From time to time, telcos drop these charges, often by quite a large margin, then pat themselves on the back. Just try working out what the charges are in gigabytes, not the megabytes they always quote, and see how they stack up against what you pay at home.

Why should you have to pay more when you go overseas? When you take your mobile to the UK, say, and use data, the mobile telco you are connected to in the UK ships that data back to New Zealand for your home telco to put it onto the Internet here. That’s bonkers, and its part of the reason why its all so expensive. What *should* happen is that local mobile companies wherever you are should just connect you to the Internet for a decent price, i.e. whatever they charge their own customers plus a percentage to reflect the cost of billing it back. I’m not holding my breath on this.

Anyway, that’s not what this article is about. It’s about how to avoid paying these insane charges.
While international data roaming prices remain unaffordable we need a way to make all those shiny gadgets that need Internet access work when traveling without needing a mortgage to pay for it. Here’s what worked for me.

Having several machines with me – laptop, iPad, Kindle, iPhone – I wanted a way to make them all work. So, whatever solution I came up with had to connect them all to the Internet as and when I wanted to. The way I would normally manage that is by using the personal wi-fi hotspot feature on the iPhone. (That feature came in the last major iOS upgrade; before that I would tether the phone to the laptop and run the laptop as a hotspot. Messier but doable.) The problem with doing this overseas, of course, is that it’s going to need international data roaming turned on. Either that, or I put a local SIM in the phone and lose access to the phone calls and texts that come in to my New Zealand number.

iPhones are not the only phones that can provide a hotspot. Androids do it well, for instance. And 2 Degrees were selling a cheapish Android smartphone. I bought it, set up the Android’s wi-fi hotspot, then took it with me to the UK. As soon as I got off the plane I bought a data-only SIM from Vodafone for 10 pounds. I chose Vodafone rather than, say, Orange simply because it was the first mobile shop I encountered. Not very scientific, but it worked.

I could have bought a mobile broadband stick for slightly less than the Android phone. I opted to get the phone because it gives me a backup handset if I ever need one, and because I got some experience with Android that way.

Anyway, the whole thing worked well. All my devices could use the wi-fi hotspot. I had a car charger for the Android phone with me and left it running when we were driving (not for the driver’s use!). Emails were sent and received, the web was surfed, Twitter was tweeted and Google Maps was a useful as ever. There were a couple of “learning experiences”, though:

• Running a hot spot chews through phone battery. If you go out walking with it, you either need to turn it off and just turn it on when you need it, or face three-hour battery life.

• Don’t assume that 3G is everywhere in the UK. Admittedly I was in some fairly remote areas, but I found that I was getting very low speed sometimes, to the extent that the web was barely usable. THis wasn’t a problem in the cities.

All in all, it was a good way to take the Internet with me while avoiding stupid roaming charges. But I shouldn’t have to go these lengths. I look forward to the day when there is sane pricing for data roaming.

One 17 year old’s opinion on this phone may be somewhat redundant, I don’t pretend to be the target market for a phone this expensive (possibly attributing to my ogling when being handed this for a play by my father?). But from the perspective of one who’s owned many Nokias and an iPod Touch, this phone seems to be a mix of the two with money thrown at it. So I’ll assume that you, reader of this post, who almost certainly spends more than $10 a month on their phone don’t really mind about spending a bit of money on some data. Not that I pretend to be an expert on data pricing.

Seeing as I have just spent 114 words outlining why I am completely unsuited to providing my opinion on this phone, I will now proceed to give it. In terms of hardware I can find no fault with it. It has a few buttons that are easy to grasp, but relies predominantly on its touch screen as an interface. The screen seems to be as good, if not better than my iPod, and it has a 4.1 megapixel camera. The Windows-driven interface is also easily manageable, their ‘tiles’ approach seems to work effectively, and maneuvering between the phone’s functions is easy and efficient.

The Internet user will also find that their address book is integrated with Facebook, and I would guess heaps of other stuff which my teenage phone experience has warranted little exposure to.

However, I still find myself maintaining my initial judgement of this phone, that the software, after a harsh upbringing in an orphanage, has been adopted into the hardware’s family, unlike with an iPhone where the components seem to be blood brothers. Oh please, elaborate on your confusing comparison I hear you ask. Very well. (i’m drunk on power by this stage.) Many of the phone’s menus and titles don’t fit, or are just a little too small for the screen, with seemingly random areas of blank screen space for no apparent reason. Stupid. Also, this may sound typical of someone who has grown up on Macs [the computers, not the beer -Ed], but the ‘Windows’ factor becomes apparent sooner rather than later. I have found myself turning to Google far too often to solve my problems, with a depressing rate of success. In this way (and many others) the phone seems more restrictive than the iPhone, and indeed it would be hard to not view the iPhone as more varied.

Thanks for taking the time to read this uncomprehensive (and in hindsight shockingly pretentious) report on my time with this phone. In conclusion, This phone seems to be good at being a phone, and I’m sure if you wanted to fork out around $900 for it, it could make your telephonic experience easy and simple. Comparing it to an iPhone seems harsh, despite them being in the same price bracket, and my Mac experience makes me question why you would buy one over an iPhone, but i’m sure Windows users will quite justifiably belittle this opinion. Whatever, man.

Since the first iPhone, smartphones have come to challenge laptops for complexity and, in some cases, capability. Ten years ago, Windows on the desktop faced a small challenge from Linux and a larger (but still relatively small) one from Mac OS X. Now, despite the rise of the easy-to-install and use Ubuntu distribution, Linux is still very small on the desktop, but OS X is increasing strongly, up to about ten percent of total PC sales. But the interesting change is in the hardware: starting with the iPad, we are seeing devices using phone operating systems which are expanding into the space normally occupied by laptops. That’s a threat to Windows, not because of the iOS operating system, but because of Android – which is, of course, a version of Linux – becoming available in large numbers on slate-type devices and challenging Microsoft’s hold on the desktop and laptop operating system market. So, the question for Windows Phone 7 has got to be – not “is it good enough to sell?” but “is it good enough to keep Android out of the market, or at least out of the slate and tablet market?”.

Enough context. Microsoft lent me a review phone running Windows Phone 7. The phone is a HTC Trophy, and it comes in the “all screen, few buttons” format pioneered by the iPhone. Many sites have done in depth reviews of every aspect of the software and I’m not going to repeat that here – try this one if that’s what you’re after. I’m more concerned with the phone’s usability and its ability to grab mindshare from its competitors: iPhone and Android. (I’m also slightly hampered by not having a Vodafone SIM. The Trophy is Vodafone-only.)

The “out of the box experience” isn’t bad. Most of the accessories are in plastic bags that make it hard to figure out which is which; just open them all. There’s a few leaflets including quite a long software licensing agreement. I don’t know anyone, lawyers included, who reads these things, and I’ve often wondered what would happen if they said something truly outrageous. Maybe they do. As per usual with a new phone, I plugged it in for a few hours before trying it out.

The phone itself is quite good looking. It has a large, silky screen with three obvious buttons at the bottom – back, Windows and search. There’s a hardware power button on the top edge of the phone, a volume rocker on the left hand edge and a camera button on the right hand edge. The phone feels reasonably solid, but the rear cover is flimsy. You shouldn’t need to open that often, though.

As an aside, I’m really not convinced about the Microsoft advertising which implies that people spend longer than they want to on their iPhones, and will be able to get in and out of their Windows phones more quickly. It misses the point that the iPhone is seductive – people spend time on it because they want to. If Microsoft’s phone doesn’t have the same effect, Micrsooft will lose.

The first time you turn it on the phone runs a wizard for setting up email and presumably access points for data, messaging etc. Once through the wizard, the first thing to see is the phone’s main point of innovation – the main screen with “tiles” and “hubs”. These are rectangular areas of display, configurable, giving access to the various areas of the phones functions. Flicking this screen sideways gives you a more normal-looking menu with small icons and text. The tile effect is quite interesting and I could probably get used to it as a way of launching programs on the phone.

There’s a lot of eye candy in the interface. Items whizz in and out, often through an apparent third dimension. Some tiles are animated even when they aren’t in use. I find that all a bit off-putting, but maybe that’s just me.

There’s a marketplace-cum-app store, as you’d expect, with a lot of applications behind it. I’m happy to see that there’s now an official Twitter app, which looks much like Twitter on other platforms.

A really odd thing about the phone is that it doesn’t support “hidden” wi-fi networks, i.e. ones that don’t broadcast their names. Microsoft has said that that is is deliberate. That seems an odd decision to me, since the main user base you would expect for a Windows-based smartphone would be corporates, which often hide their wireless networks. Even some home networks are hidden – such as mine – and Microsoft’s answer to that is to reveal your network. Presumably Microsoft could fix this lack, and they’ll need to if they want to make serious headway with the phone. Or perhaps they will just try to get the world to reveal all its hidden networks, but, frankly, that isn’t going to work.

With Windows Phone 7 Microsoft has certainly proved that it can make a modern smartphone platform. Is it good enough to stem the flow to Android? Possibly; it’s at least a credible contender and many IT departments are more comfortable with anything Microsoft than alternatives. But the real question is whether it can prevent Android devices from leaping from smartphones to tablets in the enterprise. And it’s too early to say on that one.

Then Apple pushed iPhone OS 4 – or iOS4, as it’s now called – and the trouble began. Programs on my phone kept crashing, the sound kept getting interrupted and it became glacially slow. My phone went from being a thing of beauty and a joy to use to being a clunky machine to be endured and cursed. Using Wellington’s helpful text-to-park feature became nearly impossible because the parking machine would time out in the time it took me to send it a text message. And, in what was the last straw, it started ignoring incoming calls and going straight to voicemail.

This is the story of how I fixed all that by going back to iPhone OS 3.

Many others with the same phone model are complaining. I called Apple about it and they told me to reset the phone. I had tried that already, of course. I also updated it to 4.0.2, the very latest iOS, but to no avail. I tried all the tricks to improve the speed on a 3G that I could find on the Net including turning off Spotlight but it didn’t return my phone to a usable state. So I went back to the old iPhone OS.

Apple say that it is not possible to return an iPhone 3G that has been “upgraded” to iOS4 to the previous release of the iPhone software. There are many pages on the Web telling you how to do it, so I didn’t believe them. It is possible, as I have proved for myself, but it took a fair bit of time and some nail biting moments when the phone was all black.

Before I tell you what I did, please bear in mind that Apple claims this can’t be done and I’m certainly not offering you any guarantees. It worked for me, but if it fails for you, you are on your own with Google to figure out what to do next. Also, it should go without saying that you won’t have access to the iOS4-only features if you go back. For the iPhone 3G that includes threads in the email client and the ability to put programs into folders.

I started from this How to Guide by Taimur Asad. It covers downgrading your iPhone or iPod touch to iPhone OS 3. The guide provides instructions to get back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3. I went back to 3.1.3 because I knew it worked well on my phone. If you are keen to do this, read the guide thoroughly a couple of times and be sure that you have one of the specific models it covers.

I use a Mac for the computer that my phone syncs with, and my phone is on Telecom’s XT network. Those things affect the instructions and you need to understand what to do differently if you use Windows or a different telco. That said, the guide looks as though it would work for a Windows computer, and carrier bundles are available for most mobile carriers.

I had several false starts when trying to follow the guide. Each was slightly scary because you have to put your phone into DFU mode (I think I know what that stands for!) which makes the phone black and unresponsive. Getting back from DFU mode involves a bit of (free) software such as RecBoot which you need to install on your computer before you start. Eventually the phone comes back to life. It’s all in the guide – thanks, Taimur.

Eventually I figured out that my false starts were because I was using a USB hub. I normally sync through a hub and it works just fine, but my computer wouldn’t recognise a phone in DFU mode unless it was connected directly to it with a single USB cable. Once I had sorted that out, the restore process followed the one set out in the guide.

The actual process was relatively quick once I’d figured it out. It took about half an hour. Then I had to do a restore and a sync of what was now an empty phone. That ran overnight.

There was a problem early in the restore process. iTunes refused to let me reload a recent backup saying that the backup had been made by more recent software than now existed on the phone, which it had. I wound up restoring from a very old backup. I’ve spent a chunk of today reloading configuration detail like my wireless passwords. It would be a good idea to identify the last backup you have (iTunes makes them when you sync) from iPhone OS 3 and restoring from that when the time comes. Do bear in mind, though, that you might lose information that is embedded in programs on your iPhone if you do this.

The final step for me was to reapply the carrier bundle for XT so my phone would do 3G data, texting and tethering again.

The result – one iPhone 3G functioning as well as it ever did, which is very well indeed. I only wish Apple hadn’t put me through so much grief to get it back that way.

After that, if there’s any time, we’ll have a brief look at a new theory of physics that may integrate gravity and quantum theory. Gosh. And, of course, steam cars.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. If you don;t want to listen live, shortly after the programme, you’ll be able to get it as a podcast or just download the audio as ogg or mp3.

No speaker notes for today – most of it was done off the cuff after the Apple launch. But if you missed it live, you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

This is a Lockheed SR71 “Blackbird”, displayed on public view at the air museum in Duxford, England. The Blackbird was a high-altitude supersonic spyplane used in the later part of the cold war. The Americans started using the Blackbird after Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR in his U2 – the SR71 flew higher and faster – but pensioned it off after it became clear that advances in missile technology meant it was at risk of shooting down from the installations it was sent to observe. Now, of course, we all use satellite technology thanks to Google Earth. As a kind of postscript, the U2 is still flying over Iraq and other hot spots, long after the aircraft designed to replace it has gone to the museums.

The Blackbird flew at over Mach 3, at heights of over 75,000 ft. It took off and landed – of course – at sea level, so its engines and airframe needed to be able to deal with low speeds as well as its cruising altitude. The engines would only burn subsonic air, so the inlets of the engines had to be complex and vary in shape to slow the air enough when the plane was going fast. That’s the purpose of the cones pointing forward out of the engines – the cones moved in and out depending on the aircraft speed. Even so, the SR71 would sometimes suffers what the US military quaintly called an “unstart” while at cruising speed and altitude. Both engines would go out, meaning that the aircraft would have to descend and decelerate while trying to restart the engines nearer sea level. That’s not something you would want to have to do over enemy territory!

Even so, not a single Blackbird was lost to enemy action. But 12 out of the 32 that were made crashed in accidents. It’s not technology that you’d want to use in airliners.

But I still think it’s a wonderful, if strange, looking aircraft.

I did it primarily because Vodafone’s coverage at my house in Wellington was so poor. Every time the mobile rang I would have to run upstairs with it and get out onto the deck to hear the caller. Vodafone say they are going to do some more “infill” of their urban Wellington coverage next year; I can’t wait that long.

So, when Telecom came up with its $600 iPhone offer I paid attention. The offer – which expires at the end of this month – is that, if you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS that you have bought from Vodafone NZ or the Apple website in NZ, you can take it onto a specific XT plan and get a $600 sweetener from Telecom, which in most cases would exceed the cost of breaking whatever plan you are on with Vodafone. And, even with 1G of data added to the Telecom plan, it’s cheaper than the $130 iPhone plan I used to be on.

The process of changing was easy. I took my phone and a recent bill into the Telecom shop and it took about ten minutes. The phone changed over a few hours later. Same number, same phone, just a new network. To get the data working I had to upload the XT carrier pack to the phone. This is slightly fiddly but well-documented at iPhonewzealand.

My iPhone performs very well on the new network. That’s what I was after and I haven’t been disappointed so far. I’m getting four or five bars of signal everywhere I go in Wellington, which often wasn’t the case on Vodafone. That’s partly down to the frequency choice that Telecom has made – the iPhone uses 2100 and 850Mhz, which is what the XT network uses. XT is mostly 850 which penetrates buildings better. By contrast, Vodafone is mostly 2100 in urban areas, and elsewhere its 900 which the iPhone can’t use at all, so you drop to 2G as soon as you leave a city.

Finally, all my iPhone goodies just work, including mirabile dictu tethering. That means using the phone as a modem for my laptop. It’s massively useful, and gives me coverage even inside large buildings, which my old Vodafone Connect card never managed. I’ll be canceling the plan on that card soon.

All in all – this is very impressive. I get a faster, more useful phone, a reduced monthly bill, and some cash in hand. What’s not to like?

I’m keen to give this thing a blast. I’d love suggestions on what to try. Anything goes provided it doesn’t damage the phone (or me!), and I can do it in and around Wellington. The phone is a Nokia 6120. I’ll post results on the site.

Suggestions, please?

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: Anything else for use this week?

A: Londoners can’t use their mobiles on the London Underground, that’s the tube to its friends. The technology exists to make the mobiles work, but its not going to happen, in the short term anyway.

Q: Would you want someone next to you yapping on their mobile?

A: Would you be able to hear it? The tube is such a noisy place that I don’t know how you’d hear a mobile phone if it was next to your ear!

Q: Is there any thought of making mobiles work on aircraft?

A: I wouldn’t rule it out. It’s technically possible to modify an aircraft so that mobiles could safely be used, but it would be expensive, because you’d have to use satellites to get the signal in and out. And again, do you want to be sat in economy next to someone yammering away? I don’t think this one will fly!

Q: OK – anything else for us today?

A: A good article in the Herald called “How to tell if your machine is infected”. This is a serious issue on the Internet today – people taking over your computer and using it for their own nefarious ends like sending spam. The article gives some signs that this has happened – your system keeps going slowly for a while, or you have dozens of popup ads you just cant get rid of, or you keep ending up at web sites you didn’t intend to visit.

If this is your computer, try getting it scanned. There are several sites on the web that will do this for free, and they may be able to clear up the mess. The only guaranteed way to get it clear, though, is to reload your operating system and all your software from scratch, which is an arduous business and not for the faint hearted. You’d need to back your data up first, of course – you should be doing that anyway.

Q: Sounds scary!

A: It is, a little. The second best way to avoid this kind of thing is to make sure you are running up to date system security software, like Norton, McAfee or Kaspersky. You need to pay for this, and keep paying to keep it up to date. It’s a royal pain. One of the antivirus, called AVG, has a free version which provides a basic level of protection.

Q: You said that’s the second-best way?

A: The best way is not to use the same operating system as everyone else. Use Linux or a Mac and you won’t need to worry about security, or at least not to worry as much as Windows users.

Q: So what do you really want to talk about today?

A: What drives the pricing of desktop software? Unlike physical goods, software has upfront development costs but very little cost of producing each copy. So the traditional cost-based model that we use for, say, cars doesn’t apply. The competition for Microsoft Office, say, is mainly from the free OpenOffice, although the (also free) Google Docs, which runs on Google’s servers rather than on your computer, is getting some attention. Another paid alternative is Apple’s iWork suite which goes for a lot less than Microsoft Office but only runs on Apple hardware. So, the price of Microsoft Office is staying high despite the availability of free competition. That’s a neat trick, and its achieved mainly through the fear of re-training costs and incompatibility. Incidentally, its why Office is available for home users at a far lower cost than it is for commercial users.

But, the question for those of us who use software is: what drives the price? And, how can we justify using software with any kind of price tag in today’s environment when free software is available? That’s particularly a question for CIOs as they see their budgets slashed in the recession. And it’s very relevant to government, which buys an enormous amount of desktop software – so much so that it tries to negotiate specific government wide deals with the main vendors, in an attempt to control its software costs.

The French Police force has recently converted to Ubuntu Linux. A quote from their CIO, Lieutenant Colonel Xavier Guimard:

“Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

The German Foreign Ministry converted some time ago. Last year I met the man who had taken that decision, a diplomat named Rolf Schuster. He said that cost of maintenance – not just the purchase price – had proved to be much lower than running pay-for software.

Q: Is this happening here?

A: Not yet, but you’d have to hope that the government will take notice and realize that there is some real money to be saved here. You would think that the government would appreciate spending modest amounts of support dollars on local companies to help them with open source rather than remitting a far larger amount overseas in licence fees.

One last thing – Terry Waite has come out in support of Gary McKinnon. Most people will remember Terry Waite as the former Church of England envoy who spent several years locked up in Beirut. We’ve mentioned McKinnon before, as well – he’s a British man who in about 2001 went looking into US military computers to feed his obsession about UFOs and cover ups. It was stunningly easy for him to get in – they mostly had very simple obvious passwords. And he left little messages saying that their security was rubbish – that’s probably what cooked his goose. Anyway, the Brits have agreed to extradite him to the US where he will face a probably lifetime in jail. He’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and its clear he doesn’t have the same grasp on reality as the rest of us. A list of celebrities from Terry Waite to Boris Johnson have come out in his support and say he shouldn’t be sent to the US.

Links

Mobes on the Tube? Not going to happen.

IBM trying to buy Sun?

How to tell if your machine is infected. If you are worried, scan your PC.

How to reinstall Windows XP or Vista.

Windows security software – a ‘must have’ if you run Windows. This mostly costs money, but there is a free but basic suite.

French Police save millions by switching to Linux

German Foreign Ministry goes to Linux – ‘it’s far cheaper to maintain’

The trials of Gary McKinnon.