Here I am at the Nokia World event, surrounded by all sorts of fantastic new technologies and devices showing the leading edge of mobile technology — but somewhere between Rafe of All About Symbian and I, there’s an SMS breakdown. He gets messages from my American SIM and account, but somehow messages he sends from his UK account disappear in the ether.
So for all the grand talk about where the industry is going and all these new products it’s delivering, let’s not forget about the small, basic things. It’s great that I’ve got a phone that can do so many things. But right now, all I want it to do is to deliver Rafe’s SMS to me. Having mobile TV or whatever other new service is fantastic, but all the new services in the world won’t make people overlook basic problems like faulty SMS interconnects.
My phone’s working here, but I have a sneaking suspicion I might be being charged a pound of flesh for every SMS I send. And I roamed a bit last night, so will be selling my granny next month…
Have you seen the DJ yet with a pair of N91s? He’s a very friendly chap, he built the decks himself…
[...] When I was in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, I noted that the industry still manages to get hung up by small things, like shoddy SMS interconnects. Today, my T-Mobile bill arrived in the mail, bringing with it the inevitable feelings of regret that I actually bothered to use the phone while I was there. I can handle the 99 cents per minute for voice and the 35 cents per text message, really, but the $15 per MB of data really gets to me. This is a path plenty of people have gone down before, so I won’t rehash the entire argument — I’ll just say that I’m a T-Mobile US subscriber, and I was roaming on T-Mobile Netherlands, so the cost of delivering mobile data to me in one country versus the other shouldn’t be that radically different. [...]
[...] There’s no denying that SMS alerts can be useful for some things, but it always seems a bit risky to use them for things that are truly urgent. That’s because they’re not all that reliable — plenty of SMS messages tend to disappear into the ether, or sometimes it just takes a while for them to get through. So, it makes you wonder just how effective it will be for hotels in Japan to SMS or email guest’s mobile phones if the building is on fire. They say they’re looking to do this to help guests with hearing difficulties. It’s a nice idea, in theory (and the software is being offered free by a Japanese government agency), but it seems like a solution such as adding flashing lights to the hotel’s fire alarm system might be a bit more effective. [...]