Changes afoot with mobile data?

Time was that I either had to hunt out the Wifi or figure out how to get a local SIM or take a roaming SIM with me, to get connectivity when travelling overseas. This still is the case right now for PC usage in the main, but there are changes afoot caused by the EU restricting what mobile providers can charge for roaming data for mobile phone usage. Some providers like Vodafone had already made some changes and offered 25MB of data a day for £2 per day (and £1 per MB after that), and now O2 in the UK is also making changes which seems to offer exactly the same thing.

In the spirit of these changes, I signed up for a Vodafone SIM (O2 does not makes its changes for month or two more, and they are my home network) and inserted it into a little Android unlocked mobile phone I have, and suitably added some credit. By default, the £2 for 25MB data is activated on PAYG/Pre-pay SIMs so I was ready to go. Rather helpfully the Android phone offers a 3G data usage tracker that is easily accessible from the notification drop down, so I could keep track of my usage as I went.

I set off on my travels by train this morning and ended up in Belgium, where I turned the phone on for the first time. I then began using the phone for email pickup, some very light twitter use, a look at Facebook once and about five Foursquare checkins covering me from Brussels to the border with Luxembourg… and then all of a sudden I had used half of my allowance. I had been careful to turn off my data every single time I stopped using it so that there was no ‘leakage’ from the phone. Then I arrived at my destination and a single check (unsuccessfully) on Google Maps took me to 23MB of my 25MB and then I turned it off because even at £1 per MB, charges would rack up pretty quickly at that rate.

So all in all, I am glad that some new tariffs are coming through however they do not reflect anyone’s usage of a smartphone and I hope that things will go further still in enforcing a reduction in the ‘banditry’ that is roaming mobile data very soon. 25MB for one day is insufficient for ANYONE, who really wants to use a smartphone in a realistic way, how about 100MB or even 150MB for £2 for one day? That would be a little more realistic for £2 and not the £125+ that it would cost today on Vodafone PAYG (note that would be £450 on my CURRENT O2 tariff).

Customers prefer thin over working mobile phones WTF!

I am shocked appalled at this report…

At an event today, HTCs vice president of product strategy Bjorn Kilburn noted that the company had conducted research last year to find out whether customers preferred thin smartphones to those which compromised thickness for better battery life. The answer, interestingly, was that they generally preferred thinness, at which point its plans for 3,000mAh-plus devices were removed from the roadmap.

via HTC: customers prefer thin phones to better battery life | The Verge.

What the hell was the question they asked? Do you want a brick with excellent battery life? or a wafer thin mint that will run for 8 hours? I can only guess two things here, that Steve Jobs was right and you shouldn’t ask customers what they want or that they did ask the most stupidly and self serving research questions in the world!

I don’t think we need a phone that lasts a couple of days, but I truly believe the middle ground is that the phone MUST last under normal to heavy voice, video and data usage for 12 to 14 hours but it must be less than2 to 3 cms thick (which frankly is thin in my book). This is achievable today with good design. Right now phone manufacturers are making the equivalent of cars with 1 gallon fuel tanks… great around town near a petrol station, but useful for doing anything for longer. A car such as that would be seen as being fundamentally flawed and would sell like a plague carrier, so should a mobile phone that lasts 8 hours or less.

Samsung S2 Battery extender

Battery life is the bane of the Smartphone user and for most getting 10 hours use out of their mobile phone is an achievement. There are a great deal of workarounds for this problem, most involving carrying a large external USB charger device as I have talked about before on this blog or a battery jacket of some sort. The big issue with those are that you have to attach them to your phone for some time during the day which makes it all a little unwieldy at times. During last summer I upgraded to a Samsung S2 mobile phone and for a great deal of last year, this phone had excellent battery life, getting 10 to 15 hours of usage each day. Then I returned to work in the UK for an extended period and I quickly noticed my battery life was significantly down, getting between 6 and 10 hours depending upon my usage. The penny dropped – my data usage was now going over 3G and not WiFi. My phone battery life was suffering from the vagaries of the signal reception causing additional battery drain and the fact that 3G is a higher drain anyway.

I started the search for an extended life battery and stopped first with Samsung themselves. What they had was a 1950mAh extended life battery which I could not describe as extended life as the standard battery is 1650mAh and this was for a MRP of £19.99! What a waste. I kept looking and found a 3rd party extended battery which provides 3500mAh on Amazon.com from Accessories Online. Now 3rd party batteries are a little troublesome due to a past record of safety and quality issues, but I crossed my fingers and ordered one for the grand price of £7.90 (price seems to vary a little) thinking if it did not work I only lose the money and possibly my fingers in the resulting fire

However that is not how it has turned out, the battery has turned out to be a fantastic addition to the phone and certainly pushes the Samsung S2′s real world usage up beyond 20 hours of normal everyday use away from WiFi networks. In fact some days I find that I am putting it on charge with 50% still on the phone as I go to bed. I can really recommend it with two provisos. The first one is a stupid one, it does take twice as long to charge it obviously. The second is that this battery is double the thickness and you can thus see the problem – how the hell does it fit in the phone. The simple answer is that it doesn’t, it fits into the phone space and you have to have a new back plate that doubles the maximum thickness of the phone. You also have to realise that it also adds a bit of weight to the phone.

However I am fine with the extra thickness as it only makes it as thick as an older style phone or an iPhone 3GS in a case. It fits very comfortably in the hand and I have never really had thin as a required feature for my phone. The problem is that no cases will now fit and if you use a desktop cradle that is also not usage (unless you can modify the fitting as I have done to make it work). The additional weight is also not something I care too much about but it does make the phone seem a lot more solid rather than heavy.

I have been using this now for four weeks and I have not suffered a problem with it, and it has really liberated me for my phone usage on an every day basis. In fact during the time I have been using this battery, Motorola US has released the Razer Maxx which does something very similar but with a more svelte fitting than this bolt on is. This is as a smartphone is supposed to be.

O2 and its telephone number leak update

O2 has now posted on its blog, its own description of the problem that occurred today. It describes it pretty much as a misconfiguration that allowed a provision for ‘selected partners’ to receive the client’s phone number in the headers of the HTTP request to spread to be applicable to all sites.

Although seemingly a reasonable explanation, it is the first time that I have heard that O2 would be using this with ANYONE. Almost certainly I will find the clause buried down in my terms of use somewhere (still looking), but this is a shoddy and appalling lack of privacy and control around something that a few people (not me but I still don’t want to share it with web sites unless I choose to) keep VERY private. To not be expressly clear to the user or to provide a mechanism for blocking it is bad. I am reminded of an old Internet Explorer feature that had to be disabled very quickly in the 1990s whereby the browser would present the username of the logged in PC user to every website. The feature was useful in authenticating in a corporate environment but unfortunately they allowed presentation to every site – a horrible privacy AND security issue. The disabling came in to the user control through Security Zones but it was by default turned OFF. This is something that should be the case here.

We shall have to see how this issue progresses. Certainly I am thinking twice about having O2 as a service provider. I will also be more careful about my use of SIM cards from providers I am new to in the future, after all they could similarly do this.

O2 and its Telephone number leak

This morning a twitter comment alerted me to an issue with the O2 mobile phone broadband data service. In common with all broadband internet services, O2 passes its traffic from customers via a transparent proxy which can additionally do things like reduce the file size of pictures through compression. This is normally specified in the APN configuration of your phone. The ‘new information’ though was that it was making use of a feature of the Openwave WAP proxies to additionally tag a HTTP request header on to each transaction that gave away the subscriber’s mobile phone number. The HTTP request header is the very clear x-u-calling-line-id. You also need to know that this happens regardless of the client device you are using as it is built in to the Openwave proxy.

This is a serious breach of privacy for any mobile phone owner as EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE that the subscriber visits via the broadband connection will then have a copy of the subscribers mobile phone number. No opt-in or opt-out. Also it is quite likely that this has been happening for many years, in fact it could be as old as 3G Broadband from O2. To confirm if you are affected, I suggest you visit a site that displays all of your headers and look for your phone number or other personally identifiable information such as http://www.cylog.org/headers/.

Right now O2 is scrambling to deal with this PR and possible legal issue. I am personally offended that they do this as well. However you need to think wider than this. O2 is not necessarily the only company doing this, nor does it have to be via the same HTTP request header. After all, that header is something that Openwave provides which can be being used by any mobile operator in the world. Additionally other mobile operator WAP gateways manufacturers can and do use different methods of doing the same thing. The result is that privacy can be being breached worldwide, whenever you use your 3G Broadband connectivity.

This means that not only can someone personally identify you very easily, they can pair the informaton directly with the IP address that you are operating on which will also allow the identification of where you are.

If you are interested in background as to what you can be sharing when using your Mobile Broadband connectivity, please look at these two sites http://mobiforge.com/developing/blog/useful-x-headers and http://www.mulliner.org/collin/academic/publications/mobile_web_privacy_icin10_mulliner.pdf.

Apple and Android–what is a Post PC device

Last March, when the iPad 2 was released, Steve Jobs described it as a Post PC device. Rather scathingly I could not agree to that as under iOS4 you still needed to activate it using iTunes and a PC of Windows or OSX flavours. The promise was that once iOS5 was available, this would be solved and the iPad would be standalone and be truly a Post PC device.

Well iOS5 came along and it is true that you can activate the device without a PC and make use of iCloud to backup your content and do most things without a PC, but if you do not have a PC then you have lost much functionality for managing your content. Primarily the iPad (or iPhone for that matter) needs to connect to a PC over WiFi to sync content, particularly Podcast audio or video content, where you have to go and get it rather than have it delivered. Since last March, I have moved on Android devices to get that standalone device, and I can say I have pretty much achieved it as I have phone and tablet devices which auto subscribe to audio and video feeds, and give me direct access to home content via DLNA and access to files via online file stores such as Dropbox or Box. So Android of any sort above 2.3 gives you that PC-less experience that was so pushed last March by Apple and they have not yet succeeded in delivering.

I also have to say, I don’t think this sort of device is Post PC in the truest sense of the term – PC stands for Personal Computer. It has become a way of describing a device with a keyboard, a screen and a central processing box. I think the term has to be taken back to its original meaning - a personal computer. In that context, my Smartphone is a PC device… my Tablet is a PC device… my Laptop is a PC device. Post PC devices are actually PC devices where PC stands for a personal computer device and they are all PCs.

Battery Life is a Feature

I do not always follow every iDevice rumour but the one I do hope would come true (and not just for iDevices) is extending battery life further.

High End Version of New iPads Get Extra Battery Life

Reports are coming in that Apple will be unveiling two versions of iPad3 this early 2012, one for the high-end segment and one for the mid-range segment. One rumored improvement of these new devices over their predecessor is longer battery span, which will be increased to 14,000mAH.

This rumour is probably absolute nonsense but I hope device designers out there really start to focus on battery life as a primary feature of a mobile device, and not as a secondary one. Devices need to be able to run through a heavy working day with some spare capacity without the need for me to carry my trusty recharger.

SMS and Old Tech

19 years ago last Saturday, a momentous event occurred…

The first SMS message^[21] was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth ofSema Group (now Mavenir Systems) using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was “Merry Christmas”.^[22]

I wouldn’t have mentioned it but it took me back to my first GSM mobile phone – the Orbitel 902.

The reason it took me back was because this mobile phone had a very interesting setup for SMS… it only received messages. This was because back then the messages were never seen as that important for consumers, and it was pretty much to be used for sending messages of a network nature.

That phone was a great phone considering the technology limitations:- a battery life that amounted to about half a day or about 50 minutes talk time – not much has changed on the battery life . It also had the unfortunate problem that the battery had exposed connections that were too easy to short, as I found out when my metal staff pass loop managed to cause a little warming in my inside pocket one day.

Despite those limitations, it did work and worked well enough to allow my synchronisation of my arrival at a station to being picked up by my wife, and it really saved me time (interestingly the mobile coverage along the North Kent Railway line has not improved over the last 15 years). Of course, very few other people had one but that soon changed over the next five years, through to now when pretty much everyone has one.

Travel Tablets

Like many of you I acquired an iPad just after it launched last year and added it to my arsenal of lightweight information processing equipment. However I struggled to make it work in my setup primarily because I make use of an ultralight laptop. It ended up being yet another similar sized device that was used but was annoyingly bulky compared to my main machine. That identifies the problem, it never replaced the laptop despite being useful for reading watching video podcasts, documents and magazines. 10 inches is simply too big.

So I acquired an Android 7inch device in the guise of the HTC Flyer (although I also looked at the now out of manufacture Dell Streak but I dropped that one as the resolution of the screen was lower at 800×480). It is not ideal as it still runs Android 2.3 but the 3.2 Honeycomb upgrade is imminent.

After the last few weeks using it, it has proven much more versatile as I can have it with me much more often and does not feel bulky compared to my ultralight. The battery life is good (as I can get through a business day) and it serves the functionality I need in terms of video podcast watching, light web browsing, document and magazine reading as well as being a much more effective email processor than a smartphone when you are not running around.

Now all it needs to do is make that upgrade to Honeycomb (hurry up HTC!) to remove some of the rough edges and make it equal to the iPad but exceed its usefulness in being the right size for my jacket pocket.

Steve Jobs… You are so wrong about the 7 inch tablet.

Voice Communication with your Device

The recent iPhone 4S launch was a very evolutionary device launch, with key performance improvements being a major delivery point, but along with that has come Siri. Siri is a full on voice controlled assistant making use of cloud processing to give the small device the ability to rapidly process your voice commands. There is a degree of excitement about part of the Apple delivery, but I believe that this is of academic use and in many ways just like 3D technology for TVs – nice, clever but overall not a major feature or use case.

Think of it this way, you are walking around an airport and suddenly you need to send a text message to say your flight is going to be delayed. Do you:

a) Get your phone out and say ‘Siri, send message to Joe Bloggs, my plane is delayed by at least 60 minutes, send.’

b) Use finger and touch SMS icon, and quickly type ‘My plane is delayed by at least 60 minutes, send.’

Which of these two approaches is going to make you look like an absolute madman? Which is the least private? Which is the least error prone with all the noise going on around you?

Think of this another way, you are sat in your open plan office with the low level murmur that all open plan offices have from people on telephones or having short corridor discussions, and all of a sudden you need to search your address book for a contact and make a call to them. Do you:

a) Get your phone up and say ‘Siri, Call Joe Bloggs, Mobile’

b) Get your phone up and type a search for Joe into the Contacts app and select the correct number and press call’

Which of these two approaches is going to annoy the hell out of the person next to you? Which is the least private? Which is the least error prone with the general office noise of the standard open plan office?

You might notice that I am not a believer in voice control of devices in the business. I think that the entire interaction with a device through voice is just incompatible with group working as well as too error prone for the working environments we are in. As for full interaction through voice with a desktop device, I also believe that the speed of interaction of voice is simply too slow compared to the very highly optimised keyboard and pointer/mouse interaction (and even QWERTY is optimised compared to voice). I do see the introduction of touch to the interactions with devices, but not the wholesale interaction pushed by many touch PCs – touch is something that is added to the peripherals in front of you and augmented (but not replaced) by the use of touch on displays, particularly the larger whiteboard level displays that are common in schools but not in offices.

Voice though, is definitely not something that is a fit to people and the environments in which they work. Or to put it another way, “I am sorry Dave, you need to go back to the keyboard.”

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