Does your phone have bad hair, oops, battery days? Mid afternoon and suddenly the battery low light has come on, despite no special activity? I know my G1 does, and the N95 I used before that.

Looking carefully at the network activity indicator has given me an idea why this might happen. Sometimes data connections are effectively instant, particularly checking for new e-mail. All the networking ducks are aligned between me and our mail server and, lo, the radio goes on, the data comes over the air, and the radio is off again.

Other times the connnection sits for long seconds before either failing or finally returning some data. Clearly the radio circuitry is working a lot longer, chewing down the power. The delay could be coming in at any point from weak signal, busy basestation or any point back right up to the mail server itself.

In our office we have a “donut meeting” each Wednesday where everyone gives a quick summary of what they are doing, accompanied by the eponymous confection.  However today I upgraded my Developer G1 phone to Donut, as Android V1.6 is called.

The upgrade process is very developer centric - normal people would faint in terror at the instructions let alone actually doing it. People with T-Mobile G1s just get an over-the-air update that just happens, but developers use a command-line tool to side copy the update to the device then load it through a series of secret-handshake key combinations. Then the long wait to see if you’ve broken it.

So far so good, but it’s only been a few minutes. All the Google cloud info returned automatically, which was a good start.

Google Maps comes up with some new features, including a nice view-once “what’s new” box which would a good thing for all mobile apps. Hoping that e-mail will continue to be improved. Cupcake wasn’t as stable as I’d have liked so I’m hoping that Donut will have fixed the occasional wobble. I’ll report back in a few days.

Prof Jeffrey Ullman

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

Big thanks to Edinburgh University Informatics to invite us local community types into a lecture given by Prof Jeffrey Ullman of Stanford. A part from being a prolific book writer, his claim to fame is having been Serge Brin and Larry Page’s PhD supervisor.

“There’s nothing you can learn from studying Google”, he said in response to a question. “It was easy.”

This set the tone for a great talk - he explained how PageRank (named after Larry, not the pages) beat search spam, in proper lecture-like way. He explained how a series of connections had funded the guys into the Google we now know.

Interesting comments on the death of text books due to internet resale. He mentioned that his publishers keep asking him to reorder the exercises so that students would need to buy new copies, but he refuses to do it. Would that all the writers did so. Strikes me that the internet and one copy would quickly solve that too.

Good debate around newpapers, trust, and advertising as well.

A good couple of hours - thanks again to Andrew and Danny.

Each month my Vodafone bill tells me I have 20 unused video calling minutes. Or it might be 40. Either way I really don’t care. I’m just amazed that they persist in the notion that video calling is at all useful. I can’t recall ever seeing someone make a video call, and the couple of times I’ve tried it were strictly to allow the other party to see something.

Yet last week, when earnestly speaking at my computer for a Skype-based conference call, I found myself wanting the video I’m used to with point-to-point Skype computer calling.

So what’s the difference?

I think it’s all to do with what you’re looking at, what you’re focusing on, while you are talking. When using a handset, and I use the word deliberately, an expectation is set that you are not looking at the device. It’s beside your head. So video calling with a conventional mobile device creates significant cognitive dissonances, or in ordinary speak, it doesn’t feel right. Desktop phones are broadly the same - we are conditioned to not look at the handset while we are making a call.

But computer screens were made for looking at, so it feels completely natural. Perhaps an example of convgence having the desired effect of being bigger than the sum of the parts.