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…

Have a read of this:

Some 55 per cent of 950 people questioned said they did not want Transport for London to go ahead with the programme, which was announced by Mayor Boris Johnson last week.

Of the opponents, 48 per cent cited concerns about privacy, including the potential for other passengers to see sensitive data over their shoulder. A further 31 per cent said they were worried that increased use of smartphones and laptops on the tube network would encourage thieves, and 14 per cent said it would make journeys more stressful.

via Londoners ‘oppose tube WiFi plans’ – Telegraph.

Clearly, the folk doing the survey spoke to a bunch of heathens.

Concerns about privacy? Privacy? That’s a stupid one. Ultra stupid. Privacy? Really?

Oh please. If that’s a valid concern, then we should rip out WiFi from every railway station in London. We should descend upon McDonalds and rip out every WiFi transmitter in every one of their restaurants. Yeah. No. Ridiculous.

And what’s this about ‘encouraging thieves’? Oh come on. People are ALREADY using their devices on the Underground. It’s just a flipping arse that you can’t actually *do* anything meaningful with them.

Just how many people are going to get more stressed by the introduction of WiFi on the Tube? 14% people actually specified that as a concern?

Presumably these are the same people who are worried about going on holiday to ‘somewhere foreign’ and are concerned about the possibility of the sky falling down.

The fresh round of leaked photos of the device we’ve all been calling the ‘Tube’ which first made it’s fleeting public appearance in that Batman movie has got everyone (including the usually-calm Financial Times on Tuesday) talking about Nokia’s new ‘smartphone’.  Some of the more breathless coverage is already referring to it in the same league as T-Mobile’s Google-powered G1 and the Xperia X1, in ‘three new iPhone killer’ terms.

But look at it [photo credit: MobileCruch].

Nokia are singing to their own hymn sheet here.  Sure, it will be the first ever S60 Touch device, but it’s on a 5xxx-series music phone and that’s all it will be.  When the music and video party-tricks are done reviewers expecting ‘the next big thing’ are going to left scratching their backsides wondering what to write about next.

It’s not an N-series device – the camera will be so-so and the processor won’t be up to the toughest jobs -  and it certainly won’t have the enhanced PIM features of recent E-series devices… The most recently released E71 and E66 didn’t event make it to the expected FP2 release of S60 3rd edition in the interests of platform stability (probably wise given the ‘missing VoIP stack‘ issues with the N96 / N78).

Why aren’t Nokia going hell-for-leather and slapping this new S60 edition in a N-series ‘king of the smartphones’ unit?  Well, I think they probably will and fairly soon too, but right now either the need to focus on ‘comes with music‘ in the run up to Christmas or the desire to knock a few rough edges off this young interface (or both) means it’s going in a music phone.

It might be good, but flagship smartphone it won’t be.