if connected

Hutchison Rabbit was a wireless pre-mobile phone that only worked at specific locations where the Rabbit sign was displayed. Years ago when I started advising clients about public WiFi hotspot models I referred back to the weaknesses of Rabbit.

What’s striking to me now is how many so-called current mobile services still resemble Rabbit, and like Rabbit they’ll fail unless they’re available to people 24×7. Some examples from the many:

• iPhone applications that only work on WiFi, rather than 24×7 on the mobile/cellular network (e.g. Slingplayer, Skype, Pandora, etc.). I can’t see this model lasting.
• Handheld games consoles that rely on WiFi for connections and expect their users to search for the right location to go online. Effectively no one is going to bother, except at home.
• WiMAX networks that don’t have national coverage.
• Muni WiFi where the coverage is great in urban centres outdoors, but the signal doesn’t reach reliably into buildings where people are actually sitting.
• Cloud based services that aren’t available when there’s no Internet connection, e.g. Google Docs, the new Office Live.

The following advertising was inside a 1993 motorway guide book I found recently in a friend’s car:
(Click on an image to zoom in to read the text, it’s rather wonderful with the hindsight of just 16 years)

It’s Thursday, four days after European clocks changed to what others call daylight saving and I’m still finding clocks stuck on GMT.

I’ll forgive those without an Internet connection like the wall clock in the kitchen, but way too many devices should know better. Windows Mobile still seems awkward, probably because I’m still running 6.0. The brand new Blackberry Bold hooked up to my company’s Blackberry Enterprise Server really should have updated itself. Two years ago I wouldn’t have cared.

But iPhone has changed everything. It just worked.

A former colleague wrote recently that ‘save file’ should have no place in this day. Everything should be saved automatically all of the time. I think manually changing the clocks twice a year should follow it into extinction.

Sidenote – This is the first post I’ve written on the new version of WordPress for iPhone. It’s a big improvement and worth returning to if you’ve tried and rejected it in the past. It means I can post more easily from wherever I happen to be:

Earlier, I wanted to take a photo of an electrically-powered UPS delivery van. The vehicle was stationary while waiting to turn.

Even so, my phone camera was nearly fast enough… But still missed the shot.

The iPhone asked me whether I wanted to allow the camera to use my GPS location yes/no. The seconds delay from that extra dialog meant a bus obscured the van, and then the van turned and was gone.

The phone wasn’t fast enough.

Catching up with blogging….

Almost two weeks ago we were driving back into London on the A40 — three lane urban motorway with no hard shoulder to stop safely — and we suddenly lost all power. I made it into the slow lane, just, and we sat on the grass verge.

Camera fail: I had a real camera with me in my bag, which I left the car with. But the shots below were taken using the cameraphone I had even closer to hand. In the moment, I simply didn’t think to reach for the good camera.

Mobile phones are great. I didn’t need to walk down the carriageway and GPS + Google Maps gave me the name of the road of the turning we’d just passed… which helped the highway patrol people to find us.

The AA were poor to begin with: I started the call saying we were stopped in a dangerous position and had a baby with us. But *after* taking all of our details, only then did they say they couldn’t help and we should call 999 to get the police to tow us somewhere safe!

More car tech fail: When the AA did show they were good, and ended up towing me home. But the AA man’s computer completely refused to talk to the car’s computer. So, the AA could tell one or more coils had blown, as had a fuse, but couldn’t be sure there wasn’t more damage.

Car politics: Apparently we were on the Met’s turf, not Highway. So, there was a delay while we waited for the police to give the OK for the Highway people — who actually turned up — to tow us:-

Earlier today Gmail stopped working, for most people, for about four hours.

It’s not the end of everything, as numerous things I’ve read today argue. It doesn’t blow apart ‘cloud computing’ or putting faith in other companies or other people. Computers break. Parts of the Internet fail. Even phones seem less reliable now. There’s nothing new here. Anyone that relies upon just one digital service, or device, will enjoy painful cold turkey sometime soon.

But what is different now, is how many ways we all have to do something. If our main phone goes down, we reach for our mobile. If twitter dies, then it’s back to Facebook, email, IM or the best option yet: Friendfeed. If one email address stops working, most people reach for another: The main pain with email failing is that incoming messages sent to the broken account can’t be read until that system — Gmail here — comes back up.

I use Gmail as a fallback to my work email because it is so versatile, Gmail has many alternative ways of access: I had few problems during the outage earlier as I access Gmail via IMAP on my PC, and on my iPhone, as well as using the web browser interface. So, I could read stored messages fine. Unlike Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, Google makes access to Gmail easy from regular Internet-standard PC/Mac/handheld/phone email software, complete with full folder management.

But, to take advantage people need to set up their phone or PC email software, and ideally in advance before panic has hit.

Thinking about the so-called cloud services, all the best ones work this way: remote access via a browser plus local sync for speed, fallback when the cloud rains, and for offline use, when the Internet isn’t available like on a plane.

Nationwide put a “hold” on my credit card yesterday due to a transaction from a well known bricks & mortar retailer’s online store (and not one that is about to go bankrupt either).

What I don’t understand is:

• The retailer whose transaction triggered the block is one that I’d bought from several times before using the same credit card. The last time was as recently as October. Why can’t Nationwide use my purchase history?
• Why do I have to wait over 24 hours for my card provider to tell me they’ve blocked my card?
• Nationwide froze my card recently — beginning of November — yet seem not to understand why I consider repeated blocking to be unacceptable.
• Both times they froze my card at the weekend: But their security department is shut (!), so I can’t unblock the card. Why don’t card operators have 24/7 support?
• Putting a “hold” on my card actually stops other transactions rather than putting them on hold! I have to contact each company and ask them to retry payment — Nationwide won’t — and I have to hope that those firms are organised enough to try again. One of them has already tried the payment three times in the last day.
• Amazon appears to have better understanding of my purchase history than my financial institutions. I can go back about five years of transactions there, but a credit card company has trouble with a history of much more than five weeks!

Nationwide isn’t alone here. I had a similar discussion with my previous credit card provider several years ago when they blocked my card due to three online purchases on the same day. That bank has recently been re-capitalised.

Perhaps this is why the financial sector is stuffed?

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).