I’m back, having managed to not read e-mail for two and half weeks. That’s a record for me, I think, since I started using e-mail systematically back in 1980. (Yes, there was e-mail in 1980, even if you had to write your own software!)

The holiday was not without technology, with plenty of fun playing with my new Canon 350D and a pair of very fine lenses: 10-22mm  and 28-135mm zooms. Superb and great fun. The difference between a D-SLR and even the top-end digital cameras is remarkable, although you probably have to have used a film SLR to appreciate just how good it is.

We also visited the brilliant image and technology-base theme part Futuroscope near Poiter in France. Amazing graphics, including dual-screen Imax, hemispherical Imax and Imax Solido 3D. Lots of real-life fun too, with my younger daughter absolutely loving the water jets in the heat.

I am off on vacation until August and will not be posting during that time.

After that there will be plenty of exciting news.

Having sung the praises of the very simple Nokia 1100, some news of a super Sony Ercisson top-end device: the K800i.

Both my wife Roseline and my colleague Duncan have bought one and I’m dead impressed. The screen and the camera are just awesome.

Lots of built in software toys that just worked. Sort of like you’d expect, but it’s always good to see it actually happen!

A lot of people talk about convergence and whether it’s a good thing or bad. One of the most practical examples of convergence is not needing to wear a watch because you can tell the time from your mobile.

Well, My Mobile Watch are doing the reverse - building a watch that is actually a GSM phone.

The design is still a bit clunky, but clearly there is scope for fixing that once the market is proven. Superb opportunity for through-branding!

I was waiting for the family on Saturday and had a few minutes to fill in, so I fired up Vodafone Live! to see what was there. Dr Who content caught my eye and I discovered that I could download a “Meet the Daleks” video and the Dr Who theme music as a ringtone. However I had the choice of realtone or sommat else that meant nothing to me. How are users supposed to know this?

I tried to download the realtone for £2. I played it and it was unrecognisable. Out of curiosity I downloaded the other version (another £2) and it sounded like a Bontempi organ playing something that could occasionally have been mistaken for the Dr Who music. Neither met my standards. So I tried downloading “Meet the Daleks” for £1.50. It turned out to be a rather stupid interview with members of a club that build Daleks. Ok, so that’s a fine hobby, but it was not BBC content and it was not a particularly well run interview.

So there I was, £5.50 down in under five minutes. It then dawned on me that the target audience for this material doesn’t earn that much in an hour! If I was on the minimum wage and had paid that out, I’d be really annoyed.

Sometime later when I went back to the content I found that the realtone MP3 file wouldn’t play properly, nor would the video. Even later, after switching my phone off and on again, the content I had just paid out so for much for had gone. Vanished. Not a trace. I can’t say I was sad, but I could imagine what a teenager would be like after splashing out all that money. Livid. I could imagine anguished cries of “Daddy - my content has just vanished, can you get it back?” Well, for once I couldn’t.

Searching for it I chanced upon an MP3 file I had downloaded last year and decided to play it. It wouldn’t. “Not Authorized” it said, despite the fact I had made a bonefide download of it from Vodafone.

Not good. Really not good. It’s amazing the markets have grown to the size they have, considering how flakey it all is.

When you work in the mobile business you tend to have the latest multifunction, just released, never-been-tested smartphone. In my case it’s a SonyEricsson W900i which makes a passable job as a camera and works well as an MP3 device. The sound quality is really quite good. Not so keen on the styling, the swivel, or the Java implementation, but I can live with those.

Yesterday I bought a Nokia 1100 as a backup mobile for my Mother. It fits nicely in the hand, it has a sharp black and white display, is very light, and has a blissfully simple user interface. I suspect the battery lasts forever. All my Mother needs is the ability to make and receive calls, and this device delivers that in spades. Up/down arrows select from the address book and the central button calls.

Congratulations to Nokia for delivering something that works and is instantly obvious.

Now the question is, how do we get that degree of ease of use into the smart phones? More complex should not necessarily mean more difficult to use.

I spent Monday at the ETF Mobility Summit in a scorching hot London. I have written more about it but there was a curious lack of WiFi availability, despite the fact that ubiquitous communication was a major theme.

I was there to talk about our recent sale of Mobet to Betfair, and my co-speaker Martyn Holman from Betfair and I were totally different from the rest of the event that was resolutely about enterprise solutions. Seems that for most of the other people mobility meant a notebook computer, or at the very least, a PDA! We were the only people talking about mass market phone applications.

Once more convergence and identity was a major issue, with a divergence of opinions. Intel see connectivity anywhere, anytime, but others clearly didn’t want that. They wanted well-defined delimitation between home/work communication. Enterprise VoIP routing to a single mobile phone was popular - until the details were revealed. Nobody really wants to carry two phones, although many of the speakers and participants seemed to be quite happy a phone and a PDA.

A show of hands revealed an always exact half split in numbers wanting to be always connected and those choosing to regulate who could call.

The other issue on mobility that kept surfacing, apart from the cost of mobile calls, was security. Lots of horrendous, devious security loop holes introduced by smart phones. Clearly there is lots of scope for innovation in that area.

This week I’ve read Martin Geddes resolutely against single identities and listened to Tony Fish just as adamant that the we all need one!

I must admit that I’d rather have one identity as I tend to use the same e-mail and mobile number for both private and business lives. However I think I’m rather unusual in that. I think that most people prefer having two identities, one for their working lives and one for their own lives. It’s only those of us that don’t make much distinction between the two who find that useful. Most people, however, would like to keep that difference.

However that doesn’t mean that there isn’t scope for convergence. There is - you can have a single work identity and a single personal identity. That would cover e-mail, IM, voice, whatever, without overlapping the two worlds.

An interesting example of this in practice is people’s preference for different mobile phones. I love my Sony Ericcson hierarchical directory, where each person can have a single identity, as it were, but six different numbers/addresses below. It effectively locks me into their devices as I can’t bear to go back to “Name Mobile” meta naming schemes.

As an extension of Web 2.0, how about Sicknote 2.0? One of our team was ill this week with unpleasantly swellings on his face. As an attachment to his e-mail saying he’d not be in was, yes, a photo of himself with symptoms fully visible! Is this the start of a new trend?