Mike Wilks' Blog

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.

The release of the new iPhone 3GS seems to have stirred up a hornets’ nest of controversy around the O2 contract and pricing.

The phone itself seems to be a bit of a stopgap release to me. Sure it is faster, has a better camera and has a few new features like a compass but there is nothing game changing. The really good stuff is in the 3.0 OS which will be available to previous iPhones. I can’t help thinking that this is not the must have upgrade that the 3G was from the original iPhone. Personally there is nothing much there to make me want to rush out and upgrade, especially given the O2 “upgrade policy”.

Now I understand that I signed up to an 18 month contract when I upgraded to the 3G but this does appear to be lost on many. That said O2 and Apple had set the precedent by allowing early upgrades to the 3G. The reasoning for allowing the upgrade last time but not this is that the original iPhone was not subsidised. Even accepting all this the O2 position of  having to buy out of your contract seems extreme. If the pricing for buying out of your old contract is really the number of months remaining multiplied by your monthly costs then why would anyone do that? You may as well sign-up to a new contract as it would be the same price and you still get the use of the minutes, texts and data on the old contract and have a new phone. I cannot understand how Apple and O2 didn’t see this storm coming (and maybe they did) – a 12 month product refresh and a contract of a different length was always going to cause problems!

I can’t really get too excited about the whole upgrade fiasco as there is nothing in the new phone I really want – it might be different if there was. What does really annoy me is the tethering charges. As I understand it O2 are going to allow iPhone tethering but will charge a bolt-on of exactly the same price as their 3G data plans. Now I could live with this if they didn’t describe the iPhone data as unlimited. I think I saw the O2 twitter account say that the reason they were charging for tethering is because it uses more data. Now leaving aside the discussion about whether tethering uses more data per se or just allows you to torrent and usenet it is clearly not the case that the iPhone data is unlimited. I cannot understand how the ASA and others have not slapped O2 and every other telecoms provider hard for this whole unlimited farce. Unlimited cannot have a limit by definition and it doesn’t matter whether you call it Fair Use, Acceptable Use, Excessive Usage  or anything else – it is still a limit.

The other thing I find funny about this whole situation is the fact that it makes Pay as You Go look so attractive. I haven’t checked the maths but various people are claiming that Pay as You Go is cheaper then signing a contract with the obvious advantage of not being locked in. If this is true then O2 may not care right not given they are still getting the revenue but they will start to care as soon as their exclusive ends. The fact O2 has an iPhone monopoly in the UK is probably the route of most of these issues and will no doubt be solved when there is some competition. When O2 started to push the 24 month contracts on iPhone so hard I thought it may be a clue to when there exclusive might end but now I am less sure because of the lack of early upgrades. If there were an end to the exclusive in sight I would presume O2 would look to tie in the existing users by extending their contracts by way of upgrade.

Anyway I am just going to wait out my 3G contract and then either continue on a rolling contract or explore jail-breaking and another network.

A decent Skype application on the iPhone would be the killer App, bar none. Whilst there is still no official Skype client for the iPhone there are a number of third party applications which have various levels of Skype functionality.
All of the clients out there have two very annoying restrictions which, for me, reduce the proposition of Skype on the iPhone. What’s worse there is nothing even an official iPhone App from Skype can do about them.

1. None of the applications will allow you to make Skype calls over anything other than Wifi. I wonder how much influence the network carriers have had over this apparent Apple imposed restriction.
2. Apps cannot run in the background on the iPhone so even if you are at home or in another place where you have constant wifi you will still miss inbound calls unless you have one of the Apps open at all time. To be honest though if you are at home you may as well have Skype open on your Mac or PC.

The iPhone Skype capable applications I can find include:

• Fring
• IM+ for Skype
• Nimbuzz
• TruPhone

Functionally their coverage is not the same, the table below shows the major differences. IM+ for Skype is not compared here because it works in a different way, described below.

[TABLE=4]

IM+ for Skype is different because it uses a callback model where you enter your mobile number and Skype calls you (at a cost) even for outbound calls. This is the same model as the Skype Mobile Lite products and makes little sense to me. The only use I can see for it is for making international calls where the cost of the Skype mobile call is less than the cost of the international call you want to make. If you are on a subscription then the Skype To Go functionality seems like an easier and cheaper alternative.

Of these clients Truphone seems to have the best call quality, with Fring being very laggy and Nimbuzz being somewhere in between. Right now there is no perfect Skype client for the iPhone, sad but true. I don’t have great hopes for the much hyped (and little officially confirmed) Skype client because of the inherent iPhone restrictions and the fact that their other mobile clients are so restricted.

If you jailbreak your iPhone then things get a little better. There is an application to work around the wifi only restriction as well as one to let you run apps in the background. My iPhone isn’t jailbroken so I am stuck with these restrictions, rumour has it they kill your battery anyway.

I spend a fair amount of time using both my MacBook and iPhone on public wifi networks and this has always nagged at me. I’ve looked at various VPN providers before but never signed up for one. I came across Witopia today while doing something completely different (playing with with Boxee). For $40 with a free PPTP  VPN (for use on my iPhone) too I thought I’d give it a go. Installation was dead simple as they email you a personalised install package (presumably with the certificates contained), a quick reboot and it was done. Configuring the iPhone was a little more manual but not especially onerous, I just don’t like how the VPN dropped out when the iPhone turns of Wifi to save power when the screen goes off!

Witopia also has the advantage of having a US IP address – which is apparently which it is so popular in the Boxee community … can we say Hulu? I suspect they would also be popular if they had UK IPs as well because of BBC iPlayer for people outside of the UK. I suspect there is an entire cottage industry of providers supplying IPs from different countries which has never really occurred to me previously.

Anyway I haven’t had much time to play with it yet but I’ll probably blog about it when I do.

The iPhone’s 10Mb limit on podcast downloads over non-wifi is a royal pain especially when I go away and don’t take my MacBook. You can workaround it using Safari by browsing to the file but this is clunky. There is now a slightly less clunky method of achieving the same thing.

RSS Player allows you to subscribe to podcasts then download them via 3G (or even GPRS).

Pros:

• It is less clunky than using Safari.
• You can download and save the podcasts so you can listen while disconnected.
• You can quickly and easily see new and old podcasts from a particular feed and stream or download them.

Cons:

• You have to manually type in the full URL of the podcast’s XML stream.
• It is not integrated into the native iPod functionality so you end up with two places for podcasts.

RSS Player is currently £1.19 in the Apple Appstore

I have a number of apps on my iPhone that come and go but these are my “keepers”.

• My Rail Lite
• Twitteriffic
• NetNewsWire
• 1Password

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’ve been using MobileMe for a few days now and I have to say the experience has been pretty positive. I haven’t experienced the outages that seem to be affecting others and generally it has been pretty stable.

• Mail – I’ve had very little problem with Mail, I have noticed a couple of times that mails haven’t appeared until I’ve gone into Mail on the iPhone but Push seems to work the majority of the time.

• iDisk – Storage in the cloud is a fantastic idea and for me is the killer app of MobileMe. I am still not sure that I trust the security so I am TrueCrypting anything even remotely sensitive that I store there.

• Calendar – I am frustrated by the lack of products it will integrate with on the PC but overall the web interface is pretty good. The inability to add alerts to calendar entries via the web is annoying (but you can do it from the iPhone.)

• Gallery – Now this is a fantastic bonus, I didn’t expect to use this feature but I have. Gallery makes it so easy to upload photos that I have found myself creating web galleries of photos which I have always meant to upload but never got around to.

• Contacts – Not much to say about contacts other than Push works well. I have found myself using the website to add and edit comments just because I can type faster on the PC than on the iPhone.

MobileMe is not without a few bugs and quirks though:

• If you are editing a contact on the MobileMe website adding a URL doesn’t work unless you add another field first.
• Mails deleted on the iPhone still show on the webmail. The fix here is just to delete one of the phantom mails and it will sort itself out and remove all of the deleted ones.
• Push of mails doesn’t seem to work everytime but it might be my imagination.
• The trial is a great idea but there is no way to “upgrade” to the real thing without losing your trial days. This is not a major issue as the only thing missing on the trial are aliases.

It seems Apple have introduced a fairly large hole in iPhone security in the 2.0.2 release. This has been posted at various places including http://www.iphonebuzz.com/iphone-202-security-flaw-puts-your-info-at-risk-274527.php where I saw it.

To cut a long story short:

• Take a locked iPhone and slide to unlock.
• Hit emergency call.
• Double-tapping the home button takes you to favourites without ever entering a code.
• Click the blue arrow of a contact who has a SMS or mail entry and you can write a mail or SMS to them.

But It gets much much worse, if you hit cancel while composing an email or SMS to those contacts you get free reign in those apps!

The way to fix it is to change the behaviour of the home key so it doesn’t take you to favourites – until Apple patch it.