…or is it the network?
This week I upgraded my trusty (but now falling apart) Siemens C35i to a Nokia 6600 smartphone in the expectation of achieving fast internet access via GPRS. The 6600 falls somewhere between a regular mobile phone and PDA-like phone (such as the Sony Ericsson P900). It has lots of nice features, but so far I have not been able to persuade Vodafone UK to give me anything other than WAP internet access. This is pretty limited, and what I need, I think, is to connect to their Internet Access point (not WAP).
The existence of the phone’s built-in Opera browser was hotly denied by Vodafone (you must have downloaded it - no, I didn’t; it must be a second-hand phone - no, it isn’t; you didn’t buy it from Vodafone - yes I did). Apparently, Vodafone UK only allow the Sony Ericsson P900 to run Opera: the Nokia 6600 is to slow and the ‘user experience’ apparently suboptimal. (But isn’t that for the user to decide?) I suspect it has more to do with inadquacies in the Vodafone network than the Nokia, though others may disagree.
One of the reasons I went for the Nokia 6600 was to use it to access my servers with the likes of puTTY and Pine, as trailed by Russell Beattie recently. these, and Opera, will not work through the WAP Access Point. :-( Still, the phone has some plus points. It takes pictures (but so do my cameras, rather better). It does bluetooth connections with my Mac PowerBook OK, and iSynch works though is a bit picky sometimes. And the screen is large enough to display the whole of a standard SMS text.
What else can one say? One day, perhaps, mobile phone operators will stop trying to be content providers and concentrate on connectivity.
