Magic and Lies

I’ve been getting calls, sometimes four or five a day, from the number 00420239011111, sometimes 001420239011111. The phone rings three times then stops, just before the answering service kicks in.

Now, I make a habit of not responding to numbers I don’t recognise on my personal mobile so no harm was done, but these calls have become increasingly persistent. I googled the number out of curiosity and discovered what I had already suspected. An automated dialler originating in Czechoslovakia. If the user calls back, it’s a premium rate international call.

So yesterday, out of a sense of good citizenship I called Orange, to tell them about the scam and ask them to block the number. A service that they advertise on their web site. The first operator told me there was no such service and that it was impossible to block calls. I told them it was on their web site, they put the phone down.

I called back and got a different person. This operator said that it is possible, but only from the phone. They helpfully confirmed that it would not be possible from my phone. I told them that they should make a note of the number and perhaps investigate it – after all, somebody is targeting the Orange network and they have a responsibility to protect their customers. Don’t they?

The operator sounded exasperated and repeated the advice that my handset would not be able to block the calls. I told him I understood this and asked him why Orange appeared to be so disinterested in protecting their customers. He put me on hold and conferred with his supervisor. After several minutes he came back and said that they would make a note of the complaint and pass it up to management, following with the line “Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

Resisting the temptation to point out that they had actually done nothing so far to help me today, I asked him why he had omitted to take down the number if he was going to pass the complaint to management. I suggested that I might not look so favourably on Orange as a provider even though I’ve been a customer for over ten years, if nothing was done about this problem.

Reluctantly, he took down the number and promised somebody would call me back. They didn’t.

So there is a computer, somewhere in the Czech republic furiously dialling numbers on the Orange network, basically stealing money from the unwary. Orange quite clearly couldn’t care less. And then the penny dropped. How stupid of me – it’s the Big Society. If I want something done about this I’ll have to do it myself. Well the first thing I’m going to do is to add the numbers to my address book and set it to direct all calls straight to the answering machine. Now why couldn’t Orange have suggested that?

Early adopters of technology must sometimes feel like hamsters, interminably stuck in the exercise wheel. Yesterday evening, having nothing much better to do, I decided to upgrade my HTC Hero to a newer version of the Android OS, my transparently ridiculous excuse being that location awareness in Twitter posts is obviously something I can’t live without.

A cursory inspection of the HTC site showed that upgrades were available for the Orange branded handset and I downloaded the build and read the instructions. Unsurprisingly, the phone needs to be connected by USB to the computer where the binaries are held, and so the HTC Connect software also needs to be installed.

Now, my experience of running the HTC Connect software in Windows Vista was so flaky that I hastily uninstalled it, but my general experience of Windows 7 has been so much better that I decided to reinstall, noting that there would be the possibility that my HTC supplied version of the software might not support Windows 7. I was correct to be suspicious, the software installed but resolutely failed to connect to the phone. No problem I said, I’ll just go and download a more recent version….how naive, I really should have known better!

The Windows 7 compatible version of HTC Connect installs fine and recognises the phone. However the support statement says that Android 1.5 is the minimum level of OS. I discovered why, as soon as I kicked off the firmware upgrade – the drivers are incompatible with Android 1.0. this manifested as an I/O error, so no damage was done, though I am curious as to why HTC Connect recognises the phone yet the upgrade software doesn’t.

Plan B was implemented – installing the HTC Connect software on a Windows XP powered laptop enabled the right drivers to be in place. I copied the binary for the upgrade across to the laptop and kicked off the install. It took approximately ten minutes to complete. Afterwards, with the newly upgraded Android 1.5, I was able to sync the handset against my Windows 7 machine.

A word of warning for the unwary – the firmware update wipes the ROM completely – that means your address book and custom applications, your Google, Facebook and Flickr connectivity, all gone. What would be useful for HTC Connect to feature might be a way of restoring these values during the sync?

Another grumble – in syncing my address book from Outlook, it would be really useful to flag certain addresses as being unwanted. Outlook has a habit of hoovering up addresses from the copy lists of every E-mail you recieve and respond to, hence I found 271 new aquaintances cluttering up my phonebook with e-mail addresses. Surely HTC Sync could provide an interface to the phone that allows you to delete batches of addresses instead of going through the list manually and deleting one at a time?

The good news is the phone appears to run faster than it did, it gave me an opportunity to install newer versions of a couple of apps and discard the ones that I don’t use. New wallpapers are available too, so the handset looks and feels like a new phone. Location awareness in Twitter? Haven’t a clue, just need to find something worth Tweeting about…

Windows Mobile OS can finally be consigned to the dustbin. In Android, Google have come up with a mobile operating system that is super slick, lightning fast and paired with HTC technology represents a very real threat to both Blackberry and iPhone.

Hardware

The Phone is impressively specified:

3.2 inch TFT Screen

5 megapixel Camera

420 minutes talk time and 750 hours standby (WCDMA)

Onboard 512mb ROM, 288mb RAM expandable via MicroSD Card

Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets

Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g

The most notable innovation is that the touch screen has been improved in both sensitivity and responsiveness and enhanced by the addition of a Blackberry like tracker ball with scroll and click functionality.

Software

Android is the operating system built on a Linux kernel by Google with the intention of competing with Microsoft, RIM technologies (Blackberry) and Apple in the mobile market.

The immediate advantage Google have in this space is evident the minute you provide your Gmail credentials. The telephone leverages the full range of Google Apps, so if you are already using Google Calendar for example, you will find your phone calendar automatically synched with the online version.

The operating system supports VGA, 2D graphics library, 3D graphics based on OpenGL ES and as you would expect from a Linux based distribution, virtual screens. The HTC Hero provides a total of 6 full screen estates.

Android uses SQLite for data storage and for connectivity, supports GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The web browser is, like Google Chrome, based on the WebKit framework and the OS has a development kit with an emulator, debugging tools, performance profiling and a plugin for the Eclipse platform.

Android, like Apple have organised a virtual mall, Android Market , where developers can sell or give away applications written for the Android platform.

Verdict

First impressions are jaw droppingly good. The phone is everything its Windows based predecessor (HTC Diamond Touch) wasn’t. It is fast, flexible and intuitive, largely down to the dropping of the Windows Mobile platform. The Google tie in has ensured that Microsoft document formats are supported and there is support for multiple mail accounts and social software support in the shape of Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. HTC still persist with the USB supporting but proprietory connector for headphone and laptop connectivity. It’s a minor irritation, thankfully mitigated by the addition of a standard headphone jack on the top of the phone.

This is a serious piece of kit and fully deserving of the fistful of awards it has already picked up. Even the arch Apple apologist Steven Fry has conceded that  “you have to applaud HTC, they have gone all out to rethink every detail of the user experience … It’s an impressive device, really really impressive”