More and more operators are putting wifi into busses and trains. Even the bus from Edinburgh airport into the city centre, a journey of at most 20 minutes, has free wifi on it. Nice idea, but surely the mobile operators should be providing this connectivity directly?

Back in the April volcanic ash fiasco I spent a lot of time on trains in Italy, Switzerland and France. All of them offered rock-solid mobile signals, including going through tunnels.

So what’s the problem in the UK? Lack of joined-up infrastructure? Hasty privatisation of rail? The operators make enough money already and can’t be bothered with the expense?

And before anybody says that having no signal on the train makes for a quieter journey, consider all the people being cut off and calling back. The air can be replete with expletives!

Until a week ago I’d been jealously guarding my original Google G1 because I loved the keyboard. I struggle on iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

But the phone was getting too slow and besides someone else needed it for testing, so I jumped onto the Nexus One. With the larger screen, smaller margins and generally better ergonomics I find it very easy to type

Still like the predetermined functions across the bottom, freeing up on-screen space for useful information rather than over-sized back buttons.

There are still places available, so folks book up now. Let’s get it filled to capacity to show Mike Butcher how much activity, excitement and interest there is here!

However it’s worth noting how thin the veneer is on our technology-empowered lives. Ironically I found out about the flight cancellations via SMS while on the top of Vesuvius surrounded by slightly sulfurous mists. Our rental appartment had no internet access and no mobile phone signal so we’d been happily oblivious to the outside world. This meant that when I was checking on our flight cancellations I had to go out and stand in the light drizzle to use my mobile browser.

BA provided acceptable mobile browser support, although the option to rebook simply came back with a message saying that there no corresponding flights. Trying to find out about trains, however, just didn’t work on the mobile browser. When we moved to a hotel with wifi we found it didn’t work on regular browsers either. In fact the only way to find a route out of Italy by train was to buy tickets at a travel agent. We only found that out via word of mouth - simultaneously via Twitter (me) and asking the hotel owner (my wife).

Three solid days of trains and two overnights and we were home and a lot of money lighter. Now how many companies let you make claims online? None - it’s all down to the post, and I’d hate to be the person opening those letters. And the person waiting to be paid. Oh, that’s me. Oh.

Not to mention the mobile phone bill from extensive internet and endless on-hold calls.

[This is a repost as the original still exists but not in the Wordpress index. Odd.]

Peter was the youngest Professor at Edinburgh University when I was a PhD student. He was always sharply dressed, in contrast to the rest of us there, but drove a Citroen 2CV. My first real contact came with him was when he was appointed as internal examiner for my PhD. I was a Computer Science studen and he was Chair of Integrated Electronics across the road in the EE department. My PhD thesis was a system on a chip compiler that compiled code for embedded electronics and designed a dedicated system on a chip device to implement both soft and hardware functions.

Later Peter wanted to hire me to look after the software side of his spinout company, VLSI Vision Ltd, but unfortunately his funding didn’t work out at that time and I went to work at Digital Equipment Corp. Sometimes I wonder how things would have panned out if that funding had been sufficient.Since then I’d only really bumped into Peter.  Sometimes at events organised by Pentech where he was on the advisory board. I once had a fascinating discussion about electronic paper when we ended up sitting beside each other on a flight.

Despite not knowing him that well I feel very sad this morning. Peter was a tremendous inspiration in the entrepreneurial community here, balancing humanity with technological genius with drive.

The Scotsman has a good obituary.

However, sometime in 80s the complexity of many devices became such that it is simply not possible for anyone outside of a fully-equiped lab or workshop to do anything themselves. Electronics became a few ASICs surface mounted on some flexy substrate, car or bike engines became over run by a black box full of surface mounted ASICs. And with those you just can’t do anything without the official, expensive, workshop diagnostic boxes.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to seal the insides of an iPad, iPhone or whatever - there’s nothing you can do with the insides anyway. One possible exception is the removable battery, although this is a peculiarly American complaint. I’ve never once heard anyone outside of the USA grumble about fixed batteries, nor have I ever seen anyone carrying spare batteries for the phones which do take new batteries.

Cory Doctorow also complains that the content on the iPad is fixed and controlled by Apple, that you can’t make your own. This seems a little bit like complaining that your new television won’t let you broadcast your own videos! The only way you can broadcast your own video content is setting up a pirate station - which is pretty much the option you have on iPad and iPhone - ad hoc build distribution or jailbreaking. And of course you can build any number of websites that make use of the special features.

And while I don’t like the “Disneyfication” of content on apps on the iPhone and iPad, its their channel and they are entitely to do what they want with it. I’d be quite happy if they clamped down on violent content, to be honest, as some of the games are much more disturbing than any occasional nipple.

I agree with Forrester that the iPad is currently the right device for the wrong market. Buy something else if you want to make stuff; there’s no shortage of alternatives.

What I hit upon was buying a wind-powered generator for your house. It sounds like a good idea, it’s tantilizingly close to doing something about climate change, but you don’t how much it will cost or how much you’ll get back from it.To the brand or service provider looking to add mobile to their existing customer interactions that’s pretty much what they feel. Apple marketing has made them aware of the potential excitement they can generate, general buzz shows how mobile can be a useful service, but for that first purchase, they have no idea of the cost or likely return.

At Rapid Mobile we’ll always take the time to talk to people at the earliest possible stage, helping people understand what a project is likely to cost and the potential benefit - if any. We all need to help people discover their mobile potential if the early spring flowers  we see are going to bloom into a full mobile summer.

Before all the iPhone fundamentalists claim this is their invention (no, not you Robin!), touch screens clearly go back a long, long way. But generally there hasn’t been enough computer power put behind the device to provide the correct visual feedback,  or the touch was a simple replacement for a mouse. The first mobile phone I had that had some form of usable touch was a Sony Ericsson P990i, a phone so full of bugs that it qualified as an animal habitat Yet for many things you could just poke at the screen with your finger and it worked really well.

Moving forward a scant few years, and I find myself assuming that you can touch the screen. We’re in final test for a very cool BlackBerry app (more on this soon), and when we move from the touch-screen Storm to a Curve or a Bold we all find outselves poking the screen and wondering why it isn’t doing anything. Touch screens are just natural.

Now add to this an element of visual and manual co-ordination  precision. The recommended minimum size of a finger button is 40×40px. This is important because anything smaller becomes almost unusable to those of us with larger hands. And to people with visual impairment.

This was brought sharply to my attention last week when I was playing with the astounding new UK-wide Streetview, where Google seem to have photographed every millimeter of every road in the UK. (And, as far as I can make out, the rest of Europe too). My father is currently suffering some eyesight difficulties, making precise selection difficult, and the Streetview interface was really problematic for him. The interface is designed for ux savvy people, with tiny little visual indicators for many functions, demanding that you understand both what the icons mean and have the mechanical and visual dexterity to click on them. This is a strong limitation and will prevent a cool service reaching a mass market.

This is one of the reasons why I think iPad and all the other tablets that are emerging have the possibility to really change the way people use media and services. They’ve been designed from the ground up to work with fingers. Actually some won’t have been, and they won’t survive. Those looking to create interfaces for these devices need to look at resources as diverse as simulated information systems in movies and Microsoft Surface. The latter has been using high-end systems to make touch interfaces for a while now, so there will be good learnings to be had. I’m sure Windows Phone 7 will find its way onto tablets to offer an awesome surface interaction paradigm.

The final distinction will be that, like a well-designed mobile system, input will be minimised. While swirling pics around with your fingers is fun and good, entering any significant amount of data is still best done with a keyboard. Even Steve “no moving parts” Jobs has recognised this with an ugly docking system for the iPad. Finger-based systems are primarily for consumption. Holding your hands up to access a screen that is at the right angle for your eyes is tiring. Precise finger movement is tiring, and the more you do, the accuracy decreases.

None of this means that touch tablets will offer a poor user experience, it means that they will offer a different experience from the current the current mouse and windows paradigm which is now nearly 50 years old. Bring it on!

Interestingly all the folks on the Microsoft stand were wearing branded football shirts over their poloshirts. They looked uneasy in this combination of clothes. However the product they were launching - Windows Phone 7 was as wonderful, slick and elegant as the idea of making Microsoft stand staff wear football shirts was unpleasant, unaesthetic and badly executed.

Windows Phone 7 really has a game-changing UI - it’s breaking away from the icon grid into a live interaction surface. Edward Tufte would be delighted at the removal of frames and the intelligent use of colour and pictures to group information. It’s not just about sexy transitions, although there are plenty of them. It’s also quick, elegant integration of diverse sources of information without worrying whether they are Microsoft owned or not.

Hopefully this will help provoke Apple to move away from the Fischer Price grid that the iPhone foists on its users. Although I doubt that they’ll be allowed to be as free with non-Apple branded products. I’ve thought for a long time that the proper interface for a phone is a self-prioritising feed of contacts and information from social media sites, calenders and feeds, with frequently used functions and information bubbling up to the top of the screen and things you don’t use discretely hiding themselves. It looks pretty much like Windows Phone 7 gives you that.

Elsewhere Nokia were presenting their latest S60 interface and frankly it looked dull. No sparks of excitement there.

Equally, the last-minute unholy alliance of operators and handset makers promoting apps through the Wholesale Application Community looked like too little way too late. After spending years blocking the routes to market for app suppliers it is going to take a long time for the behemoths to change their policies. By then the world will have moved on even further and part of the business will be struggling to keep up with something else while another part does its best to block innovations.

I also found it difficult to be excited about Bada, a new C++ framework from Samsung for building apps. The earnest young Frenchman who tried to persuade me that we should port our existing customers to Bada seemed surprised when I said that Java was infinitely preferably to C++. Full marks for supporting developers, but I’m not rushing out to get our team skilled up on yet another framework of which our customers haven’t even heard.

Bada proved one thing though, nobody seemed to care about handsets this year - it was all about the software user experience. Unless it’s all bling, a handset is a bit of glass and plastic with as little to get in the way of the user experience as possible. Shame that so little has been done by most of them not to copy what iPhone looks like without actually understanding the deeper through-design elements that make it work. The sensible people were all opting for Android which was the defacto operating system on new phones.

There was one exception - the Puma Phone - which integrates branding and sports information to make something that frothed up excitement. Shows how a known brand, excellence in packaging and production with good marketing budget beats innovation for buzz every time. Check out the site it really is quite weird.

Elsewhere the only thing that appeared as a theme was in-building access. Femtocells and other tech to ensure that we can access wireless everywhere was popping up round the halls.

Will next year show the return of casual? I don’t think so. I expect the suits to still be in ascendency; the creative buzz will be elsewhere.

For those who haven’t looked closely, as described on the Apple UK website, there will be no iBooks support here. That’s right - an book reader with no books. Clearly this is due to not having content licensing agreements in place for the UK and no some evil Apple plot, but it surprised me that they aren’t getting global licenses from day one. Maybe even the mighty Apple can’t get the publishers to agree to that.

However moving on to the challenge of diversity. When I first downloaded the iPhone SDK I was mortified to see the sample code using literal constants for screen width and height. That reinforces the line that there will only ever be one screen size on the iPhone or iPod touch, but is fundamentally bad software engineering. We all know that things change, so it would have been good practice to provide methods that returned screen size even if they were constants.

So now the four-of-them-taped-together model comes out with a four-times the area screen. Ok, so apps can run with pixel doubling, but that’s not going to look nice. Brand managers will weep as they see steppy versions of their logos and graphical designers will sigh at what’s happened to their luscious creation.

How much better would it have been to think stretchy in the first place? The UI designer tool works in relative terms anyway so that shouldn’t have  been an issue. So now some number of app developers are going to be running round making their iPhone apps iPad aware and behave accordingly.

But how many of them will take, or be allowed to take, the opportunity to build a proper iPad app? This is a very different device and really opens opportunities for spectacular new app styles. This really is direct manipulation - right there at the ends of your fingers. Note: fingers. Not a stylus. Ever since getting my first touch-based phone, a Sony Ericsson P990i,  I used my fingers to work with it. This is completely natural, and is likely to become the key modus operandi of casual interaction. Serious text input will always need a real keyboard or voice recognition, but only a tiny minority of us actually need that.

When the original iPhone came out I wasn’t excited. Despite the hyperbole, it isn’t really that interesting a platform. It has since become much more interesting, but primarily due to the millions poured into smart marketing.

In the case of the iPad, I’m excited about it despite the endless stream of superlatives. This is a product that doesn’t need talked up.