Grombles

So my iPhone 4S fell on the floor. The screen crazed and my old faithful finally joined every other iPhone in the house. Tricky to read and not worth stealing. But it was only a couple of weeks away from the release of the much vaunted 6 and my network contract had expired long ago. These days I buy SIM only contracts with EE. Vastly better coverage than the loathsome Vodafone and O2, and cheaper to boot. So what I needed was an unlocked 6. No problem. Ordered it on Apple's website and within a few days it arrived. Hurrah. Although Apple did send me an SMS text to my old iPhone with a link to a website that an iPhone can't read! iTwats. Now the most important thing not to do to an iPhone, as I had already discovered, is drop it. The fancy box it arrives in has a tight fitting lid that you have to pull off as the increasing vacuum inside tries to stop you. Finally the lid popped off, releasing my precious and precariously balanced, as I now discovered, £700 iPhone. In slow ...

I'm truly sick of Vodafone ( after having been sicker of O2 ). Both networks aren't networks in that a network is meant to connect things - and my phone doesn't connect to anything most of the time. Vast swathes of the UK are invisible to it, but especially the barren unpopulated wastes (not) of Surrey. My biggest gromble is about the lack of signal (3G especially) that I experience on the train between Guildford (county town of Surrey) and London - a distance of around 35 miles through some of the most densely populated parts of the planet. Wealthy too. At best you get a Vodafone signal for half the journey and perhaps only 5% of it is usable for data (ie 3G). This independent comparison research explains why I decided to experiment with a new network, EE (Everything Everywhere), who have combined the masts of Orange and T-Mobile: I have an iPhone 4S on a Vodafone contract which recently expired. So I'm due either an upgrade from them or I can easily move to a n...

Every time I plug it in, my iJobs insists I upgrade its operating system. It requires about 1GB of download to install. After weeks of nagging pop-ups I finally decided to let it run - despite the fact my iJobs has been performing 'normally' up to this point. How easily we forget the countless times in the past when we've 'upgraded' only to discover that we've unleashed system clash hell on our increasingly confused hardware, only to bitterly regret the decision, again and again. But we always hope that this upgrade will solve all our problems - like my iJobs not picking up a mobile or wifi signal perhaps - and delight us with something new and amazing. Make it a better telephone would be top of my wishlist Mr JobsV2.0 if you're reading this. So I finally give in and click 'OK'. I need to leave it running overnight since our internet bandwidth into the house only permits the occasional lonely passing byte to squeeze down the phone line every now a...

I'm typing this on a train between Guildford (the wealthiest city in the UK) and London, 35 miles away. Mobile signals (forget 3G) drop out between 10 and 15 times during this popular 45 minute journey through mostly built-up areas. And when I am connected, I'm hanging onto 1 bar (did you know that means 1 bar for reception, not transmission). Where I live, in SW Surrey, we rarely get a mobile signal at all. So much for the UK being in the vanguard of technology. We're in the dark ages compared to most developed countries, and many more far less economically successful. Why? Get used to it (notice the bars mean nothing) There are four major mobile networks competing for our money in the UK (now that Orange and T-Mobile have combined). In 2000 the British government had a wheeze. 'Lets have an auction for the mobile 3G bandwidth'. So every company who wanted to provide a 3G service tried to outbid each other for a slice, and ended up paying billions of pound...

I'm going to cry. No really. I'm going to cry. My iPhone won't sync the notes I write on it with Outlook. After hours of forums and fiddling, I've discovered that some spotty software developer at Apple has decided that notes written on an iPhone go into an email account (why??!), which some other spotty-faced developer at Google (and I have great sympathy with all acne sufferers, but god knew what he was doing afflicting these bastards) decided should be in my Gmail account (it's an email address, not a folder to keep stuff), and which some spotty-face at Microsoft decided wouldn't show up without crashing Outlook on my incredibly slow and totally knackered Dell, designed by.... some other spotty-faced nutter. I'm a graduate engineer from UCL (lord knows how) and regard myself as technically literate. I read New Scientist, BBC Focus (fantastic mag!), watch endless science and tech documentaries, and am a member of the Royal Institution. I founded a number...

Every two years I switch to one of the other four UK mobile network providers because a) my memory of the last time I was one of their customers has faded, b) I have a mistaken expectation that they've done something in the meantime to improve their service, and c) I'm bored or angry with my mobile and hope that a new one might suddenly work better as a phone (why did I ever abandon my old Nokia?). We all know every mobile operator offers a patchy service in the UK. Most of their money goes into marketing. Clearly very little goes into increasing their coverage. What's even more annoying is that we've grown to accept this in the UK (where our declining economy has just been overtaken by Brazil!). Everywhere else on this planet the service is brilliant. We're told its crap because: a) we're all watching porn, football and soaps like Coronation Street on our mobiles, and that's used up the bandwidth (which of course is bollocks, because no-one CAN watch an...