According to this article from emarketer, there are more people in Europe who have dropped their mobile TV subscription than are still paying. Ouch.

And the reasons? Quality and cost! No surprise there.

Another recurring comment I’ve seen is that users want a free trial period before committing themselves. Nothing surprising there, it makes sense and is effectively equivalent to charging for the service in arrears.

Messaging might be the great common denominator of mobile devices, but it does seem fraught with problems for A2P (Application To Person) messages. I was looking at a propery information service leaflet that I found in a coffee shop, with SMS to short code information on rental accomodation. So I sent off a message, carefully checking code and message.

Nothing. That was about an hour ago, so I’m sure I’ve been charged and not received anything.

However their website fired up on my phone immediately and, despite a huge list of check boxes that appeared dynamically in the page making it a loooong scroll down to the Search button, it worked.

So why are people so obsessed with messaging?

Mobile Today is a great way to find out what’s happening in the UK mobile phone retail industry. It’s perhaps best know outside of the shops for it’s useful Counter Intelligence section listing the best-selling devices amongst other things.

They are also running a Shop Idol competition to find the best mobile phone seller in the UK. Look like it’s the third year running too. Since most shops give really bad service I had look at it, and the video-recorded mystery shopper gets genuinely good service form the person I picked. Congratulations - neat idea.

I don’t know what’s happened, but I’m suddenly getting about 500 spam comments posted on this blog! They are mainly increasingly explicit porn adverts, mixed in with strange products varying from dog grooming to plastic surgery. And of course any real comments are buried in the middle of it all.

It’s a bit depressing scrolling through hundreds of unpleasant two line posts. Has someone written a WordPress Spam filter? If not, there’s a great opportunity.

I’m quick to complain about network operators, so I shall be quick to congratulate Vodafone UK on two good things.

The first is the introduction of near flat-rate charging for data. £1/day for up to 15Mb works for me. And some days we don’t use it, and we don’t get charge. Nice.

The second was the leaflet  I received with my bill explaining the above. It was superbly clear, wasn’t full of jargon, and outlined all the conditions. A first rate bit of explanation. It deserves a Crystal Mark for clarity.

Well done chaps - keep it up!

I was looking at a competitor’s website today and it had an example of a video ad injected into the front of a cartoon. The cartoon appeared to be aimed at small children with a sort of Hello Kitty style. However it very quickly turned into deeply disturbing violence - I had clicked away as I was beginning to feel sick. Really. All the more unpleasant because of the childish delivery. Any small child would have been glued to it.
This highlights  how easy it is to stumble into things you don’t want to see and why the somewhat comical “contains moderate violence and partial nudity” statements on movies actually work. On-line and mobile providers are going to have to provide something equivalent or there is going to be big trouble.

Clearly there’s no censoring organisation going to have enough bandwidth to check every bit of graphics and video pouring out onto the web and mobile, so it’ll have to be self imposed. And extended to UGC.

I am very skeptical about people watching video on mobile devices. So we’ve been trying watching films on a video iPod while on long enough flights to get a chance to actually watch. Fifty-minute hops from city to city don’t really afford you the time to do very much.

I’m pleasantly surprised at how acceptable the viewing experience is, although holding the device up to get the best angle becomes tiresome. However the same can be said for reading a book, which is clearly the alternative for when you are stuck on a long plane journey.

Ripping the video on the first place is slow and fraught with unexpected snags. One DVD would not grab beyond the first chapter. Another was successfully encoded, but turned out to have the French soundtrack for no apparent reason.

Mobile TV is streamed, of course, but that’s the only objection I see it answering. On the iPod the video quality is very good, and I’m watching films that I know and love, which makes it easier to follow. Mobile TV that I’ve seen has a tendency to go scrambled every now and then generally loosing the plot.

And of course you can’t use a phone on a plane, so it would  be restricted to trains and busses. Perhaps there’s scope for “commuter TV” that addresses just that market.

A nice little video from the Churchill Club here with one guy proposing that we’re going to see more device fragmentation. What he means is more single-purpose devices and less convergence. I think he’s absolurely right.

His analogy is changing your shoes - people put on different shoes to do different things, and so it will be with phones. He comments that the “brains and the power” of the phone will move from device to device, so that ladies (as he put it) can have a big phone during the day and a small one in the evening.

And he’s so right. I have my wonderful Canon EOS 350D and a pair of great lenses. But they are huge and heavy and I don’t carry them round unless I’m expecting to take special pictures. I want a device with me all the time, especially on business travel, as I often see things I want to take pictures. I use my camera phone, but the results are very mixed. I’d rather have a small, special purpose camera with outstanding optics and software that works quickly and meets my requirements as a photographer.

What do you think?

I remember being one of the first people to have a Bluetooth headset. People thought I was an alien, and that’s just family and co-workers!

Now loads of people wear them. Anybody who is mobile (drivers, delivery men, builders, plumbers) and not lumbered with a desk phone has one clipped to their ear.

Is this evidence of a quickening adoption cycle, or just that the headset is a really good idea?