I should have bought one of these years ago, and I’d recommend anyone with a Nokia device who travels to get one. It’s a USB charger for your phone and weighs only a gram or two.

Perfect example of specialisation - it does exactly what you want, no more, no less.

Having been reading about social objects this morning, it dawns on me that these carefully prepared, relevant and targeted e-mails  are ideal for starting dialogues. Perhaps with the retailer, perhaps with my friends and family.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that these promotions, when appropriate, do actually work.

The one I came across was an awful Catch-22 on the Outlook/Google calender sync application. My Vista machine asked it I wanted to run a file called Gooupd.tmp (or something like that, it started Goo and end in .tmp). Instant reaction was that this was some kind of inept virus/trojan trying to install itself. Checking on the path to the file it was in the Goosync directory. So I let it run. It wanted me to exit Outlook to run the update, fair enough, but Outlook 2007 on Vista at least runs as a background process all the time. The only way to exit is it logout and in again as simply killing it with task manager leaves the data file in a mess. But of course, logging out kills the update. And there’s no other other way of making it happen. Catch-22.

The other problem is now called the root console bug. When I first  heard that text keyed on the G1 keypad went straight into a root console I thought it was a very fresh urban legend.  However it’s not - there’s an official release to fix it. While not many people are going to SMS rm -rf / to their mates, it’s still an amazingly sloppy piece of releasing.

Part of our release process is always remove all debugging. Even stuff that you “know” won’t ever be visible, take it out. Clearly the Android team did not apply this simple rule. Perhaps they had been on a death march and were asleep on their feet. Perhaps marketing (and T-Mobile) decreed that it had to go no matter how broken.

Sigh. Mobile rules apply again.

However it is good to see mobile companies beginning to value the developers that drive the adoption of new services. We’ve seen the App Store with its deluge of torches and tip calculators, the Android Challenge and it’s dismal winners, and the utterly dull BlackBerry investments. Nokia have been running developer competitions for years, but usually restricted to games.

Now Sony Ericsson are running a competition for X1 “panels”, which sounds like a great promotional vehicle for smaller or individual developers.

Find out more here.

The closest historical model we have to this is the newspaper column written by industry figures. I’ve been a magazine columnist and it’s hard work producing something consistently interesting and on-topic even once a month (although to be fair to myself I often wrote feature articles for the same title). While blogging is quick and low overhead compared to professional publishing, it still takes time and effort which is hard to find.

I wonder where the final balance will fall.

This connection is, of course, very useful for checking opening times, locations, events and the weather. (Not that the weather forecasts were ever correct. It was, however, impossible to resist pulling down e-mail. Easier not to answer, helped by Orange/Wannadoo blocking SMTP traffic. Sigh. Why do they insist on doing that? It is not a spam relay, it’s an authenticated connection for heavens sake. No doubt it is easy enough to look up the right SMTP server, and changing settings is easy when you know how to do it, but how many normal users do?

That’s probably why webmail services like gmail and hotmail  are so popular - nothing to configure or understand.It just works. So turns out that conventional e-mail isn’t consumer-ready either. Sigh.