or a cheeky £55.

I was appalled when I found out that the projector hire was costed at £175 for the day. On the way out I asked the chap behind the desk if this was an accurate cost.

“Er, yeah,” he said, sheepishly.

I looked to the right of reception and saw the rack rate of an ‘executive’ Holiday Inn room. £179. Rack rate. Come on.

“I could have had a room for 24 hours here, for the cost of that projector hire?” I asked.

“Er, yeah….,” he replied again, hoping that I wouldn’t explode at him. He didn’t work in ‘conferences’, you see.

To be quite sure I wasn’t missing something, I had to point out that the LCD Projector cost MORE than the room hire.

Another sheepish nod.

At the same time I’ve had an email recently from Holiday Inn asking if I’d like to discuss preferential rates with them since I’m in danger of becoming a regular (I’ve booked three rooms with them in the last few months).

No, is the answer.

I’ll find somewhere else.

Alas we were stuck in a bedroom — the Rowan Room. Or the ‘Rowan Suite’. It’s a converted bedroom with a board table stuck it in. Round the corner from the main business section of the hotel. So the ibahn stupidly priced WiFi doesn’t actually work. And the air conditioning is rubbish so you have to keep the door open.

And the LCD Projector is one hundred and seventy-five pounds.

Once again instead of complaining to the poor chap on reception, I smiled brightly, thanked him for his time, typed in the pin number on my credit card and gave them £405 quid.

If you’re thinking of doing business with Holiday Inn, do ask about the LCD Projector cost. Learn from my mistake of assuming they wouldn’t take the mickey.

I’ll invest a bit more in Holiday Inn, I think. Using my executive powers here at Mobile Industry Review, I have decreed this post will be stuck in the ‘Annoying’ category on the frontpage of the site for a month.

“It’s all about the network effect,” I said.

It’s, “all about who’s following you.”

It’s, “Errr, status updates,” I said, beginning to fail in my task at moving them into the Mobile 2.0 arena.

I even pointed to some Guy Kawasaki Twitter How-To posts (“How to use Twitter as a Twool“).

They weren’t buying it.

And neither do I.

Twitter works if you are somebody.

Whether you believe you are somebody or whether you actually ‘are’ somebody (depending on definitions here), Twitter works.

It works if you’re all about your own importance. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But there’s a finite amount of time.

If your job involves you reaching out to folk every minute of the day, good. If your job enables you to sit and ‘stream’ in a state of continuous partial attention — without doing anything, great.

But if you actually have to do something, then the challenge with managing your Twitter interactions is rather large.

I like the concept.

The reality simply doesn’t work for me.

I don’t want to know what you’ve had for breakfast.

I don’t want to know where you are. Do NOT broadcast your location to me. That doesn’t work. When I want to know your location, I will ask for it. Or I will find myself in the ‘Waterloo area’ and hopefully my mobile service is smart enough to connect the fact you’re available for a pint at the same time I am. But don’t tell me on Twitter.

If I subscribe to you on Twitter, what exactly does that mean nowadays?

I was given to understand that it would help me connect to folk. People I already know and people I don’t know. I was hoping it would help give me an insight into folk. Discover what they’re up to. That sort of thing.

The model works for a few people. Follow more than, I dunno, 20 active Twitterers and you’re screwed.

I was particularly pleased to read a selection of Tweets whilst Chris Anderson was on stage at Le Web.

I’m assuming he was because a load of folk on my Twitter talked about the fact that he said — words to this effect — Continuous Partial Attention Doesn’t Work so shut up and listen. (To his speech, I imagine).

I found it highly amusing that he says this, only to have it Twittered to the world by folk who, amusingly, aren’t paying full attention to him. Because they’re typing stuff out on Twitter.

It’s entertaining, Twittering. You can see it when you read the consciousness.

I’m wondering, however, whether it isn’t rather rude of everybody. Twitter isn’t chat. It’s one-time messages. Not live chat. At least, that’s how I view it.

And this is probably my issue.

In a live instant message chat — one to one or one to many — continuous (chatty) messages are fine.

I’m not happy with it on Twitter though. Because of relevance.

In many of the Twitter streams I’ve looked at recently, a whopping 95% of output is bollocks. Bollocks that I don’t understand.

Example:

@someuser Yeah me too! x

What the flock is that about?

How is that enriching my experience?

That should be a direct reply. Right?

Why the fook am I being exposed to this drivel?

And why doesn’t the originator think about this.

Or have I totally missed the point of Twitter?

And if I have, then Twitter is a pile of shite and destined to go nowhere.

Can you IMAGINE 60 milion British Tweeters doing this? It’d be unusable and highly, highly irrelevant.

Here’s another flucking gem:

@someuser and @anotheruser alright chaps? See you there!

Yup. Bollocks.

What’s interesting to me is that the originator here has decided to ACTUALLY reference two friends in his message. Presumably those two friends then use something like TweetDeck or any number of other application/services to track their ‘public replies’.

And I’m sure they’re delighted to be mentioned, to get the message and to then react as they see fit.

But what about me?

This is, surely, the email equivalent of addressing a note to SomeUser and AnotherUser and BCCing your entire address book?

If I’ve subscribed to you, that means I’m interested in hearing from you.

Just ‘generally’.

I ‘generally’ want your updates.

Unless you’ve setup a username for a specific feed or the like, I am subscribing to read general stuff about you. I’m specifically expecting you to have some degree of self-awareness though.

My time and attention comes at a massive premium to me. Everyone’s time and attention is. Every moment spent flicking over to read drivel is another moment I don’t get to sit and relax. Or write a blog post. Or reply to an email.

So I’m in a bit a quandary. It ain’t working for me, this Twitter thing.

I think I’m pretty good at delivering Tweets. That is, you get automatic updates from @MIReview whenever we post and, now and again, when I judge it relevant, I’ll knock up a real time entry. Like if I’m sat in front of some chaps from INQ. Or the like.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a bit of how I’m ‘feeling’ and some stuff semi irrelevant to mobile. And I’ve been making sure that any message I write is generally consumable in stand-alone form. You shouldn’t have to read back for hundreds of messages to get the context from my text.

So whilst a lot of other people are enjoying Twitter, I take heart that I’m not along. There’s another 3.something billion who aren’t bothering and aren’t really that impressed.

I’d really be missing something if Twitter was growing at the rate of Facebook.

But it’s not.

And that’s because it’s all ego based. And that’s finite.

I could only just keep up with the text messages being sent to me on the panel at Future of Mobile. Forget tracking the Twitter back channel. Too much irrelevance. Too many bollocks. Shite UI. Doesn’t matter what application or service you’re using, you can only properly track a back channel if you’re sat in the audience (or at home/work) doing fluck-all.

The other week I thought I’d check out the back channel ‘chat’ whilst sat on the Chinwag panel about the Future of the Digital Industry. I managed two glances at my handset before I really had to pay attention.

Similarly when I’m sat in the audience at these sorts of things, I find myself arsing about with my email and hitting F5 a lot in the hope that somebody-has-said-something-else. I often feel like a stupid rabbit or a hungry dog, sat there, pavlovian-style, waiting for input. And I miss half the presentation as a result.

Back to ego. I want to know what Stephen Fry is up to. I find his updates interesting because it gives an insight into his life and what he’s up to. Because normally you only get to interact with The Fry via a limited ‘public’ sanitised fashion via a 3 minute TV interview or the like.

The fact that he’s getting on a plane to film a new show in the States or the like is interesting to me. I didn’t wake up in the morning HOPING to get a Tweet to find out about Stephen’s travel plans. But learning of them via Twitter is pleasing. And I don’t get 50 updates a day from him either.

But sadly the vast majority of Twitter is not Stephen Fry.

Which leads me to my what-to-do-moment.

Switch it off.

I noticed that if people really want to talk to me, they phone me. Or they email.

What are your thoughts?

I *don’t* think I’m missing anything.

I’m sure that having 2,000 folk subscribing to your Twitter updates is useful in many ways.

But then again I’ve got about 300,000 folk popping in now and again here at Mobile Industry Review. Do I need to develop a Twitter ‘following’ as a separate project? Interestingly, the 300k folk who pop by do so at their leisure. And they rarely get fed utter bullshit about my breakfast. Or if they do, it’ll be in the context of me getting Phonejacked or the like.

So what am I missing about Twitter? Love the technology and the platform. Can’t stand the way most folk use it…

By the way, those Twitter messages I picked out — totally random. I made them up as examples. I’m not picking on anyone in particular.

My Mum gets Carphone Warehouse letters in the post; and the other day I arrived home from School, seeking out any interesting post for myself, when I came across a little Christmas brochure. I expected to see the usual mix of non-interesting and far-fetched mobiles, which have very limited appeal to someone who is as indecisive as I.

Then I came across the LG Cookie.

I’m not an LG fan by any means, yes their phones are nice, and I have to say although I appreciate the minor attempts at creativity with their naming processes; previous experiences of LG’s have taught me that they’re not my cup of tea. Should I mention I’m not a fan of their interfaces, or just generally how they work and feel?

However, the Cookie did catch my eye! It looks nice, it’ll be a new experience, it’s a touch-screen (another learning curve), and also the ability to use an on screen QWERTY keyboard, and importantly its price.

I don’t know what to do.

Now this could just be a sporadic urge to go and spend money, and get something just because I’ve seen it, and I like the price; but then I think… LG. An interface I know I won’t like, and will struggle to get grips with, and I fear I’ll see all the flaws in my purchase just after I’ve broken that “unbreakable seal” on the box.

It’s hopeless! I do this with every wonderful find I come across, and I deliberate an item and a possible purchase so much that it either becomes outdated and therefore useless, or I decide I don’t like it although secretly still wanting it, or I’ll find something else to admire and want.

I know for one, I can’t be the only person who does this; and I know for one that it’s probably a good safety precaution my mind has implemented to stop such impulse buying – a trait I really try to avoid at all costs.

Now I wonder, why is it I find mobiles such as the Cookie, and previously before it the LG KS360 before that, and there was also a Sony mobile before that too; why is it I loose interest, and forget about it, and then find some other mobile-crush?

Could it just be that no matter how lovely one major aspect or feature of a phone is say, it’s price, a new built in gadget or a sleek, slender design; it really isn’t enough to make a mobile good, or at-least good enough to buy.

What I’m beginning to see is that mobiles tend to be about one major factor, be it its connectivity, a particular design focus, a built in application, the camera, the media, the price, or its “technological achievements”.  I don’t want just one particularly above average feature as reason to invest in a mobile; I want a device that has equally good features which aren’t just surfing above the acceptable quality in phone.

So my next mobile-crush won’t be on a weak whim, a spur-of-the moment encounter, it’ll be something which offers more than one better than alright feature, and something I won’t fall out of love with.

Feel free to e-mail me anything at Samantha@mobileindustryreview.com

For fun, let’s remind ourselves of the definition of ‘unlimited’:

un-lim-it-ed [adjective]

1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.

Wow… Infinite, unrestricted data… no conditions?  For 30p a day?  That’s not bad.

But let’s check the small print:

Fair Use Policy: [snip] …subject to a fair use allowance of 25MB per day. If your usage exceeds this amount then we reserve the right to charge you for the excessive element of your usage at the per MB data rate for your tariff outlined in our Tariff Table. Unlimited use is within the UK and is for your personal, non-commercial use only. It doesn’t include making internet phone or video calls, peer to peer file sharing, using your phone as a modem… [snip]

So let’s recap:

1. It’s 25MB per day.
2. You won’t be warned if you exceed ‘fair use’ and may be charged immediately at full price (about £2 per MB).
3. You can’t use it for any commercial use – so no work-related e-mail.

That feels pretty limited to me.  The 25MB alone is a disgrace…. Forget uploading more than a few pictures to Flickr, forget last.fm streaming or BBC iPlayer, don’t even try to sync a large e-mail inbox…  Normobs will easily exceed this.  And how is restricting all commercial use fair?  Does a business e-mail have a greater impact on Virgin’s network than a personal one?

Rubbish!

In my opinion this is deliberately misleading – I’m off to see if this is covered by the ASA and make a formal complaint.

I was tickled pink on Friday to be able to give him the test one we were sent over by T-Mobile. This is the first ever handset we’ve received as a trial from T-Mobile.

Ben and I went and bought one each ourselves so that we had one to play with and experience. Dan Lane, on holiday in the North of England had exactly the same problem I had on Saturday morning in Central London: He couldn’t find a T-Mobile shop nearby. I was in London watching Josh Harnett fluff his lines in the new Rainman stage play. My other half is potentially interested in getting a new G1 so I wanted to swing by a T-Mobile shop. Unfortunately you can’t do that in the West End. Whilst there are bucketloads of Orange and Vodafone shops on every sodding street corner, the only T-Mobile shops nearby were in Clapham or Oxford Street. Not quite round the corner and far enough away to put my other half off the idea of walking too far amongst annoying crowds.

I cursed T-Mobile silently as I sat surrounded by fawning drooling women as Josh began to undress on the Rainman stage.

Dan Lane was going nuts in the North West of Yorkshire. I did a look-up to see where his nearest T-Mobile store was. I wanted to text him an address as I could feel his must-have-a-G1 quotient reaching breaking point from the IMs and emails being swapped between the team on Saturday. Alas, T-Mobile don’t have any stores within something like 100 miles of the North West of England.

I cursed T-Mobile again.

Meanwhile I began receiving IMs, emails and texts from Mr Whatley. As you no doubt saw on Monday’s MIR Show, he is taken with the G1.

He made quite a lot of comments about the actual handset but I asked him to focus his upcoming review on the concept of the device — the openness, the possibilities, the unified nature and the fact that ANYTHING he didn’t like on the actual G1 could more or less be fixed by a caffeinated teenager with an Android SDK.

For example, he lamented the lack of ShoZu on the device. Try PixePipe, I suggested.

I didn’t want James getting put off his review, or diverted, by silly stuff that actually can become very annoying.

There are a lot of people – Nokia fascists, in particular, still stroking their Nokia N82s and N95 8GBs who are hanging on every communique from Whatley. (See last week’s assassination of the Nokia N96).

They read my piece. They saw our video and they’re waiting for the Whatley view. They’re looking for Ben and Dan to weigh in — but Whatley is the first.

They’re expecting a few words from him on the fact that, yeah, the G1 camera doesn’t compare to an N82 and that, yeah, there’s not that much in the Android UK marketplace yet. They’re expecting some degree of experiential account from James.

And, er, he’s got to send his handset back.

Nixon McInnes, social representatives of T-Mobile, called to ask for the G1 back on Monday but I was out most of the day. On Tuesday I told James he needed to give it back and James promised to mail it when I got the delivery address. This morning I’ve asked them for the delivery address. Whatley will send it back this afternoon.

It really does wind me up when folk think that you just need a day or so to ‘review’ a device.

We’re not writing some piece of shite ‘it’s got this much RAM on it’ or ‘it’s got a whatever megapixel camera’. We’re not doing a mainstream media piece of puffery. Our readers don’t give a toss about that. They want to know what we THINK about it before deciding whether or not to acquire one themselves. And a big component of our coverage is being able to let Whatley sit and play with it and deliver a balanced view. Getting him to put down his array of Nokias for more than 5 minutes is a real challenge. I wanted James to sit and play with the thing and really use it.

So imagine my fooking annoyance when T-Mobile switched it off the G1 connection this morning. Disconnected!

What the hell do I have to do to get the guy to be able to focus on experiencing the handset?

I think I have to spunk just under 500 quid to buy him one on an 18 month contract.

Ergo what use is the public relations department at T-Mobile?

Gahhh.

Next time I’ll just buy the sodding thing for him so we can get some decent editorial. My mistake.

We’ll bring you a slightly shortened piece from Mr Whatley later today.

I’ve used it for an hour and decided it’s going back to the shop.  I may just throw it through the door and hurl abuse, but I hope to have calmed down enough to go in to collect a refund.

On paper it’s an appealing device – you insert your USB broadband dongle and it creates a WiFi access point…  Ideal for the MIR crew when we’re out and about.  Every operator will offer one – we saw T-Mobile’s effort recently.  So what’s wrong?

It doesn’t have a battery! It was advertised both in the marketing materials and on Three’s site as having a battery (UK Gadgeteer has the story)…. many sites wrote this up. It doesn’t.  It needs a power supply.  Three have changed their site without any comment and it’s confused customers. £70 for something that’s tied to a power supply? Bah!

It’s slow. Oh my god it’s slow. Speed tests are notoriously hard to do, but I never managed to get the router to operate faster than 25% of the speed achieved by using the dongle directly.  Pages crawl down.  T-Mobile’s unit didn’t feel this bad.

I love Three – the Skypephone, X-series and cheap broadband, but this really is a massive disappointment

If the lack of the promised battery doesn’t bother you, I’d still recommend waiting for reviews of a few other models to come in – I couldn’t live with it.

For those interested here’s some more pictures and interface screenshots:

The one thing that amazed me (that always amazes me) is people taking pictures with their crappy camera phones. Do they not realize that’s not going to show up? I have an N95, with a 5 megapixel camera, and from 26 rows away, this is what my pictures looked like.

They aren’t even *that* great.

So what makes people think this tiny little, what does a RAZR have, 1.2 megapixels on a good day? camera is going to take pictures that you can even make something out on? “Look look, there he is, he’s that white square right there!”

Same thing with video & sound clips. The husband had his E62 out trying to record some sound clips, when he got home and listened they were so garbled you could barely make out two words. The only reason why I took pictures (and video, which I’m going to upload tonight) is because I know on an N95, it’s going to turn out at least legible/audible/etc.

Get a better camera phone, or bring a real camera.

(PS, it’s often said that cell phones are the new “lighters” at concerts, you know, slow song, wave your cell phone in the air. Not so at the Who, the lighters were out in full force

What has to annoy me the most with mobiles, especially here in the UK, is the locking, and branding of mobiles on certain operators.

I absolutely loathe this.

Yes, mobiles are subsidised by the networks we buy them from, and hooray for that, but loading horrible, cheap, and ugly firmware onto a device I have just paid for is at the very least; highly annoying. And then plastering your network brand all over my shiny new device? No thank you!

I will use the example of my Sony W810i, it has Orange branding all over it (which I hate), and when I used to turn it on, and use the menu, It was all Orange branded. No I don’t use Orange, and I don’t want them infiltrating my phone. So I decided to get it debranded; now apart from the fact that none of the high street retailers knew of such a term, was irritating.

I ended up doing the procedure myself; which for about two hours nearly bricked my phone. I was panic stricken, and worried.

The point is one shouldn’t have to half scare themselves to death in order to use a mobile they paid for, in the way they like. And even if you don’t break your mobile yourself as my friend found out, Nokia’s which (can) come hard locked can cost around £25 to unlock.

My answer to this problem is now to ask the staff at mobile shops “What phones do you sell on PayG unlocked?” and from there, only the devices which are unlocked, unbranded and free for me to do whatever I wish, I will take into consideration. It’s a terrible truth, but I will not pay in excess of £200 or £300 for a network free phone, but nor will I pay £100/£110 for a mobile that is complete with horrible firmware.

So to you, another mobile consumer, if anything, if you had one thing to change, what would it be? Would it be something to do with the handsets, sales, operators, applications, or anything!

Well at least twice a day I walk past what would appear to be the flagship Phones 4U store on Tottenham Court Road and most days I’m treated to an unobstructed view of some poor normob’s personal details. Name, address, phone number; it’s all there in plain sight as they cross their fingers and hope they pass the credit check for that shiny new device perched on the desk in front of them.

(For the non-Londoners: Tottenham Court Road, or TCR is traditionally where people go to buy high-tech goods although in recent years it’s popularity has dwindled somewhat.)

When I strolled past the other day and took some snaps with my N95 at lunchtime nobody was actually buying a handset, which is fortunate really as I couldn’t in good conscience post a photo of some poor unwitting sap’s home address on the Internet.

So yes, that photo you see on the left is one of at least five points of sale desks with the salesman’s monitor facing out into one of the busiest streets in London just a few strides away from the exit of one of London’s busiest tube stations (the prime real estate directly outside the exit is actually taken up with a very well designed and stylish Carphone Warehouse).

Now, as you’ll notice the N95 didn’t do a great job of capturing the text on the salesman’s screen.  But a 1080p high-definition camera such as the one we use for the MIR Show would easily pick up all the information on the screen.

I’m sure the Information Commissioner’s Office would have something to say about this.

In the meantime, if you really must purchase a phone from a high street store, I recommend going into the operator’s own shop or buying online… speaking of which, I always buy from the operator’s website but does anyone have any experiences to share from using a third party website to order their contract handsets?

I learnt yesterday after a meeting with the Blyk Manager of User Experience that it isn’t just poor customer service I’ve had, it’s plain ignorance. Blyk don’t want to accept any wrong-doing, even if it’s as simple as human error.

A simple analogy of Blyk would be they want sheep. They want a member base of “lazy students” who jump to their every beck and call, and to be perfectly honest; I’m not a sheep.

So, I end all coverage of my experience with Blyk right here, and right now. I’m joining another network, quite possibly my old one Virgin Mobile, but I’ll shop around to compare prices and stability. The best thing though is I’m not even sorry it’s had to go this far; Blyk don’t want me as their customer, they’ve told me that, and I don’t want them.

Thus the end of my Blyk coverage.

Well, to be honest it hasn’t been going good. Yesterday I “celebrated” my six week anniversary of Blyk not working; not much cause for celebration really, but milestone nonetheless. So what has been happening?
Well, not a lot. After a lot of phone calls, and complaining, laughing, and mild shouting Blyk have now come to the up-most conclusion that they are not at fault; it must be my phone. Their answer to my astonishment (and fact I don’t own a selection of phones to choose from) “buy a phone from the Blyk store.” – Excuse me? They are charging £91 for a Samsung J600 – I can buy that for forty-ish pounds in Woolworths.

They’ve also sent me my third Blyk SIM card – lucky me – and I was told to try it in another phone. A lot easier said than done, when all the phones in my house are locked, broken, or five years old. I want it to work, but then again, if it does work, that means it’s my phone, and in short, I’m buggered. I cannot, and will not use a Motorola L6, and why should I have to buy a new phone, when according to Blyk my Sony W810i is completely compatible?

As for the Membercare Team! Communications came to an end on Tuesday after the team manager decided she would “terminate the call”. I fear that Blyk have absolutely no idea how poor their service is, and the fact that they keep insisting that their service is the “best” that they can offer is truly laughable.

So in all, it’s not good. I don’t know what to do with myself, whilst I want to leave Blyk (I have a PAC code and everything now), I wanted Blyk to work for me. I mean, who wouldn’t turn down the chance for free texts and minutes? It’s just a horrible shame that such a good idea has been coupled with appalling service, and lack of response.

Well, it all hangs on whether Blyk works on the L6 now – if it doesn’t it’s actual proof Blyk are at fault, but it also means, having to phone up Blyk again, and talk to people who obviously haven’t the faintest idea on how anything works.
Ahh!

* – I promise, I will actually not moan at least once a week, for the rest of my remaining weeks here at Mobile Industry Review.

Well I think there is. And yes, these are another example of my “grannyish” tendencies, but hear me out.

Firstly, mobiles in the cinema! Quite possibly one of the most aggravating situations ever; you’ve paid to sit in an incredibly uncomfortable seat, to see a below par film, with an over-priced ticket. Then halfway through that moment of immense enigma, emotion and emotion the classic “doo do doo do doo do do do dooo” (Classic Nokia Ringtone), sets the whole room alive.

It’s painful, and I hate it. I’m one of those people who’ll point out their anger and frustration at such low-level rudeness as this, and will inform the owner of the mobile of where to go, and what to do with their device. I mean, after all, you have paid for the privilege of watching this film right? So surely one should be able to hear it without the disruption of dreadful ringtones, and conversation.

Secondly, restaurants; I’m not talking about somewhere like McDonalds, Pizza Hut or even Nando’s.  I mean a proper restaurant, and normally ones that end up costing a small fortune. Is there anything worse than hearing someone’s phone ring during your meal? Or, even worse, if they’re having a text conversation, and don’t think to put their mobile on to silent, despite knowing that they’ll receive a reply within the next minute?

I’m actually quite sure there are plenty of other places mobiles don’t belong. Thankfully, I’ve never heard someone’s mobile go off when I go to the Library; although I’m sure the array of angered elderly people would be first to express discontent quicker than myself. Museums I think are another place that silence should be truly relinquished to its natural perfection. I don’t often get a chance to go, but when I do, there is nothing worse than hearing a badly distorted version of the current single’s chart number one blasting from an outdated Nokia or Sony.

Transport for London have a poster campaign on the buses (and Tube if my memory serves me well), which is trying to retrain us back to our pre-mobile, polite, English mannered ways. For instance, “I will not play my music aloud” and “I will not shout on my mobile” are too images or slogans used to try and keep the commuters a little sane.

Is this then proof that mobiles are finally becoming truly recognised for their vexation? Well, I think maybe so. I also don’t think this will be the last poster campaign that will try and get mobile users to be friendlier with their devices. Maybe we might see a public area where they are banned altogether.

Can you think of anywhere that mobiles don’t belong? Maybe it’s a place you frequently visit, and love, but you feel agitated by the constant buzzing of the mobile phone? Or, maybe you think mobiles do deserve a place in society, and that we have our rights to use our phone, no matter how bad in choice in ringtone we have?
Feel free to post your views, or e-mail me at samantha@smstextnews.com – let’s see if we can get a debate going!

I’m sitting here testing out a Nokia E66 (expect the review later this week), and I’m looking at the Maps function, and amusing myself at having Facebook on my phone. And I’m angry, at two things; that poor excuse of “speed”, and the ridiculousness of the cost.

I would have used WLAN, but I don’t have access to it, so instead I just used the £10 I topped up with half an hour ago, with an Orange pre-pay SIM. I’m sitting here now, and I am back to zero credit. I barely used the thing; I logged onto Facebook, and it got too slow so I gave-up. Then I thought I would try out Nokia Maps – it looks cool right? – WRONG! It’s too slow, and it ate up my credit!

This mobile, which is expensive to say the least, a business model, designed for those who require constant connectivity, and yet it lacks such a basic function as WiFi. And instead, I’m charged for the privilege of the slowest internet ever – ten pounds in thirty minutes!

Nokia Maps is a joke too. I got as far as seeing the M25, and half of London. I don’t want to see half of London, I want to see my current position, hence why I set it to that; but no. Apparently, that takes ten minutes, and £10 to do so.

Ahh!

I’m shocked, and also angry. How can networks get away with charging that much for an extremely slow and terribly unresponsive service as that? But also, I know you’re thinking “You should have known better you ignorant little girl”, and in all honesty, I should have known better, I know. I remember wasting my credit on Virgin Mobile years ago just trying to read the news whilst out and about. I knew that it would be eaten up, but half an hour, for ten pounds?

I’m appalled right now, angry, frustrated, and wondering how networks can get away with it. Isn’t OFCOM meant to be regulating this type of thing? Plus, the internet is a standard to the majority for their lives and work; so it should still be reserved for the super-rich, or contract payers.

And this is why I want WiFi. There are loads of Hotspots around London, and more being added all around other cities in the country. Plus there is new technology like WiMAX, which has a radius of thirty miles. That could pretty much cover the whole of my area easily. I don’t expect them all to be free, but even the ones you have to pay for, there is no way you’ll be charged £10 for thirty minutes, and you get better speeds too.

So to the mobile industry, I’m disgusted. I could just about comprehend the stupid rates you charge about three years ago, or more, but now? You honestly think you have a right to charge me that much for the slowest, most unreliable connection I have ever had the misery of using? You’re wrong!

And to Nokia, Sony (sorry Ewan, I know you don’t like them), Samsung, and all the others; make more phones that are WiFi compatible for the nornobs like myself, and for the business users too. Not only will the internet function be more used by the normobs, but it’ll probably progress into better levels and versions (like a web 2.0 for mobile), because there is more use.

I’m going to write to Orange and ask why it cost me so much, because I can guarantee you now, it didn’t cost them £10 to supply me with that miserable service!