I know Ewan loves and adores the N900, but even he can back me up on this. Just as having a serious smartphone without a 3.55mm headphone jack is a joke (yes, I’m looking at you G1, various BlackBerrys), having a smartphone with a stylus is becoming unacceptable. To the early adopters/mobilegeeks like me, it is a deal-breaker, and it’s only a matter of time before the disgust with the stylus seeps down to the general public (normobs as Ewan says).

I know some business men and women must be used to the stylus, as they’ve been using them since the days of the PDA. The stylus is like a security blanket for these people. But if they could have back the hours they devoted to learning the Palm Graffiti 1 & 2 alphabets and instead spent that time to learn how to play guitar, they’d be Randy freaking Rhoads by now.

The point is, that styluses (styli?) had their day in the sun. As did the rotary phone. As did the phone before the rotary phone where you’d pick up the receiver and say “Operator, get me #12!” But we are living in the age of glorious, gorgeous touch screens: the iPhone, Palm Pre, the HTC Hero, and the BlackBerry Storm (OK, just kidding about that last one).

About half the time I’m using my phone, I do so one-handed. I don’t operate it when I drive if that’s what you’re thinking, but rather when I’m carrying a cup of coffee, my lunch etc., so using a stylus is just out of the question.

Even with two hands, I hate the stylus. The act of sliding the ugly plastic wand out of the side of the phone is always the last resort. You try to think, “OK, this webpage only has two links I want to click, maybe I can get away with using my fingernail.” Then, invariably, you try again and again until you are so frustrated that you resign yourself to removing the stylus from its plastic cocoon.

Then you get to a website with fields. It’s too much trouble to go into a field put the stylus back, use the slide out keyboard, then remove the stylus again. So you try to hold on to they stylus by pinching it between your pointer finger and the side of the phone, as you attempt to type with your thumbs. Then of course, the stylus, awkwardly held in place merely by friction, tumbles to the filthy ground, and then rolls into the gutter. You then go to the nearest bridge or tall building and hurl your body towards the sweet embrace of the afterlife, a world with no stylus.

So I know that the N900 is a serious smartphone, and I’m sure that Nokia engineers were loathe to include a stylus. They would probably say “We had no choice, how else are you going to navigate the parts that need a delicate and precise touch?”

To which I would say: figure it out. Just figure it out, you’re the high paid engineer. We can put a man on the moon, but we’re still in the dark ages of mobile devices with the stylus. Actually, a little known fact, the original stylus was a crude hunting and gathering tool used by Neanderthals. A million years later, little has changed.

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley was fantastic this evening. There was a huge turnout on an uncharacteristically rainy San Francisco evening for the Location-Aware app demo evening.

Skyhook Wireless kindly underwrote the bar and gave a pitch at the beginning of the series of presentations, outlining their rather excellent range of location services available to mobile developers. I managed to catch Skyhook’s Director of Marketing, Kate Imbach, on camera discussing the merits of their offering. Suffice to say if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate location based services (e.g. Find Me) into your app, definitely, definitely talk to Skyhook.

Here are the companies who presented:

• Crazymenu.com – Launched their iPhone (lunchtime) online restaurant discovery and ordering facility. I really liked their concept. I’m going to look for it in the iPhone app store.
• Cristdrive – Their application, Voilà, will simply and elegantly tell any of your online services where you are, right now. $0.99 in the app store.
• Retronyms – Couldn’t make it for some reason so Kate from Skyhook did her best with their presentation. They’ve got a rather interesting GPS game by the name of Seek ‘n Spell going live. Check their site.
• Wertago – Showed off their app offering city nightlife in the palm of your hand. Nice!
• Geoterrestrial – GPSToday, a comprehensive Windows Mobile application offering an array of GPS related services. If you’re into location services, definitely check out what they’ve created — amongst other features, it’ll sit in the background and continually tell folk where you are.
• HearPlanet – Dale Larson’s audio city guides deliver location information that really speaks to you. You can, as the site puts it, ‘leave those bulky tour books behind and let HearPlanet (iPhone) show you the way. Get it on the App Store. It’s the #2 rated Travel app at the moment and they’ve had almost 500k downloads so far.
• Life360 – Trades on fear. But in a good way. Their mobile (and desktop) services deliver you instant safety, security and peace of mind. I’m going to get this for my wife and I. Google Latitude helps show where we both are.. but I want more than that. I particularly like their ‘find your family in an emergency’ facilities.
• Carrrmatey by Lionebra –> Brought the house down. So much so that I filmed their pitch. I think the audience were really taken with the pirate theme. It’s a really smart utility that records where you left your car, reminds you to return at appointed times (for meters) and guides you back to your car — rather useful if you keep on forgetting where you parked.

I managed to get some good video interviews tonight — I was going to hold them back until we’ve launched with the nice new look and feel, but it’s al about content, right? I’m going to aim to get the first lot of videos up tomorrow morning.

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Latitude, if you’re not familiar with it, is an add-on to Google Maps that (amongst other features) overlays an avatar of your friends on Google Maps. So if you’re out-and-about you can see their location. Or if you’re on your desktop you can see a large Google Map of your friends.

Typically innovative, Google decided to take things to the next level. Wouldn’t it be neat that, if you had sufficient friends each with a T-Mobile G1 (for example), you could position them on the map to spell out a message.

Granted, you’d need to have quite a bit of spare time. But it’s doable, right?

Right.

The Google Latitude team stuck their money where their mouth is and had a bit of fun, thus:

That there is a screenshot of a Google Maps screen spelling out ‘Hi Mom’ across central San Francisco. Each little square you see is an avatar representing a physical Google team member with a phone standing in the corresponding physical location in San Francisco.

The enterprising chaps also made a video documenting the process of setting this up:

There is, I suspect, limited value in spelling out messages using your friends on Google Maps / Latitude. But it’s a super proof-of-concept for the technology.

And a reminder to get on Latitude.

Latitude, of course, isn’t yet available for the iPhone so that’s most of San Francisco ruled out. But for everyone back in Europe sporting your common-or-garden N-Series Nokia device, perhaps it’s time you and your friends spent this Saturday spelling out ‘Hello Your Majesty’ across a map of London.

(You’ll need about 10-12 friends per character.)

Of course AdMob are also hugely active in the application monetisation space with well over 1,000 iPhone applications carrying AdMob inventory. What’s good to know is that in many cases, AdMob is writing cheques (or ‘checks’) in excess of $10k+ to a lot of developers. (Indeed, some of the more popular apps are knocking back hundreds of thousands in AdMob revenue.)

So this evening’s event was both an introduction to AdMob’s iPhone related services, a panel discussion on the hot topic du jour (iPhone App Discoverability) as well as the opportunity for developers to network with each other.

The panel featured the following luminaries:

Mike Kerns, CEO, Citizen Sports (Sportacular)
Jonathan Zweig, CEO, Jirbo / Epic Tilt (ESPN Cameraman, many others)
Ben Lewis, Founder, TapJoy
Alan Wells, Zynga

Here’s a pic:

The always reliable and informed Richard Wong (far right in the blue shirt), General Partner of Accel Partners was moderator. If, by the way, you’ve come up with a genius mobile service, you should be talking with Richard. Right now. They’re hunting.

My evening began on the boulevards of San Mateo — a rather picturesque series of boutique shops and pizza restaurants (I think I walked by about 10 pizza outlets on the walk from the station). I used the always reliable Google Maps on my N95 8GB to navigate the 10 minute walk from station to venue. (In a show of solidarity I thought I should bring my UK iPhone to the event — but in an uncharacteristic effort to avoid being nailed for £7/meg in data from o2 UK, I’ve had it set to Airplane mode, so I’ve been using my TMO USA sim in my N95.)

I arrived about 15 minutes early so the Benjamin Franklin Hotel wasn’t quite ready. I spotted a chap standing outside with his iPhone and I theorised he might well be one of the 150 developers attending the event. I struck up a conversation. Turns out that the chap — Steffen Frost has been working with iPhone app development since May 2007. He came up with the concept 1st of May 2007 and had $100k+ seed funding within two weeks. Nice. His product? Carticipate. They’ve basically fixed car-trip-sharing by iPhone.

Here’s a pic I snapped of Steffen:

“Show me!” I said as he described the concept. Within seconds he was showing the functions. You can browse the trips already being made in your area and ask to ride-share. Or if you’re heading somewhere yourself, you can advertise your trip and see if anyone else wants to join you. Smart. They’ve had some substantial interest from a lot of big companies wanting to sanitise their employee commuting traffic (amongst other applications).

“What’s your next platform?” I asked Steffen, “After iPhone?”

“Android,” he replied. “How about Nokia?” I asked.

“Yeah, well…”

Suffice to say he was severely unimpressed by the current Nokia offering.

That wasn’t a unique viewpoint. I’ll come to that later.

The venue opened a few minutes later so Steffen and I popped in. Jeff from 148apps, (the iPhone review site) had written his Twitter ID on his label — so I promptly copied and began marching around the room thrusting my hand out and asking questions left, right and centre.

Goodness me it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. Obviously this was an iPhone developer meetup — but I was fascinated to see how insular, how wholly-iPhone the development community is here in Silicon Valley.

“What’s your next platform?” I asked another developer.

“Er… probably Android,” he replied, after a bit of thought.

“Right… and, after that?” I prompted.

“Well,…” he replied, the conversation trailing off to the point that we both stood there in silence for a few seconds.

I remembered myself and spluttered out “Blackberry?”

“Well…” he replied again. A nice way of saying no.

Ok.

“What about Ovi?” I asked. Hopeful. I was expecting either a venomous “GET OUT” or a knowing nod.

“Ovi? What’s that?” he looked at me confused.

“Er, the Nokia offering — their app store?”

He and his two colleagues who’d now joined us looked horrified. As though I’d taken their iPhone and nailed it to the wall.

“Nohhhkeeaaaa?” They asked. I’m sure their minds were drifting to the $29.99 bollocks-handsets they see on display in the mobile operator stores. The rubbish ones — the glorified mobile telephones complete with alarm clocks. (Think the Nokia 2100 series).

“Er LIKE NO,” said the chap’s colleague, as the other two nodded vigorously.

Interesting!

I thought I’d try out a killer stat on them.

“So 17m iPhones on the planet — Nokia reckons they’ll have the Ovi Store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010.” (I was paraphrasing — this is more or less accurate.)

Blank looks.

Nobody cares.

It’s a fascinating experience walking amongst these developers. They’re the cream of the cream. They’re the Stanford drop-outs (or not – “I did my first and second degrees at Stanford” said one chap”). They’re conditioned by the Silicon Valley mentality to think big, BIG BIG. This is where the innovation is. It’s easy to see why the Valley is the centre of everything.

At least it’s the centre of iPhone development.

There’s only so much you can do when you’re sat in a dark office in London waiting for the ‘your app has been accepted’ email from Apple. Compare that to one panelist’s throwaway comment, “We’re really tight with the Apple guys.”

And tight is good. Tight is the way ahead. Almost every chap I met has a friend-of-a-friend who works at Apple. Or knows a ‘guy’ at Google. Or whose dorm mate knocked out a $10k/day Chess app for the iPhone.

As I walked around the venue, I bumped into Omar, AdMob’s founder. I’m still ridiculously embarrassed — I haven’t got over sitting next to Omar in a dinner in San Francisco last September and asking him ‘what he did at AdMob’ only to find out he was the founder. OH THAT OMAR!

I found Omar in good spirits. He was on his way up to commence proceedings. It says a lot when the CEO and founder of AdMob took the time to pop along and introduce the event. He outlined his company’s commitment to mobile developers and platforms such as the iPhone before swiftly handing over to colleague Mike for a quick AdMob FAQ, namely:

Q: Can I monetise my app with AdMob?
A: Yes. Lots of people are already (1,000+ apps using AdMob).

Q: How much money can I make?
A: It’s very dependent on the application and it’s use case, but, for the sake of argument, assume $0.15 net revenue per customer.

The audience sat in silence, gobbling up the information as Mike delivered it. It was very smart to give some basic revenue examples. Some apps are clearly making a heck of a lot more than $0.15 per customer, but if you’re looking for a ready reckoner of what you might be able to achieve, having this information is really valuable.

Next? The panel. It would be fair to represent the panel as iPhone Developer Rockstars. They’re operating in the mythical space of more or less continual Top-50 App Store billing. As I sat taking in the panel debate I was mentally calculating just how many application downloads the four guys accounted for. If you’re looking for confirmation of rockstar status, witness this panelist quote:

“We worked out the other day that one of our applications has been played by our users for 2,000 man years so far,”

Shit.

Moderator Richard Wong did a super job of asking a series of pertinent questions to the panel around the issue of application discovery. Once you’ve got your app accepted, do you blow a load of money (on, for example, AdMob) to get your app discovered on the launch day? Or do you play a longer game? Can you really monetise with ads? (Yes).

One point I really liked was, I think, made by Ben Lewis of TapJoy. He explained that customers had emailed in saying they were finding it difficult getting above level 30 in one of their games. So they responded by making levels 30-40 easier. In doing so, they found that their ad-impressions flew off the charts. If you’re displaying ads at the end of levels, it makes sense to ensure that the majority of users can progress to an array of levels.

Panelist Ben caused me to rethink my stance on Apple’s micropayments. if you recall, Apple’s next OS version, 3.0, introduces the capacity to extract micropayments from consumers using your applications. Ben commented that whilst a 30% revenue share for the hosting of the App Store, credit card processing and so on was fair enough, taking the exact same share for micropayments ‘just wasn’t cricket’, as we say in Britain. The point being that Apple aren’t doing any more work, other than the transaction processing.

Now to the good stuff.

For months — possibly even years — I’ve been banging on about the iPhone platform finally unlocking the opportunity for developers. Not everyone has been agreeing with me. Indeed quite a few purists in Europe have continued to assert the apparent superiority of the Symbian/Nokia platform for development. And whilst there’s certainly an argument to be had there, it’s — fundamentally — all about money. And there’s a reason Silicon Valley is going nuts for mobile. (Where ‘mobile’ equals ‘iPhone’). It’s the 800 million iPhone downloads, 70% of which are revenue generating. It’s the fact that you can, theoretically, become a millionaire overnight by developing a successful iPhone application, even though there are only 17m iPhones in existence.

So having been a diehard make-it-easy-for-developers chap, it was rather exciting to be surrounded by a few hundred of the Valley’s iPhone geniuses.

Panel questions arrived. I’d already been mentally willing Richard to pick me when he eventually opened the panel up to audience questions.

“Right, any quest..” he began. I shot up my hand.

“Ewan!” he said.

“Hi, I’d like to ask you about…”

I was getting stuck in.

“Wait a moment Ewan, introduce yourself for the audience,” prompted Richard.

Ah. Yes.

I couldn’t wait to ask my question.

“Given that Nokia expects to have their Ovi store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010, are you looking to develop for that platform?”

The moment I mentioned ‘Nokia’ I could feel the audience bristle.

One of the chaps on the panel looked at me — that ‘what the fluck’ look.

“Er, no,” he said.

He passed the microphone.

“No,” said the next chap.

“Er, we’re thinking about it,” said another.

“Errrr NO,” said the next.

Geez.

I felt like a pariah as the panel began to dissect their reasoning. The path to cash is unclear. It’s a massively fragmented handset population. It’s not centrally controlled and beautiful like the App Store. The Ovi Store doesn’t appear to be that ‘easy’ to work with. The capabilities of the development platform are unknown (at least within the Valley)… and so on.

Judging by the response of the audience and the other developers I spoke to after the panel, the ambivalence to Nokia’s Ovi offering — and the offerings of the other manufacturers — is echoed across the Valley.

Blackberry was mentioned once or twice. Surprising, given the amount of Blackberries in use across the States. But when you consider that a whopping amount of devices are corporate devices that are locked to prevent downloads — and that Blackberry App World isn’t pre-installed as yet — you can see why it’s getting little attention from this community.

Another surprise was the lack of Windows Marketplace discussion. Yes this was an iPhone developer meetup but you’d expect — or at least I expected — most developers to be reasonably platform agnostic or at least looking at other possibilities. Out of the 150 developers there, a show of hands revealed only one chap who had worked on the Windows platform.

This will change. Effort is driven by monetisation. If Ovi, Blackberry and Windows Mobile deliver on their promise, I’m sure the majority will give them the time of day. But right now it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone and I don’t blame them.

What unmitigated dickhead is running music publishing at EMI Music at the moment?

I heard a track on the radio last week. Rare because I don’t often listen to live radio. Indeed I’m one of those cash rich and completely hidden customers — a growing trend. My dollars, combined with the dollars of my friends and colleagues who also don’t bother with ‘live’ anymore, are significant.

I heard a tune and I though, ‘Right, this is a time for Shazam!’

And woosh.

I shazamed the track. I dialed 2580 and let the handset sit there listening for 30 seconds before Shazam disconnected. 10 seconds later I had the tune.

Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun.

Excellent.

The radio presenter said words to the effect of the track being ‘released’ toward the end of February.

Bollocks to that I thought. I’ll go and download it.

Two days later I hit up iTunes.

All I can find is the music video.

True enough, the total dicks at EMI have held it back. It’s not available for me to download.

I can get the £1.89 music video. I don’t want that. I want the audio. I don’t want my iPhone to come alive with video whenever I play the song. No. I want a download.

But I can’t have it.

I can’t have it because some total DICK at EMI has decided to put a ‘release date’ on that track.

They’ve given it to radio stations to ‘generate buzz’.

And now I have to wait 2 or 3 weeks.

Well I say screw you.

Screw you with BELLS on.

Here I am, a customer, ready to buy — and you’re choosing not to sell.

That, Mr EMI, is a dickhead practice from a dickhead era from YEARS ago.

Therefore rest assured that I won’t be buying the video track. Or the audio.

I definitely won’t be buying it.

It wasn’t THAT important to me. I was interested, I quite liked the tune. I was generally up for opening my wallet to the tune of, what, £50 quid over two years — provided your artist came up with the goods over the year.

But your bollocks release date? Your bollocks ‘authority’. Your ‘NO YOU CAN’T HAVE IT YET’ position is ridiculous.

Let me point out that in 30 seconds, I could download the video, rip the audio and have it up on a sharing site — or Youtube or the like — within another 60 seconds. Don’t you GET this? I could simply go and get it for free.

Yet here I was.

Here I was ready to give you some cash. To encourage your innovation and move to digital.

But no. I won’t be downloading it, I won’t be copying it illegally, I won’t be ripping it.

But there’s a million others that will be.

In fact I’m willing to bet that if I asked for it on Twitter, 10 people would send me a link to download within 10 seconds.

You simply don’t get it, do you? Digital demand finds a way.

And I feel better now.

And relax….

For me this meant having a look at the mail, scanning the Twitterific traffic and so on.

I didn’t get far until I started noticing #uksnow Tweet messages.

Here’s what one looks like:

#uksnow Not much happening yet.

Or

A light smattering. PA1. #uksnow

Some bright spark — Ben Marsh — had nothing else to do last night and knocked up a Google Map hash from the uksnow tweets. And here it is:

I remarked negatively on this subject to Ben and Dan. They were, it seems, hugely in favour of this total waste of sodding time.

There is, I remarked, a weather service out there. The Met Office does a pretty good job. Enough to have been warning us about impending snow for the last three days.

Most of yesterday, a heck of a lot of people started sending frequent bollocks into my Twitter stream about their current #uksnow experiences.

This would be highly, highly relevant if I was 6 years old. I’d love to share your joy about the snow if I was 6. I used to regularly pop to the window throughout the night to see if the snow was still falling.

Now it seems, having got through another 25 years worth of living, I’m now being subjected to dozens and dozens of sodding #uksnow updates.

Almost every person I’ve subscribed to has given over to the #uksnow bollocks. I am even being sent INSTRUCTIONS on how to properly format my #uksnow Tweets in case I should want to also participate.

The instructions, in case you are wondering, are thus:

- Put the first half of your postcode
- Then put your ‘snow score’ (I KID YOU NOT… a SNOW SCORE) out of 10
- And don’t forget to include the hashtag #uksnow at the end

So an example Tweet would look like this:

CM12 5/10 #uksnow

Great.

Technically great. It is super to see the possibilities.

And that’s relevant to whom?

I suppose if any of my followers ALSO live in the CM12, CM11, CM10 or similar postcode areas, that Tweet might prevent them from having to look out the window. Although they’ll have to have more or less the same value structure for the ‘snow rating’ in order for it to be of much use.

But for everyone else — especially the people following from abroad — any #uksnow messages are a total 100% waste of time.

Stick up a Twitpic of the snow by all means. Like James Whatley did. Or Gerry Moth. Or Jonathan Mulholland.

That’s semi useful to me. It’s not polluting my mind. I’ve subscribed to your updates and I choose whether or not to click on the picture. Nine times out of ten, I probably will. I’ll have a look. And move on.

But sending me a #uksnow update every 8 minutes is ridiculous.

These hashtags are in danger of becoming wholly, wholly irrelevant — like the “@somebody yeah” Twitter messages that I’ve already managed to filter.

Last night I was getting so annoyed, I thought I’d join in with my own hashtag rubbish to see it would garner any response.

Here’s my first:

Absolutely stunned by the amount of banality on hash uksnow. 100s of pages of bollocks about whether it’s snowing. Is there a #UKrain?

Then I thought I’d try temperature:

#ukTemp quite cold at the moment

And then a Sunshine update:

#ukSunshine No sunshine here right now. It’s dark.

And then I got carried away:

#ukWatchingPaintDry I’m just waiting for the paint to dry now
#ukSunshine Still dark outside

I then Retweeted Dominic’s Tweet:

Thanks for the update Dominic! RT @DominicTravers: #ukmeterologicaltedium not much happening, a touch chilly

And Kip Hakes one:

RT @kiphakes: #ukwashingup – There were 6 cups, 2 plates and one of G’s bowls – more news as it happens

Ben Smith jumped in with his #ukwashingup update:

@Ew4n @kiphakes: #ukwashingup – Dishwasher loaded here. Not sure if it’s too full to run an economy wash. Twitterpoll?

And I asked Ben Smith to keep me updated:

@bensmithuk Agreed. Is it snowing where you are? Could you give me #uksnow updates in 30 second increments?

Tedium.

Tedium.

And thrice tedium.

Please THINK before you TWEET.

If you’re in the mood for some banality, get stuck in. Here’s the real time Twitter uksnow update page: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=uksnow

Knock yourself out!

Thanks to Jonathan for this bit of rather accurate humour…

Jonathan Mulholland:

Very funny! RT @shinykatie: “If the Germans had dropped snow instead of bombs, they’d have won the war” #uksnow

My issue?

Have a read of this sentence. I’ve bolded the problem line.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic offers a complete music experience and features a number of music and entertainment essentials, including a graphic equalizer, 8GB memory for up to 6000 tracks, support for all main digital music formats, and a 3.5mm jack. Built-in surround sound stereo speakers offer the industry’s most powerful sound.

AND a 3.5mm jack?

Now, I understand why the PR feel this needs to be included — because often many handsets ship with some dickhead adapter. For multiple reasons. This isn’t some historical quirk. The ‘open’ T-Mobile HTC G1, launched last quarter, doesn’t actually come with a 3.5mm jack. You need a USB extension.

The fact that Nokia’s PR felt they needed to stick in the ‘and a 3.5mm jack’ fact is indicative of just how rubbish this mobile industry really is.

Whyever would you make a handset that DOESN’T have a 3.5mm jack for your favourite headphones?

Well.

Multiple dickhead reasons are provided, all of them 100% invalid.

3.5mm is the standard, yes? Let’s move on. Nothing smaller, nothing bigger, no USB bollocks please.

Do you think we’ll EVER get to the point whereby we actually have to report that a phone has a 3.5mm jack? Will this finally become commonplace this year?

Or have I had far too much caffeine?

In fact thinking back about 15 years ago, if I was lucky, I got similar speeds on my 56k modem.

I’m using an 8mb ‘high speed’ British Telecom broadband connection.

If you get a brochure from BT any time soon talking about their 21CN network — the fabled brilliance that will connect us all with gigabyte speeds — please do send it to BT Centre, Newgate Street, with a note attached with words to the effect ‘stick it up your arse jumper.’

Can we just do a test here? Across the comments today, there’s been a number of readers giving examples of their slow slow connections (that are meant to be super fast).

Could you please respond telling me what average upload /download speeds you’re getting and what connection you actually are meant to have?

Don’t do one of those broadband speed tests. I want to know real life, real examples. Take a 100mb file and upload it to Vimeo — during the upload it gives you a throughput stat. I’d like to see just how bad (or good) it is.

I know that Ben Smith has a lightning fast Be Unlimited connection in West London.

But in Billericay, Essex, we’ve got shit.

Witness, for example, this comment from Dominic Travers:

I Currently live in Bristol and can get O2/Be ADSL2+, which is exactly what BT aim to have rolled out nation wide by 2011 as the culmination of their 21CN project to make Britain world leaders in IP based communication technology. 15 months ago when I first signed up to the service it was pretty good, 16Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up. For at least the last 6 months the O2 box in my local exchange has been full to bursting and the thoughput can only be described as dismal. I can still get the maximum speeds once a connection is established, but the latency in ordinary browsing the internet is abysmal now I am on the max contention ratio.

If this is as good as UK domestic broadband is going to get we’re doomed.

Rubbish.

Absolute unmitigated rubbish.

We can’t do better than this?

And if we can’t get the sodding FIXED connections working, what hope have we got of making it work whilst mobile?

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’.

Not after I saw his Tweet last night about ZumoDrive.

27 seconds to upload 1GB to #ZumoDrive

I am riddled with jealousy.

I’d like to point out that Lee is in ROMANIA. And he can upload a gig in 27 seconds? How shit is the UK infrastructure?

Well, let me tell you.

I have an 8mb BT broadband option 3 bollocks connection. (“8mb connection my arse!”)

It’s the most expensive consumer ‘business’ one you can buy. And at peak performance it will do just under 50k/second upload.

Typically, with everything switched off and the whole town asleep, it usually does 35k/second upload.

Download, it’s more or less double. 80-100k/second down. Sometimes slightly faster from companies who have got data centres in the UK and highly connected.

I can thus upload a whisker over 2mb a MINUTE if I’m lucky. That means I can upload a gig in 8.3 hours.

HOURS.

So whatever bollocks you read in the press about the Government — and British Telecom — moving ‘Britain into the 21st Century’, it hasn’t happened in Billericay, Essex, 30-odd miles East of London.

I’d be — literally — quicker moving to Romania.

More about ZumoDrive here.

Update: See Lee’s comment below. 26 minutes, not seconds

Stop it, stop it, stop it.

STOP using @reply unless it’s in a fully formed sentence.

Stop sending me utter, utter bollocks.

Twitter is not for conversations. That’s what INSTANT MESSENGER is for.

It’s NOT for you to publicly reply to every bollocks chatty message your fingers feel like typing.

I don’t CARE what you’re saying to someone else unless I SPECIFICALLY know them.

And the onus shouldn’t be on me to have to go and find the sodding context.

Messages such as:

@jimmy heh!

@robby yeah me too!!

@jill I think so. But then he said no. So nerr!

Stop having public discussions on Twitter. Absolutely grade-A useless.

I’ve already removed 100 people from my followers last night because of it.

And now I’m faced with removing most of the 89 people I’m currently following on @ew4n because, as much as I really, really REALLY enjoy most of the input, I can’t take the irrelevance.

It’s my problem though, isn’t it?

Everyone’s polluting away without regard for ME.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. Most people just stay silent thinking they’re ‘misunderstanding how to use Twitter’. You’re not, don’t worry. You’re just being spammed by inconsiderate folk not thinking.

It’s gotta be the worst kind of pollution.

Any message that begins @jimmy indicates a near virtual guarantee of bollocks following in the rest of the message.

And I don’t think I can turn off these things. It’d be good if I could.

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?

“Dear Ewan, I see you are attending Mobile World Congress.”

Yes, I say out loud as I read on.

“I wonder if you’d be interested in meeting somebody, from some company, that you probably don’t want to really hear about?”

I do the mental equivalent of a cautionary ‘Yessssssss’.

“They’ll have some very exciting news to do with: LTE WiFi HSDPA Routers Accessories (and so on, delete as applicable)”

Time for me to say ‘Riiiiiiiiiiiight’ in my head.

“When should I schedule a meeting?”

Er.

Well, I’ve got this all wrong beforehand you see.

All very, very wrong.

It’s nice meeting people, it most definitely is. I’ve got a few folk in mind that I’ll meet — but generally, I’m afraid I’ve gone off the whole meet-as-many-folk-as-possible routine.

It’s particularly annoying when I’m paying for it.

I’m paying to take the team to Mobile World Congress. I’m delighted we’ve managed to secure press passes from the press team.

We’ve loosely got a plan.

I’m aiming to see if we can ‘shoot’ a MIR Show from the floor every day. I know Ben will have one or two companies he’s identified that he’d like to meet — and then film. Dan is quite busy at the moment and is most probably going to go flying into Mobile World Congress ‘blank’ apart from our pre-show briefing. I think that’s good news. He’s got an excellent radar for finding interesting things. I would like to point the camera at him and walk about. Folk on the floor generally look bemused when he appears on their stand in his huge, huge f-off massive boots complete with spanners and whatnot hanging off. Until, that is, he starts firing pin-point technical questions at them whilst the camera rolls.

“RUUUUBSIH,” he’ll then exclaim, slight glint in his eye. I have to smile and pretend I’m just the camera man and most definitely not the editor. No sir, no sir not me. And I’m certainly not privately sniggering as Dan rips apart your technology on camera. I’m doing my best to keep a straight face.

It’s all done positively though. Most of the time.

We should be able to snag some time with Mr Whatley and bring the whole MIR Show team together in the evenings for some events.

Speaking of which, Rob Kerr — our new resident news guru … well, he doesn’t need any pointing. He’s already sniffed out the good stuff and got it booked in. The great and the good already locked him down to interview dates and times months ago. Knowing him he’ll pop along with a pre-production N98 or something.

Which leaves me. And a huge, huge feeling of guilt.

I started Mobile Industry Review nee SMS Text News back in 2006 for a number of reasons. One of which was a total unmitigated frustration about the mainstream media. They simply wouldn’t cover any news from my companies. And we were doing good, good stuff.

Since then I have thoroughly enjoyed wielding Mobile Industry Review and all who sale in her for the little guy. Not always the little guy, but particularly those who don’t necessarily get the requisite attention from the mainstream media that their services/products deserve. Or who get idiot know-nothing journalists dismissing their concepts out of hand.

Having been to a fair few events and sat in a fair few interview/pitches where, frankly, there often hasn’t been much for me to write, I’ve come to the end of my patience.

I think my real frustration is probably the dull marketing method. Big event, hold some ‘news’ for it, release the ‘news’ — and … well the biggest issue is that the vast majority of stuff isn’t news worthy. You most probably wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Do you want to know, for instance, that there’s a new addition to the line-up of a router manufacturer’s already well documented range? Nothing new, nothing supremely stunning. Just another one added to the range. It was added last year. But the marketing and PR chaps held the ‘news’ back to ‘launch it’ at the upcoming big event. Because they’ve got to have something to say.

That is literally it. If you ask a few pointed questions to a momentarily off-guard marketing executive, they’ll drop the fact that they’ve got nothing else to talk about. Or they ‘had to have something to talk about’.

Which means they pressure their public relations chaps to sell the hell out of the ‘news’. And I do feel for them, I really do, having to punt the stuff.

I used to listen and pay attention expressly.

Until I recognised that, fundamentally I’m paying for it all. Mobile Industry Review is vanity publishing at it’s best. Clickatell (and some notable other advertisers here on MIR) contribute a substantial amount toward keeping the lights on — and for that I am eternally grateful. Indeed, if you have the opportunity to award a large amount of business to a number of mobile companies and Clickatell is one that you’re evaluating, give them the business please. They’re helping fund me being able to write this sentence.

Clickatell make no editorial demands whatsoever. They simply purchase the frontpage space here on MIR because they’d like to reach you. I’ve built up a large audience of executives and developers. Folk who routinely purchase their services. That makes sense.

As a result of Clickatell’s support — and that of the other smaller advertisers — I’m able to augment and deliver an enhanced service.

Clickatell originally purchased advertising based on the fact that — from an editorial policy — I did whatever I wanted. One moment I was talking about how ridiculous Orange was with their mobile data policies (back in the day). The next moment I was writing about this new thing called Twitter, primarily based on text messaging. Now and again we’d do some profiles of readers. Occasionally I’d talk to a PR and, if I liked the story I’d write it and run it.

So when I’m sat here feeling guilt-tripped reading releases and pitches from very nice people having to sell not-very-relevant-or-interesting stories, I feel bad. Wretched. I think about the employees that work at the company. I think about the company’s founder and find myself empathising strongly with the position I was in a few years ago when no one would write about the cool things we were doing in mobile.

And I star the email in Gmail and wind up my assistants who don’t like to see ‘full inboxes’. I star it. And I wait. And I wait. And I think ‘geez, I better write something’. And I don’t. Because I don’t want to publish stuff that I don’t rate at all. Maybe there’s an angle. Maybe there’s .. if I work hard enough, I could try and… think about the poor founder chappy. And if I don’t write anything, they’re not going to get any coverage. No one else on the planet will write about it. I know. I’ve done the research.

And repeat. That’s mostly my editorial day — now and again.

But I’ve pressed reset.

If you’re that founder — if you’re that guy or girl wanting publicity for your really really cool products and services, then I’m right here ready to help. Talk to me. Sell me on what’s cool about it. Knock me over an email overview and I’ll most probably publish it. I get super feedback from the audience whenever we publish a letter-to-the-editor style ‘here’s an update’. Like the one Steve Procter of iTagg sent me the other day.

If you’d like to meet at Mobile World Congress, email me and tell me how we can help.

But if you’re a really nice public relations person with a godawful set of boring releases, that’s it. Game over. I’m 99% not interested. And I publicly absolve myself of my internal guilt. I also setup MIR Company News — a carbon copy of Mobile Industry Review — to publish most of the press releases that we get. My assistant Michelle diligently goes through them and sticks them up. We’ll shortly be integrating the headlines into MIR, at the bottom of the front-page somewhere. Guilt absolved twice.

If you’re a really nice public relations person, please don’t take this post as a ‘screw you’. Please do talk to me. Just, if the client’s news is shit — and you know it is — don’t pitch it to me. Don’t waste my time or yours. I’m most probably interested in talking to your clients about what they’re up to though. Or doing a Q&A email interview with one of the client’s directors. Or putting them in the MIR Who’s Who. Or reviewing their app. And so on. To be clear: I’d like to cover your clients. Just not with the aid of uninspiring news and deeply irrelevant press releases. Contact me and let’s get a bit inventive with some coverage.

So what am I doing for Mobile World Congress? Right now, I’m taking an open mind, a camera and an array of laptops to seek out the cool stuff and bring you some wicked coverage that I hope will excite, inform and entertain. I am really looking forward to collating some brilliant MIR Shows.

If you’ve got some suggestions for companies you’d like to hear about, drop me a note.

I’ve mentioned this before (and no, I’m not complaining), but the iPhone really isn’t my cup of tea. I’m not that bothered about what people think of my mobile phone; I mean I was walking around with a Nokia 3200 until September last year. In fact, if my Nokia 3310 wasn’t dead, I would happily use that, with no care about its age or looks.

The iPhone to me, just screams “look at me, I’m expensive, and glamorous; come and feel my touch screen! You know you want too.” – And to put it bluntly, this isn’t me. My mobile has to be practical, and it has to do what a mobile should do, to a good standard, and importantly at a good price.

Okay, the iPhone may work well (I can’t yet vouch for that yet), but is it worth what you have to pay? And yes, I’m aware you can get iPhones for “free” on contracts; but does paying £75 for a contract sound like free to you? Or maybe more importantly, is it practical for a sixteen year old?

In simple terms that is a straight-forward no!

Then there is the fact it’s trying to be an MP3 player. I, unlike many people, do not like iPods. I once did, but after hearing the sound quality, and even having to endure using iTunes on my computer, I quickly realised what a horror it was. There is also the fact; I like to have separate devices for my MP3 Player and mobile.

I want my MP3 player to sound amazing, and my experience of listening to music on mobile phones, is horrible. I love my music, don’t get me wrong, but when I listen to it, I want it to sound good, not half-arsed, and distorted. iPods, as far as I have heard (and I’ve had the horrible pleasure of using and listening to quite a few), sound horrific. So surely it can’t sound much better as a mobile device either?

Then there are the applications. My mobile phone is used for texting, making calls, and for the radio when I’m out and about. I rarely use the internet due to the cost, and because Mobile sites drive me insane; and I don’t require much else. I like to have a camera in case I don’t have my Digital Camera on me, but that’s it really.

At tops my mobile phone requires a camera, a phone book, the ability to send and receive texts, calendar, FM Radio, Alarm and a torch.

Basically, I’m a normob at its best!

Maybe you can see why I don’t like the iPhone. It’s not because it’s crap (it may not be), but it’s because the iPhone isn’t a phone I require in my life. It draws too much attention to itself, and doesn’t suit my general purpose or needs. I don’t like phones which are designed purely to make other people, and their mobiles feel bad. Remember those cute Carphone adverts with the lonely phone? Well, I see the iPhone as the creator of that phone; it’s too brash and it tries to put other mobiles to shame.

Should I mention too, that I think it’s too big, the camera is wrongly positioned, and I don’t like touch-screens too?

However, despite this ramble which may just sound like a moan and it isn’t, I’m more than willing to admit that I’m wrong. I may be stubborn, but I will admit when I’m wrong. I want to see if the iPhone can win me over! Can I even be persuaded to buy myself one? Or, is it going to make me realise I was right, and in fact there are a collection of other annoyances about the device too?

Well, we’ll see in a couple of weeks, and see if I was wrong after all!