Hong Kong's currently offering
free wifi at all CSL hotspots (most maccas, Pacific Coffee stores, KFC and other places) for all roaming customers until the 25th Feb 2007. To get access you have to roam on to the CSL network here, and you'll get an SMS with more instructions.
Anyway, although I have my tablet with me, I thought I'd see how my O2 Atom would fair, and what its like to use the net on a PDA. So I went to the local maccas and had a fiddle around - pretty easy to get it working, just had to pick the right network (wifi hotspots are everywhere here, and the new
y5zone service lets multiple providers operate in one location. Btw, get it - y5zone? I thought it was a cool name.
So I jumped on and checked my
gmail, read some news, updated my
AvantGo, and checked out my RSS feeds in
Google Reader. It was all pretty much as expected - all the content was formatted for the smaller screen, and was pretty usable except one thing.
Google reader and gmail, among other online mobile web services, likes to split pages up so its quicker to download. What I mean is, if I open up a long email, it will split up the email in to page 1 of 3, 2 of 3 etc. To get to the next page, I have to tap the link and wait. The pages aren't particularly big either. Try reading a paragraph or two from an email, waiting 5 or so seconds to read the next, and so on. Ok, maybe I'm just impatient, but that's what people are these days -
time is money.
Fine, if I was using GPRS or EDGE then that's acceptable. But I'm not!
I'm using a 802.11b network, which is just as fast and cheap as most people's internet access at home! And we're moving on to 3G stuff anyway; surely bandwidth, speed and costs aren't a factor anymore, not for text articles anyway. I'm not sure if the 3G content on 3G phones is like this (still waiting for a decent 3G PDA phone...), but I sure hope not.
A better way is if some sort of
special HTML/WAP tag can be employed so that when I reach a certain point, it'll
automatically load the next section. The tag will also specify the size of the next section, so if my mobile browser knows I'm using a fast and cheap connection, it will ignore the tags and load the entire article in one go. But this is really just a stopgap solution - by the time the specs go through, we won't be needing page splits anymore, with 3.5G (HSDPA) here and 4G (WiMAX, UWB and co) on the horizon.
So after about 30 minutes of that I got bored reading stuff in miniscule font and having to wait for things to load, I logged off and turned wifi off.
My atom's battery had dropped by 30%, from 98% when I first entered maccas. WTF! That's 1% a minute! And the majority of that I spent reading stuff...I downloaded a maximum of around 5MB (I have a 3MB Avantgo subscription).
How are we supposed to have content on demand if our devices can't last? Ok, my atom's battery has been going down since I got it a year ago, but even then with moderate usage I could only get 1.5 days out of it. I actually take my old phone now when I go out at night - my atom won't last. And I never have bluetooth turned on anymore unless I need it badly.
I've been told that a lot of customers moving off 2G phones have been complaining at 3 because their phones are only lasting 1-2 days now, as opposed to 3-5 days before. I wonder whether or not this has improved in the newer devices, like
i-mate's JASJAM (aka
dopod's 838Pro), O2's
XDA Zinc and XDA Flame (which also has to deal with the power hungry nVidia graphics chipset),
Blackberry's new Pearl, or the
dopod D810.
It seems to me that battery technology is not keeping up with mobile technology, especially with the miniturisation aspect. In fact,
battery technology is probably holding back mobile technology. iPods and other audio players are solving this by reducing power usage, but when it comes to radio transmission devices, there's only so much you can do. I sure hope there's some new tech on the horizon to solve this...there'd be heaps of money going your way if you can solve this problem (hmm...if I was smart enough to invent this, it'd be an awesome startup idea).
With Apple's much-hyped (most say over-hyped)
iPhone coming out with BT and wifi built in, and
Nokia's N95 coming out with 3.5G, GPS, BT, and wifi built in, it be interesting to see how the bigger, more mainstream companies tackle this huge problem.
Maybe what's needed is a company that sits back, resists the urge to pile their devices with all the new and cool things, and makes the mobile work like its supposed to -
simple, 3-5 day battery life, always-on, integrated web content, fast and responsive, individualisable and personalisable, 3rd-party customisable, an efficient text-input method and an efficient and nicely-designed UI. Once they achieve that, they'd have a huge advantage over others, whose unusable, inflexible, mass-marketed devices are loaded and bloated to the brim with features that most will probably not realise they're there or what their potential could be. Maybe that's the angle Apple's iPhone's aiming at...
P.S. I only just actually checked out what Blackberries are like - look pretty damn cool, a bit business-y at the moment, but if they ever push into the consumer market, I reckon they could give the big 3 a run for their money. Its not the magical phone I've been looking for, (neither is the iPhone), but its a small step in the right direction. The fact that their customers are referring to them as crackberries is a great sign.