Tony Blews

The New Commandments

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:43:07 +0100

"And the Great One did descend from the mountain, bearing a strange staff,
and looking a lot more like Neptune than he had before.
To the faithful he gave a list of things that should be, and some that should not be.
All who followed his commandments were happy, and those who disobeyed
were cursed with an eternity of non-standard cables and missing driver disks."

Here are what I shall term as the "New Commandments".

There shalt be no other interface than mine - All mobile phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and their like shall use a standard USB connector to interface to a computer, and if applicable as a power supply for charging. Nobody want to have to carry a bag of different adaptors, especially when the likes of Nokia can't decide what size charger you need.
Spread the interface, for the interface is good - All desktop peripherals that use USB (and they all should), must include a built in mini-hub, or at least the ability to daisy chain one device.
Thou shalt not have any graven driver disks - Every USB device that requires special drivers that store them on the device itself in a sort of memory stick ROM. Nothing is more annoying that re-installing your machine an finding that you've misplaced a couple of inportant device drivers.
Honour thy specification, and do it properly - If I want to use my camera as a memory stick, I should be able to do it. It shows up as a removable drive on the PC, so it should bloody well connect to the printer for direct printing.
...seriously, do it properly - if the maximum cable length is 4m, bloody well work on a 4m cable.

Follow those five simple rules, and I won't be forced to visit you with a flensing knife.

3 Skypephone developing problems

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:14:48 +0100

Damn, my Skypephone (see earlier posts here and here) is playing up.

As posted on the 3 Skypephone forum, the problem is:

"If the phone has been plugged into the pc for a while (either to use as a modem or to sync the contents of the media folders), it has a habit of shutting down. After a restart it refuses to accept that the sim card is installed, but will accept the sim card from my Huawei USB modem.

The Huawei will accept the sim from the skypephone, but neither of my other older 3 phones will (both Motorolas).

If I leave the phone off for 6 hours, it starts reading its own sim again. Any idea what causes this, and how it can be fixed?"

If you have any ideas about this, or are having similar problems, the relevant thread on the forum is here.

Mobile Internet Speed Test

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:57:55 +0100

Today being Veteran's Day, I was out at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas with a minibus full old people.

So, here is a photo of the Lancaster Bomber that did a fly-past. Clicking on it will take you to some more photos...

While out there, close to the middle of nowhere, I compared the connection speeds of the mobile and USB dongle I use to connect to t'internet.

Here is where I was sitting:

View Larger Map

And here are the results...

Firstly, with the Amoi WP-S1 3/Skype Phone:

And with the 3 Mobile Huawei E220 USB Modem:

Not really that much difference is there? To be honest, the dongle couldn't get a HSPDA signal and defaulted to 3G, but was still slightly faster.

Amoi WP-S1 3/Skype Phone - 5 months later

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:22:31 +0000

Last November, I bought a 3 Skypephone, AKA an AMOI WP-S1, AKA an AMOI 8512. My original review of it is here.

(blurry photo taken on my old phone)

After five months of continuous use, I've decided to take another look at the phone.

And it is in remarkably good shape, despite being dropped, splashed, almosted drowned, and generally abused. The magnet holding the battery cover in place hasn't fallen off yet, which is unexpected. Some of the rubberised coating has become a bit worn, but thats not really a big issue.

Remarkably, neither the screen nor camera lens have suffered any damage at all. The buttons all still work, and the USB port has failed to go all loose and wonky.

Physically, it seems about as indestructable as my old Motorola V600 (but I haven't thrown it at a wall yet - most likely due to not having anything to do with O2 these days).

Skype:

Well, yes. I've used it twice, and that was just to see if it worked. I only know one avid Skyper (who will admit to it, anyway), and I never bought it for the Skype functionality anyway. It works.

MSN:

It works now, after 3 finally got around to supporting it properly, but the app is a pain to use on the handset.

PC Connectivity:

To start with, the software seemed overly complicated and tedious. Why, I thought, couldn't I just plug it in and use it like a USB memory stick? Well. After I found the MicroSD card taped inside the packaging (just as I was about to chuck all the needless cardboard into the recycling bin) and installed it, thats exactly how it works. It's just a pity that it won't work that way with the internal memory.

MoDem:

This is the best thing about the phone. True, the connection speed is only ~~115.2kpbs~~ 180kbps download / 43kbps upload at the moment, but that is double what I was getting through the internal modem on the laptop on a normal dial-up connection. Sadly, the modem now refuses to work when the AMOI's drivers are installed, but that is hardly a big loss as it was just causing me to run up big phone bills at work.

Pretty much everything i've tried is working over this connection, with the exception of the YouTube multi-uploader. I haven't tried World of Warcraft yet, because I'd like to retain some of what little of a life I have left.

The connection speed may sound low, but its enough to watch videos without them stopping all the time.

3 do have annoying policy concerning what they term as "adult" sites, though. You can't access them. No chance. This is annoying as i used to use b3ta a lot, but now I can't (apart from one day last month when their policy got relaxed - or got broken, more likely - for about 6 hours). Also, quite a few of my friends' sites have been tagged as "adult", as they are a sweary bunch of troublemakers.

All this talk of data transfer brings me on to probably the most important thing about a mobile phone...

Running costs:

Calls to normal numbers cost 12p per minute, with texts at 12p each. You can buy add-on bundles to make these cheaper, which I only tend to do for texts, as I try to not to ring many people (apart from taxis, pizza delivery places and pubs).

Data is charged at a quid per megabyte, which sounds expensive because it is. However, the internet add-on bundles can save you loads of money and cost 50p for a day, £2.50 a week, or £5 a month.

I'm still not sure what the "fair use" data limits are for the weekly and monthly blocks, but daily seems to be about 100mb. Which isn't bad.

I tend to stick on a load of daily blocks in one go, as its easy to exceed 100mb in a day (if, for example, you decide to watch all the Happy Tree Friends episodes whilst drunk), and you can move into the next day's block without having to wait until midnight.

All in all, it cost me about £20 every three weeks.

So whats wrong with it?

The camera doesn't have a light or a flash. <sarcasm>Oh shame</sarcasm>.

The microSD card was cunningly hidden in the depths of the packaging and nearly got binned. And doesn't come with an adapter.

I can't get the modem to work with the built-in bluetooth on my laptop, yet it works with an external dongle. Not really an issue, as anyone likely to want to connect a laptop to their phone will probably have a USB cable on them.

And thats it.

Verdict?

It is still a brilliant and cheap little phone, and works almost perfectly. I'd like to see a new version that does full mobile broadband without me having to carry an additional dongle, and maybe a future one will. I'll upgrade to that when it comes out, but for now I can handle the slower speed. You should buy one now.

Oh, you want a rating? Right. Which 80s popsters had a song called "System Addict"?

Thats right. Five Star.

EDIT: In the end, I did my a mobile broadband thingummy. See it here: 3 Mobile Broadband.

Amoi WP-S1 3/Skype Phone

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:22:15 +0000

Whats this? Two reviews in on day? Holy crap.

Anyway, on with the motley......

This week I got a bit drunk and bought a new phone, a 3 Skype phone. In reality, its an Amoi (no wok included) WP-S1, and this is what it looks like...

Snazzy, eh?

For £49 its not really a bad bit of kit. True, it is on the 3 network, but after being frigged about by O2 and Virgin over the last two weeks I'll try any alternative.

So, what does it do?

Well. It does all your normal phone crap, plus it allegedly automatically uses Skype when you want it to. I say allegedly as I can't even get mine to log in using my Skype details. And 3's usually unhelpful customer support have no idea what to do.(But at least they can't beat the O2 monkey who asked me, twenty minutes into our conversation about why my GPRS had been cancelled, if I owned a mobile phone. No, Sherlock, I can process GSM signals in my head.)

Anyway, thats not important. What can it do?

For me the big win is that you can use it as a modem and get 'net access. True, its only about 116Kbps, but that better than I was getting from O2. The downside to this is that the software supplied completely screws up all your existing modem drivers. Not a big loss for most people, but bloody annoying nonetheless.

Sadly the internet service is somewhat restricted. Mail and Web services seem okay (with exceptions), but thats it. FTP is blocked, as are MSN Messenger (probably a good thing) and no gaming stuff will work.

For some reason, POP access to my gmail account won't work, but I can still access the gmail website. Odd.

Access to sites like B3ta are blocked, but thats probably a good thing for me.

A big problem is Facebook. I was never a big fan of it (see elsewhere) until I got the phone. Now I'm on it all the time, mainly because you can access straight from the phone. This is my biggest U-turn since I suddenly decided that VW campers were indeed a bit cool.

The FTP thing is annoying, as I have to update these pages via FTP. I means that I have to go to the pub and use the WIFI machine. Like I needed an excuse.

So... ultimate verdict, is it any good?

Yup. Best phone i've had in ages.

Update: Yay! FTP / IM / Flickr uploader.... it all works now!

Another update: How am I getting on with it? Amoi WP-S1 3/Skype Phone - 5 months later