Hal MacLean

One of the tools I used yesterday in Reading was a rather nifty SMS tool, which allows me to receive SMS messages on a mobile phone and display them to the audience. All through the power of bluetooth and some technical wizardry!

As a tool when presenting it offers the audience a chance to interact directly – asking questions, making comments and so on. You need to be careful who you use it with though – there is no moderation, and although the sender’s phone number is captured, the messages appear without any names or identifying features… so all pretty anonymous.

The screen capture here shows what happened when it was used in Reading. As you can see from some of the comments… my mac fell over during the presentation!

If you are looking to do the same thing, drop me a line and we can talk about how we might work on it for you.

Barely days old, and this is what you get:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/06/iphone-autopsy-.html 

Sigh… I guess someone had to be first! Fuelled by beer and a few screwdrivers, the inside of the iPhone is revealed in a somewhat clumsy manner – but interesting nonetheless!

I’ll start by saying I don’t actually mind people using a phone on a train. In fact, I’d prefer people spoke than sat in silence, even if the speaking is to an unseen recipient in a conversation. I also think there are times when a phone on a train is essential, particularly at those busy times when you need to be in touch for work reasons but have to travel to meetings by train.

I’m not worried so much about the London Underground or any other tube based train system. I kind of expect not to be able to use my phone on those. They are, for the most part, underground! I realise that in the Dartford Tunnel you can get a radio signal in your car, but in a tube train you can’t. ’nuff said.

What I really, honestly, absolutely can’t understand is why overground trains have such exceptionally poor reception for mobile phone signals. Even when the train is running through a massively open area, and phone masts are in plain view, my phone struggles to get a signal. Perhaps the train was going too fast… (err, ok, perhaps not).

So here’s my idea and this should work on any electrically powered train.

If the trains had mobile phone ‘base stations’ in each carriage, capable of handling the numbers of phones in use, and those base stations were connected to the overhead cables, surely the cables could be used to carry the data signal to a repeater station that then linked to the main cellular network? It seems as if this isn’t possible – I can’t be the first to think of it, and I’m sure some phone companies will have investigated why this isn’t possible. I’d like to know where I can read about it all and find out why it isn’t possible. If I am the first, and it turns out it *is* possible, then why the heck hasn’t it happened yet?

OK, I’ll come clean. I was on a journey from London Euston to Preston in Lancashire on Friday (yesterday). We went right through the middle of the country, via Milton Keynes, Wigan and so on. I needed to make one five minute call, but it took over an hour to complete with all of the dropped signals and nonsense I had to contend with. I was really quite agitated by it all, and I can’t be the only one to have suffered in this way.

Is anyone doing any research into this, or a feasibility study? I’d love to be involved.

I have been using mobile phones since about 1990 and from the beginning have always been with Orange (Hutchinson telecom, as it used to be, I think). However, lately I have grown more dissatisfied with Orange as a service provider and when the time came to change my work phone to my own number the crunch came.

I needed to keep my work number, but it was part of a large contract deal which meant that I couldn’t just transfer the number to my other phone. I asked this several times, in several places and was told it just couldn’t be done. Odd then, that several colleagues appear to have managed it. That was issue 1.

I have always lost my signal when traveling south on the M11 between J7 and J6 Which has been somewhat of a nuisance. I can also get no signal with Orange when sitting at home. This is inconvenient, but not enough on its own to cause me to change provider, but this is issue 2.

Recently we upgraded one of our own phones and wanted to pass the old handset on to a relative. This meant that we needed Orange to unlock the handset – something that is promised within about ten days. After four weeks it still hadn’t been done and in the end we took the phone to a ‘bloke on the market’ who had the necessary piece of kit to do the job. It cost the same amount but the wait caused by Orange caused some inconvenience. That was issue 3.

Finally, I decided to look around and see what else was available and for the first time in years went into a Carphone Warehouse. To my delight it has changed!

My phone needs are pretty specific – I have to have a T610 phone or spend mega bucks getting a new cradle for my car kit. I therefore went in asking for 200 minutes a month, on a T610, with a minimal number of texts. The salesman was great and recommended T-Mobile…

The T-Mobile deal is for a T610 (unlocked already), 200 minutes and, for the first six months, 200 texts a month as well. The line rental is ��29.99 (reduced by 50% for the first six months) and the contract is for 18 months. Nothing too unusual about that… until you see that you get ALL of the line rental money back at six monthly intervals.

Yes! You did read that correctly! ALL OF THE LINE RENTAL IS REFUNDED TO YOU. That means that the ��430 pounds I will be spending on this phone over the next 18 months will be refunded. I have three vouchers which I post off at the relevant time and they return me a cheque.

So what is the cost? Well, naturally if you exceed the 200 minutes or texts then you pay the call costs… and to get the deal you have to pay ��99.99. So from the outset you have got a mobile phone with a pretty generous call and text allowance for 18 months for the princely sum of approximately ��5.55 per month.

There it is… go get that deal if you want it! I am fairly sure it won’t be lasting too much longer…