Pete Ashton’s Blog

We continue our hopefully short series of posts about the mobile phone I was sent for free on the condition that I didn’t have to review it if I didn’t want to but still find myself wanting to write about. Yesterday we concluded that all mobile phones are shit and this one is no exception. The industry has managed to pack an incredible about of technology into a small object, such that it would be indistinguishable from magic 20 years ago, and yet make the whole experience of using the thing more irritating than irritated bowel syndrome.

But from what little I’ve heard about this phone (and I’ve been deliberately ignoring the hype and reviews) that’s not the point. It’s supposed to be a bog-standard phone. What’s different is the built-in Skype.

Before I got any further here’s a chart taken from the iPhone UK pages.

There are, you’ll note, three tariffs increasing in the amount of calls you can make and texts you can send. And yet they all come with “unlimited data”. Now, call me a fucking pedant but what is a text if not an incredibly small amount of data? Come to think of it, aren’t phone calls just data? Or are they converted into analogue sound waves as soon as they hit the tower? This, in short, is a con.

Skype and other VoIP systems are revolutionary not because they are generally free but because they break though this bullshit by saying everything is data and you can’t discriminate between the end use. Text, audio, video, whatever - it’s all the same when it’s reduced to 1s and 0s. So if your ISP lets you send email “for free” then it should also let you make phone calls.

The Skype phone, then, is something of a brave move for 3mobile (as I will call them so I don’t have random digits cluttering the place up) as they’re pulling away the curtain and revealing their lack of clothes, to mix a metaphor. The Skype service is treated as data and thus only works when you can access the internet with the phone. You can therefore use this phone to call other Skype accounts all over the world for free without being tied to your computer or wifi network. This is very good indeed.

So last night I called my mother in New Zealand, ostensibly just to try it out but being my mother we talked for 45 minutes. The connection was better than usual which doesn’t mean a whole lot as Skype calls vary tremendously depending how your call is routed, but it was a good thing. Usually we get a bit of a time delay but it was pretty minimal. And the connection did’t drop. Considering it was being done over a mobile line the quality was good. And, above all, I was phoning New Zealand for free. Sure, I was doing it from my flat so nothing really changed but I could have been anywhere there’s a 3G signal.

Incoming calls are pretty indistinguishable from normal mobile calls which was a little odd at first. Not a problem, just a little weird. No-one’s supposed to have this number so I freaked out a little when it rang.

The next test was instant messaging. Having gotten used to the 10p per text scam (I’ve always been a pay-as-you-go kinda guy rather than paying some absurd amount each month for a contract) this was pretty revolutionary. Not only can you “text” as much as you like you can send well over the 160 character limit. But that’s not the big advantage. Because they’re free I found myself sending little bursts and actually having a conversation rather than constantly thinking about the cost and maximizing the characters I sent. So other than some hiccups with the keypad having buttons in slightly different places to the usual phone I was loving this a lot.

When you’re logged into Skype on your computer the phone takes priority for incoming calls. Or at least mine does. There doesn’t seem to be a way to say which has priority. And when using IM on both it can get a little confused. Messages sent from the phone never seem to appear on the computer but the reverse will sometimes happen, displaying them in different colours despite coming from the same account. Or maybe I’m getting confused.

The downside is 3mobile have crippled Skype a bit. You can’t use your Skypeout account to call normal phone numbers which is a big shame and you can’t send files held on your phone over Skype. You have to use the mobile phone network for that which costs many monies. That’s fair enough I suppose since they need to recoup the internet use at some point. Interestingly the Skype functionality really is free and not part of an internet data plan. All you need is to have some credit on your phone. (At least I think that’s right - decoding mobile tariffs makes my head hurt - another reason I hate mobile phone companies.) I guess the future for this is a system where you pay for the unlimited internet connection and can use your Skypeout account.

The phones themselves cost £50 which doesn’t seem too bad for an unsubsidized pay-as-you-go.

And that’s about it. I guess if you use Skype and are in the market for a new non-contract mobile this isn’t a bad option. But I’m really not an expert. What I can say is the Skype stuff works as described, which is refreshing.

For some reason I’ve been sent a free Skype mobile phone from the annoyingly named “3″ company. I last had a new phone in 2003. It’s got a black and white screen and doesn’t do much more than make calls and send texts. This is my first real adventure with what passes for cutting edge in the non-iPhone world of mobiles. And I’m pretty darn tech-savvy. So let’s see how I do.

11.45am

General Setup

Switching on is simple as is setting the date and time. I can’t be bothered to set my wallpaper but have hit my first stubling block. The instructions to set the ringtone just don’t relate to the phone.

Ah, figured it out. There are two left buttons, one on the rocker and one an actual key. Least offensive noises selected - a doorbell for text messages and the “school bell” for calls. There’s nothing resembling an actual telephone, of course. And thank heaven I’ve managed to switch off the retarded clicking noise every time a key is pressed.

12.00

Voicemail set up. Hated doing that.

12.03

Bored now. Let’s see what this site looks like on the mobile web. Eek! The phone doesn’t seem to get curly quotes (which Wordpress puts in by default and which I don’t really like but never got around to sorting) and images seem a little pointless. But at least it loads stuff and is readable. Charges by the MB apparently or for £5 a month.

Okay, it’s a mobile phone and as expected I’m rather unimpressed with the whole experience. But that’s not why I have this. I have this for the Skype function. Let’s see how that works.

12.13

Skype set up was very easy, but then I already have a Skype account. The only problem is none of my Skype buddies are online right now, so I’ll have to test this later on.

Possibly the best thing about this phone is I really can’t be bothered to play with it. If it were something intuitive and usable that made me want to investigate every inch of its capabilities and push it to the edge then I’d just waste the whole day. As it is I’m going to get on with some work now.

The iPhone might not be perfect (and I have no intention of getting one until the cut’n'paste issue is sorted at the very least) but you can see why Apple went for the mobile market. They general standard really is poor.

On the plus side I’ll be able to make Skype calls away from Wifi spots and without my laptop on my lap. Which, considering the phone and service is free (for the next three months anyway), isn’t bad at all. It’d just be nicer if the phone wasn’t irritating. (Not complaining, just reviewing.)

For the record, this is a three month trial and then it has to be sent back so I’ll be keeping my current phone and number going. So nothing has changed on the contact front.

Continuing the symbiotic relationship between bloggers and journalists in the fair city of Brum I had a communication from Jo today about this CiB post.

“What the hell are you playing at, breaking news like that?” she didn’t actually say as I’m paraphrasing. “That’s my territory!”

“Well,” I explained, “you notice how I didn’t actually back it up with research, quotes or even the slightest shred of evidence? That’s your job.”

And happiness prevailed across the land. (Except for the poor sod at the Council who has to explain this nonsensical decision. Apologies dude.)

Unless Jonny B:iNS has some weird notion of when November ends there’s a little over three days to go in the Brummie of the Year 2007 awards. Right now there are 21 votes between the lovely Mr Tighe and myself. If you haven’t already then search your soul and do what you need to do.

Previously:
Vote Early, Vote Often
Day 8 update
Meeting Mr Tighe

Back in the mid-late 1990s when I was distributing small press comics through the mail (as the original incarnation of BugPowder) one of my favourites was Goathland, a diary comic by John Welding. I haven’t really thought about John much recently (hence my only-just-now discovery of his lovely looking blog) but images from Goathland, seared onto my brain circa ten years ago, occasionally spring to mind. One in particular went a little like this:

John and Helen, having recently moved from Milton Keynes to the village of Goathland in the North Yorks Moors, are getting ready for the winter. They move everything into one room of their cottage and hang blankets up over windows and doorways, nesting for the cold months ahead.

I’ve been sort of doing that this last week. While the “two rooms” notion, making a distinction between sleep and work, was a nice one in the summer it’s not proving quite so effective in the winter as it’s easier and more financially sensible to keep one room warm. Added to this the whole laptop phenomena (a relatively new development when I moved in) means I’ve pretty much been working from bed while at home. The table in the kitchen ain’t been used much.

So I’ve put together my work desk (previously in pieces above the cupboard) and set it up in the corner of the bedroom. Right now it’s a bit a of a bodge but when I get back from NZ I’ll put a bit more thought into it, perhaps figuring out a way to shut the work-stuff away at night.

A different form of migration has been taking place online as I’m falling headlong into the ever-lovin’ arms of the Google corporation. A brief experiment with their Reader proved a success so I’ve moved over to that from the Mac-based NetNewsWire and today I told Gmail, which I’d previously been accessing through POP, to get the peteashton.com email directly meaning I no longer need to use Apple Mail.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly the interfaces in Gmail and Reader, while taking a bit of getting used to, are far superior to the desktop versions. Don’t ask me why but they are. Secondly the search is much quicker, especially for the feeds. But most importantly the flagging (or in Google’s case “starring” ) system seems to work better for me. With NNW and Mail I’d be flagging stuff but never coming back to it meaning the process was kinda pointless. With Google I do. There’s no rational reason for this -it just works for me.

I’ve also started adding stuff that didn’t come through feeds or mail into Google Bookmarks. Del.icio.us and the like never really grabbed me but if I can somehow integrate these three systems into One Single Place (the iGoogle home page thingy really feels like a backward step) then that’ll be a super way to funnel stuff into the blogs. Which is what this is really all about. I’m now in the business of information management, filtering all the crap about online into useful things for my blogs. These Google tools seem to have enabled this a lot more than I was expecting and I still have to figure out how to use them betterer.

Later: It occurred to me what the difference is between the Google apps and the desktop apps. Mail, NNW and (for bookmarks) Firefox are all about filing stuff away whereas Google is all about using stuff. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

I feel violated. But only a bit as it was bound to happen at some point. Thanks to a comment I discovered today that my site had been hacked. More specifically my Wordpress installation. At the bottom of each page, hidden using CSS, were a whole load of links to Viagra-style sites.

If you want to check your blog (and it’s worth doing as Google et al penalize sites that hide links like this, not to mention that you’re rewarding the wankers who do this shit) either view the source or switch off the styles in your browser. If you don’t see anything untoward then you’re okay.

If you do, and you’re running Wordpress, have a look in the “Footer” module for a bit of code which I did make a copy of but have now lost… Suffice to say it wasn’t obviously evil. Once you’ve figured it out, delete it and everything should be fine.

And then change your password. In fact change your password right now.

This week in Birmingham the sport has been sticking captions on Edgbaston councilor and prospective parliamentary candidate Deirdre Alden.

She runs a fascinating weblog all about the fascinating stuff she does in the community and, critically, includes photos of herself doing it. And she’s always smiling, in stark contrast to the campaigning camcorder councilor Martin Mullaney who, while not an overly serious chap (he runs a comedy club after all) does tend to stress the gravitas a bit.

So it came to pass that some bright spark decided Deidre was crying out to be LOL’ed and set up a Flickr account putting funny captions on a few of her recent shots. No doubt using her journalistic skillz Jo came across it and since then a small cabal of net-savvy freaks have been putting words in her mouth, including, of course, myself. I don’t know who’s running the loldeirdre account - I just got in touch with him/her within Flickr and was given an email address to directly upload my pics.

And then the madness started. I’ve spent most of this afternoon obsessing over Deirdre. I’ve never met her but I’ve built up this complex character in my head, one that I’m starting to care about. This isn’t a parody for me and it’s certainly not an insult. It’s something else. What, I’m not quite sure, but thankfully there’s a whole year of photos in her archives just waiting for the captions.

I wonder what she’ll make of it all?

In one of those moments that shows how the comics “industry” has it’s head so firmly stuck up it’s arse that it, quite frankly, deserves to die miserably there’s great shock that Los Bros Hernandez are to stop publishing their work in pamphlet form and are instead to just publish graphic novels with spines once a year. The reasoning being that readers prefer this with the added bonus that it makes artistic sense.

Even my good chum Rich Bruton is astonished saying “it could easily be one of those defining moments in the Comic Business that we will look back on and identify as a discreet point in time where the entire industry changed.”

I don’t now about that. What I do know is the pamphlet (28-36 pages with staples coming out monthly or so) is a really stupid format. I stopped buying them ages ago because unless you’ve got a specialised storage system they’re incredibly annoying to have around the place. Despite getting rid of most of my pamphlets I still have a couple of boxes and they’re buried in a cupboard. Meanwhile the comics with spines are on the shelf and re-read frequently.

That the comics industry didn’t dump the pamphlet years ago is a testament to how fucking stupid and irrelevant it is. Sure, there’s a hardcore audience who like them - there’s an audience for vinyl but no-one thinks it’s going to save the record industry.

What’s most astonishing about the comics industry is how it makes the book publishing industry look like a paragon of good business practice and, as anyone who’s mixed with book publishers knows, that’s quite the achievement.

Whatever, I look forward to more Hernandez published in the right format from the off. It’s about time.

Later: Hmm - reading that press release properly it’s not quite there yet. “Fantagraphics confirmed that the stories published in Volume III will eventually be collected into logical graphic novels/collections.” Gah! Why not just publish the bloody graphic novels from the off if that’s the “logical” way to do it?