Plans to build a mobile phone network on London Underground in time for the Olympic Games have been abandoned.The UK’s four mobile operators on Thursday said they had concluded it would not be possible to build the network in time for the Olympics starting next July.

via FT.com / UK – Olympic Tube phone plan dropped.

I’d have settled for mobile data access on the station platforms. That’d have been a start…

A total of over 490,000 phone calls were made on the country’s GSM network, in and around the Beijing National Stadium, on the eve of the Opening and Closing ceremonies for Olympics. Before you start making remarks about the Chinese, the report goes on to mention that 20,000 of the total users were international roaming service users. Believable? 

Surprisingly, a spokesperson for China Mobile went on to reveal that they achieved 100 percent call connection rate and only around 0.27 percent of the calls were dropped.

The company also gifted 15,000 phones to Olympic officials.

As Rob commented earlier, the BBC’s Olympics text service looked promising.

I was looking forward to frequent text messages across the business day about plucky British chappies and ladies risking all for blighty and spectacularly failing. We’re very good at screwing up and coming last here in the UK. Or nailing the competition to the wall. It seems to be very binary.

Instead though, I’ve been getting television promotion alerts.

Hardly useful.

“Watch Nicole Cooke try and win something at 10am,” the message said. Something like that.

Ok.

So I wasn’t able to do that.

Where’s the update? Did she win? Did she fail with the pluckiness of a good old Britisher? What happened?

Almost helpful.

I’ve loved watching Phelps’ gold rush, Cooke’s cycling gold was equally amazing to witness and, being a rowing nut, I’ve not moved from the TV whilst these events are on. But, some of the interactive services suck royally.

Aside from screaming at the internet and TV when a mistake meant the lightweight women’s double race, scheduled to be shown, was replaced on both with sailing – made all the worse by a friend competing in it – I’ve been most disappointed by the Beeb’s text service to alert you to the top events.

So far I’ve had the sum total of zero texts to alert me that Cooke could be on for a gold in the road race cycling. Zero texts to alert me that men’s 4-, the flagship boat, is about to race. And zero texts to suggest that a swimming gold was being contested.

I’ve registered twice and am getting particularly fed up. How hard could it be to get this service sorted.

I’m also slightly annoyed that AOL has ajusted the medal table to put the US above China (it’s counting medals, not gold medals as all other charts do). i’m now actually routing for China over the US in everything except the three remaining events in which Phelps is swimming. But that’s beside the point.

However, right now the question is what mobile tech should I take to use and test?  On the list so far:

• Truphone and Rebtel for cheap international calling
• A local China Mobile SIM possibly with some mobile data
• A SIMable chip so I can swap SIMs into any phones I like
• iPhone for music and a simple Mandarin language course
• Some offline maps with Olympic venue POI such as Garmin’s
• An N82 for pictures
• Several Proporta backup batteries
• A netbook for mobile blogging (which one?)
• The Macbook Air for proper computing
• A decent gadget bag – something that doesn’t scream ‘laptop’!
• Some high quality headphones for the flights – perhaps Entymotics?

Any other recommendations / options?  Have you been to China and what was useful / rubbish?

The search giant has come up with a load of features designed for Olympics fans.

From Google’s mobile blog:

We’ve launched a new mobile search tool that gets you sport results, country medal count, and event schedules right at the top of your search results. Go to www.google.com on your phone and try a search for “swimming.”

Once the events have begun, you’ll be able to search for things like “gymnastics medals” or “Russia medal count” to get updated medal counts and rankings in your search results as well.

Handy for those who haven’t suffered Games overload yet.

To be honest if you are going to Beijing for the Olympics then I’ve got very little sympathy for you. I’m sure you’ll have an amazing experience and a lack of 3G will hardly register.

On a non-technology note, I wonder if Dwain Chambers will need to buy a new Chinese handset. Dwain is the UK’s highest profile drugs ‘cheat’ and he is trying to get his lifetime ban from the Olympics overturned. You can read more about it here.

China Mobile is giving away 15,000 3G handsets to Olympics officials and 3 million yuan of call credit to boot, says Xinhua. They’ll be able to get the higer-speed TD-SCDMA connection in eight cities, five of which will be hosting the Olympics.

China Mobile first started testing the service back in April – it’s amazing that it will go from pilot to full launch within four months. Some people take that long to test an application, not an entire network. Or am I being too optimistic – is a short testing period likely to signify a network that hasn’t had all the gruelling testing it needs?

Forbes says the operator will give away 20,000 TD-SCDMA mobile numbers free and will give way the same number of handsets for nothing, with other subscribers offered discounts of 100 to 200 yuan on their phones.

Things are certainly moving in the right direction for TD-SCDMA – and the Olympics looks like it’s figuring large in people’s minds: five out of the eight cities are Games venues.

The reports say that Sharp will bring in high-end devices to the Chinese market and the company is already in talks with operators about carrying the phones, making it the only Japanese handset maker selling its wares in neighbouring China (assuming you don’t count Sony Ericsson).

It’s no surprise handset makers are all turning their attention to China – it’s been enjoying record new subscribers of late and there’s still shedloads of room to grow before saturation starts to rear its ugly head. That said, Sharp’s compatriot Kyocera recently said it was pulling out of a China, so it’s certainly not an easy market, but it is one with enthusiasm for high end devices – exactly what Sharp plans to sell.

Xinhua also adds that China Unicom will also provide English, Korean and Japanese hotline services during the games and extend opening hours for its outlets around the Olympic venues. It looks like the most interesting race won’t be on the athletics track this Olympics: it’s all about the networks. China Mobile, which is also working on Olympics content has promised to get its 3G network up in time for the Games while Unicom is reportedly spending billions of yuan on improving its GSM network. I wonder which will go down better with visitors – slow and steady or fast and just-released?