Intellisync on the E71 is unusable

I’ve been using my trusty E61i for a while now with intellisync running happily on it, but after I switched back to my N95 the E71 became spare so I dropped Intellisync onto it and thrust it into service instead of the E61i.

This turned into a bad move as it’s just so unusable, the device just reboots itself every couple of hours. You can watch it on the desk, during conference calls, the screen just goes blocky and then the Nokia boot up screen appears, a few seconds later the phone comes back.

The end came when the phone started to ring and it went bang and the Nokia logo screen appeared. That’s the final straw, any phone or smartphone has to work as a phone first and foremost. If it can’t work as a phone then forget it.

So the E71 has gone back in the basket and the E61i is back in service. I looking at the companies ActiveSync set up that some of the guys are using with their iPhones (in countries where we sell the iPhone) (BTW I heard there are 20,000 iPhones on the Orange network, an interesting stat if it’s true)

We know that Nokia is moving out of the corporate email market and focusing on the consumer market with it’s Nokia Email Service (which is built on Intellisync). But to just mess up the firmware of the E71 so badly that it won’t even work with the latest Intellisync client is a disaster. I know it’s not me too, other work colleagues are having the same issue.

Barbour provides an amazing service

A while back I bought a Barbour International Jacket, I had a Barbour years back and I out grew it, but it was bomb proof. So I had every faith that my new jacket would last equally as long.

But it didn’t work out like that, the stitching on the pocket started to come undone, not through any extreme use, but normal day to day use which was a tad disappointing.

But a check on the web and the jacket was covered by a 2 year warranty, so I dropped Barbour an email and Gill responded within 24 hours. Gill from Barbour sent out a large pack with prepaid postage for me to return the jacket to Barbour.

I packet the jacket up and sent it back and within a few days it came back all fixed and good as new, all at no cost to me and excellent service. So if you’re looking to pick up a jacket that is backed by great customer support then look no further than Barbour.

Gravity will soon allow you to forward a Tweet as an SMS.

A few days back I tweeted the message below, wishing that the awesome app Gravity had the feature to forward tweets as an SMS.

A couple of days latter @janole tweets back;

Now that’s what I call a service. The reason behind the idea was that there were a few really funny tweets from @genehunt that I thought would be appreciated by a few friends who weren’t on twitter. As tweets are 140 characters they fit right into SMS 160 characters just fine.

So this is @janole’s handy work, as you can see there’s a “FWD” option, Reply, retweet, favourite and then Forward.

The “FWD” option allows you to forward either as an SMS, an Email or copy to the clipboard. The Email options requires you to have an email account set up obviously. The copy to clipboard allows you to do what you like with it.

And here it is, the tweet dumped straight into the message window, allowing users to pick the recipient from the contact list and send away.

It’s a bit ironic that here in the UK, where twitter stopped it’s SMS alerts we’ve found a way back to text…

Truphone could wipe the floor with Google voice

There’s a lot of buzz on the web right now about Google voice going public. But there’s still a huge problem, text messages.

What people are looking to do is disconnect their number from their sim card. People are keen to have a number that’s theirs but not tied to a specific handset (voip, fixed or mobile) and are looking to Google voice to give them that functionality. The extra benefit being they don’t have to carry or use the same device they are device independent.

Google voice will only give you half of that functionality, the voice portion, the text portion is still left on your handset. So you’re left holding multiple devices again, if you want to receive SMS or MMS.

This is where Truphone trumps Google Voice, Truphone disconnects your number from the device, you can install Truphone onto most mobile devices and then insert any sim, local or roaming and it’ll just adopt that network as the transport, but using your truphone number as the ‘from’ number for both voice and text. So your Truphone number can deal with both Voice and Text. But you’ve spotted the tiny issue, it only works for mobile devices.

A little while back (august 2008) I wrote to the guys at Truphone with the following message, with the relevant one here being point 4 enter the Grand Central space (Grand Central is now Google Voice)

1. Number choice – The ability to choose a number from those available and or buy a ‘gold’ (and silver?) number.
Some carriers used to have the concept of Gold and Silver numbers, where you paid for a more memorable number.  If you don’t want to buy a number, you’re given the ability to select a number from the db. For example, my (GSM) number is XXXX 7887898, but my truphone number is +44XXX8804483, so I’d maybe try for  07978 887898 or 887899 for example.

2. Number portability – port my GSM number to Truphone.
James mentioned this in our short and bad line quality call the other day. I think this would be great as I could port my number to truphone and then use any carrier pre-pay sim card behind it for gsm coverage. Assuming truphone anywhere would still provide my Truphone CLI so it wouldn’t matter which sim you used. This I’m sure could cut my personal phone bill from a grand a year to a few hundred. The ability to disconnect your well known phone number from the carrier and allow you to move around carriers, both national and international would be a great benefit and provide a huge amount of freedom.

3. CLI choice – The ability to select.
I think there’s been some issues in this area with fraud, but the ability to choose either the GSM or Truphone CLI to be presented shouldn’t be a problem. People could put Truphone on their whatever phone and use it where there wasn’t any GSM coverage, but I would want to present my GSM CLI which my contacts can identify. (assuming you haven’t ported your number)

4. Enter the Grand Central space?
We don’t get Grand central in the UK and it’s had problems because it doesn’t do SMS, (no sms forward so resorting to sms to voice!). Could Truphone step into this space, by allowing users to register several numbers which are called in simultaneously or in order. The ability to define when certain numbers can get through or go to voicemail. The SMS capability of Truphone gives you a huge advatange over Grand Central here.

We know Truphone bought Sim4Travel and are working on their own sim for roaming, but I think some work on the back end of the voice routing, which could then allow users to tweak call routing via a portal would allow a much richer functionality to be gained and provide users with what they want, a number that’s not connected to a specific device that handles both voice and text.

Palm Pre has a shocking boot up time

Just watched CNET Asia’s ‘prize fight’ between the iPhone 3G, 3GS and the Pre and I was shocked as to how long the Pre and the iPhone 3G takes to boot up. My N95 takes about 25 seconds including entering my Pin. But 1 minute and 46 seconds to boot that’s just nuts, 48 seconds for the iPhone too, ain’t too clever.

The Pre did go on to win the next two tests, web browsing and taking a photo and emailing it. The second test is a little useless here with MMS already available.

Watch the video here. [via intomobile]

Linux is ready

I first used Linux several years back and it was a real struggle to use. You had to be a major league geek to get stuff working, installing software was a nightmare, even getting it on the net was a chore.

I set up a Linux box running Ubuntu 12 – 18 months back and it had come on leaps and bounds, it was easy to install and get onto the network, but it still had some major hang ups. In stalling software was still a chore, CHMOD and LS’ing around try to find stuff.

I’ve been running eebuntu on my eepc for the last couple of days and I’m extremely impressed, it took a couple of goes to get it installed but that was my fault not it, the USB stick i/o wasn’t fast enough.

The big test for me was installing new apps, so far I’ve managed to install a blogging tool, upgraded flash, installed Tweetdeck all without having to open a terminal window. That’s a huge leap forward, it makes Linux much more usable for the average person, much more of a product that could go mainstream.

I’m going to give this install a lot more time to see how it handles in the long term, but so far I’m over the moon.

Orange Business Live 09

Here’s some of the links to the content we created during Orange Business Live 09 in London, while I was there as one of the ‘bloggers’.

We had 26,500 visits to the site in just two days and gained 140 new followers on Twitter (2,700 in total), posted 39 Posterous articles and 9 full blog articles and recorded 25 lots of 3 min video’s for Orange TV interviewing various guests.

The main blog is here –> http://www.blogs.orange-business.com/live/

The Posterous site for more rough and ready posts is here –> http://orangebusiness.posterous.com/

Our Twitter site is here –> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness (please follow us)

Our TV, site is here, yep..we’ve got a TV channel –> http://www.orange-business.tv/

The highlight for me was interviewing one of the top 4 economists in the world a regular on CNN, for Orange TV, I’d never done video interviews before so was an interesting experience, the actual video will be up soon -> http://orangebusiness.posterous.com/dr-norbert-walter-being-interviewed-by-rob-ev

It was a great experience, Orange sure knows how to put on a conference, I got to meet Barbara and talk to some of the customers who were extremely happy working with us all, one of the key themes was partnership and the event ended on the note of “together we can do more”.

Featuring in other people’s pic

It always make me jump when I’m scrolling through Google reader and an image appears with a mug shot of me in it. The above appeared a few days back and made me jump (again). All I can see is it’s interesting to see how other people interact with Facebook.Here’s the original post on intomobile.com

Search for N

oops…looks like I sat on one of the clues for the search for N.

I got this video emailed me to as a clue at 4pm on the 30th..a few hours before the really mobile project (if my EST to GMT conversions are correct)

Anyway, you’ve already seen the video and figured out the answer it’s here

Keep an eye on the Nseries Blog (blogs.nokia.com/nseries) during the afternoon of Tuesday 2nd June, and the 5th clue will appear before your eyes…

ps. I promise to check gmail a little more frequently until this is over.