Samsung SGH-E700… now with Android?

Imagine my sudden, unexpected excitement when I...

My iPhone 15 Pro Max SLi Ultra Ghia Plus strategy

So there's a new iPhone about to...

Failed by my technology on the way to Prague

We took MIR TV to Prague over the weekend. It’s a super city — steeped history, stunning architecture, friendly people.

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.

Recently Published

Samsung SGH-E700… now with Android?

Imagine my sudden, unexpected excitement when I saw this email and subject in my inbox this morning: "OMG," I thought. "Have they actually done...

Why you need GadgetsOman (or similar) in your life

About four days ago I got a familiar WhatsApp message from the team at GadgetsOman. It was just a day or so after the...

My iPhone 15 Pro Max SLi Ultra Ghia Plus strategy

So there's a new iPhone about to launch. It's not that different from the one I've already got (iPhone 14 Pro Max). The camera is slightly...

Microsoft Surface Duo: Insert lament post here

I was reading Ron Amaedo’s post on ArsTechnica earlier today about the ending of software upgrade support for the first edition of the Microsoft...

“Apple will only sell 100,000 of their headsets in the first year” Really?

BGR reports a TrendForce estimate that Apple will sell 100k units of their new headset when released and says “but that’s still a big...

The BlackBerry Movie: Worth a look, but it’s heavy on fiction

I went to see the BlackBerry movie last night here in Dubai. I was astonished to find the movie theatre almost full, apart from...