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Rebel yell

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:26

Paul Ockenden looks at an alternative to removing the SIM lock on expensive phones, and tweaks his Touch HD.

I eventually ended up buying a Pure PocketDAB 1500, which works and does everything it says on the box, but doesn't do anything my old Ministry Of Sound one didn't - and to add insult to injury it's in a much bigger case. And that isn't because it's so full of electronics, because the small Li-ion battery sits inside a compartment that was obviously designed to accept 3 x AA alkaline cells (as PC Pro pointed out in its original review way back in 2006 - see web ID: 90230). Rather it just looks like lazy product design. Perhaps I've just been spoiled by the smartphone sector, where the innovation over the past couple of years has been fantastic, especially from the likes of Apple and HTC. Right now the pocket DAB market is indeed in a very sad state, so perhaps those news stories were true after all.

Wi-Fi too high

I was glad to see Expedia making a fuss about the cost of Wi-Fi in hotels, since it's one of my bugbears too. Many smaller hotels offer free Wi-Fi service but the bigger and swishier outfits, especially those abroad, still seem to think it's all right to charge £1 for ten minutes of Wi-Fi time. I wouldn't mind paying a token sum for Wi-Fi access, but I don't like to feel I'm being ripped off. So my advice is, if you're planning a stay somewhere or organising a meeting room in an hotel, ask them if they have free Wi-Fi available. I'm not suggesting that you actually boycott those places that don't, but if enough of us start asking this question then maybe, just maybe, they'll start to get the message.

Applications

I've been spending a fair bit of time recently playing with applications on the main mobile phone platforms, everything from high-end enterprise stuff like SAP clients through to freebie games available from the various vendors' online application stores. I'll report back more fully in a future column, but one thing that's struck me immediately is that in the "free clients for social networking sites" category, the iPhone seems to do really well while the BlackBerry does quite badly (and there's a very varied range of Windows Mobile clients sitting somewhere in between these extremes).

Take official Facebook clients, for example. On the iPhone, if someone comments on my status I can see the comment and reply from the phone via the client, whereas in the BlackBerry client I can see the comment but can't reply to it without logging onto the Facebook website first.

And while on the iPhone I get a full display of the Facebook messaging system, with my inbox and all sent items available (even those that I typed using the web interface); in the BlackBerry client, I only have access to messages I received using that client and replies I typed on the phone. It all seems a bit half-baked.

A similar situation exists with Twitter: while there's no official client available for either iPhone or BlackBerry, I've looked at some of the ones that are highly recommended by other Twitter users. On the iPhone I found TwitterFon, which offers a very clean interface and is really easy to use. On the BlackBerry, most users seem to favour either TwitterBerry or TinyTwitter, both of which look positively archaic in comparison to their iPhone cousin.

I'm not entirely sure why this should be, but I wonder whether those people who are capable of building attractive and intuitive applications are simply more attracted to the iPhone as a development platform, which would be understandable. Like I said, I'll follow up with a more detailed discussion of some of these mobile applications in a few months' time, so stay tuned! And in the meantime, if you're signed up with Twitter then feel free to follow @PaulOckenden and @pc_pro.