Mike Wilks' Blog

I recently spend a week in the US. On previous trips I have done without mobile data access and relied on hot spots. This year I decided to splash out and get a US SIM with data access. I chose MrSimCard basically because he appears to be the only game in town. The SIM I went with was $99 with unlimited web, phone and texts . This is actually a resold Simple Mobile SIM so you are paying a premium of around $40 (Simple sell it for $60). That said it is unclear to me whether you can actually get this delivered direct from Simple outside of the US or whether you could actually walk into a reseller in the US and buy without a US address. Either way I felt like I got reasonable value from MrSimCard.

Activation was a quick call to MrSimCard who activated the SIM on the phone and read the number to me. When we arrived the setup was easy, and we had working data and voice/text in the cab from the airport. Before I left I swapped a few emails with MrSimCard because I was concerned over whether the data was actually unlimited. I was assured it was and this seemed to be true. While in the US I managed to rack up over 2Gb of data mostly in podcasts but quite heavy browsing, foursquare and lots of usage of google maps. I never had an issue with signal or download speed but then we were mostly in Manhattan with the trips to Queens (to see the Mets), Bronx and New Jersey. The SIM reports it is on the Simple network but I understand this is the T-Mobile one underneath.

As a quick side note having phone access allowed us to make use of the Localphone calling card feature which seems to have better call quality than using VOIP (certainly over a 3G network). Localphone was pretty good for the whole week. Incoming calls to my UK based number allowed people at home to call me with me only paying the 1p/min divert costs to my US mobile. Outgoing calls works pretty well too, the only slight niggle was that one of the setup US numbers did not forward correctly to a mobile I was trying to call in the UK but I was able to call it through the calling card access number.

Skype on the other hand was a different story. I have credit in my Skype account from before I knew better. Skype have an access number system called Skype to Go which I decided to give a try. In contrast to my experience with Localphone the call quality was horrible. DTMF was so patchy that I managed to lock-out my work voicemail because while it seemed to get the number I was dialling it clearly didn’t pass the PIN correctly. I had similar DTMF problems trying to use my creditcard phone service.

In conclusion the SIM from MrSimCard in combination with Localphone was a great combination albeit a little expensive for the SIM itself. Skype was a huge disappointment, this along with the refusal to create a decent Android app means I am pretty much done with Skype – besides which I find Localphone much better.

I have no relationship with any of the companies mentioned here other than customer.

Photo from Metsblog

Photo from Metsblog

I ordered a Nexus One during the announcement event and I’ve had it a couple of days now. I got it to replace my iPhone 3G (not S) which is looking slightly long in the tooth now. Initial thoughts:

Positives

• It is blazing fast compared to the iPhone 3G.
• The screen is much crisper and colours pop more.
• The gMail client is infinitely better than the mail on the iPhone.
• No more 10Mb download limit on podcasts over 3G !
• Voip over 3G with Sipdroid and localphone.com is a killer app. That said SipDroid doesn’t seem to like localphone direct so I need to configure pbxes.org which will hopefully give better results.

Negatives

• I really miss 1Password – hopefully there is an Android version before too long.
• Multi-touch is not there on the standard apps. Not a huge thing but muscle memory keeps trying to do it.
• Bookmark sync with safari is going to take some getting used to not having. That said Crossmarks mobile site as a replacement is working pretty well so far.

I’m currently on the O2 Simplicity for iPhone tariff so I thought I better tell them I no longer had an iPhone. In theory the normal Simplicity tariff has more minutes and texts than the iPhone one but in reality I never get anywhere near using them.  Calling O2 just led to confusion. Once I got across what I wanted to do they initially told me that I should move to Simplicity 20 – but only if I was sure I wasn’t going back to iPhone. Eventually after he struggled with the system for 5 minutes while I was on hold he advised me to leave it as is. If there’s any come back about me being on the wrong tariff I might need to request they listen to the tape!

The phone is unlocked so I guess I need to look through the Sim only deals out there. O2 is not a great signal where I live but does seem to be properly unlimited data (at least they have never complained). I spend at least as much time away from home as at home so I can just about live with 3 bars of 2G at home. Vodafone is a much better 2G signal (in fact we can see the 2G only tower) but has a pathetic 500Mb limit as does Orange. That said at least I could just about get a 3G signal on Orange at home. I really do not understand how they are allowed to advertise 500Mb as unlimited. 3 and T-Mobile are complete non-starters as there is no signal at home. Decisions decisions, my Vodafone 3G data contract is up in a couple of months just to complicate things, the Mifi I use in theory means I need less phone data when I travel.

More updates as I live with the phone a bit longer.

I came across Backupify on some podcast or other. Their concept is fantastic – we all trust much of our data to the cloud now and Backupify backs up cloud data. Backupify is free until the end of January which also helps. The supported services have must people covered, I have started to use it for backing up WordPress, Twitter and Google Docs but it does other things.

Setup is dead easy and once you have authorised your accounts you just sit back and it does the hard work with daily or weekly backups. When I first signed up I had a couple of issues: the Google Docs backups just contained a line saying not authorised and my Twitter account had been ignored. I deleted the Google Docs accounts and re-added, I also got a reply on Twitter from Backupify so I am not sure whether they fixed it or I did – either way it works now. The only slight issue I have is that my WordPress has not backed up more than once, this may well be because it hasn’t changed but positive confirmation would be nice.

I have no affiliation with Backupify other than being a user of it and thinking it is a very cool concept that deserves to succeed. They also answered a tweet on Christmas day which makes them as sad as me!

I finally got around to doing some upgrades on my MacBook recently. Snow Leopard has been sat on my desk for a little while but I was put off by PGP Whole Disk Encryption being a known issue with it. My MacBook spends a fair amount of time in hotel rooms so I wasn’t keen to remove it. I weighed the risks of going with the Snow Leopard friendly Beta of PGP and decided to give it a go. The thing that actually put me over the edge was the new Version (3) of VMWare Fusion.

So in order here is what I did:

1. Paid for an upgrade from Fusion 2 to 3 and installed.
2. De-encrypted with PGP and uninstalled
3. Installed Snow Leopard
4. Installed PGP 10 Beta and re-encrypted

All this worked fine. I actually also bought a download delivered Windows 7 Home Premium to run under Fusion also. Windows 7 itself is pretty impressive and works well under Fusion. I probably didn’t need to shell out £80 for an OS that is secondary and only going to be used under Fusion but I like new shiny technology. I’d had an RC version which had pretty much replaced my Vista install as my windows operating system already so this was a natural progression.

So I now have a nice shiny version of OSX with the new Windows running under the new VMWare all protected by a (too) new PGP – good stuff.

I’m not sure when they were added but Skype have a whole load of new US Online numbers. These include 212, 917, 718, 646, 378. All of the other New York numbers have been there before albeit not very often but this the first time I have seen 212 numbers. I managed to snag a 212 zone one number which will replace my existing 917.  The 212s do seem to be getting snapped up fast, all of the zone ones have gone since yesterday but there seems to be a good amount of zone twos left.

Two months since I called BT about being charged the wrong amount the refund they promised has not appeared. I have no idea what they have billed me for. On the one hand they say the contract expired in July but on the other I was not entitled to the free calling package in April, May and June so they charged me for it. At least I think that is what they now are telling me, not what they said last time. May is particularly confusing as I paid £26 for line rental.

If I had any other choice for a line to supply ADSL I would dump BT in a heartbeat. I really can’t be bothered with this but I guess I should get around to a complaint.

I signed up to the BT 12 month contract with a promise of free evening and weekend calls out of apathy as much as anything else. Not that I wanted a 12 month contract nor would I use the free calls. Anyway the last three months BT seem to have rather cheekily charged me my normal line rental plus the cost of this package which is meant to be free. (They have also confusingly changed my billing date to align it with the date they take payment which also creates a bill that is difficult to understand.)

Anyway a quick call later and I have ditched the 12 month contract and gone back to £11.25 line rental only.  The 3 months higher line rental charge was explained as an error in their new billing system where the free calls package for people under contract was actually charged for. They’ve agreed to refund the charges but it does leave a nasty taste. This was clearly a known problem so why did I have to call after it had been incorrectly billed for three months? The whole idea of auto-renewing 12 month contracts is also something that doesn’t feel right (although admittedly they make perfect sense for house insurance etc.)

I would ditch my BT landline in a heartbeat if I didn’t need it for my ADSL connection (from an LLU provider). I have unlimited Skype and more mobile minutes than I need so a landline really is just something that I need to get ADSL rather than a phone.