SpinVox and Me are off to Barcelona in about 12hrs or so for the biggest mobile event of the year, Mobile World Congress…
I’m going to be blogging all over the shop – a large chunk of it here, some more here, videoing a bit here and here as well as micro-blogging a little bit here too.
If you’re going – see you there! If you’re not – why not keep track of me here!
See ya!
🙂
James Whatley writes, this week, with an impassioned open letter to Vodafone. Write to your MP. Call your local radio station. Send letters to Arun!
– – –
(Not another mobile web rant, promise.)
Dear Vodafone,
Let’s get one thing out in the open before we start:
I love you.
There. I said it.
It’s out in the open for the entire world to see.
You and I have been together now for over ten years and although there have been a few ups and downs along the way, somehow we have always managed to pull through.
Red, what can I say? The years have been great.
I still regret the affair I had with Orange back in the 90s and I know that my foolish dalliance with 3 is best forgotten. I was weak. Led astray by promises of ‘revolutionary’ handsets and blinded by their multitude of minutes. Ultimately I was betrayed by my own greed. They just weren’t you Red.
After all these shortfalls, you were there for me, waiting to take me back with open arms whenever things went wrong.
I am a card carrying member…
… of your love parade and I am proud to say that I recommend you and your network to anyone looking to change providers, (and often to those that aren’t). Everything from the fantastic customer service to the virtually non-existent drop-call rate, Vodafone you put a smile on my face by never letting me down.
But as the years have gone by (and my monthly spend has slowly gone up) I have felt, lately, a strange detachment forming betwixt you and I.
Thing is, there is some shall we say, room for improvement.
When you rolled out 3.5G? Brilliant! Amazing in fact! But at £2.35per meg you and I both knew that something had to give… and it did! You went and released your own little data bundle… And at the same price as T-Mobile’s too! What a fantastic move… But no, you had to spoil my fun by going and capping it at 120mb. C’mon… You know can do better than that!
Signal strength is second to none. I cannot count the amount of times I’ve been out and about with friends and being the only Vodafone subscriber of the group has meant I was the only one in the with a signal.
However when it comes to your Tariffs, you may have great coverage but it seems that this comes at a price too. You’re, dare I say it, high maintenance.
Admittedly you’ve tried to wean me off my old school 3000mins per month tariff for ages now but you have nothing that comes anywhere near it currently. 1800mins for £75?! Shocking. You’re good but you’re not that good Red.
I’m not budging. Yeah ‘Stop the Clock‘ – is pretty cool but can I have Vodafone Passport?
“Not on such an old tariff Mr Whatley.”
RUBBISH!
Voda, you know I feel about you. Take me on my word: You need to catch up! You could be left behind! 3, who were once the laughing stock of the UK operator market, now have one of the sexiest offerings around with their X-Series.
See, o2 got the iPhone, (you did well to avoid that), and you went and got the N95 8GB for an exclusive amount of time. Excellent choice. But why did you have to cripple it with your own firmware?
It’s like three steps forward and two steps back sometimes, really.
Hopefully, when the iPhone v2 comes along you’ll be right there waiting to grab it and pass it onto to your loyal followers. Hell, if YOU get the next version of the iPhone, I might even get one.
Now there’s a statement.
Can you imagine? With you Voda and your super HSDPA (3.5G) and solid CS, network etc…
It would be killer.
But hey – that’s the future – let’s talk about now.
Let’s move onto the one thing that gets me the most… and I’m sorry to bring this up… (I mention it every time we speak) the ONE bugbear I have with you? The teeny tiny thing that I just cannot stand?!
MMS
Tell me, Red, why do you not offer ANY MMS bundles?
None. Nada. Zip. Absolutely, positively ZERO. NOT. A. THING.
Videos, sound clips, pictures… all charged 35p-50p a go. It drives me nuts about you. WHY OH WHY OH WHY?!
You offer one of the latest and best phones (the aforementioned 5MP beauty from Nokia) and you don’t offer ANY MMS bundles to support it?!!!!!?!!!
You say that the requirement isn’t there, that the advent of picture messaging has not been the success that the networks thought it would be…
Well, if you charge for every single MMS sent and don’t allow anyone to add anything to their monthly tariffs then what on earth do you expect?!
You gladly give me video call minutes (which I actually use from time to time) every month as part of my tariff, but not video messaging?! Insane.
It’s been like this since September 1st 2006 Vodafone and I’ve let it go month on month on month… This has got to stop!
Voda, I love you, and I think that you love me.
Try this, do it for the sake of us…
Make MMS free for a month.
Yes. That’s right. FREE. Like you did with Mobile TV, (albeit that was for three months), try it. SEE the uptake.
Look after your customers.
Love them.
Save them money.
And above all, save ME money. Help me love you more.
Yours hopefully,
James Whatley
Hmm.
Ok – on the back of yesterday’s announcement of the new Mobile Pownce (http://m.pownce.com) site, I thought I’d tackle a subject this week that I (along with quite a few others I suspect) have quite strong opinions on:
The Mobile Web aka The Mobile Internet aka WAP aka the Internet, made Mobile.*
*Delete where applicable or just insert your naming convention of choice.
(We’ll come back to this one later).
Having had a rather long (read: head-bangingly frustrating) conversation with someone yesterday about how… all mobile sites will become irrelevant within 12 months as the Operators all follow Vodafone’s lead, and introduce rendering engines [like Novarra], which will offer up the full internet experience to the end user’*… I thought now would be a good time to have a rant which has been boiling away inside of me since my days at Mippin.
*My reaction at this point, in case you’re interested was to walk away, screaming.
This issue is something that I absolutely, 100%, fundamentally disagree with. People (normobs — normal mobile users) do not want the internet on their mobile. They think they do.
But they don’t.
What they want is the information from the internet, optimised and perfectly formatted for their handset. They would never tell you this, because, as I said, they just don’t know.
Compressing banner ads and re-sizing images to give an out-of-context and screwed up version of the website the user is trying to view is SUCH a poor experience it’s not even worth talking about, especially when others have already hit the nail on the head so perfectly — read more about the Vodafone contoversy in-depth here.
It’s an old story back from September but it is still relevant as shown when it came up at the recent Future of Mobile event.
To quote from Mobile Internet site creators, Wapple who, at the event, commented:
“Vodafone (and other operators) are taking a best guess at websites and dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator to fit mobile screens. They do not understand that mobile users want to interact with information in entirely different ways than they would for web.”
YES. YES. YES. The mobile internet user is, by definition, a completely different mental model to that of an internet user. The same applies to TV and Mobile TV, (which I have equally strong opinions on).
Moving on…
I am a huge evangelist of the ‘m. solution’, that is: Educating end users to drop the ‘www’ and simply insert an ‘m’ into your phone’s browser will take you to the mobile version of the site you are looking for.
Facebook has done a shed load of ground work in this area by introducing m.facebook.com to the masses. To my mind, the ‘m.’ is slowly becoming the de facto mobile website standard.
Yes there are the guys from dotmobi (*wave*) who are doing a great job (in partnership with the W3C) in introducing Best Practices for Mobile Websites and anyone developing a mobile site right now would be foolish to not look at how these guys can help – but tell me this:
On a mobile phone, what is easier to type, remember and use?
http://m.yahoo.com or http://www.yahoo.mobi?
Now, putting all that aside and going back to my opening paragraph…
Just what is the correct naming convention for what this thing is that we are accessing through our mobile browsers?
Does it depend on what we’re accessing?
‘WAP’, for me, is a meaningless acronym which brings back memories of green and black screens on phones like the Nokia 7110. But still the word is bandied about within boardrooms as if it’s still cutting edge technology.
‘We need a WAP site!’
– ‘No. We don’t. We need a Mobile Website.’
‘WAP’, for me, is defined by the precursor wap. i.e.: wap.yahoo.com – there’s a WAP site for you. Two colours, basic text with a couple of links and that’s about it. WAP, for me, is the mobile equivalent of ‘Web 1.0’.
Internet made Mobile? See Vodafone’s poor attempts.
Failing that; for a meaningful attempt at taking internet content and making it mobile, try Mippin.
The Mobile Web? That’s where it’s at. Stick an ‘m’ in instead of the WAP or the W3 and see what you get.
If WAP is Web 1.0, then the Mobile Web is, to me, Web 2.0.
What say you?
Liveblogging from The Future of Mobile – at the BFI IMAX!
Tony Fish of Open Gardens kicked off proceedings (see pic), very impressive presentation too..
Am sending most of my notes to my Jaiku and i’ll write them up into a larger blog post in a day or so..
Luca Passani of Admob taking the stage now to talk about WURFL, (but not before he unleashes at Vodafone and Novarra re: The Mobile Web).
As i said – Follow my Jaiku for live updates or come back later for an overall writeup…
This morning, my phone died.
It ran away… then came back… but I think… I think, in its absence it must’ve caught some horrific disease or something…
The screen has broken…
The phone is no more!
It has ceased to be!
It has expired and gone to meet his maker!
It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If I hadn’t nailed it to my hand it’d be pushing up the daisies!
It’s metabolic processes are now history!
It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, its shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!
THIS IS AN EX-PHONE!
Ladies and Gentlemen..
It’s official.
Tomorrow – Aug 24th marks my last day at Refresh Mobile.
Over the past 13mths I’ve worn many hats and gone through many job titles… so here goes –
Ahem – SO – I am leaving the role(s) of:
Mobizines Manager, Customer Champion, Chief of Blogger Relations, Content Merchandiser, Blogger, Product Manager, Quality Control Manager and Service Evangelist… (breathe) …at Refresh Mobile.
Phew… and where am I off to?
Well…
I’m off to go and be the new Digital Marketing Product Manager over at the voice-to-text specialists, SpinVox.
Working alongside another new(ish) recruit – James Scroggs – to help them expand the SpinVox brand and products across the world and throughout the entire universe!
😉
In the meantime – I wish the guys at Refresh every success with Mippin…
…which, by the way, IS fantastic. I’m gonna be taking it along to the SMS Text News Unlimited Drinks event tonight – so if you’re coming too – grab me and I’ll give you a cheeky preview…
And I owe a massive amount of thanks to them also, for plucking me from obscurity many moons ago (more details here) and helping me grow in all sorts of ways…
(ask Scott Beaumont what I was like when we first met!)
It really has been an incredible journey* (which is by no means over for them – Mippin is gonna ROCK!) but at this point our paths are headed in different directions…
Good luck guys – The first round is on me at the next Mobile Geeks of London!
🙂
____________________________________
*Some key points in the Refresh Mobile journey so far – in no particular order:
(and I’ve probably missed a few too – so expect this list to grow)
– Nokia Developer of the Year 2006
– Shortlisted for the Meffy Awards
– Getting Mobizines live in the US – Hungary – South Africa and Germany!
Me and and buddy from Team Mippin went to this lovely little soirée last night, and very good it was too.
Ewan and his team from SMS Text News were great hosts and it was fantastic to meet them all at long last.
They’ve already said “Thanks for coming!” and there’ll be a main review coming later I’m sure…
😉
Ok – so a few of us N95 users at Refresh Mobile have noticed a thing called ‘Network Throttling’.
Basically, when browsing the mobile internet your operator chooses what kind of kb per image you can download.. This is usually a low number.. So that when you first get to a webpage, more often than not, the pictures on said site are usually grainy and horrible..
Now, this wouldn’t normally matter on a small-screened phone – but on the N95, it is VERY noticable indeed!
Ok.. The example I’m going to use is when I was chatting away on Jaiku earlier on today and my friend Chibbigirl uploaded a link to her m.flickr account.. (i’d tell you what it was – but you’re about to see it anyway!).
So, said link appears in my (fantastic) Jaiku client, I click it to go through and see the pic..
And what do I see?
A grainy rubbishly loaded version. Grr!
However, a simple ‘reload page’ fixes this issue..
Which is fine..
Until you realise you have to double load EVERY PAGE YOU GO TO!
Aaargh!
See below for before & after shots…
Do you see what I mean?!
Shocking…
And following up on Adonis’ comment:
Dude! I’ve got auto-reload on already and I still get this problem!
Rubbish!
Right then!
Obviously I’m going to have this lovely little phone for a little while… and obviously this phone is predominantly a music phone, (not a multimedia phone), so it wouldn’t really be fair to compare it to my Nokia N95… would it?
Oh I don’t know..
We’ll see…
First I think I’ll just do some size shots..
Enjoy..
I must admit – it is a bit bigger than the current range of Nokias on the market.. but more than that is the sheer weight of the thing.. it’s just so damn heavy!
When I had the N93i I mainly demonstrated the uses of the camera but as I’ve already mentioned – that’s not what the N91 8GB is for…
So really I should make this sort of comparison… No?
You tell me…
🙂
Not two days after I returned my rather swish and swanky Nokia N93i to WOM World they turned round and sent me another corker of a handset to have a play with.
What was it this time?!
A brand-spanking new (it still had the little stickers on the screen/camera) Nokia N91 8GB.
Not only that – but it was the nice black version too 🙂
The silver variant (which I believe is only 4GB) is not really my thing – it’s amazing how much of a difference such a minor cosmetic change can have on a product.
Comparison shots coming soon…
whatleydude.com 