Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

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I had to go back to the ward office to collect a certificate of certificate of registration (or something) so I could open a bank account.
Opening the account itself was way easier than it is in the UK, all I had to do was to provide the above certificate and sign a form to say I wasn’t in any way American (!?! not so surprising given I was opening an account at Citibank). My previous attempts at opening accounts in the UK have involved two hours of interrogation and torture, forms signed in triplicate with photos authenticated by three members of the judiciary. Or maybe they just take a dislike to me and want me to open an account somewhere else and I never quite get the hint.

To get a mobile phone I needed another of the certificates…and a two hour chat with a nice phone sales chap who knew about as much about them as the guys back home peddling the things…no matter, I managed to get one that works and gets me on the net properly at home. I’ll post some more details later, theres a whole bunch of boring technical stuff I’ve got to get off my chest about it. Let me just say that skimping on the memory manager is never a worthwhile technical thing to do.


Categories: Livejournal, Memories, Source.

/ 18 Comments

18 comments

  1. godgirl

    let me get this straight…..

    you are working for nokia and you had to go out and *buy* a mobile???????

    *comfused*

    btw, i assume uk mobiles are useless in japan…

    do they have transferrable rental mobiles for holiday people???

    oh, before we forget, need anythign from the uk bringin over? marmite, crap teabags, bad english biscuits….?

    Reply
    • neilh

      Re: let me get this straight…..

      I’m something of a second class citizen at Nokia, being a contractor. Which means I don’t get any of the help they give their permies. But they don’t do much in the Japanese market anyway, theres the WCDMA/GSM dual-stacker, but thats stupid expensive and not actually available through the networks yet. And theres a couple of dodgy old CDMA ones and not much else. I’ve got a couple of protos but they’re GSM and can’t leave the building. So I had to get my own. Dammit. And its got the worstest UI you’ve ever seen, partly because its a relatively poor translation of a Japanese UI and partly because the underlying tech is badly designed. Its the kind of thing Motorola would have come up with if they were Japanese. Still, at least I got some English manuals now so I might be able to figure out how to turn on T9.

      Reply
      • godgirl

        Re: let me get this straight…..

        so, which part of that tech talk did you actually expect me to understand?? ;p

        i get the bit about the not getting a free phone and then you lost me!!!!

        Reply
      • bart666

        Re: let me get this straight…..

        I thought the 7650 was tri-band… or does Japan use some weird shit? If so, couldn’t you go to Mr Wong’s Discount Unlocking Wah shop – must be hundreds of them around.

        And what phone did you get? :)

        Reply
        • neilh

          Re: let me get this straight…..

          Actually the 7650 is dualband, but theres a US variant so its been misreported as a tribander.

          They use (W)CDMA over here, so the 7650 won’t work here – you need the horribly expensive dual-stacker, or a local phone. So I got a local phone – this one

          Reply
    • maluse

      Re: let me get this straight…..

      The timeport is a fine phone! Mine’s still going strong after over 3.5 years. I’m not sure why people keep saying bad things about the UI on Motorolas, they seem completely reasonable to me: press the “menu” button to get the menu, then use up/down/ok/cancel to move around the menu structure. Some of the functions are hidden a few layers down in the menus but you can assign shortcuts if you use them a lot.

      My personal theory is that at some point in the past (Startac era perhaps? I don’t think they had the shortcut feature) a journalist had trouble with the UI, and since then it’s been accepted wisdom that Motorolas have bad user interfaces.

      Not sure what I’m going to replace mine with when it finally expires, simple, robust, phones (large software stacks + mobile phone dev. timescales = buggy messes) with IrDA (Bluetooth must die!) are getting tricky to find.

      Reply
      • neilh

        Re: let me get this straight…..

        Timeports are technologically great, the stability isn’t bad and the functionality is good. I’ve never gotten on well with any Motorola interfaces, they seem to assume the user is a part of the system, rather than just a dumb sack of water and bones than can’t remember numbers for toffee, which is why they bought a phone with an address book after all.

        Whats wrong with Bluetooth? But, yes, I agree with your buggy mess analysis, theres not enough thought put in to stability of these systems these days. Large systems don’t necessarily lead to instability, its just that you’ve got to be more careful how you link everything together. I don’t think anyones quite got the hang of that yet.

        Reply
        • maluse

          Re: let me get this straight…..

          The Motorola UI possibly doesn’t isolate the user from the hardware as much as it should do (case in point: to see how much storage is left for phone numbers, you have to check the SIM and phone memory capacities separately, rather than having the UI munge these two values together into something that hides from the user the fact that these are separate areas of memory; that said, I like being told these details).

          As for Bluetooth, it’s a perfect example of why the best protocols are designed by small groups of people. The Bluetooth specification is absolutely huge (1500 pages IIRC) and yet Bluetooth really doesn’t accomplish very much: it just allows data or (low-quality) audio packets to be transmitted between two devices. It could have been a really nice, simple, spec, but instead got bloated to a monstrosity so that each Bluetooth partner company could include its intellectual property (and obfuscate the spec). Once specifications get beyond a certain size they become impossible to implement correctly unless they have a very strict set of conformance tests to pass (which Bluetooth doesn’t). I fear Bluetooth isn’t going to die, but its survival is condemning personal wireless devices to be much more complicated than they need to be and so trapping us a generation of tech behind where we should be.

          Reply
          • neilh

            Re: let me get this straight…..

            I’m not sure I totally agree about the bluetooth spec (but then I’ve not read it myself), but there certainly seems to be quite a few agendas taken to these kinds of standards bodies by the participating members (I went to a WAPforum meeting once).

            This is some kind of an incentive problem, isn’t it, there is little incentive to make the spec good but lots to make it reliant on your own tech.

            How can we solve that?

          • maluse

            Re: let me get this straight…..

            I’m really not sure what the solution to the spec problem is. Software patents are one of the root causes, but they’re around for a while I fear. Open-source redesigns of specs may be one solution (eg. Ogg Vorbis), but for things like Bluetooth that aren’t really useful without their own chipset that won’t work, although things like Altera HardCopy devices are reducing the cost of developing custom chips to small business cost levels (a few thousand UKP).

          • neilh

            Re: let me get this straight…..

            I’m not sure the open source community is really much better, though their squabbles are more about ego than money [0]. And its very easy for people to blame things like software patents, that externalises the problem nicely since they aren’t going to go away, we can sit and whinge about patents being the problem and not have to try to do anything about it. While I totally agree that the patent system is some way from ideal, what I’m trying to understand is, given the system exists, what is the best way within that system of improving things? Free software is not the answer (though if you’ve got a fundamental dislike of paying for the right tool for the job it is normally good enough). But what is the answer? What about the mechanism that gave us SSL? Or SSH? They’ve both turned into fairly widely used protocols could their example be followed? What about if there were some automated ‘protocol stack generation tool’ that could be fed a protocol description and compile an appropriate state machine for you? What about we all pile into a room with big spiked clubs and the last one alive write the protocol? Theres got to be an answer.

            [0] I know thats not true of *all* open source development…

  4. neilh

    Re: let me get this straight…..

    The phonebook ‘feature’ was present on at least some of the timeports…though it did occur to me that it might be some the people who encountered that were too lazy to read the manual to find out how to make it work and actually preferred swearing about how bad the UI was.

    I’ve never owned a Motorola phone but have never had any success attempting to do anything with them either (in my “its easy, you’re just being stupid” grabs from some of those around me). At least Ericssons are more in tune with how I would program them, even if they’re not the most intuitive interfaces in the world.

    Reply
  5. neilh

    Re: tech

    I’m contractually obliged to remain silent now.

    Except to suggest you want a Nokia phone built into the chassis of an SH888? – the only phone I’ve owned that I’ve not been afraid of using as a hammer.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Re: tech

    Nokia do have a rubberised 5xxx series phone which is quite funky in a tennis ball kinda way, but its not much good for smashing rocks.

    Theres got to be a market for fashion phones, where you take you’re dainty little phone when you’re out being sophisticated and the SH brick to go with the angle grinder when you’re off to the industrial club.

    Reply
  7. neilh

    Proximity SIM would lead to all sorts of interesting billing experiences especially on crowded trains or at the pub.

    But we can make phones smaller than a matchbox that contain more computing power than put a man on the moon, why on earth should we stick with two year old technology like the 3210? Erm, maybe I don’t get this mindset?

    Reply
  8. neilh

    I can think of a few people who would appreciate that kind of simplicity…maybe we could put together a belt-clip and post-in note container for these people?

    Reply

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