Still catching up with things after looking after my father. One of those things was unpacking a new 13″ screen Apple MacBook.

First point of note is that the packaging is so beautiful that you regret opening it! The next reaction to the packaging was “were are the docs and CDs?” - neatly packed away under the computer itself in a box labelled “Designed in California by Apple”. Not that you need them, but I wanted to check if I should be charging the battery before use or anything like that.

Getting at the docs means lifting out the computer and you suddenly realise that it is heavy, or more precisely dense. Much denser than you’d expect. The case is very solid, and in fact the whole unit feels like it has no air spaces in it. Very different from my very light titanium case Vaio.

Setting up was pretty and easy, although I did feel I was asked rather too many questions of the “Sign up now and buy lots of stuff from Apple!” nature. I was connected to the home wifi network immediately and reliably.

Getting used to using OSX wasn’t quite as easy as I had expected as some of the graphical hints are a little, well, obscure. I also found that the huge bar across the bottom of the screen took up way too much vertical space on an already slightly small screen. I eventually worked out how to scale it and move it to the side, as well as removing all the stuff I’m never likely to want, even if I had time to use them.

Setting up Firefox was interesting as it was not at all obvious to me what I was supposed to do with the icon - I think you have to drag it from the installer to where you want the app. This wasn’t obvious, and frankly I didn’t know (or care) where to put it. Maybe when I’m more engaged with OSX it will seem more natural.

Haven’t made any posts recently as my father has been ill while on holiday.

It’s interesting to see how mobile phones have played a vital part in the whole experience, sometimes good, sometimes bad. My mother was able to call me from her mobile to my mobile as soon as my father was taken ill. She was also able to call the emergency services, which was lucky as the coverage in the cottage where they were is marginal at best.

When she tried to call me back to say to which hospital he was being taken - the call did not come through and went to voicemail! In a state of nerves she didn’t leave a message saying where they were going, and of course in an ambulance and the hospital her phone had to be switched off.

I had to drive towards the general area and the first (regional) hospital was able to track them down for me and I was able to find out that he was settled in and not critical.

Mobiles also played a critical role in contacting family members and ensuring they were up to date.

What would we have done before mobiles? Call boxes and hotel charges I supose, but it would certainly have been a very different and even more distressing experience.

Although Nokia have been flirting with fashion phones for some time, the truely designer-branded device has been elusive. It now seems that Motorola have figured out that if D&G can sell truely horrible clothes for vast amounts of money, the same mugs will probably shell out a bit extra for having a phone with a logo on it.

I’ve been wondering when this would happen, as it seems to be a logical conclusion. Once you’ve provided voice, text, data, camera and music playing, there’s not much else to interest customers with. So how better to grab some market share than to co brand? Way to go, Moto!

O2 have just released findings on what people do with their i-mode service (reported here and here). While being coy about how much they make, they are rightly pleased that people are actually using it.

What I find mildly amusing in all this is that they’re reporting that eBay is the hottest service. Well golly gosh, could that have something to do with the blanket advertising they did promoting eBay well above their own brand?

What this proves is that there is latent demand for many mobile services, but most people don’t know they exist and many people can’t make them work as the operators have put up too many barriers to adoption. Promote services that work, easily, and people will use them.

Compare and contrast with Vodafone (with whom I couldn’t even place voice calls yesterday evening) still seem convinced that mobile TV is the future. But they don’t promote it that much and they make it difficult to use. Recipe for failure?

It’s not often that you get to see the scene of a real smash-and-grab operation in the literal sense. Our office is very close to Hamilton & Inches, an up-market jewellers, and in front of their shop window this morning was a huge sledge hammer and a small pile of shattered glass.

Despite the almost comical size of the hammer (think Tom & Jerry), the miscreant had only managed to make a small flap in the glass, through which he or she must have slid their hand to make off with something.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt have been with the IT industry for years, and will no doubt remain for ever. But I think that the mobile world has developed a new form, Fear, Uncertainty and Ignorance.

This thought was prompted by discovering that a prototype Java application that we knocked together for a partner is being sidelined by a WAP application. The reason being that a major operator told them that Java apps had to be built specially for each handset. Aaaaargh. We’ve spent the last few years avoiding that with our Active Provisioning software which does automatic device detection and profiling, no manual involvement.

When we were planning Rapid back in late 2003, I had identified that provisioning was a key issue. I didn’t know then quite how key, but it seemed natural to me that we should build code that will work on almost any phone. I’ve done that for unix workstations, PCs versions and web browsers before, why not handsets? So we did, and we’ve served software to some 400 devices, most of which we’ve never seen.
I hope that with some Special Sauce we can get that project back on the road.
And the people who gave that wrong advice? Well, I suspect that it was FUDI, Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt and Ignorance. Sadly a powerful force. Perhaps today being 06/06/06 we’ll make those the four horsemen of wireless apocalypse.

I’m always fascinated by the way that technologies evolve differently when kept apart. A simple example is the power plug and socket. Here in the UK we’re lumbered with huge, over spec 13A square pin fused things. Very safe, and you can’t pull them out the wall by tugging on the cable, no matter how hard you try. Prior to that we have 5A and 15A round pin plugs and sockets in a similar shape. These live on in lighting circuits, and in South Africa. Most of main-land Europe use round two pin plugs, but add an earth pin and you’ll find that a Spanish device will not plug in to an Italian socket.

There are loads of other examples, but what made me write about this was how here in Europe we talk about mobile, but in the use everything is wireless and phones are specifically cell phones. That term is also used in other countries.

How come the internet, that great leveler of international divides, hasn’t made these variants vanish?

For some reason the pool where my daughter has her lessons (see below) has the best Vodafone 3G signal of anywhere I’ve been in the UK. Rock solid, no toggling back to GSM, no DNS delays, just super fast service.

I’m wondering, has this more to do with being near the Scottish Parliament or that the University have rented out the roof space and I’m sitting under a mast?

To paraphrase an old joke, working in the mobile space is like being in a bowl of granola, what ain’t plain nuts is flakes.

We are blessed in Edinburgh with a very severe city-centre parking regime, the only redeeming feature of which is the ability to use mpark to pay instead of grubby coins. When it works, of course. I tend to carry even less change now that I can charge to my credit card via a quick call. (BTW, if the guys at mpark are listening, how about putting in place a decent downloadable app instead of the phone call?).

Except that from time to time the service goes does, always as we’re rushing to my daughter’s swimming lesson or something similar. I rock up, press the yellow button on the parking machine and select mpark from my address book. Cool stuff, but two weeks ago it said “Sorry, the service is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.”

This weekend the service is back up, but on connection the parking machine never responded to the call, while mpark was convinced that it was locked into handling a task for someone else. I’m guessing the parking machine’s internet connection had gone down, but that’s no comfort as I desperately tried to scrape together enough change to pay for an hour’s parking.

Would that be acceptable in any space other than mobile telephony?

Those of us who travel regularly have, presumably, all switched over to self service bookings. Reserve on-line, check in on-line, manage bookings on line. Or almost.

I was due to travel tomorrow with a colleague, who is unfortunately rather ill, so I’m going alone. Down was a cheap no-refund job, so that’s fine, it’s gone. The return was refundable with BA Connect. I checked the website, and I could cancel the whole booking, but if I wanted to cancel for only one passenger I had to call in.

I did call in, and the process was painless and efficient. What interested me, though, was the technique that was used. The BA staffer split the booking in two, allocating a new booking ref for Iain’s ticket, and then cancelled that, leaving mine intact. A simple, effective solution to the problem, but one that the web site designers didn’t, or couldn’t access.

How much of that was due to the legacy system that BA uses, as opposed to new systems used by the like of easyJet where you can do pretty much anything on-line. How much competitive advantage do companies with flexible back office systems gain?