Mike Wilks' Blog

Well the Mets still have something to play for. The division is gone but a wildcard place is still up for grabs. Johan Santana was awesome last night pitching a complete game shutout on 3 days rest, that is why he got a $137m deal.

Lets go Mets.

I’m confused.

In the O2 terms and conditions for the iPhone it says that you cannot do “continuous streaming” on their network. The question is what do they mean by continuous. Can I watch CNET TV videos on 3G, after all they are of a discrete length if you watch the recorded versions. Is this allowed?

O2 effectively banned BBC iPlayer from being used over their network and this also plays programmes of discrete length so I’m guessing they don’t like any video or audio downloaded over the air. This is pretty sad when you consider that the iPhone is all about the multimedia experience. There are a number of sites which have created iPhone specific versions with audio and video. It would seem in O2′s mind they are for use on your own wifi network. Now good as my iPhone screen is I’d rather watch video on my PC than iPhone if I happen to be home.

I appreciate that O2 need to protect their network but I do wonder whether they could be a bit more upfront about this term. I’d be amazed if your average iPhone user even knows where to look for the Ts&Cs let alone knows the contents. Incidently they also disallow the use of VoIP which smacks of good old fashioned protectionism.

It is only a matter of time before the whole net neutrality debate comes to mobile phones too. The recent Comcast limits in the US have really raised the profile of the whole debate. ISPs in the UK are pretty good about making their caps visible too. O2 used to have one (200MB I believe) but dropped it in favour of “fair use”. It will be interesting to see whether there is any pressure on them in the future to be more transparent over the actual amount of data that can be transferred and to be neutral about what kind of data it is.

I’ve been using MobileMe for a while now and there is nothing really to say. It just works. Sure idisk is a bit slow but other than that I really have no complaints about it. Gallery is still incredibly cool, push mail works, contact syncing is good and I find myself increasingly using the online calendar which in turn means I use my iPhone calendar more.

I installed Chrome like most techies have, just to have a play. I waited until the EULA issue had been resolved but, to be honest, this was more because I was busy rather than because the EULA particularly worried me.

Pros:

• It’s quick
• It looks pretty
• It really makes the migration from Firefox seamless
• It’s not IE

Cons:

• There is no way currently to synch bookmarks between machines (Google used to have a plug-in for Firefox so maybe we’ll see something like that). I currently use Foxmarks in Firefox.
• I can’t install it on a work machine.

This list of pros and cons will probably expand as I use Chrome more. Right now I am using it every now and again rather than trying to replace Firefox, it will be that way until there is a solution to syncing bookmarks.