3G – Page 3 – ɔimoɈɒ

HSDPA coverage in NI

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide. The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The … Continue reading “HSDPA coverage in NI”

O2’s network maps for HSDPA are a little frustrating. For one thing, they won’t show you a map of the whole country, only little segments 7.5 km wide.

The big deal for me is that when you’re in a 3G area, you can surf the web and also make/receive calls at the same time. The current EDGE-based iPhone can do one or the other; that is you can’t start browsing the web on your phone while you’re using it for a telephone call. Yes, this is a real need!

What does this mean for speeds? Rumour has it that O2’s implementation has a theoretical peak of 3.6 Mbps (about 400 kilobytes per second) but their mobilebroadband USB modem package, which also uses HSDPA, tops out at 1.8 Mbps. That’s not quite as impressive but then again, beats the pants off EDGE. O2 also specifically prohibit streaming and VoIP applications over their 3G network.

O2’s roaming charges for data aren’t too bad these days. For countries in Europe it’s Â£3 per megabyte and outside of that, Â£6 per megabyte. Considering that since October 2007 I’ve consumed less than 1 gigabyte of data, I’m not worried about the additional charges for roaming while I’m on holiday for two weeks in August.

I’m going to pop into an O2 store later this week – have a go at their 3G demo machine and ask some questions. Last time I tried a 3G demo machine was in the Three (3) shop in Castlecourt and my iPhone beat Windows on 3G for rendering a web site – so you can imagine how slow the 3G was. Not very impressive. Now…O2’s infrastructure provides Three (3)’s 2G network and a little birdie told me that Orange provide the backbone for their 3G network so the 3G performance I noted may not be indicative.

If you’re in Belfast, say, around QUB, you’re going to do okay.

but coverage gets very patchy outside of the town centre in Bangor (where I live). In fact, my house is right in the middle of one of the big white areas there so I’m going to have to rely on WiFi or (god forbid) dialling down to EDGE or GPRS.

and where my parents live in Lisburn is just … barren. For what it’s worth, they live about 200 metres away from that green B101 label in the centre of the map. It doesn’t look like they’re going to be enjoying HSDPA speeds any time soon!

and I’m thankful that Mac-Sys Ltd will give you their WiFi password if you ask them nicely because coverage in Newtownabbey really depends. As soon as you start seeing grass, the coverage simply ends.

The saving grace is that O2’s mobile broadband contract also covers the Cloud hotspots (which there are quite a few of these days) and the iPhone contract will also cover BT OpenZone hotspots from July 11th (give or take a few days). Pretty soon, we’ll have wireless everywhere.

So, go on, pop along to O2’s network maps for HSDPA and post your area coverage. Drop me a link or a pingback so we can see what’s happening!

WWDC Keynote highlights

There were two things shown during the WWDC Keynote today. The first was new software. This software will be available to everyone who has an iPhone, new or old in July and available to iPod ouch users for $9.95 (which will probably be about Â£7.99 in the UK). The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G … Continue reading “WWDC Keynote highlights”

The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G was announced. It’s pretty much the same device – it has two differences however.

There’s a 3G radio in there allowing access to the UMTS/HSDPA networks. This will step down to GSM/EDGE if 3G is not available which provides a decent fallback. One big advantage of the 3G radio is that it can be used at the same time as taking a call – something that has proved to be an iPhone annoyance – you can’t browse the web while on the telephone! HSDPA supports download speeds from 0.9 Mbps to 14.4 Mbps so until we get more information, it’s going to be anyone’s guess.

The second hardware difference is GPS. Gone is the ‘yeah, you’re somewhere in this town’ and now it’ll pinpoint you right down to your street position and follow you around. That’s what a GPS is for. It’s not going to read instructions to you so it’s not like your Tom-Tom but on the plus side I’m not going to have to buy maps for every inch of the planet if I go travelling.

Let’s face it – unless you’re a real geek, you’re likely going to be happy with current iPhone hardware and won’t need the iPhone 3G at all. You’ll just be able to take advantage of the hundreds of new apps that will be available for free (and for pay), you’ll get the new calculator, better attachment support (now it does iWork documents, Word, Excel and Powerpoint!), the new integration with ‘mobileme’ and other stuff they thought wasn’t interesting enough to cover in a keynote.

Apple said they had already sold 6 million iPhones in the first year while only being released in half a dozen countries. They’re going to be launching in 60 countries….and the price is down to $199 (Â£120 or so) for the 8 Gb version (the version I paid Â£269 (over $500!) for.

Price is likely the biggest sticking point with the iPhone. Not so any more.

Steve Jobs wanted to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. He sold 6 million at the old price in 1 year. Do you think he’ll sell 4 million more at the new price? Yeah, obvious huh?

Microsoft re-invents the past. Again.

Back a hundred years ago when I was studying Human-Computer-Interaction, there was much discussion about touchscreens. They mostly discussed the difference between a mouse, a touchscreen and a light pen. The latter two devices got short shrift from my lecturer as they had two issues. your arm obscured the screen your arm would get tired … Continue reading “Microsoft re-invents the past. Again.”

your arm obscured the screen
your arm would get tired

The recent upswing in multi-touch touchscreen technology, pioneered by Jeff Han’s amazing multi-touch demo and brought to consumers a year ago in Apple’s iPhone, has produced a lot of speculation as to the nature of computing devices. For the same reasons as above, I think touchscreens, even with haptic responses, will become an additional way to interact. It has advantages and disadvantages – it absolutely sucks for data entry in the same way that voice recognition sucks for data entry. In addition, touchscreens might be fine for 17 screens but do you really want to spend a day directly manipulating data on a 30″ LCD? Or two of them?

Let’s experiment.
Put your keyboard just ABOVE your monitor. Put your hands on your keyboard. Now imagine that being your new work position? Of course – it’s going to be bollocks.

None of this stops Microsoft re-announcing multi-touch like it’s new all over again.

This is what happens when someone innovates and Microsoft photocopies. There will be poor implementations of multi-touch for the next few years from Microsoft (remember that Windows 7 is still slated for 2010) just as they have ‘bullet pointed’ every innovation from other companies.

“Multi-touch? Sure, our OS has multi-touch. It’s shit and doesn’t work right but our end users will blame themselves for not being better at using it so we’ll get away with our shoddy implementation. Anyone for Foosball?

This is the pattern I’ve seen repeated now for over a decade with Microsoft. I remember mentioning cool new technologies and my friend countering them with “Yeah, Windows has that”. One of the conversations had this gist…

Me: Cool new feature in Mac OS – Location Manager. You select this option and with one click can choose which network ports to activate, whether sharing should be on or off and so forth. It’s a simple selection – it’s great – takes all the work out of changing locations.

Friend: Yeah, Windows has had that for ages.

Me: It requires a reboot? How do you set your options? You have to edit the configs directly? Uh, that sucks…

Friend: Heh. MACINTOSH stands for “Macintosh Always Crashes If Not Then Operating System Hangs!

Me: I have to go over there now…

It never mattered on the QUALITY of the implementation, just that the bullet point was fulfilled. This was repeated again and again over the last two decades and it just staggered me that people who were, to all intents and purposes intelligent, still endured the awfulness of Windows.

Back in 1996 when I was living in Belfast, Apple wasn’t doing so well and I refrained from convincing a friend to buy a Mac. He had no intention anyway – but I remember him laughing at our Macs afterwards (he’d gotten excellent PC-buying advice consisting of hearsay about how Macs were crash-happy). Five minutes at his flat showed how he worked with his PC. He screamed at it. He bashed the monitor. He repeated data entry again and again because Word simply couldn’t handle the large files he was throwing at it. In the end he finished his dissertation on a Mac he borrowed from me and yet still, even in the face of superior capability (on an older, slower machine) still remained a PC user.

It was around then I came to the conclusion that as well as perceptive, cognitive and emotional intelligence, there must be some sort of ‘common sense’ intelligence that was missing. It’s one thing to never use a Mac and be ignorant of the advantages. It’s another thing entirely to have them spelled out, demonstrated, used and then still defend your shoddy technology choices.

This neatly segways into two conversations I had recently about the rumours surrounding the new iPhone. Cheaper prices? Wider distribution? There’s a sizeable number of people who have iPhones now who do not want the general public to have iPhones – they enjoy the exclusivity.

We only have to wait a few days to see what is happening with the iPhone. And two years to see them poorly copied on Windows.

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.

Kicking RIM’s ass

The big news about iPhone OS 2.0, due this summer, will be how much time Apple has been distracted from ‘making the best phone ever’ to ‘kicking RIM’s ass’. The stuff we know about iPhone OS 2.0 is that it supports VPNs (PPTP, L2TP/IPSec), SecureID and it’s going to do Exchange email, calendars and contacts … Continue reading “Kicking RIM’s ass”

The big news about iPhone OS 2.0, due this summer, will be how much time Apple has been distracted from ‘making the best phone ever’ to ‘kicking RIM’s ass’.

The stuff we know about iPhone OS 2.0 is that it supports VPNs (PPTP, L2TP/IPSec), SecureID and it’s going to do Exchange email, calendars and contacts which means there’s no reason to send your email to Blackberry’s Canadian servers for redistribution to your mobile clients. My own experience with Blackberry on the O2 network was not anything to write

RIM’s response to Apple’s upcoming software revision (likely with attendant hardware revision) is to release the Blackberry Bold, an iPhone-themed Blackberry with 3G. The problem being that the cellphone/PDA companies are doing exactly what the PC industry tried to do:

It’s stupid to compete on features.

The iPod didn’t win the industry because it was the best music player out there based on features, something that utterly frustrated Creative, Sandisk and Microsoft. It won because it did a few average features in the right way. It wasn’t the first hard disk player but it did it right. They even managed to release an MP3 player without a screen – something that would have been considered a real turkey by the mainstream – and became an overnight success.

Adding 3G to Blackberry won’t make it win. Like Microsoft, they have a commanding market share and the only way is down.

Wireless on the Choo-choo?

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”? …getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has … Continue reading “Wireless on the Choo-choo?”

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”?

…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.

Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.

Why?

Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.

IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!

The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.

Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?

Do not go gentle into that good night

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas I’m not talking about ‘death’ of course, but the notion that ‘going dark’ is desirable. I recall someone accusing me of being addicted to the Internet which, despite being true, is also utterly preposterous. I pointed … Continue reading “Do not go gentle into that good night”

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

– Dylan Thomas

I’m not talking about ‘death’ of course, but the notion that ‘going dark’ is desirable. I recall someone accusing me of being addicted to the Internet which, despite being true, is also utterly preposterous. I pointed out that this person is never found without a watch, and in fact, owns half a dozen of the accursed things which is as ridiculous as anything. (I would prefer a wall clock and watch that use nothing but ‘fuzzy time’ (like this one. It’s evidently just as possible to be addicted to knowing the time, another completely artificial construct.

Darryl has mentioned ‘go dark’ a couple of times to Gareth and Andy because they were on vacation (in Dublin and Prague). My other half has balked at my attempts to find good internet coverage while we go on a cruise (visiting 6 countries) in August because it shows my addiction. She will, on the other hand, be taking her MacBook Air with her (to download photos to) and will be disgusted if she can’t get her email.

I think that for my ‘watch bearing friend’ and others who cannot leave the house without watches, reading materials, makeup, umbrellas, chewing gum, tobacco products and other serious but potentially more socially acceptable addictions, they should work on their own issues. Being internet connected 24×7 isn’t something I strive for. But it being present when I want or need it is.

That’s the difference between ‘always on’ and ‘always available’. I want internet to be ubiquitous because I don’t know if I need it ‘now’ or ‘later’ and unlike tobacco and makeup it’s not something I can just ‘buy’.

Anyone know the state of free WiFi in Stockholm? St Petersberg? Talinn?

iPhone versus 3G Phone web shootout

A German web site did a test between the iPhone and a recent 3G phone in web rendering. Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites Webseite iPhone(EDGE, 2.5G) Nokia E61i (UMTS, 3G) Die Zeit 76 79 EBay 30 26 Applephoneinfo 31 27 You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it … Continue reading “iPhone versus 3G Phone web shootout”

A German web site did a test between the iPhone and a recent 3G phone in web rendering.

Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites

Webseite iPhone
(EDGE, 2.5G) Nokia E61i
(UMTS, 3G)

Die Zeit 76 79

EBay 30 26

Applephoneinfo 31 27

Webseite	iPhone (EDGE, 2.5G)	Nokia E61i (UMTS, 3G)
Die Zeit	76	79
EBay	30	26
Applephoneinfo	31	27

You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it better but that may be an entirely subjective thing.

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