New site Old Blog posts
I finally decided I needed to overhaul my ‘site’ I had a very ageing wordpress blog that hadn’t seen much of an update in several years and really just needed taking out an shooting. In addition I wanted to get things onto some slightly more stable hosting than my own server that used for hacks and demos and something that has some backup. So what you’re seeing here is a brand spanking new fresh install of wordpress with some nice themes, new layout and all the bells & whistles.
However I had to decide what to do with some of the old content, mainly the blog posts, I’m not the world greatest blogger and thats part of the reason that the blog is now relegated to a sub-section of the new site instead of being the main attraction, hopefully it won’t be quite so noticeable that I haven’t updated it in months! I’m preferring to write up some of my projects as pages and keep the blog for the occasional time that I have some thoughts one something that I want to publish. The old posts weren’t great and there aren’t a lot of them maybe 10 going back nearly 7 years! but they should live on somewhere, so I decided to import them into this site and tuck them away. Its a part of my history and it certainly shows what my thoughts were on a few things back then. Its been interesting to re-visit those posts now with the benefit of hindsight and see how accurate I was.
Looking back at some of the posts:
Most of this now seems pretty obvious but remember that January 2008 was an age ago in mobile terms, the first iPhone had only been available in the US for 6 months and the concept of the app store was still a good 6 months away! 1) Yep I was pretty much bang on about Location, these days having GPS and other location tech in your smart phone and apps using it is 2nd nature to us. 2) Handset vendors gain strength, OK so I was talking about Nokia a lot and things didn’t exactly work out great for them, but who are the dominant forces in mobile today? Apple & Google/Android, we seem to have finally seen the back of carrier crapware! Orange Homescreen anyone? 3) Well the operators are still hanging in there but their relevance is still on the decline, again this post predated the app craze let alone the OTT services that that enabled, WhatsApp was a few years off. 4) Well we’ve seen a few MVNO’s come and go, several more data centric providers out there, however I think the operator that really nailed the mobile internet has to be Three, I didn’t see that coming but full credit to them they’ve built some damn fine bit-pipes, also we’ve seen a few OTT services making use of the number for identity, although thats mostly been driven by the likes of Twilio with easy to use API’s.
Mobile Broadband signals the Death of WiFi Hotspots
Hmm hard to say on this one, personally the only commercial WiFi hotspots I use are the ones on the Tube and thats down to a lack of mobile access, tethering and MiFi’s seem to have become a pretty fixture for people on the go, I’ll use free wifi at a venue but I’d certainly use my phone over paying for hotspots.
T-Mobile G1 vs. iPhone – Round One to iPhone
Well it certainly took android a few more iterations to become as mainstream friendly as the iPhone I think, I’d say that the HTC Desire and Android 2.1 was probably the first device to go properly mass market?
T-Mobile UK Capped Data Charge – Hidden Rip Off
Well mobile data charging does seem to have at least become far more reasonable and generally built into most plans, I still think we’ve got apple to thank for a large part of that when they lauched the iPhone and mandated that you have an ‘unlimited’ plan that was the real tipping point. Oh an these days my wife uses data on her iPhone far more that voice or text!
Well things generally work a bit better although i think much of this is down to the intgration of the mobile OS’s with their own cloud offerings such as iCloud. I still hear of people having sync disasters and ending up with duplicates or lost contacts, which reminds me I really need to clean up my phonebook!
Android, Buyer Currency Support C-
Well I’m please to say Google finally sorted this out, I can’t remember exactly when it was fixed but the Play Store as its now called now has all sorts of funding options from credit cards to PayPal and even carrier billing in some places!
Electronic Payments & Graceful Degradation
Well its only 2 years old this post but I still don’t think I’ve seen anyone paying with their phone in mainstream use, incidentally a friend was asked to use the carbon copy machine for his card payment in a restaurant the other week as well so thats still valid!
Well that was an interesting look back, and I’m promising myself that I’ll write down more of my thoughts in the future.