Don’t let three’s ingenious blog marketing campaign for the Skypephone fool you - this bright-sounding idea is not ready for prime time. I won’t repeat myself about the shortcomings of the phone I ran across in the first few days of use - if you want to know more read my previous post. Suffice it to say that I now understand why having a branded phone is important. Amoi, which built the phone, knew how to fit in attractive hardware features and hit a pricepoint but not how to integrate the phone to PCs properly or design a good UI - that’s where larger phone manufacturers have the edge. And since three’s offerings seem aimed squarely at Internet-using, techie users like myself, this is an important issue.

But the main reason I am going to stay away from three, attractive as its PAYG feature package appears to be, is that their customer service is dire. In brief, days after purchase I discovered I had to remove the SIM card from the phone in order to register online. When I did so, a tiny metal stud on the phone’s circuit board broke and unfortunately rendered the phone completely dead. It took me several calls (more than an hour) and two mis-handled courier pickups to send the phone to be repaired and a few days later the phone was returned to me with a note saying because it was damaged I would have to claim it on my insurance (without indicating what it would cost). I argued that if it broke that easily in removing a SIM card it was bad workmanship not user damage but the customer service person in India somewhere was adamant there was nothing to be done. I only had the phone for three days!

True, the phone is apparently a write-off (something that wasn’t indicated on the returns notice) but since this was not my own fault (it’s in mint condition except for the damage to the circuit board) and since I and my wife would have been potentially customers for several years to come you would have thought the company could have given me the benefit of the doubt! It’s not that I can’t afford to pay another £50 and get a replacement - it’s the principle, and the fact that the poorly organized and rigid way they’ve dealt with me so far bodes ill for the future.

I was surprised that when I asked around none of my tech journalist friends appeared to have signed up with three - I now suspect I know why.

As an aside I am also surprised that none of the reviews I read of the Skypephone online turned up any of the user interface or software sync problems - they just concentrated on the phone’s specifications (which you can get off the company’s website anyway).

Update: Having spoken to Three I requested that they email me their reply so I would have it on file. And they have done so… a month after my original query.

I gave our household a technological upgrade and it has been a rather frustrating experience. First I bought a three Skypephone then an iPod Touch. A number of the weaknesses of the Touch I was aware of - at least on the hardware side. No Bluetooth, no built-in ability to edit rich text documents, no microphone (though one has been hacked onto it). I knew less about the weaknesses of the Skypephone prior to purchase. Indeed, both from a hardware and a network proposition perspective it seemed a very attractive proposition. But in both cases I have run into what seems to me an extraordinarily long list of what seem to me to be entirely un-necessary and irritating problems.

In no particular order:

3 Skypephone

• 3 Customer service is lousy - it takes 20 minutes to half an hour on the phone to sort anything out, things that are sorted out don’t stay sorted etc. Of course that may just be the normal things-not-working that one can expect from any company these days…
• If you are a pay as you go customer and go abroad to Austria, Hong Kong, Ireland or Italy then it’s as if you were at home - cool! But on pay as you go their international roaming is very patchy. I could understand their not covering most of Eastern Europe but they don’t cover Canada or Scandinavia or even Switzerland! And it appears you can’t use their Internet services like MSN Messenger or Skype except in the 5 “home” countries - even at £3/Mb MSN messaging would probably be cheaper than texting between two Skypephones I am guessing
• The Skypephone has a button on the side to activate the camera, but it doesn’t seem to over-ride whatever application you are in at the moment. So to take a picture you first have to use the task switcher to switch to the “idle” start screen then push the button.
• You can email a picture from the phone but you can’t skype it to someone.
• The PC ’syncing’ software doesn’t sync with Outlook - you have to import and export. As far as I can tell you even have to import/export Outlook events individually!
• At least there is PC sync software - the Skypephone is not supported by Apple’s iSync at all.

As for the iPod Touch I thought originally “OK its functionality is limited at the moment but what it does do it will do well with Apple’s customary attention to UI detail.” Er… not really. Particularly note the first two inexcusable oddities:

• You can’t copy and paste?!
• The touch’s version of iCal doesn’t support todos so you can’t sync todos from your Mac’s calendar
• There’s no way to create, edit and sync rich text documents. In the January software update Apple added a “notes” application but a) it isn’t rich text and b) it doesn’t create a file you can read (or paste into) on the Mac - the only way to get it onto your Mac is to email it to yourself
• The only way to read PDFs is to email them to your Touch.
• The Touch has no bluetooth

I had rather hoped that for a fairly modest expenditure these new gadgets would help ease the transition into my 43rd year but all these hassles have rather ruined the fun! At least the Apple iPhone/Touch’s fanbase among early adopters encourages me to think some of these flaws might be addressed in the coming months…

I’m thinking of signing up for their Skypephone service.
1) I would be interested in hearing people’s experiences with 3 in general and (if possible) with the Skypephone in particular.
2) If you are a 3 contract user use this form to “recommend a friend”. Then let me know you’ve done this via comments and I’ll contact you and give you my email address and that of my wife to use as “friends” if we decide to go ahead and buy. You get £60, we get £60 and 3 gets two more customers.
3) If you are reading this and work at 3mobilebuzz or know someone who does, could you ask them to get in touch and send me a trial phone or two? If I have to try out the Skypephone the old-fashioned way (buying one) I might post a short bit about my experiences (and of course I might decide to stick with my existing phone). If 3 are good enough to send me the phone I will keep up my end of the deal and write something substantial about my experiences with it (though as you’d expect I won’t be swayed one way or another in my evaluation by their generosity).

Needing a USB drive I couldn’t resist buying the catchily named Sumvision M18 - a 4Gb memory stick MP3 player, voice recorder and FM radio costing around £30. While it’s labelled “USB 2.0″ the speed of data transfers on it is dreadful (7 minutes to transfer a 160Mb file). It’s much too slow to run portable applications off of it as I’d hoped to, and it’s a hassle if you want to change the music or other files on it regularly. If all you want is to use it as an MP3 player and radio though I guess it’s OK, and the price is certainly right, but the user interface is extremely un-friendly to the point that about the only way to use it is like an iPod shuffle (”just give me a random next track”).

By contrast the iPod nano I bought before has not been without problems and was much more expensive for fewer features but is one of my favourite devices - what it does, it does very well.

I just read about the Freeplay Devo radio and was quite excited. OK it is £90 which is a little steep for a radio but I’m geeky enough to want to supplement my podcast listening with a little digital radio. So a wind-up one seemed just the thing… until I looked at the fine print. The Devo weighs 1.2Kg and while 60 seconds of winding gives you an hour of FM listening, it provides just 3-5 minutes of digital radio listening! Inevitably this ‘green’ radio would mostly stay plugged into the mains or run off its 6hr battery. Guess I’ll have to wait another few years. Which is probably just as well since I also just read that the Freeplay radio and others may become obsolete anyway.

At my local toy shop I noticed a new series of wooden toys - the BRIO Network Toys. They look cute but not exactly technically accurate… The website has flash animations and even some video clips but alas is Flash-based so no deep linking- you’ll have to explore it yourselves. Yes, the Internet really is everywhere these days!

“Viro”

Back when I used to write for MacUser (14 years ago!) I had a column called “Brake’s Bunch” where I used to write about various shareware utilities, games and other files which I had found. Then I left the Mac fold for a while… but now that I am back I have slid back into the habit of gathering bits and pieces and installing them. So here is a moderately frequently updated roundup of the freeware, shareware and open source stuff I have accumulated since I got my ibook in the hope it will help some of you (this post seems to be one of the most-read ones so I hope it works!). Unless otherwise noted these are available in PC and/or Linux versions as well - if I don’t provide a link it’s because you should be able to find them by Googling for them or using MacUpdate or Version Tracker to find the relevant files. If you think there’s another game/app/utility I should take a look at or there’s a different utility available that does the same things as one I mentioned but does them better please let me know!

Items added since last major update (March) are italicised.
Games:
Alphababy - Lets your baby have fun bashing the keyboard of your Mac - it pops up shapes and makes sounds whatever they press and makes sure other applications running aren’t affected by what is typed. Whether it is a good idea to encourage your baby to bash your keyboard is up to you to decide!
Army Operations 2.5 - The best (certainly the most advanced) free game available - a first person perspective shooter. Enjoy it while you can as last I heard the guy supporting it on the Mac is no longer going to keep it up to date with the (dominant) PC version.
FreeCiv - an open source, customisable offshoot of Civ II.
triplea - A WW II strategic level game being developed as open source. The AI is basic to non-existent but if they get that and other niggling bugs sorted out it looks promising
The Ur-Quan Masters - a multi-platform port of a classic “explore the galaxy in your ship and negotiate with/kill aliens” adventure/combat game. The best Mac variant is here.
Xconq-MacOSX - An excellent open source empire building game based on the original “Empire” game. Graphically unimpressive but offers loads of options for different modes of play.
Privateer Gold - An open source copy of Wing Commander Privateer (with some added features).
Applications:
Audacity - Great open source audio editing and recording software
Chicken of the VNC - Lets me view the screen of a machine running VNC server and control it remotely (handy for using both my wife’s PC and my Mac at the same time).
Conversation - Free IRC client
Cyberduck - FTP client
Comic Life - An excellent little app that lets you take pictures from your own collection, add comic-book style speech balloons etc and create your own comic book. It’s not freeware but you can try it out for a month before it starts putting a watermark on anything you do.
Fire - Multi-platform instant message client. Similar to Proteus - which one you use is probably a matter of taste…
FreeMind - A Java-based mind mapping application
galerie - A (mac only) add-on for iPhoto that makes it easy to create photo galleries using your available web space. OK to use but I am using Flickr for this these days.
Grapher - Cool free graphing calculator
Nvu - Handy WYSIWYG web page editing software
Transana - Excellent open source software to aid transcription of video and audio files - in Alpha on the Mac but still worth checking out.

Utilities:
Active Timer - Tracks the amount of time you spend in each application on your Mac. A pretty basic feature set but it’s easy to use and it’s free.
AudioScrobbler - Tracks what you listen to in iTunes and automatically creates a profile for you on last.fm which should help you find music you like. Its support for Classical music is rubbish (it doesn’t handle the ‘composer’ tag) but otherwise well worth a look.
Aurora - An alarm clock for your Mac that ties in with iTunes - excellent!
BluePhoneMenu - Handy utility for controlling a bluetooth phone via your Mac. Since superceded by BluePhone Elite which offers more features but is shareware. Still downloadable, though.
Compost - Lets you control the way the Trash works so you can instantly delete big unwanted files without flushing all of the files in the trash unneccessarily.
Default Folder X - gives you much better control of which folder you open when you get the open/save dialogue on your Mac (as well as adding lots of other misc features). Reminds me of a very early Mac addon, ‘Boomerang’. (I still don’t know why this isn’t a part of the OS by now).
Delocalizer 1.1 - Gets rid of foreign language support files you are not using to free up hard disk space.
ION, the Open Media Network and DTV - Trying to make it easy to find and download internet video podcasts.
Greasemonkey - an add-on to Firefox that enables lots of useful enhancements to your web browsing - like Quicksilver (below) it’s something you have to try before you see what use it can be.
Eyehide - makes it easy to create an invisible, password-protected folder to hide files you don’t want everyone to have access to (so you can retain some privacy without password protecting your whole computer against everyone).
Mailtags - Must-have utility for organizing Apple Mail messages (see this post)
Memory Usage Getter - (also measures CPU usage) Figure out which of your applications is a memory or CPU hog and figure out if you need more RAM.
Quıcĸsilver - Swiss army knife keyboard shortcut application many rave about but I haven’t really delved into yet.
R-Name - Easy way to change several file names at the same time on your Mac.
Romeo - Excellent free Mac application to let you control your Mac (eg your iTunes or your Powerpoint presentation) using your Bluetooth phone
Screen Spanning Doctor - Use more than one screen or use a large screen at > 1024×768 with your iBook by installing this.
SimpleWget - Provides a basic non-control-line interface to Wget which automates copying web sites onto your hard disk for later browsing.
SMARTReporter - May be able to warn you in advance when your disk is in danger of failing.
Synk - easy-to-use file synchronisation and full disk backup app for the Mac - free to academic users, cheap for others.
Textpander - (Mac only but PC options are also available) - automatically substitutes text for other text in every application you type in - useful for common mis-spellings and can also insert the date when you type “ddate” etc.
Time Out - Warns you to take a break away from the keyboard (Mac only)
Tidy Up! - Find duplicate files
TinkerTool - gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X
VLC video player - Excellent player for many kinds of video content - more versatile than Quicktime for this and includes a full-screen mode (which Quicktime ‘basic’ does not).
WhatSize Disk Inventory X - Lets you see at a glance where the big files and folders are on your hard disk so you can free up space.
WireTap Pro - Shareware Mac utility that lets you record streamed audio into files for later listening.
Yasu 1.3.1 - Performs various low-level Mac (UNIX) “maintenance” operations. Use with caution. I have to say I only used it once so far because I am not clear what it does or why I would need it…

Update: Widgets!
How could I forget the widgets I have found (through Apple’s directory) and installed? In truth I don’t use them all that much but they are occasionally useful…

Countdown Plus - Tells you how long you have before something happens or is due.
iStat Nano - Shows memory, network and CPU use etc
CharacterPal - reminds you of the keypresses needed to produce special characters, accents etc. Also see Symbols which is not as intuitive but more powerful, including info on how to generate them in HTML as well as in Mac documents etc.
Decor - lets you stick a picture up on your dashboard
Air Traffic Control - Lets you see all of the wireless networks in your area and whether they are secure or not.
quikconvert - converts between lots of different units including currencies - just type in the number and the unit type and it will figure out what you are trying to convert to.

UK users in particular may want to check out these:
BBC Weather - lets you see the weather forecast in your area in the UK or around the world for the next 5 days. Much better (and prettier) than the US one included as standard.
Postage Calculator (Royal Mail)
Trains - see the train timetable of your choice

According to this press release from now until the end of the year anyone in (or merely passing through) Canada or the US will be able to use Skype on their computers - or their PDAs for that matter - to call any US or Canadian number.

I have my reservations about Skype - I would be much happier if I could find a VOIP solution that worked well, was open and cross platform but so far I have not found anything that fulfils all three criteria - Skype while not open at least fulfils the other two. I would certainly like it if my friends and family over in North America would all sign up (hint, hint) and let me know they had done so. As an additional incentive, if you have Windows you can even use the latest beta to look in on Adrien while we talk using our webcam…

Like others I have quickly started to find my iPod Nano’s screen is starting to be covered with hairline scratches - even though I left on the thin plastic cover it came with. Now (a little late) Apple is shipping Nanos with cases but since mine did not come with the case, Apple will not ship one to me retrospectively. If I want my iPod screen to be fixed I have to send it back (and it will presumably just get all scratched up again thereafter).

P.S. I am reluctant to write about my iPod further because every time I do I get annoying spam comments advertising pyramid schemes to get them free!

I just discovered that I can’t use my iPod to transfer files between my Mac and a PC - the Nano has to be formatted as a Mac disk to work on my Mac (though Macs can normally work just fine with PC disks). I am a little surprised I didn’t read anything about this before I bought it. Oh well - it works OK to do everything else…

P.S. I am very annoyed that any mention of the iPod or Nano seems to attract people trying to get you to join their pyramid schemes to get a free Nano. If you were thinking of posting such a message to my comments just forget it now - such messages are deleted…