if connected

The problem symptoms are: Some/most, but not all, 3rd party iPhone applications quit immediately after they are launched. Built-in applications — like mail, safari, calendar, ipod — continue to work fine. The problem applications include both paid and free applications.

I had this a few times over the summer with v2.0 and v2.1 versions of the iPhone OS, and thought Apple had fixed it. Apparently not, as it happened again earlier with v2.2.

The best fix I’ve found is to uninstall a free application that has the above problem. Then, on the phone, re-install it from the App store. This seems to kick the DRM on the iPhone to accept that everything is after all fine. After which, all the applications start working again (not just the one that has been re-installed).

Interesting piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times (can’t see it on their website). According to them, banks that ask for the account holder’s name, alongside the account number and sort code, don’t use it when making the transfer.

Worse, if a person transfer money into the wrong account inadvertently by typing the wrong sort code or account number, but does enter the correct person’s name… UK banks will continue to complete the transfer, even though the recipient’s account name does not match.

Consumers in this situation have no recourse to their bank, under current law, but would have to sue the recipient to return the cash.

Unusually, while commuting to the office on the tube yesterday, I used my laptop to work rather than my mobile phone.

Two things made this possible:

• My new laptop has a flash “hard drive” which means there’s no risk that bumps will damage it — really important on the tube — and also it’s fast to start up and put into sleep.
• This time of year there are seats available. Laptops don’t work standing up, unlike phones, unless someone knows otherwise?

This year I learnt a pile of new things:

At least one hospital cares little about mobile phone use. As my son was being born, a phone rang in the corner of the operating theatre. My other half started blaming me, but the consultant answered her phone so ending the argument.

Hospital walls are too thick for good 3g reception. I spent many a night browsing online with my laptop in a hospital room on mobile broadband, but it kept falling back to 2G.

Some cameraphones really do have good enough cameras. On an increasing number of occasions I have left my real camera at home, instead taking a mobile. I even went to a wedding with just my cameraphone.

Working for a company that is bought by a larger competitor has plus sides. Can’t talk in detail here.

Flash/SSD drives for laptops transform the convenience of using laptops. It’s their quietness as much as their speed that makes them a pleasure to use. Hopefully in 2009 I’ll be saying how much better their reliability is as well. It’s too soon to say now.

TV set-top boxes are becoming louder than PCs. Plus, they crash about as often, based on my experience with a UK pay TV DVR supported by a little Google searching.

Babies can be distracted from using your laptop with a fake keyboard. But only a real mobile phone will satisfy them.

WiFi works better for location finding in cities than GPS. Mobile handset GPS’ have particularly poor reception indoors. Even dedicated GPS units struggle.

Dell’s next day on-site repair is less convenient than a drop off service. Having to wait at home for several days in succession during a repeated failure to repair a PC is a much greater waste of time than using a repair centre.

On Saturday my home broadband went down. I switched to mobile broadband using a pre-pay 3 SIM and a Nokia phone, as I had it ready to go for just such situations.

It worked but the experience felt slow. This matters irrespective of whatever the technical speed tests say (300-600Kbps download when I checked). How fast something feels is what consumers care about. I’ve written about this idea here before in more detail.

So, what’s the reason it felt slow? I think because the latency — sometimes call ping — was around 300ms. This is around ten times what a home DSL or cable connection delivers. Also, the upload speed was dramatically worse than the pretty good, genuinely broadband-quality, download speed. The average of three tests was a mere 20Kbps upload speed. For comparison, an old analogue dial-up modem can provide 33Kbps. I wonder sometimes if mobile broadband is really dial-up’s heir rather than home broadband’s cousin.

Earlier this evening I was in the rotating former restaurant many metres above London in BT Tower. Despite having a clear line of sight in all directions and windows that looked like glass, my phone only had a 2G signal. I’m wondering why?

Many companies operate calendar sharing, but the process of setting up a meeting never works as it should. The idea is simple: as people can view each others’ calendars it’s easier to set up meeting times that work for everyone invited. Reality lags:

• No calendar system I’ve seen allows for blocking off travel time before and after meetings. So, a time may look free, but is actually not as a meeting adjacent to free time is off-site somewhere. Or, someone needs time kept free for preparation ahead of a booked meeting.
• Times that are marked ‘busy’, may not be, if there’s a more important meeting being arranged. But the only person that understands which existing meetings are important, and which existing meetings can be shifted around, is a calendar’s owner. The only way for a meeting organiser to find out about this is to ask, on email or phone.
• Shared calendar’s are only up to date if people use them the whole time. So, everyone needs to be connected and in sync via their mobile phone, and needs to be up to date about entering new appointments. At no organisation I’ve worked has this been the case.
• People always seem to become confused over meeting updates in Outlook/Exchange, especially for repeating appointments. Result is that people accidentally delete meeting invites, and recurring meetings therefore disappear from their calendar.
• Network calendars are poor at offering employee privacy. People tend to keep a separate personal calendar on a different system, or, even on pen and paper. So, corporate calendars can’t be relied upon to be the whole truth about someone’s availability.

Shared network calendars just slow down organising meetings by adding extra useless meeting invite steps ahead of the inevitable person to person email exchange.