I recently changed from O2 to Vodafone.  I’ve had crappy reception in my house with O2 for a while, suffering one-way conversations where the person on the other end couldn’t hear me properly even though I can hear them perfectly, so, I decided to try some other providers.

I have been out of my O2 iPhone contract for a short while (having already changed to a cheaper tariff – note to other iPhone users:  if your contract expires, call your provider, they will always be able to give you a better deal) so I decided to give Vodafone a try first.  Honourably the O2 retentions chap tried asked why I wanted to switch networks so I explained about my reception problems.  He understood that there was nothing he could do about it and so very soon my PAC (Porting Authority Code) was winging its way to me via SMS.

The sign-up process was easy with Vodafone, though the answer to my question “which wireless providers can I use” didn’t get a resoundingly clear answer.  In any case I signed up and all seemed ok.  Ok that is, until I tried using mobile data.  Call reception is largely improved and I can now get signal in some places I previously couldn’t, but sometimes the experience of using the mobile data network, even where I supposedly have full 3G coverage, is utter shite.

Having suffered this for a few weeks I thought I’d jump ship to Orange to give their network a try-out (as I’m out of a long term contract I can opt for 30 day SIM only contracts).  So, this morning I called Orange to check out their offerings.  ”All our tariffs are on our website” the recorded message sounded.  ”They aren’t” I thought, “as I’ve looked and there aren’t any specific SIM only iPhone tariffs listed that include data plans.”  This is also a website, so my experience shows me, that you can’t even browse tariffs on from your iPhone: they have  bastardised version of the site for the iPhone which misses the sections out where you can browse Orange products.  Smart marketing.

Having waited 4 minutes on hold to the sales team (have you ever waited that long for a sales call to be answered?  They are always the quickest calls to be answered…) my call was answered and a lady told me the most sensible tariff for the iPhone.  600 minutes, unlimited texts, free internet and wifi, £25 per month.  Great.

“Who is the wifi partner for Orange?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Which wifi operators can I connect to, you know, BT Openzone, The Cloud etc?”
“The wifi is free, I’m not really sure what you mean….”
“Well, if I go to Starbucks and there is a BT Openzone network available, can I use it for free?”
“Well there might be a charge for that.”
“Ok, so what do you mean by free wifi?”
“Well, you can connect to wifi for free.”
“But I might have to pay….?”
“Hold a moment.”
[A few minutes on hold....]
Ok, so we give you a passcode, which you enter when you connect to a wifi network.  If that code isn’t recognised, then you have to pay.”
“I’m sorry, but that sounds a bit wrong.”
“Ok, let me transfer you to the iPhone team.”
[Several more minutes on hold]
“Hello sir how can I help?”
“Can you please tell me who your wifi partners are, which networks can I use when in public?”
“What is your mobile number sir?”
“No, I don’t have an Orange contract, I’ve just been put through by sales so you can answer this question.”
“Ok sir, please hold.”
[Several minutes on hold]
“I’m sorry sir but I need to transfer you to sales, I’m not allowed to answer your questions as you don’t have a contract with us.”
“No, no, no wait, I’ve just been transferred to you by sales because they don’t know the answer to this simple question, they can’t help me.  You’re telling me you can’t tell me this simple thing?”
“I need to transfer you to sales sir.”
“No, they transferred me to you, they told me they couldn’t answer the question so they were transferring me to the iPhone team.”
“They told you you were being transferred to the iPhone team?  This is customer service.  I’ll transfer you to sales.”
“No no no….  I’m not waiting in line, spending money on this call, only for someone else who doesn’t know the answer to my question to fob me off with some other rubbish.  Unless you can help me now Orange loses this sale.”
“Ok can you hold please sir?”
“No more than 10 seconds, I’ve already had enough this.”
“Ok no more than 10 seconds sir.”
[30 seconds later, I hang up.  Total time on call over 15 minutes]

The moral of the story is, don’t use Orange, they don’t know what the hell is going on, the staff don’t seem well briefed or even well trained – heck, they can’t even transfer a call to the right department, and everybody hates that.

I’m actually thinking of going back to O2, the network has been built to withstand all the iPhone users so the mobile data experience is better, and at least their customer service works.  I’m moving soon, so as long as I can get reception at home and in my new office they’ll do me just fine.

/Rant

When the iPhone came out in 2007 there were a series of ads around that showed off all the new magic that the iPhone brought to us.  At the end of the ad the phone would ring, yet it would ring with a ringtone that was never included with the iPhone.  Well, apparently it is an iLife tune, and is available to download as a ringtone here:

http://www.lifeclever.com/the-missing-iphone-ringtone/

You’re welcome.

I’ve been using FastMail for the last few years to look after my personal email.  I have several domains where I receive email and they all go to one fastmail account.  It’s always had everything I need, with a nice snappy web interface and IMAP access which I can use to collect mail on my iPhone.

Recently however, I’ve become more and more invested in Google, using Google Calendar and Google Contacts to keep track of my diary and maintain my address book.  This works great for me, as I can synchronise these things with my iPhone via push notification (meaning that if I update a contact on my phone the changes are synced to the Google “cloud”), and if I really want, to my desktop PC, albeit in a rather non-elegant way.

For example, these things recently meant that when I had to recently reset my iPhone (due to some problems I was having at the time which turned out to be hardware and didn’t actually need a reset), to get my calendar, contacts and emails all working on the phone again all I had to do was configure the accounts on the phone and magic, contacts and calendar items appear and mail starts being delivered again.  No backup/restore nonsense.

I’m searching for an “all under one roof” solution I suppose.  My buddy Chris used to use FastMail (that’s how come I do now, he recommended it) but now uses Google Apps, and is a real Google convert (he even has the crappy G1 Google phone, the fool).

The key features I suppose I need are mail, contacts, and calendar.  Mail and contacts I really want in one place because when I write a mail, I want to be able to select the contacts from within the app I’m working from.  What brought this home to me as being inconvenient recently was when I sent out an invite for a party.  Because my contacts are in Google, I selected them in my Google Mail account and copied/pasted them into FastMail so I could send the mail.  That is ever so slightly madness – I just shouldn’t have to do that.

So, mail.  FastMail does a great job with its IMAP implementation and the web interface is pretty neat.  Because it’s IMAP it lives with folders, whereas Google uses labels – I’m coming around to the idea of labels, it seems to make sense.  Also, if search works properly, I shouldn’t really need to worry about “filing” emails.  I think Google has search fairly well covered.

FastMail has a neat feature which I like, and to be honest, if Google had this I might not even be considering which way to go.  I get spam.  Everybody gets spam.  To help me track where my spam is generated from (so I can call the company up and call them names, ultimately to no end of course), I assign a unique email address to every company I deal with.  E.g. – all my WordPress mail goes to wordpress@mydomain.com, my Amazon emails all go to amazon@mydomain.com.  This works really well, as now when I get any junk mail I look to which address it’s been sent, and then I can decide how trustworthy a company is based on that and therefore whether I’m likely to deal with them again in the future.  If I need to deal with that company, I’ll email from that same address so as not to confuse matters.  This is the deal breaker – Google doesn’t let me do that – easily.

In Google Mail you can sort of do this, but you have to define the email address first (no need in FastMail) and then prove that you own it via a verification process involving them sending an email to that address, and you confirming via a link.  Why, Google, do I need to prove to you that I own amazon@mydomain.com when we went through a verification process for mydomain.com when I signed up for Google Apps, proving I own the whole damn domain?

Email filtering, either via filing into folders or applying labels is pretty much tit for tat.  Both do it, so this is not a problem in either system.

Contacts then.  FastMail sucks at contacts.  It uses, as most email implementations seem to, a proprietary contacts system that you can’t sync with anything, easily export to/import from anywhere.  This is annoying, and email providers the world over take note – you really suck at this.  Why can’t we all use some joined up working to allow us to easily sync contacts (and calendars) across all platforms without me doing anything smart.  Don’t Make Me Think.

Google, also sucks at contacts (you didn’t see that coming did you?).  It is totally lacking in detail.  I need more fields Google.  Where they win though, is that you can at least sync with your iPhone (or Android phone, if you must).

Calendars, well FastMail doesn’t do calendaring so this is another Google win.

Oh yeah, I should mention that FastMail costs me money, and Google Apps is free.  This doesn’t bother me so much, as it’s not expensive, but it is a consideration.

Reading this back, I’m leaning towards Google, if it wasn’t just for that darn outgoing “from” address thing.  What I’ve also just noticed to my annoyance is that it I export my contacts from my Google Mail account and try to import them into my Google Apps account, the pictures are lost.  This is stupid Google, fix it – it’s from Google to Google dammit!

Ideally someone at Google will read this, think “oh, how could we have been so stupid, this Tom chap is so correct” fix things, make me president of Google and we’ll all live happily ever after.  You never know.  Ok, you do.

I just put Windows 7 on my laptop at home, and it was a breeze.  Not only is the installation for Windows 7 almost a pleasure to work through, but the whole process was made all the more simple for the fact that I have recently purchased a NAS device for my home.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is in essence a hard disk with a network connection which means that all your data is stored on the network, just like it is (or I hope it is) in your office LAN environment.  In the office, such a device is usually a server, or in many cases today one of these NAS devices.

The difference between a home NAS and an enterprise level NAS is all in the specification.  A company server or NAS will have multiple disks in RAID systems protecting against an individual disk failure, and access speeds will be high, creating a highly available system.  Most home NAS devices are single disk systems, meaning if that disk fails, you’ve lost everything.  I should point out now that this is no different almost all PCs – people generally buy a huge disk for their PC and store everything they have on the PC.  Well the same applies, if you lose your hard disk in the PC, you’ve lost your stuff.  As it happens, if something is going to fail in your PC, there it more chance that it will be the hard disk than anything else.  Note to all – always have a backup!

I wasn’t going to put all my stuff in the hands of some single disk punk NAS drive and risk having it all go bye-bye – do you know how long it takes to rip 150 CDs into iTunes?  Nope, if I was going to have a NAS it needed to be at least two disks in what is known as a RAID 1 system – a mirror.  In a RAID 1 you have two disks, and they mirror one another – whatever is written to one is written to the other, and when you read data you can pull pieces of it from either disk which can speed up data retrieval times.  The only downside is that you need two disks, and you only have the capacity of one of them.  Another note here, there is another system called RAID 0 which is not really RAID at all (the ‘R’ in RAID stands for redundant).  Here data is written across both drives which means that the total capacity both disks combined is available, but if you lose one disk you’ve lost the data on both of them.  RAID 0 is sometimes known as striping too.

Back to my system….  I went for an Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B from RAIDSonic.  This is an empty drive enclosure which takes two disks.  To fill it up I went for two Seagate Barracuda ST31000340NS 1TB hard disks – lots of capacity.  Once everything arrived I took it all home and set about putting it together.

The drive enclosure is secured with a few screws just to keep the lid on, so I popped those off.  Inside there is a basic circuit board and the connectors for the two SATA disks to plug in.  What is also inside is a temperature sensor, which once you have installed your first disk (or only disk – you don’t have to have two, but why wouldn’t you, right?) you tape to the top of the disk.  Then, once the second disk goes in you have a temperature sensor sitting in between the two drives.  This tells the system whether or not to power the fan.  To be honest, I think in my device the fan is pretty much on all the time judging by the light humming coming from behind the sofa, unless the cat has climbed the evolutionary ladder and taken up humming.  The hard disks push into place in between four rubber fixings which form part of the screw attachment fixing – you screw through these rubber rings and into the mounting holes in the drive itself.  This ensures that the drive isn’t subjected to too much shock if the enclosure is bumped about.  All clever stuff.

Once I had the disks in I fired the little blighter up and connected via the web interface to the management console.  The device initially has an IP address which is fixed (I think, this is from memory from a few months ago, please correct me if I’m wrong).  You hook up a laptop straight into the ethernet port on the device and away you go.  Setup is a doddle, there are loads of options on the thing but the essentials are getting the storage right,  I told it to create a RAID 1 system and format as FAT (for my Windows systems) and let it get on with it.  If you poke about in the interface you can have it manage your DHCP, be an iTunes server, a Twonky Media server, a printer server (it has a USB port for attaching said printer), an FTP server.  To deal with file and FTP access you can setup users and groups to grant access to users, and even grant quotas.

Although the speed of access is nowhere near 100Mb, it’s still very usable for the home and dare I say it small office environment.  In my house everything is wireless, so I’m restricted by the bandwidth available via the wireless connection anyway.  Overall I am very pleased with my NAS and now much more comforted that I have loads of space, and some redundancy built in too.  And you know what, a few weeks after I got this up and running, one of the drives failed.  If that had been a drive in my PC I would be screwed, but I just shut the NAS down, took out the dead drive, packaged it off to Seagate (the Seagate drives has a 5 year warranty) and they sent me back a new one.  When it arrived I popped it back into the NAS and it went off and rebuilt itself.  Cool huh.

The title of this post suggests there was more to my joy of this solution than just the NAS itself, and that is correct.  Usually when I rebuild a PC or laptop there is always something I forget to backup, my profile, favourites or desktop items.  Not now.  As well as making sure everything I need is on the NAS, I now use many “cl0ud” based services to supplement this, which also has the benefit of making certain stuff I need available wherever I am in the world.  I use FastMail for my email which provides IMAP access through Outlook if I want it, or a web interface if I’m travelling, Google for my contacts and calendar (and secondary email account) which I can sync to my iPhone (which means if I lose my iPhone I don’t lose all my calendar and contacts too), Delicious for my bookmarks, together with the Firefox extension plugin which enables my Delicious bookmarks to take the place of the Firefox ones.  I even have my iTunes library now on the NAS.

This all meant that I didn’t hesitate in bombing my laptop and putting the new release candidate of Windows 7 on my laptop to play with – I took a quick look for stuff I might have saved to the desktop and blew it away.  And I lost nothing.  I’m going to do the same with my desktop PC soon too.

By the way – Windows 7 rocks, try it out.

I have just tried to use MyRail, the free iPhone app I have been using for months to provide me with train timetable information, only to be presented with a message informing that they are no longer allowed to display the information due to licensing.

Odd that the national rail folks don’t seem to be bothered about the old “trains” app I have which still works. Of course this will have notiongto do with the fact that that have their own 4.99 app doing the same thing. Bastards.

I suppose it was inevitable given that they have been ordering people to take down their iPhone apps providing the same functionality, but National Rail has launched an iPhone app.  At £4.99 it is expensive as apps of this nature go, although so far it has nothing but rave reviews.  I have to say I’m shocked about that.

I mentioned in a previous post that National Rail have previously ordered other folks to take down iPhone apps and websites providing a far superior experience for discovering train info than their own website, and using their data to boot.  I am shocked that people seem to be very pleased with their iPhone offering considering their website for the very same thing is nothing short of utter shite.  I would have thought that a sensible thing for them to have done would be to buy out the most successful app already in existence, rather than chugging away at a new version of the good old wheel.

I still hang on to my older apps which I managed to get before they were torn down from the store, the best of which I got for free.  I’m afraid you won’t be getting a review from me of the National Rail version of it as there is no way that I’m shelling out 5 quid for something which should be freely available given that they probably want people to be using trains.  The alternative is to put up with their damn awful website, which rather than improve they’ve decided to advertise on to bring in revenue.  Tip for the rail folks:  if people could easily and efficiently get accurate information about their train journeys on a consistent basis, the revenue would come from customers, bums on seats, you know the sort.

Just an idea.

Apple are giving the public a preview of what is to come in the new version of the iPhone OS tomorrow which will be version 3.0.  As I’ve previously mentioned I’m a huge fan of the iPhone and am excited by the new stuff that they will include in what ought to be a markedly different version, given the major version number change to 3.0 from the current 2.2.1.

As usual there are rumours floating around as to what these new features will be and Kevin Rose is throwing his hat into the ring to tell us what will and won’t be happening (he was bang on with the iPod Nano stuff last year, although has previously been way off).  I don’t really care what actually makes it in, but what does I’m expecting to be great stuff.  Apple has a great reputation for innovation and creativity which is what gets people excited for these events, there is always such a buzz around them.

We’ll see tomorrow I guess.  Check out theiphoneblog.com for live coverage of the event!

Twitter is a social networking site with a very limited focus.  Its sole reason for being, say its authors, is to allow its users to answer the question “what are you doing?”  Think of it as your Facebook status.  That’s it.  Really.  It has been dismissed and mocked by those that do not quite understand it, only later for them to succumb to the temptation themselves.  More recently, ‘celebrities’ have been signing up in droves, joining the throng in what looks to be this year’s new toy.

In fact Twitter has been around for at least a couple of years, and was for the longest time a niche exploited by Silicon Valley tech folks like Leo Laporte (twit.tv, leoville.com, @leolaporte) and his friends.  Even John C Dvorak (dvorak.org/blog, @therealdvorak) was late to the party, rubbishing Twitter for the longest time before finally succumbing to its advances.  Now he’s a regular user and happy to be so.

So what is it about Twitter that makes it so popular?  Different strokes for different folks, it has to be.  People with a huge following like Dvorak or Laporte can use Twitter to their advantage, to crowd source or get a message to a huge number of people almost immediately.  The folks who are following them are hoping to find out something new, interesting or funny from someone they admire or have an interest in.

There is an element of voyeurism too.  Jonathon Ross and Robert Llewellyn are happy to share with you their day-to-day activities in a way which brings their followers closer to them, and allows them to directly interface with their fanbase.  It brings a feeling of being connected.  For the less famous of us, Twitter is about the following, and an opportunity to get a reply from a person that you would likely otherwise never have the opportunity to meet.

Stephen Fry is a phenomenon.  He does little more than provide an insight into his daily schedule and provide some of his clever wit, yet he has amassed a following which at the time of writing this is second only to the president of the USA in the twitter rankings.  Fry does little if nothing in the way of self promotion, so it would appear his following is nothing short of a reflection of the adoration his public has for him.

Twitter is replacing blogging in many places.  This no doubt has a lot to do with the ease at which one can contribute – updates can be made via the web and many many clients for both handheld devices like the iPhone as well as PCs and Macs.  There is also the 140 character limit, which has led to this form of communication to be referred to as micro-blogging.  Short sharp ‘tweets’ are much easier to throw out than thoughtful, considered blog postings.

There is something for everyone in Twitter.  Get signed up and follow some folks you like.

The National Rail website for UK travel information is awful, truly awful.  It’s badly designed to start with, and functionality is worse.  Trying to find the times of trains on their website is a cumbersome business because of the way they have put this thing together.

It’s refreshing then to see other people putting together sites and applications which feed on the information available via nationalrail.co.uk but do a much better job on presentation, speed and ease of use.  I have an iPhone, and have a couple of applications I use to look up train times, Trains and MyRail which has become my favourite.  If you follow either of those links you’ll find that neither application is available any longer.

National Rail is incredibly protective about their data.  I’m not sure why, it’s already in the public domain via their website.  If they did a good enough job of providing the information in the first place then people wouldn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel, but their service sucks and so people do.

Trains and MyRail are not the first or last to have been pulled due to National Rail asking for the service to be removed.  My buddy Chris Roos setup a National Rail Twitter Service which he has now had to take down due to a request from National Rail, and other services will come and go.

Somehow, Matthew Somerville has been allowed to persist with traintimes.org.uk, a slimmed version of the main National Rail website.  The horrid usability has been replicated but Matthew’s site does seem more responsive and has ‘bookmarkable URLs‘ which the main site does not.  How Matthew has been allowed to continue where others have not is a bit of a mystery though.  I should clear up now that I am not advocating the removal of Matthew’s service but rather a uniform application of policy and allowing everyone to access this publicly available data paid for by their customers.

The National Rail service also suffers from obvious scaling issues in times of high demand such as now when we have very bad weather.  I’m in IT, and I understand that you do not normally scale a website to cope with absurd peaks just in case Stephen Fry mentions your site on Twitter.  However, a service like this which a heck of a lot of people depend on should be able to cope with high demand – the operation of the country depends on it.

The safari experience on the iPhone does seem to be a little more stable.  I’ve been using it this last hour to hop around a bunch of different websites and it hasn’t crashed once.  ‘Old safari’ would have crashed at least once during that time, so it does look like the experience has improved.

I was going to use safari to write this post but sadly I couldn’t click into the box where you type this text, one of those little nuances of using a mobile browser.  Handily I have this splendid little iPhone app that I can use instead.  Unfortunately it lacks spell checking and link management, so I’ll tidy up later.  That at least isn’t Apple’s fault!

Let me reiterate – I love my iPhone, and I love Apple too!