The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Posts tagged Annoying
ITV in ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ shocker
Oct 18th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Link: BBC NEWS | Entertainment | ITV ‘misled viewers on phone-ins’
So TV broadcaster ITV have just finished an internal A review into their use of premium SMS and phone services.. and guess what? They’ve figured that they screwed up, and overcharged a stack of people. Ok so they didn’t exactly say those words – preferring to announce the discovery of a “serious cultural failure” within the company.
According to executive chairman Michael Grade, the company made £7.8m from uncounted votes. Whether that’s just their cut of the revenue or the amount ripped out of viewers isn’t clear – however he did say they’d reimburse anyone who was ‘misled’.
Mr. Grade also said “I’ve never been involved in anything as grisly as this or anything that’s damaged broadcasting as much as this”.
Perhaps he hasn’t watched the output of his own channel lately?
Daily Mail readers h8 txt msgs
Sep 24th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Link: I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language | the Daily Mail
It must be a slow news day over at the Daily Mail. With no apparent stories of immigrants stealing our jobs, paedophiles ravaging our kids or any other general threat to the pretend ‘la la land’ middle England readership that the Daily Mail purports to represent, they’ve decided to lay into text messaging.
It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.
They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.
Right.. I’d imagine Genghis Khan would be a little peeved to have his plundering and pillaging antics compared to someone asking if you fancy a pint later (or should that be l8r?)
PS: I expect someone will buy me this t-shirt after my little rant
Beware of cheap imitations
Sep 17th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
The internet is about collaboration, community, and the sharing of information, right? Even more so with blogging – which is why we love writing this site so much. However, what’s not really fair is ripping off the whole blog, removing all references to SMS Text News and republishing it under your own name.
Quoting our stuff is good, and is welcomed. There’s nothing wrong with link love either.. but the biscuit is well and truely taken when you find sites out there that are pumping every single article we lovingly handcraft for your reading pleasure straight into their own site and passing it off as their own. No link love, no hat tips, no credits, no nothing. And then they fill it up with Google ads, get it indexed by the search engines, and sit back to wait for their fortune to amass from advertising – ableit very slowly.
Honestly (and I’m sure Ewan will agree), it’s not an ego thing – it’s just principle. If you’ve referenced posts in your own blog or site in the past, we salute you. If you’ve given us link love or a hat tip, again you’re our friend – and we owe you a pint sometime.
However.. If you’re one of those people who are ripping everything we post lock stock and barrel, removing all sign of a credit, pretending it’s yours and didn’t even have the decency to ask first – then watch this space. Your details might be appearing on a ‘name and shame’ list in the not too distant future..
From Good to utter crap in a few months
Aug 17th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
I used to love my Good mobile email. Having seen Ewan wax lyrically about it in previous blogs, I took the plunge in April, got myself a Nokia E61 and a Good-enabled account with Fasthosts.
It was all lovely and dandy for a while, but in the last few months it’s gone completely to pot. The application itself is constantly crashing on my phone – which wouldn’t normally be the end of the world except it holds all my contacts. This means I’m getting phone calls and texts from people who are in my address book but no name coming up on the screen – just a number. I’ve sent a few embarrasing replies to texts asking who people are – which really makes me look stupid.
At the moment, the last email in my Outlook inbox is 1.53pm today. The last one on my Good app? 10.09pm last night. There’ve been quite few emails in between those times. No amount of synchronization, restarting, prodding poking or hitting my phone seems to want to make it sync.
Just to check it wasn’t just me, I talked to Ewan. He’s running good on a Nokia E61i – and is having the same problems. Maybe Good will fix it in their new version – announced as ‘coming soon’ a while back but no ones quite sure when…
In the meantime, I’m seriously considering my alternatives. I like my push email, in fact I rely on it to keep in touch when I’m out and about. However, if it ain’t doing the job, why bother keeping it?
Answers on a postcard please.. especially if you’re from Good themselves.
Update: about three hours after I wrote this blog entry, all my mails mysteriously appeared, and my mailbox is now up to date. I haven’t heard anything official from Good or Fasthosts as to why it was broken, but then I wasn’t expecting a miracle.
‘Smishing’ outbreak hits Canadian town
Aug 16th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Link: BCNG Portals Page (R)
Welcome to the picturesque town of Maple Ridge, about 45 minutes East of Vancouver. Surrounded by magnificent mountains, pastoral meadows and beautiful lakes, it’s a great place to take a vacation (so says the area website). However, bad things are afoot in Maple Ridge. Residents are getting worrying text messages telling them they’ve won a cash prize, in a ‘smishing’ outbreak.
The text message that beeped on Veronica Cellier’s mobile phone was too good to be true. It said congratulations, you have won $428,000 and directed the Maple Ridge resident to e-mail ‘the claims office” at claims@standfordproductions.org.
‘I’d never heard of scams through text messaging,” the 32-year-old said incredulously. ‘I’m just not stupid enough to respond.” Cellier was one of four Telus customers to report the scams which targets short message service (SMS). Smishing or SMS phishing variation of the phishing scam where the user will receive a text message with an Internet or e-mail address.
The article goes on to say that ‘smishing’ is like phishing – if you follow the link or reply, bad virus things will immediately invade your computer, phone, washing machine and toaster.
It’s times like this when you do wonder about how gullable some people really are.. Anyone know if Nigeria gets cheap texts to the UK?
HTC and the curse of the weak displays
Jul 23rd
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
A few friends of mine have HTC phones. HTC? You know, the guys that make that nice Touch handset – the one that Ewan quite likes. I’ve really been into Symbian phones over the past few years (both S60 and UIQ), and never really considered a Windows Mobile device. However if someone had asked me up until a few weeks ago which one would I recommend, I wouldn’t hesitate to send them off to get an HTC unit.
Then I witnessed a strange thing. In the same weekend, two friends had their screens completely fail, both within a couple of hours of each other. We’re not just talking a slight failure, or maybe a few duff pixels: oh no, we’re talking complete and castastrophic display failure. There’s no sign of physical damage to the plastic part of the screen, not even a scratch.
They’re both with Orange, so a quick phone call, and Orange being their usual unhelpful self (‘have you tried switched it off and on again?’), and the next day they got their handsets replaced by courier.
Over the weekend, the screen went *again* one of these two week old replacement handsets. That’s it in the picture at the top of the article. It looks like someones shot at the middle of the screen – but again not a single scratch on the plastic. They haven’t been dropped, kicked, sat on, or anything obvious like that – the displays just seem to be randomly failing.
One phone having a problem is just bad luck. Two – hmm, perhaps a concidence. Three phones from two people in as many weeks? It reeks of a manufacturing fault, or a problem with a batch. Orange just keep replacing the handsets under insurance – but how long will that last?
Incidently in all my years in mobile, with more handsets than I can remember under my belt, I’ve never had a broken screen on a phone. Seen it happen once on an HP iPAQ, but that was after serious daily abuse and a catastrophic dropping incident.
Just don’t mention the ‘i’ word
Jul 6th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
It’s July (just in case you hadn’t noticed), and time for the industry to clear off for two months. That means it’s all very quiet out there in the world of mobile at the moment. Very quiet indeed. The only real thing happening is the iPhone PR steam roller is in it’s usual frenzy – Google News reports about 18,346 in the past 24 hours on Apple’s ‘wonder device’.
In comparison, SMS comes up with 3,797 mentions. Most of it is either dull as dishwater, or we’ve already talked about it – so there’s not a lot to link to at the moment.
Anyway, that aside. Can I have a show of hands (or a click of the mouse and a few keystrokes to leave a comment) on a proposal to not post any more pointless stories about the iPhone. Obviously if something exciting happens, like we get one to play with (look, there’s a flying pig!), it might just justify a story.
What do you think? Leave a comment, or drop me a mail to alex@smstextnews.com
Activation woes mar iPhone US launch
Jul 1st
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Link: PC World – iPhone Activation Disasters
What with other rather more pressing issues keeping the news broadcasters busy the past few days, you’d be forgiven for forgetting the iPhone launched on Friday just gone. So how has it gone so far? Rather badly, it seems.
There’s reports doing the rounds that many quite delighted purchasers of Apple’s new wonder-toy have been driven to despair, as their handset resembles a rather expensive brick until it can be activated. A simple process, you’d imagine? Apparently not.
Jim Dalrymple from Macworld posted a blog entry late on Friday, in which he says “Three hours after getting my hands on one, I am ready to drop the thing from the 44th floor of the New York Hilton”. Fellow Macworld reporter Dan Moren reports that he had a DOA iPhone, which lasted all of a few seconds before giving up the ghost forever. Declan McCullagh over at CNET has, at the time of writing, been waiting 36 hours so far for his phone to be activated.
So what do AT&T have to say about these problems? Apparently they pretty much don’t exist. Courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News:
A spokesman for AT&T, however, said that the glitches had been minor and isolated, and that the company was working to fix them on an individual basis.
“The vast majority of iPhone activations on iTunes are going through in a matter of minutes,” said spokesman Ted Carr. “Many of the situations causing a delay are being resolved in a matter of hours. But we are not experiencing any significant companywide activation issues.”
Just by chance the apparently few people that are affected by this ‘minor, isolated’ problem are prolific bloggers and journalists – that’s if you believe AT&T’s response. Whilst writing this post I’ve come across about 20 or so different examples of activation problems on less than five different news reports and websites.
Three things AT&T and Apple should do at this point. 1 – admit there’s a problem. 2 – refund everyones $36 non-activation fee they’ve paid, and 3 – say sorry. Denying the problem exists (in AT&T’s case) and ignoring phone calls from journos (in Apple’s case) is not going to win you any friends.
Teachers say mobiles are ‘offensive weapons’
Jun 26th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Link: BBC NEWS | Education | Mobile phones ‘offensive weapons’
Expect this to turn up in the Daily Mail tomorrow..
A teaching union is calling for mobile phones to be classed as potentially offensive weapons. NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said the way pupils misused them to bully their teachers meant they should be banned from school premises.
Hmm ok. There was me thinking from the headline we were talking about throwing mobiles at the teacher, or attacking them with the power of a Razr flip. Anyway, the article goes on:
Ms Keates is raising the issue of mobiles with ministers at a task force meeting on Tuesday. She is particularly concerned about websites such as Ratemyteacher and Bebo which, she says, provide a vehicle for false allegations and abuse by pupils which can damage teachers’ self esteem and careers.
She said: “These sites are fed by pupils’ misuse of mobile phones. The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon and action taken to prevent their use by pupils while on school premises. Regrettably, our evidence shows that some schools are still not taking these issues seriously.”
Right. Firstly, what’s stopping pupils using Ratemyteacher and Bebo from their PCs at home? In fact, they’re probably more likely to do that as the data charges on prepay are pretty crippling.
And second – ‘offensive weapon’? What’s that about? I’m surprised they haven’t banned pencils yet, following my complaint sometime in the 80′s that the boy that used to sit next to me in Infants school used to constantly stab me in the leg with a blunt HB.
Of course if you’re a Daily Mail reader, this is yet another serious issue that needs a knee-jerk reaction. Standby for the feedback from ‘Angry from Tunbridge Wells’..
First they broke the web – now Vodafone break push email
Jun 17th
Posted by Alex in Mobile Industry Review
Had this in from SMS Text News reader Reuben Raveendran, talking about his experiences with the new Vodafone Mobile Internet service. He’s very kindly allowed us to quote his email, so over to Reuben..
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On Wednesday last week I called up Vodafone to add the £7.50 “Mobile Internet” bundle to my account and was looking forward to using it the next day (activates overnight) on my Nokia E61. I used the “internet” GPRS access point like I have in the past and was joyful that I no longer had to pay £2 per megabyte for Good Mobile Messaging and Roadsync or so I thought…..
I did my usual RSS feed reading that Thursday morning and read about how Vodafone had butchered the internet. Various individuals commented that you can avoid the butchering when web browsing on your phone by switching your preferences to “PC Standard” or using the “internet” access point instead of the Vodafone Live access point. I then wondered if usage of the “internet” access point was actually covered by the £7.50 bundle and today I can unhappily confirm that it isn’t because my unbilled usage for last week has finally updated and I was charged whenever I used the “internet” access point. To be fair Vodafone do state that you have to use the wap.vodafone.co.uk (Vodafone Live) access point to use the “Mobile Internet” bundle. (second paragraph under Pay Monthly customers)
The big problem is Good Mobile Messaging refuses to work through the Vodafone Live access point because of the gateway in the middle that breaks the end to end connection. Roadsync will connect to an Exchange server with Activesync Direct Push but will disconnect after 2.5 mins with a timeout error. This doesn’t happen when using the “internet” access point. So if you plan to use push email with Vodafone forget about signing up with Vodafone’s “Mobile Internet” data bundle because it just won’t work. It would be nice if you could warn your readers about this. It’s back to WiFi for me and I’ll just have to wait a few more months for my contract before I’m off to T-mobile or Three where I don’t have to pay £2 per megabyte for a few megabytes of email…..
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Thanks Reuben for sharing your experiences – but oh dear me. Why can’t this stuff just work? I’ve seen tube posters around London extolling the virtue of using mobile email with Vodafone. I think it’s part of the same campaign that suggested mobile TV was a good way to cheer up your morning commute into work on the train. I wonder sometimes whether the marketing people actually speak to the product and technical people at mobile operators..
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