Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
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Vehix Mobile
Mar 2nd
I kept seeing commercials on TV saying Vehix has a mobile version. I went and poked at it however and had some issues. First off was that my N95 brought up the full web version. I’ve seen a bunch of discussions online saying things like “if the user is on a device with a full browser or using Opera Mini of course they want the full version.” From expert users sometimes even. That’s just stupid. I’m pretty sure the problem was just that the platform Vehix used just didn’t recognize the N95 But in case someone made the explicit decision to return the full version to Webkit on the N series, you were wrong. Definitely in the state it’s in now.
One of the major problems is that there’s no actual link over to the mobile version if you end up on the desktop version by mistake. I searched around on the web and didn’t find any mention of it. So I pulled on Firefox on my desktop where I have a bunch of mobile user agents saved in modify headers. The first two user agents I tried resulted in an “unsupported browser” error page. Well, that also is just dumb when you’re dealing with mobile. Seriously, if you’re going to do things all half-assed, at least allow your users to pick the right version manually if they should happen to understand what’s going on. Throwing up an error page and suggesting a bunch of desktop browsers to be using instead, that’s just poor form.
Turns out the mobile version is at http://mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.vehix.com/ if you want to check it out. Once you can get there it really is a pretty nice mobile site. The layout is clean, selection options were a bit funky at times but workable, and it seemed like a perfectly practical site. My car is holding its resale value very nicely, that’s always great to see. Can’t really thank Vehix for that, but it put me in a good mood at least.
The Spirit is Willing
Sep 14th
Unfortunately I seem to have made it through the part of recovering where I sleep all the time and gotten to the part where I’m awake but not able to do stuff. I think I liked the part where I was asleep better. I was slightly less aware of what I was missing before. Fortunately the blog client on the N800 works well for when I can’t keep myself upright any more.
The IM integration is pretty great, it’s mainly what got me started using the device again. And for email and browsing it certainly rocks. Russ and I had a voice chat between two devices and that worked out much better than I expected it to. Still I can’t help but think that there’s some usage that I’m missing still that would make the device killer. Maybe it’s cause I’m a geek, but I end up thinking about things like a personal dashboard or client for the IM bots that cranks up the verbosity and provides a nice interface for digesting the streams. I thought personal agents were supposed to be mainstream by now, why do I have to keep writing my own stuff?
Bye Bye T-Mobile
Dec 1st
I swapped my mobile phone number (MINE!! thank you number portability) to Cingular yesterday. It took nearly 14 hours for my new handset to start ringing instead of my old one when I call my number, but eventually it did happen. T-Mobile was just pissing me off too much. US carriers are not about customer satisfaction, they’re about how much you can tolerate. I was with T-Mobile because of the wifi that came with my Internet account for a while. But recently I had been seeing more and more issues with their SMTP to SMS gateways, dropped inter-carrier SMS messages, their generally poor coverage, had gotten multiple reports recently from people who say they can’t call my number at all (at all, they get a “number out of service message”, T-Mobile never managed to fix it for at least 3 people), and most recently the discovery that I can’t send messages to my own handset on T-Mobile.
So I’m up officially on Cingular, and already I can send myself messages using that Clickatell account I setup. A miracle!!! Of course, I expect Cingular to join ranks at some point as well and this will cease to function. One thing I was kinda surprised by is that there’s no real appreciable difference between my E61 with a T-Mobile SIM in it and the E61 with a Cingular SIM in terms of network speed. I’ve heard a lot of folks say that they can really tell the difference. But I’ve tried both decent size downloads and interactive sessions like SSH, and they seem to be just about the same. Would be nice to see some blind taste tests of different carriers with the same device. I’m sure most people are just projecting device differences out into differences in the underlying network.
