#“Get Paid Apps on your Android Phone in Ireland”

One thing that has me incensed about Google is how the country that enables them to avoid tax on billions of dollars in revenue is generally paddy-last (pun intended) when it comes to app support.

It was only in late 2008 that Google Maps finally showed more than one road in West Cork. Their most recent manifestation of this attitude is the lack of paid apps for Irish users of Android phones. Whilst this was acceptable when only me and 5 others had unlocked US G1s, we have had mobile networks selling Android phones here for 3 months now. Grrrrrrr.

Go into the Android Store on a G1 with a Vodafone or O2 Irish SIM and all you see are free apps.

Now take that SIM out and pop in a Three UK PAYG SIM which you paid 10 for the last time you were in the UK and taa-daa, paid apps.

And this is sitting in rainy West Cork with no Three signal so I'm roaming on the Vodafone Ireland network!

As a test I just bought Pixelpipe Pro for $0.99. And for double kicks I tested the use of the Entropay Virtual Visa to pay for it and used an Irish address and phone in Checkout.

And it worked!

FFS Google, if all the bits are in place and working, including Google Checkout, what is the bloody problem?

#“Xperia X10 lands on Vodafone UK in April – Engadget”

via engadget.com

The ultimate Android phone. Massive screen, 8MP camera, kick-ass CPU.

Surely tho they'll have it on Android 2.1 before release? 1.6 would be a huge mistake.

Fingers crossed Vodafone Ireland stocks it so I can get cheap on my upgrade.

Would still prefer to keyboard tho. It's the one killer feature of the G1.

So Nokia, you have 2-3 months to blow my mind with a new product (think N900 with capacative screen and 8MP camera) before you lose me forever to Android and I retire my N95-8GB.

#“Kulula Airplane Rebranding”

via theletter.co.uk

More fabness from @discusster over on theletter.co.uk

#“Symbian Open-Sourcing Gut Reaction”

So Symbian is now fully Open-Sourced.

I bang the "Symbian is dead" drum quite a bit but it's more coming from a punter perspective than any industry insight. I have an N95-8GB and a HTC G1. The hardware on the N95 is fabulous, the apps are solid, the OS gets in my way all the time. The hardware on the G1 is rubbish, the apps are fabulous and the OS stays out of my way.

If my N95-8GB asks me one more time which goddammed way it should connect to the internet, I may throw it at the wall. Here's a wee bit of free code for the Symbian and Nokia S60 folks:

If previously used Wifi available, use that.
else
if previously used 3G connection available use that
else very very very rarely ask me
endif

Open Sourcing things at the beginning of their development often works. Doing it after 10 years rarely does, even if they are good products. How many people using the Open Source version of Solaris? What's the usage of XFS vs ext3? Do people use SVN or Vesta for source control? Exactly.

Answer me this, can I go to a Symbian site (or related hacker site) download a few files and tools, connect my N95 via USB to my PC and upload a working instance of Symbian on it and start hacking it?

Have a look at what people like @cyanogen are doing on Android. If he can do it, so can a bunch of Indian or Chinese manufacturers. Unless Symbian enables that type of instant win for the dev community, it will have a long slow death.

I, as an ex-embedded-developer, was able to install an Eclipse based SDK for Android, load up the source code for our App, figure the basics out, tweak some text and deploy the new version in both an emulator and on G1 in about an hour from start to finish. How long would it take me to do that on Symbian starting with an empty browser page and an N95-8GB?

The key problem isn't really the OS, it's everything else.

I'm afraid the future is Android, Maemo and iPhone. Symbian will be something I see when I power up the N95-8GB in 5 years time for old times sake and it says "Search for WLAN".

#“Bill Hicks had it right all those years ago”

I read this: WTF: “Kids’ lingerie” photos featuring Miley Cyrus’ 9-year-old sister on a stripper pole?

And thought of this (circa 1min 30secs in):

#“Machform nicely formed”

When the new biz site launched we used the Contact Form 7 plugin for Wordpress. Whilst it does a good job for basic forms, we soon ran into its limitations. I had seen good success in the past with Machform on the BarCamp Cork site so gave that a trial instead.

It’s working really well for us. Install is trivial and creating forms is all drag n drop. It’s very inexpensive at €29 and the forms can be pasted into most sites with almost no effort.

The only two drawbacks are that styling is done by editing CSS instead of a control panel and it cannot do conditional fields (e.g. if person ticks “yes” in question N, show them something new).

review rating=4 lv:group=technology machform forms wordpress

#“Click & Buy make themselves look like scammers”

Catherine found a charge on our Mastercard recently that we could not get to the bottom of. We then discovered it recurred all the way back to September.

It was from "Click and Buy". We contacted Mastercard but all they could say was "it's for professional services". I went on to Click and Buy to discover a lot of online gambling logos. So of course we suspected the card had been hijacked.

I contacted Click and Buy who took weeks to reply and just shrugged their shoulders and say they had no idea. In the meantime, Catherine finally figured out that the charge was for Moshi Monsters.

If Click and Buy want to avoid looking like Arthur Daly they need to add the merchant details to every Mastercard transaction that they make.

And Moshi Monsters has lost a customer. That's stupid money for a kids online game.

#“Android soon for \u008030?”

Finally got my two-year upgrade on Vodafone Ireland. Had a look at what's on offer. N97-mini for 120 is good value but I hate resistive screens and the lack of memory.

Oh, what's this? The Vodafone H1 360 for 30? A linux-based phone, social media enabled, 5 MP camera, wifi, 3G, bluetooth, Cortex A8 kick-ass CPU, lots of memory. Is that a typo? No, it is 30.

Read some reviews (particularly Ewan on Mobile Industry Review). Damn, the software is a horror. Crappy apps too.

A wee bit of Googling. Yes! Someone had the same idea as me. Port Android to it.

The hackers have barely got started but if they manage it, you could have something that has the equivalent hardware of a Nexus One, running Android. For 30.

Poor Vodafone. I could have told them for free that they should have done that in the first place. Or buy Palm and use WebOS.

Not this badly thought out, badly implemented, will-probably-get the-bullet-when-the-bungee-VP-moves-on-to-his-next-gig disaster.

#“Sony Ericsson thinks I’m a big girls blouse”

I signed up on the Sony Ericsson site to be notified when the Xperia X10 Android phone was launched. But they also decided to add me to their newsletter mailing list. Grrrrrrreat.

Today they think I'd like to buy this wonderful Dolce & Gabbana Jalou

No.

#“Jolicloud not what I expected”

So after checking out CloudOS, I loaded up JoliCloud onto a thumbdrive. Tariq Krim’s quick presentation at Le Web had caught my interest.

I was a bit stunned to find myself booting into Ubuntu NBR Linux. And not quickly. Hardly a new paradigm.

I create a Jolicloud account and………….

“Here are some apps you can install in your linux box. Here are some other webapps, not specific to Jolicloud”

I honestly don’t get it. Mozilla Prism to run some web-apps offline. Anddddddddd?

A Cloud based Netbook needs to boot in 10 seconds or less and offer me something new, not just an aggregation of other people’s bits.

If Jolicloud is HTML5 etc (like Palm Pre) that is a good thing. But it doesn’t strike me as a business that can compete with Google and everyone else who offers the same thing on e.g. a stripped down Win7

review rating=3 lv:group=technology jolicloud netbooks operating systems cloud computing