[Nottingham] Mobile experience: From 'stone age' to 'smart age'!

[Martin]

Folks,

OK, so I'm back on the mobile airwaves again and have just jumped nearly
a full decade in technology and 'customer experience'. So for anyone
interested, here's a few comments on the transitional experience...


Soo... My old phone was the very latest in GSM/GPRS "2.5G" technology at
the time and was bought for the included features of bluetooth, WAP,
Tri-band for roaming, and being able to use "dail-up" networking via the
bluetooth and GPRS.

It's worked very well and unfortunately finally succumbed to the
vibration and temperature jumps whilst cycling last weekend.

Of the various features, it's been very well used for all except the WAP
which I quickly gave up on.


Sooo... 'Quick' look for a new phone, but this time to include Quad-band
for roaming abroad and 3G for hooking up to the internet.

And how many mobile phone shops are there?! For one company, I counted
three shops in the city centre alone!

As for the phones and deals, it's certainly got rather complicated with
very definite 'price points' imposed by marketing. There was the usual
uselessness of most sales assistants for explaining the phones and
deals. Except for one case where the assistant did know her stuff, and
was very fast for checking the web for details about "tethering/modem"
usage. I got a phone from that shop on a second visit.

If you want to do anything more serious than just phone, text, and play
with gimmicks, you need to check up on the latest "mobile phone news" on
the web... There's lots of it.


So I've gone smart phone with Android 2.1 and added a few apps
already... The main features are: Multi-touch screen, Quad band,
Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, GPS, Android (for ssh to wherever), and it's also a
phone!

The phones with integral tiny keyboards were rather too clunky for their
size and for the effectiveness of the keyboards. Hence, I soon decided
to go 'virtual' keyboard on touch phones.

The choice soon became a 'no-brainer' in that Android is the way to go...


Registering the phone to get going required a "do it yourself" on the
web, following some fairly techy details, all just for a phone! As part
of registering the phone, you must create and "personalise" an account
for yourself with the network provider. I imagine the helplines are kept
busy talking people through that lot. You don't even get to see/know
your phone number until you hack in with "*#100#". There's a helpful
"your number" information box on the phone info display, that rather
unhelpfully still shows "Number unknown" even though I've got a number
with it working fine...

Android strongly steers (pretty much forcing) you to also create an
account with Google... More web account setup. All the easy usernames
have long-ago gone. How many "Martin"s are there in the world...?

My old phone was too old to be recognised for copying all the contacts
over in one gulp by bluetooth. However, you can export/import various
formats via Google's contacts page, or you can send each contact
individually via bluetooth vcards.

So, in short, 'quick' turned out to be a surprising number of hours to
get set up! There's a huge amount of functionality thrown at you that
I'm sure will be very confusing to anyone hitting it for the first time.
It's certainly gone complicated and time consuming. There's a lot of
Marketing to suck you in to 'experience' their world...

(Is that why Apple's emphasis on easing the GUI and 'package experience'
for an easier customer approach is so successful...?)


So far, I've been pleasantly surprised by Android. My list of apps
downloaded already stretches to:

ConnectBot
Ping & DNS
Magnifying Glass
Stats
Tricorder
Notepad
SMS Backup & Restore
GPS Test
GPS OnOff
WiFi OnOff
Bluetooth OnOff
APNdroid
WiFi Analyzer
Unit Converter
Compass


The display for the apps and the apps themselves are impressive. A very
nice leap forward. All on such low powered hardware.

Typing on the virtual keyboard is as good as you could hope for but it
is rather painfully slow for typing. All good and fine for txt-ing.
However, the slow typing and the small display is greatly restrictive
for ssh sessions. But then, it's as good as it can be for that size and
a good backup if I've not got my netbook to hand.

Tethering to the netbook via a USB lead for internet access just simply
works! Just plug in, two taps to say share an internet connection, and
go! (Mandriva and Ubuntu known good, should be fine for others.)

However, it looks like for whatever reasons, tethering by bluetooth or
WiFi is not automatically supported. I guess the phone companies want
more money for that...


There's the silliness about the phones being locked to operate with only
a particular network provider. Unlocking can be anything from free to up
to £20 or so. That's needed if you wish to swap sims around. ( *Beware*
there are *lots* of scam websites for phone unlocking.)

Transferring your number is free to just to the cost of your time and a
support call cost.

If you stay with the same service provider, you should be able to simply
swap your sim into the new phone and away you carry on.


So far, all very good.

But all far from quick to learn and organise! Lots of marketing jargon!!
Lots of ambiguities that you can only unravel by jumping in and trying it.

There should be (or needs to be) a phone company agnostic FAQ for all
that lot somewhere... And a jargon buster!


All a far cry from when we just had a twisted-pair 48V phone line, one
audio handset, and your only contact with the one phone company was just
to pay the bill each month :-)


Hope of interest and amusement,

Cheers,
Martin


-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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