There’s a bill of rights for mobile consumers being presented in the US at the moment. The prime motivation is that more and more people are dropping their landlines, and hence the same level of protection that US landline customers have should apply.

Fantastic, especially if it forces carriers to offer better, comprehensible tariffs.

Sad, on the other hand, that the industry needs this degree of regulation. This must be what happened with the railroads, telegraph, and Bell telephone. History repeats itself.

The BBC News site has a broken redirection on it, according to Firefox. Not seen that message before, but I feel sorry for whoever is currently desperately trying to fix it. You can see a screen shot here.

Update: it’s fixed now, a few minutes later. I’m glad I took the screenshot in time!

The Nokia stand was too crowded to be worth elbowing my way to back to get a look at the forthcoming N96. However a few review sites are talking about it in glowing terms. I find it amusing that a key feature being listed is the kickstand - a bit of plastic that hinges out the back so you can watch video without having to hold the phone to get the right angle.

Of such simple things success is built. Now if they’ve ditched the 376 unless S60 software functions and multiple buttons round the side and focussed on simple things like the kickstand, this will be a winner.

Haven’t had access to a private browser until now, having got to the stand early and taking the time.

Not a huge amount to relate from here - it’s not as busy as last year,  but that still translates to a lot of people. Nothing dramatically new, and interestingly, not a vast amount of iClones. Samsung and LG offering some gorgeous hardware with some t00-busy user interfaces.

The coolest hardware on offer was the Readius, the first roll-up screen device I’ve seen. Very low power static screen. It’s very much an early product, but it could point to the future.

The second coolest hardware was the JCB Tough Phone, a ruggedised, waterproof device for builders and extreme operating environments. The video showing them testing them is as cool as the phones.

On the software side, everything is jumping, spinning and multimediaing. Multiple, concatenated buzzwords are clearly the order of the day, and certainly in the areas of interest to me there was nothing particularly new or exciting.

However people’s attitudes are different - much more practical, real. Looks like projects might actually be happening. At last.

We’ve posted some pictures here.

Well, we’re off to the big show, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 3GSM as was. Lots of weird and wonderful things, no doubt, hidden amongst tonnes of boring, familiar and plain stupid. And that’s the joy of mobile!

Well, the Apple-approved repair centre says I need a new motherboard and topcase, which comes in at £528!

That’s just silly.

So the Macbook is going to be a shiny brick unless someone else wants to try  and breath life into it.

Which leaves me with a 3Gb Entourage file that I need to convert back to Outlook. Oh dear.

And that’s another reason why the new laptop, when I get it, will be running Windows.

In the meantime, I’m running with my five or six year old Sony Vaio which works fine, just a bit slow and with some odd artefacts on the screen.

Finally tried installing the GirlTech software mentioned below on a recent computer. Ugh. What a mess. Looks like it had been designed by one of the mystery meat Flash designers who think that they know better. They don’t.

First of all, the camera is not treated as a standard camera or memory device. You have to use their loosing camera management thing. Which is only partly integrated into the “video journal” software and seems to work by the the main app firing it off.

Despite having to set a password and username to run the software, it doesn’t manage a photo album for you. You have to tell it where the pictures are. Every time. And it was very difficult to get it to upload more pictures without overwriting the existing lot as photo001, etc.

Once inside the journalling app, Sonia had loads of fun dragging pictures in, writing, and drawing round them. However I don’t see her readily getting pictures off the camera and into the album, which really is the point.

All in all, a fine remember that standard is better than better when it comes to computer user interfaces. There’s a huge amount of thought, research and practical experience gone into making desktop user interfaces the way they are, and that’s why, no matter what the Mac fanboys squeal, there is no difference between Windows and Macos. They’ve converged on a standard that more or less works.

Interestingly this is not the case with mobile devices. We’re still trying to figure out the standard.

Well, my hip and groovy black Macbook died on Friday. It wouldn’t come back from sleep and no amount of magic funny keypresses would persuade it to do anything other than turn  on the white light on the front and spin the disk after a brief flash of back light, or, after 4s of holding down the button, switch off again.

So it’s into the shop for repair. A rather gloomy operative seemed not in the slightest interested that I needed it back this week. Repairs take two weeks in strict rotational order. Really? That’s a really consumer oriented view of this - this is a vital business tool and getting it fixed quickly should be a priority and, yes, I’d pay for that.

However if you think that Macs are toys for making photo albums or playing garage band on, well, a couple of weeks isn’t really that important.