In Praise of Mobile

Sometimes it pays to see things with a fresh pair of eyes. For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a HTC Desire, and apart from the odd quirk, like the little notification noise it occasionally makes without having actually notified you of anything, I have found it to be an excellent phone. When I first got it, of course, I downloaded a bunch of apps, some of which I use a lot, others of which are gathering digital dust.

Then at this year’s Mobile World Congress, in a random act of carelessness - my only excuse is that for the four days of the show, you feel like you’re in a perpetual scrum - I lost it. So for the past few weeks, while my insurance claim was being processed, I have been using my previous handset, a Nokia E71. Now I remember when I first got this phone, how excited I was by it, how neat and slim and powerful it seemed. But having been forced to use it again these past few weeks, it felt like I was back in the age of steam power.

Then last Friday, after a fairly tortuous claims process, made more difficult by the fact that the lines of communication between my mobile network and my phone insurance company leave a lot to be desired, my replacement Desire arrived.

I made a point of getting a few obvious things up and running, namely email and SwiftKey. Trust me, once you’ve got used to using SwiftKey, you don’t want to do without it. Then yesterday evening, sitting on the sofa, as my wife watched a murder mystery on TV and the kids were tucked up in bed, I found myself with time to kill. So I did what most people with a new phone would do, and headed for Android Market to download a few apps that I recalled writing about over the past few months.

In my case last night, the roll of honour included Sky News; Sky & BBC Sports News; Skype; Soccer Scores – FotMob; VoucherCloud; and HipLogic Spark, which hijacks the Desire’s HTC Sense UI with its own, and which had impressed me in a demo at MWC. 

And then I started having a play. While I’m a big fan of the mobile web in terms of the reach it offers, I confess that I found the experience on the News and Sports Scores apps much richer. I liked Spark for the same reason, offering a constant stream of news feeds from the world of politics, current affairs, sports, showbusiness etc. I also like the way that on the display of your installed apps, the top row is populated with suggested apps you don’t yet have, but that you might like to try. This provides a revenue stream for HipLogic, much-needed discoverability for the app developers, and the chance for the user to stumble across something useful. It’s also very easy to switch between the Spark and HTC Sense UIs.

Skype worked seamlessly, enabling me to IM mobileSQUARED chief analyst Nick Lane to ask what he was up to, because I could. When it came to VoucherCloud, newly-available on Android a couple of weeks ago, the cynic in me could not resist clicking on the Ts & Cs on all the offers near me to see how useful or otherwise they were. And the cynic in me was disappointed to find that they were pretty reasonable. So the 40 per cent off cinema tickets at my local Odeon really does offer 40 per cent off, so long as you don’t use it on a Friday or a Saturday, or for Premieres, or various promotional screenings, such as the Sunday morning Odeon Kids’ session, where the tickets are already discounted.

Now I wouldn’t expect most of you reading this to be in any way surprised by any of it. The abridged version of this piece, after all, reads: Man gets new smartphone, downloads apps, finds they make his life better.

But I just found it incredibly refreshing, and eye-opening, to find myself back in a punter’s shoes, to go through what he goes through when he unpacks that new smartphone and discovers all the things it can do. And all the data revenues those things can generate.

But what, I hear you ask, does the photo of the man sprayed with gold paint have to do with any of this? Oh him. If you find yourself in London's Covent Garden, you’ll see him most days, on the bit that runs from the Plaza to the tube station. He is the spitting image - apart from the skin colour - of my friend Pete, who I used to share a lift to football with on a Tuesday evening, but who stopped playing a few weeks back due to other commitments. When I saw him the other day, (the golden man that is), I couldn’t resist taking a photo and emailing it round the rest of the footballers, with a note saying I had discovered why Pete couldn’t make it to football any more. I’m pleased to say, it got a laugh. And the photo, of course, was taken on my HTC Desire. Just one more thing about the modern smartphone we all take for granted.

David Murphy
Editor