Real World Computing

I'm also really starting to appreciate having a map available wherever I go: while you'll always have your phone with you, you may not always remember to bring along a standalone Bluetooth GPS receiver (or it may need charging). I got totally lost while walking to the railway station in a strange town the other day, so I simply pulled a TyTN II out of my pocket, fired up Google Maps (which talks to the internal GPS receiver) and quickly found my way to the station. Without this mobile map facility I'd almost certainly have missed my train, and would then have had to wait for another hour or so. If you start to tot up the lost-productivity cost of wasted hours like that, people will soon choose to pay a premium for a smartphone with built-in GPS.

Incidentally, as I've mentioned here before, the phone I currently find best suits me is the BlackBerry Curve 8300, so I was really pleased when I recently received an upgrade from T-Mobile to the latest 8310 version, which is essentially the same device but with an onboard GPS receiver. Externally, the two versions look identical, and it's only when you go poking around among the menus that you'll discover the GPS controls.

As with the 8800 that I wrote about a few months back, the 8310 comes with the free BlackBerry Maps application, giving you access to worldwide mapping - all you pay for are the mobile data charges, and it's a fairly efficient application that responds quickly and uses data frugally. Having said that, I prefer the Google Maps application that you can download from http://maps.google.co.uk/gmm: it isn't as nippy as RIM's BlackBerry Maps, but the maps look nicer and you get the additional option to switch to a so-called "satellite view" (although if you're zoomed in far enough the images will actually have come from low-flying aeroplanes rather than satellites). Whatever you call it, GPS and mobile mapping is the hot topic right now, and no-doubt one that I'll be returning to often in future columns.

Skype or hype?

As I write this month's column, the big news story in the mobile phone world appears to be a new handset from 3 with a built-in Skype client. Hmmm.... You know how politicians like to announce things several times over so that they get the maximum amount of kudos for a popular idea? Well, I think there's a certain amount of that happening here with the 3/Skype announcement. Sure, the new phone has a big Skype button, but it most certainly isn't the first time Skype has been available from phones on the 3 network - the company has been selling its X-Series phones for some time now, all of which had a Skype client built in and where even the cheapest £20-per-month tariff has unlimited Skype calls included.

Don't get me wrong, I think internet telephony is a great idea (although I'm a bigger fan of open systems such as SIP-based services than I am of the proprietary Skype), and I wish that more mobile handsets shipped with a VoIP client. My complaint is actually with the newspapers and TV stations that just took this particular press release at face value and turned it into a big story without doing the research to determine whether or not it really was news.

A similar thing happened with a recent press release from T-Mobile, which announced a great new Pay As You Go data tariff that's capped at £4 per day. It generated lots of column inches in various newspapers, but as regular readers of this column will know the previous PAYG data tariff from this network was capped at just £1 per day! I find it quite astonishing that a price increase could generate that amount of positive press, and I wasn't particularly surprised when my email to T-Mobile's press spokesperson asking for clarification about this and another apparent price increase went unanswered.

Continued....