Toshiba has now closed down another mobile TV service called “MobaHo!”. While the name alone warrants shutting down the service, the key stats are only 100,000 subs after four years.  No mention of opening up a consultancy period for a new version, thankfully.

Source:  FierceMobileContent

The BBC, who have some of the best programming in world, managed a maximum of 600 viewers per day, with a whopping maximum 13 minutes per month of media consumption during their 12-month trial.

So now they are seeking proposals for sending their programming over 3G.

Why? Surely the fact that less than 130 viewing hours were clocked up during the trial would suggest that nobody wants to watch mobile TV and they should give up. Isn’t that what trials are for?

Data source: FierceWireless

I’ve been comparing some iPhone apps between Duncan’s iPhone and my iPod Touch. For the small sample of apps we’ve tried, none of them work on the iPod Touch!

Duncan thinks this is bound into problems with the V2 OS as he’s found rebooting several times in a row has helped some apps work on the iPhone. And he wondered if any QA was being done on the apps at all.

This is perpetuating the classic I tried it and it didn’t work problem of mobile content, and could kill a potentially interesting market before it gets going. Again.

One of our team found a great article explaining why signal and battery indicators on our tech toys are not just wrong, but are either misleading or  wilfully misrepresenting the current status for marketing reasons.

Good grief, Apple want you to pay for V2 software on your iPod. If it was a superdooper amazing improvement that might make sense, but the key feature of this upgrade seems to be that you can buy applications from the App Store. So surely the upgrade should be free to encourage as many people as possible to have access to the store?

While the installation of the upgrade was straightforward, the process of paying was convoluted to say the least. I had to sign in to the Apple store three different times and accept several different sets of terms and conditions. Each time I was dumped back on the iTunes hope page and had to navigate back round to the download request before hitting the next blockage.

I’ve not had a chance since completing the process to see if there are any noticeable changes beyond the App Store.

For the last week of our holiday we had taken a house in Villefrance-sur-Mer, just east of Nice.

Given how steep the hillsides are, and the wide distribution of housing, you’d think that public transport wouldn’t have a hope, however there are a bus stops liberally distributed up the twisting roads. However you never see anybody waiting, how can it make sense? Because the busses are sent on demand!

You call the Créabus free phone number and tell them when and where you’d like picked up and where you are going. The further in advance you call the more likely you are to get your exact time, and you can book multiple trips on each call.

A very neat solution on how to make modal shift (transport geek term for moving people from cars) painless.

I can’t tell you how well it worked, as the the usual problem of discovery meant we had a rental car instead.

After three weeks away, during two of which I had no network access at all, and can’t say I missed it during that time. It might have been useful for weather forecasts, but they were all wrong. It might have been useful for opening times for monuments and parks, but they all change in summer and not necessarily in accordance with what the websites say. And we might have used location and mapping, but despite sideloading all the maps needed to Nokia Maps before leaving, the application didn’t take them into account and wanted to download them at a zillion euros a byte. Oh yes, and the GPS still doesn’t register in any useful time.

Some reports of interesting mobile things from the holidays coming up over the next few days.

Well, we’re off on holiday (or vacation for our US readers) for three weeks. I will testing mobility while traveling in Europe, but probably won’t be blogging.

Enjoy - we will!

When people ask me what I think of iPhone and Android I always say “Two words: more fragmentation.” This seems to surprise most people, and I have to explain why. Now here is an excellent and detailed explanation of why fragmentation is easy and building a backwards-compatibility, stable platform is very difficult indeed. And the author, David Wood of Symbian, is very well placed to know, he’s been working on it for 20 years.

Now I spent three years in Digital Equipement Corp (DEC) OpenVMS engineering team. VMS was famous for backwards compatibility and for rock-solid stability. And I can tell you that both of these things took a great deal of hard work and massive amounts of sadistic testing. David quotes a Google exec who clearly does not understand what this is about. Nor, I suspect do many people in the Linux fraternity.

Interestingly David doesn’t mention iPhone, but he does explain why it’s easier to create a unified hardware/software combination that is stable and compatible.

Back to the future! Remember when phone covers were interchangeable? Well, Nokia clearly don’t, as they’ve just pressed released a new line of devices where users can “express themselves” by putting on different covers.

Gosh how innovative - is this really the best we can do?