I don't want to faff around with physical SIMs, so I went looking for the cheapest way to keep my number for the longest time. There are a whole bunch of providers out there who will do low-cost monthly contracts (like Spusu), which I don't want. Similarly, there are some pure PAYG providers who require you to top-up with £10 every few months (like 1pmobile).

In the end, I went with Lyca Mobile (affiliate link). Total cost was £10 which should last indefinitely.

The process isn't particularly straightforward. Here's how it works:

First, add a PAYG SIM to your basket and select "eSIM"

Next, click the Bin icon (🗑) in the top right. You'll get this pop-up:

Select "Discard plan & add credit" - you'll return to this screen:

The minimum top-up is a tenner, so select that. From there, you can add details of your old number, its porting code, and when you want the port to take place. Then pay.

Done! You'll receive your eSIM instantly. Scan it with your phone and you'll be up and running. The phone number porting will take as long as it takes.

OK, but will Lyca let you keep a number indefinitely? Here's what they say:

How long can I keep my number for if I don’t use any of Lyca Mobile’s services?

Normally we will keep your number for 120 days if you do not use our service. However, you may also keep your Lycamobile number for up to 1 year without using our service. Just dial *139*9999# from your Lycamobile and follow the instructions on the screen. Please be aware that there will be a fixed annual fee of £15 which will be deducted from your balance.

Source

Note, their chatbot says the fixed fee is a fiver. Like all half-baked AI systems, it is wrong.

So, what does "using" consist of? This is hard to find out! I think is any chargeable event. Based on their current PAYG pricing the cheapest options are:

• Send an SMS for 23p
• Use 1MB of data for 15p.

If I'm right, you could use 1MB of data every 120 days. That would deplete your credit in about 22 years. More than long enough for me!

There you have it, I'm pretty sure that's the cheapest way to keep a UK mobile number on an eSIM. You can keep it switched off for 119 days, flick it on, send a quick message, then shut it down again.

Click the referral link to join Lyca Mobile

Recently, I treated myself to an upgrade - a Pixel 8 Pro. The biggest, fastest, fattest, AI-stuffed Android phone yet. It's pretty good! The camera is excellent, the heat-sensor is crap⁰, the battery is gorgeous, the weight is annoying. Google's software was too needy, so I replaced it with GrapheneOS.

But, as much as I like the device, there are some hardware things which I think would improve it. No, I'm not talking about a headphone jack! I'm talking about useful things¹.

More precise input

The early Androids - and most BlackBerrys - had either a rollerball or touch pad just below the screen.

It made it so much easier to do precise selection. Yeah yeah, I know you can slide along the spacebar to move a cursor, but it just isn't the same.

I get that a rollerball gunks up pretty quickly - but a touchpad or optical joystick would be lovely. Perhaps it could go on the...

Rear finger-print sensor

The technology behind the in-screen fingerprint sensor is magical. It works brilliantly. But I rather liked my One Plus 5T's rear sensor. It didn't blast my face with light, and I found it more natural to use when picking up the phone.

But, even better, the rear sensor acted as an input! When I stroked down on it, the notification shade appeared. Stroking up dismissed it. I'd love to have a rear-input like that again. I'd like more inputs in general!

Physical Buttons

In the future, cars will be ditching touchscreens in favour of physical buttons. Perhaps Android will do the same?

This is the HTC Dream - the original Android. And it is perfection.

Wouldn't it be nice to have physical buttons for home and back, rather than trying to remember what swipe actions to take? OK, perhaps a modern phone doesn't need this many buttons - but there are still some things where switches are useful. For example...

Silence Slider

Both the iPhone and several Android devices have a dedicated "silence" switch.

It was so handy. There's a comfort about being able to reach into your pocket while sat and the theatre and know that your phone is on silent. No unlocking and fiddling with on-screen menus. One flick and you're good.

But, with most modern Android, you have to peer at the screen to know what's going on. I kinda miss...

Status LED for power and messages

Back in the day, every Android phone had a multi-colour LED. It would show red when your battery needed charging. It would pulse when being charged. It would flash green if you had an SMS. With a glance you knew what your phone was doing.

AMOLED hasn't really lived up to its promise. There's no single-pixel flashing away on screen to let me know if I have a message. Instead, I have to pick up my phone to get the entire screen to activate. What a waste of battery life!

NFC on the top.

My new phone has NFC right in the middle of the back of the phone. That's a bit awkward for placing on a tap-to-pay terminal on the bus. My previous phone had the NFC right at the top.

It is doubly annoying for me as I wear an NFC ring. And the damn thing keeps triggering my phone!

I realise this is an extremely niche problem!

Keyboard

The last Android phone I had with a keyboard was a complete disaster. Maybe I'm kidding myself that a full tactile QWERTY experience is necessary?

But look how pretty!

Infrared Camera

Remember how I said the thermal sensor was shite? I've reviewed a couple of Thermal cameras for Android.

They're expensive - but certainly useful. Both for finding hotspots in your home and for seeing who is sweaty. OK, it isn't the most compelling bit of hardware. But if you're going to put a sensor on a phone, at least make it useful!

3D Screens and Haptic Screens

Years ago, I tried an LG phone with a 3D screen. No glasses! It used the same sort of technology as the Nintendo 3DS.

OK, it wasn't the highest resolution and you had to sit at a precise angle. But it was interesting tech!

Similarly, I once played with the Senseg haptic screen. It used weird electrostatic tech to make the texture of the screen change. It is almost impossible to describe and, if I didn't have this video, I might believe I dreamed it.

There are phones with built in laser projectors which, while fun, aren't that compelling to me.

What else is missing?

What do you remember from the early Androids that you think is missing now? Which crazy innovations need to make a comeback? Which Shenzhen-special already has all these features?

Halfway through, he says:

When the first generation [of iPhone] came out I offered the view, based on my experience of releases and refinements in this field, that iPhone the Third would be The One. I still believe this to be true. Any wishlist for hardware and software improvements in v3.0 would be bound to hope for – nay demand – the following:

So, what did St Stephen of Fry wish for? And can 2023 iPhones and Android match His expectations?

Fry's Wishlist

1. Cut and paste. I mean come on!!

Yes! Inexplicably this was a Hard Problem™ for multiple devices. Even Windows Phone 7 launched without such basic text editing. The iPhone eventually got this in 2009.

2. iPhone version of Safari to be Flash capable.

No! In 2010, Steve Jobs published his "Thoughts On Flash" letter. He (correctly) described all the problems with Flash and why it would never be suitable for the iPhone.

You may not remember, but Flash was ubiquitous at the time. Symbian phones had (rudimentary) Flash players, as did early Android phones. That wasn't enough to save the publication format. Nor was there enough consumer pressure to force Apple into supporting it.

3. Video recording: iPhone should be like a Flip

Yes. It may surprise you to learn that the original iPhone couldn't record video! Nearly every cameraphone on the market could. But not iOS.

4. Upgrade of camera (xenon flash, higher res)

Yes. Again, the original iPhone had a 2MP camera and no flash - compared to the contemporary Nokia N95 which had a 5MP sensor, Carl Zeiss lens, and a flash. Nowadays the iPhone has more cameras on it than seems possible.

5. Front facing video camera for 3G video calls

Yes and no. Again, the first few iPhones had no FFC. It wasn't until 2010's iPhone 4 that it got the ability to do video calls.

But! Only via Facetime. I don't think the iPhone has ever supported the GSM specification for carrier video calling. To be fair, mobile networks repeatedly shat the bed in terms of pricing their calling options, so repeatedly had their lunch stolen by "Over The Top" services like Facetime and WhatsApp.

6. MMS

Ish? Because the aforementioned carriers decided to price MMS as a premium product, most users turned to WhatsApp or similar. But, as Fry predicted, iOS 3 came with MMS.

7. User file management capabilities

Steve Jobs suggested that users didn't understand filesystems. And, therefore, the app should manage its specific files. That's a design decision which iOS still embodies. While there are now some limited ways to manage files, you're mostly at the mercy of the individual apps.

Of course, in a self-fulfilling-prophecy, people who grew up with an iPhone don't understand how file systems work.

Android, of course, doesn't give a shit at will happily let apps crap all over the filesystem.

8. Bluetooth that is worthy of the name. File transfers between different phones and platforms is a minimum requirement.

Hahaha! No. In 2013, iOS 7 introduced AirDrop which made it possible to transfer large files quickly between iOS devices and other Mac devices. But there's no way to send Bluetooth files to the filthy scum who use Android. Ewww!

9. A memory card slot.

No. And fuck you for asking! If you fill up your device, just buy a new one!!!

To be fair, the latest iPhones do offer a terabyte of storage. And, nowadays, it is getting rarer to find an Android which will take a MicroSD card.

10. AM/FM radio. (Mobile TV too, why not?)

What, are you some kind of Communist who wants to listen to music for free?!?! Just buy your songs from iTunes like a normal person.

Although there were adapters for radio signals there was never any native support for free-to-air radio. Several Android devices support AM/FM and use a standard headphone cable as an antenna.

As for TV? There is a standard for mobile broadcast called DVB-H. But it was only ever supported by a few Nokia phones and never any Android devices.

11. Better (and removable) battery.

Better? Yes? Removable? Again, fuck you for asking. Buy a new phone or pay for an expensive replacement.

12. Built in projector (this prolly won’t come till V4, but you never know)

I love the idea of iPhone users having a high-intensity light source with which to dazzle people! Sadly, this technology never came to iPhone. There are a few Android devices with built-in projectors but it still remains a niche bit of tech. There are too many compromises around picture quality, power consumption, and heat to make it worthwhile.

13. Customisable glossary for Apple’s predictive text input system. BlackBerry has a superb autotext that allows BB units still to outperform iPhone when it comes to input.

Yes, eventually. Early iPhones let you add custom text shortcuts albeit with some truly atrocious hacks.

14. Email to be widescreen capable.

It is bizarre that early iPhones didn't let you use landscape orientation in some key apps. Thankfully, this is now possible. INNOVATION!

15. Attachable proprietary or third party peripherals: keyboard, projector (if not built in see wish 12), printer etc. Maybe not necessary if iPhone implementation of Bluetooth gets the kick up the arse it needs.

*sigh* Apple's proprietary Lightning port and strict licencing programme means that there are some peripherals. It isn't like Android where you can shove in an OTG cable and use basically any USB device.

Coda

After his main list, Fry says:

I would add to that list three demands that are more to do with the way Apple and the network companies limit the iPhone’s power.

Oh, this should be good…!

1. Jailbreaking to be tolerated – encouraged, even

I hear Jobs spinning in his grave just thinking about it. Those who violate the holy sanctity of the iPhone must be cast out!

To be fair, the main reason for jailbreaking back in 2008 was to enable 3rd party app stores. It will be interesting to see if recent anticompetitive investigations will reignite this debate.

Also of interest is the way that Apple adopted some of the customisations released by the jailbreak community.

2. Unlocking not to be hobbled by iTunes

Back in 2009, I was frustrated that iTunes was needed to set up an iPhone. Nowadays, you don't need a separate computer and unlocking is handled remotely.

3. Apps designers to be freer to innovate yet further.

Well, yes and no. There are lots of interesting apps. But if designers are too innovative, or not socially conservative enough, their apps won't get released.

Again, this is an excellent reason to require Apple to allow alternative app stores.

Verdict

Overall, Stephen Fry did a good job of predicting what Steve Jobs would eventually launch.

It's interesting to remember that it wasn't obvious that the iPhone would succeed. It launched without features which the rest of the industry had decided were essential, but which regular customers didn't seem to care for.

Would I love to see an iPhone with a projector, 3rd party app store, and a built-in TV tuner which can save video to an SD card, while I use my USB keyboard to shuffle files on the filesystem? Sure! But that's what Android is for.

About £1,700 for a Pixel Fold or a Galaxy Fold.

WHAT THE JUDDERING FUCK!?

That's over twice the cost of my laptop. Over 4x the cost of my large 4K TV. The same cost as a PS5 and twenty-five games. It would be the single most expensive object I own. I would be terrified of it getting dropped, cracked, lost, or stolen. Look, I don't condone thievery, but if you saw someone walking down the street with over a grand in cash held loosely in their hands you wouldn't be surprised if a scrote on a bike grabbed it, would you?

I don't think I could psychologically cope with holding something that expensive and worrying constantly about keeping it safe.

When I worked for a mobile network, I got a new phone every few months. Mostly demo models and mostly for free or heavily discounted. When I left the industry, I paid full price for my own phone for the very first time in over a decade.

Six years ago I spent £470 on a OnePlus 5T. Adjusted for inflation, that's about £600. Was that worth it?

Undoubtedly yes. Amortised over time, it's the equivalent of paying £80 per year (or about £100 in today's money). Even accounting for a new battery at £30, I have received substantial value. Even today the 5T is able to run all the apps and services I want. With LineageOS I'm getting the latest Android experience and security patches. The only things it is missing are 5G, a better camera, and some financial services apps because it is rooted.

I honestly don't feel like I'm missing anything substantial from a new device. Except the geeky pleasure of a foldable screen.

Assuming my phone died tomorrow, and I wanted the same sort of value for money, I have a choice:

1. Buy a phone every year for about £100.
2. Buy a refurbished foldable for about £600.

The eco-nerd in me balks at the levels of e-waste created by buying a new phone every year. OK, I'd probably buy 2nd hand, but that's still a bit irresponsible. And, at that price point, I'm not sure I'd receive much of an improvement over my current device. It isn't like exciting new features are launched that often. Literally the only cool think I want is magic bendable OLED.

What about buying a foldable? It's possible to buy a refurbed Samsung Fold for about £600. But do I think it'd last 6 years? Right now, I'd be worried about it lasting 6 months!

I can afford a foldable - either new or refurbished - but I can't justify it. I know all tech can break at any point. I'm probably very lucky that it has been over a decade since I last smashed a phone. Can I keep playing those odds?

Perhaps the middle-ground is buying a semi-decent phone for £300 and hoping it lasts 3 years?

Or getting the Fairphone for £500 and hoping replacement parts can keep it alive or upgraded over time?

But neither of those gets me to the techy nirvana of a foldable.

As I said in Wired several years ago, phones have reached a plateau. The black rectangle is close to the platonic ideal. Very little other than incremental upgrades have happened in the market for ages. Things like Apple's lidar are interesting, but not exactly killer features.

Perhaps that's why I want a foldable? To recapture the magic of my youth where every new phone was an exciting leap in innovation.

In it, they make the convincing case that phones are perfectly capable of hosting websites and - if we want more people to escape the walled-gardens - this could be a good way to get people back into self-hosting.

I loved hosting a small site on my Nokia N95 back in the day, and I'd be overjoyed if modern phones allowed this. But there are a few pitfalls.

Connectivity is the main one. If you're sat at home on WiFi all day, or only ever in an area with good cellular reception, then this is great. But the second you get on an underground train or climb a mountain your website goes offline. Perhaps it might be nice to introduce a little randomness into our sites' availability. But most people want their site to work even if their phone is in a deadspot.

Cost is also a factor. If you're on an unlimited data plan, then you're fine. If you're on a cheap PAYG plan with only a few GB then your website becomes a liability. If one of your links becomes suddenly popular, you might burn through your monthly limit in a few minutes.

Battery life is the next big problem. Again, if you're sat in an office all day with your phone plugged in, you're fine. But if you're out and about, running a server and delivering data is power-hungry. Do you want your phone to die because your cat photo went viral?

Security also becomes a factor. Web servers are constantly under attack. Will your private data be compromised if your phone's webserver hasn't received the latest patch? And if an attacker gets onto your phone, can they then infect the rest of your home network?

All that being said... I still like the idea! I have a few old Android devices which I use as IP Cameras. They stream pictures and videos across my local network - and I can control them over a web browser when I'm at home. But would I want to expose them to the whole Internet? No!

With the price of SBCs coming down, I think it makes more sense to have a "website in a box" device. A little Raspberry Pi which is only running enough of a server to power WordPress or similar. Hardened against attack, and easy to manage and edit from a cheap mobile phone. Perhaps give it battery backup and a SIM card if you want redundancy. Boom! Instant personal webserver.

Yes, our phones should be under our control - and I certainly support anyone who wants to run a server from their device - but it seems to me that there are several hurdles which make it impractical.

Most modern smartphones are too expensive for people to purchase outright. At the most extreme end, the iPhone 14 Pro Max costs £1,200⁰. So a typical customer elects to pay £50 per month for 24 months.

The customer gets a new phone for a reasonable monthly figure. The phone seller gets a regular monthly payment which helps with their financial forecasting and cashflow.

But the seller has a problem. They have, effectively, loaned over a grand to the customer. And they've secured it against a rapidly depreciating asset which is easily stolen or broken. Most sellers don't offer different loan rates to different people. For a traditional loan, someone with poor credit might pay a higher %age than someone with a better credit rating. But, most sellers just give you a straight approve / deny for their loan¹.

This is where the Collateralised Debt Obligation comes in. You may remember CDOs from the Great Financial Crisis. They're fairly simple to understand. I am a high risk borrower and you are a low risk borrower - mix our loans together and you've got a medium risk debt.

Repeat that over thousands of phone loans. The seller has a pool of mixed risk loans which they can sell in bulk.

Here's a toy example - these figures are plucked out of thin air for illustrative purposes.

• Buy 1,000 phones wholesale for £800 each.
• Loan each customer £1,200 over 24 months to purchase the phone.
• Sell the £1,200,000 debt for £900,000.
• Immediate profit of £100,000.
• Every month, send the £50 from each customer to the group which now owns the debt.
• If fewer than 25% of the customers are bad debtors, the debt-owner still makes a profit.

Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that. And the margins are much slimmer. And there are various insurances, costs of chasing debt, ability to cut off service, etc. But hopefully you get the idea.

What does this mean for you?

If you've got a good credit rating, you're probably better off taking a personal loan to buy the expensive phone you lust over.

If you've got a bad credit rating, you're probably paying a lower rate than you would from a personal loan. But you might be better off saving up or buying a cheaper device.

Will this all come crashing down like the mortgage CDOs of yesteryear? Probably not. Phones are a lot cheaper than houses. For now...

Tawanda Nyahuye👨‍💻

@towernter

How to end a frontend developer's career pic.x.com/AYsI0pghh5

---

I imagine that this (concept) device would probably just put the browser only on one row / column. Probably sensible, but utterly BORING!

Let's imagine a few bonkers devices. Here's a daft concept phone with a punch-hole camera cutting out its screen.

What would text scrolling look like on that? Well, it's pretty easy to mock up!

The code to do this is pretty damn simple!

First, set a function to trigger whenever the body is scrolled. Then shove a <div> in at the top.

<body onscroll="moveCircle()">
  <div id="tl"></div>
  <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Next, draw a shape-outside of a circle. This will wrap the text around a quarter circle.

#tl {
  shape-outside: circle(20% at 0px 0px);
  width: 10em;
  height: 100%;
  float: left;
}

Finally, the Javascript which runs whenever the page is scrolled. It moves the circle so its centre stays in the top-left of the physical screen.

function moveCircle() { 
   document.getElementById("tl").style.shapeOutside = "circle(20% at 0px " + window.pageYOffset + "px)"; 
}

That's it!

What if your phone's notch was MASSIVE and you wanted to scroll text around it?

Again, this uses shape-outside but this time feeding it a polygon:

document.getElementById("tl").style.shapeOutside =
    "polygon(0 " + (150 + window.pageYOffset) + "px, 100px " + 
            (150 + window.pageYOffset) + "px, 100px " + (300 + window.pageYOffset) + "px)"; 

CNN once posited that the smartphone of the future could be triangluar

What would it be like to read text on such a device?

Hell. it would be hell.

OK, let's go utterly ridiculous. What if that L-shaped phone could open and close while you were reading and scrolling? It'd look something like this:

Weird, right?

Imagine you're on DEEP SPACE NINE where all the Cardassian screens are oval shaped.

With a bit of bashing about with polygons, you can sort-of make that happen.

I'm not even going to give the iCarly Pear Phone a go!

OMG! THESE ARE ALL HORRIBLE!

Yes. We're mostly used to text filling a rectangular space. And it is rare that the material we read on changes shape.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The technology is here to make non-rectangular screens a reality. There are plenty of smart-watches with circular faces - but we can go so far beyond that.

There's an excellent paper called "Investigating Text Legibility on Non-Rectangular Displays" which looks at the usability of weirdly-shaped displays. I hope it becomes required reading if / when screens start getting interesting again.

Bonus Video

Here's a video talking about how GUIs will adapt to non-rectangular displays.

So I've set up a Bananaphone. When people ring me, they get 30 seconds of my favourite song. Then the call is passed to me. The theory being that my friends get to enjoy a short ditty but con artists are likely to hang up before the call connects to me.

As detailed in last year's blog, I've set my Android phone up to make and receive SIP calls. I use the SipGate service which, as well as being cheap, has a nifty API.

It's a pretty simple service to set up. Once you've signed up and activated the developer package, set up a webhook:

Give it a URL which spits out this bit of XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
   <Play>
      <Url>https://example.com/banana.wav</Url>
   </Play>
</Response>

There are a bunch of examples in a variety of language.

The WAV file has some specific format requirements. Specifically, it needs to be an 8kHz 16bit PCM WAV file.

And... that's it! It's a bit early to say whether it has eliminated spammers (or turned off legitimate callers). I might go a bit further and change this to a recording which says "This call is protected by spam guard. Press 1 to be connected." But this is a quick, easy, and fun solution.

Barclays bank knows that customers are worried about this. So they've produced a handy website where you can see if a telephone number belongs to Barclays.

Because no one knows how to build a sensible web service any more, the page loads a 1.3MB JSON file containing every number that Barclays has.

barclays.co.uk/content/dam/json-files/TelephoneNumberChecker_26_03_2021.json

Over 74,000 numbers...

To be fair, Barclays does use a large number of prefixes for its phone numbers. But surely this could be handled in a more sensible way, like a regex?

Mind you, the service doesn't even work if you use the +44 prefix

Nor if you accidentally include some trailing punctuation Nor if you format it with dashes

So a regex might be a bit beyond them.

Now, in fairness, the site does say that just because a number appears to come from them - doesn't mean it is them.

And, looking at the file name of the JSON file, it appears to be recently updated. Which is good, I guess. Although I still think it is weird to give fraudsters a list of every single number in your range.

But, seriously, why not POST the number to a service which can be updated? Wouldn't that make more sense than slowly downloading the nine billion names of god seventy-four thousand numbers of Barclays?

Thanks to The AntiSocialEngineer and Robert Schifreen for pointing this out.

I'd grown up with American media. Phonewords - where your phone's dialpad spells out words - were ingrained in my psyche.

But the UK never had anything like that. In 2003, a reverse-charges company tried to make it a thing. Here's how they tried to teach UK users how to spell out words on their keypad:

Not even Holly Valance could convince the British public to adopt Phonewords!

The UK mobile operators adopted 7726 (SPAM) as the number for reporting spam SMS.

But, other than that, I've never seen a UK company use them.

Why is that?

(This is mostly a rhetorical question - with some historical suggestions.)

The UK did use phone letters!

In the 1933 film "The Coming of the Dial" - the British public were introduced to a telephone system which did not require an operator to place the call.

I thoroughly recommend watching this beautiful movie:

At one point, you'll see this dial - complete with letters!

There are three interesting things to note:

1. The lettering sequence is subtly different from the modern style. The letter O is on the Zero - presumably to reduce homographic confusion. I assume Q isn't there for the same reason. Z is easily confused with 2, so is dumped. But I is there, even though it can be confused with the number 1.
2. There are Phonewords! Dial TRU for Trunk Calls, and TEL for Telegrams.
3. The telephone number is listed as "GERRARD 2666-7". Dialling codes were often alphanumeric!

Old Dialling Codes

Here's the Illustrated London News, from Saturday 19 November 1927. It's a gorgeous description of a Strowger automatic telephone system.

Nestled at the bottom is this:

A subscriber wishing to call a friend whose number is "HOLborn 4932" [...] inserts a finger-tip in a hole in the revolvable disc above "H" [..] The letters "O," "L," followed by the figures "4, 9, 3, 2"

The UK's old dialling codes were based on the name of the exchange!

So what happened?

At some point, letters slowly vanished from phones. I suspect because it was no more convenient to remember "HOL" than "405".

When touch-tone dialling came out, BT was still a monopoly. As my friend Sam Machin points out, their standard phone didn't have letters on it.

When I was growing up, the payphones didn't always have letters on them:

But was this cause, or effect?

What made Americans embrace 1-800-FLOWERS, while the UK didn't? Was it because of our love of "catchy" jingles?

Possibly not...

Nowadays, of course, every phone pad has letters on it.

But, let's be honest, who even makes phone calls any more? As we move to a world of social media addresses and VoIP services, the phone number - and by extension Phonewords - have reached the end of the line.

For a decade, I worked in the mobile industry - and always had an unlimited SIM card. Rejoining the real world, some years ago, was a bit of a shock to the system. You mean people have to pay for phone calls?!?

The pandemic has everyone reassessing their finances, right? Do I need that beer-of-the-month subscription? Should I move to a lower cost brand of cornflakes? Can I get rid of my mobile bill entirely?

I pay a hefty amount for 300Mbps broadband at home and, for the last few hundred days, I've not really walked further away than my WiFi signal can reach.

All my friends and family are on Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and some cool app you've not heard of yet.

Work calls are all Meet, Zoom, and Skype (Remember Skype?!).

Most customer service call centres are desperate for users to move to online channels of support. And I don't fancy spending half my day on hold to crappy Muzzak.

So I cancelled my phone contract and went to PAYG on GiffGaff.

This is my usage for the last month.

Fun fact! One of those text messages was me accidentally replying to a 2FA code.

No, thank you Android!!!!

It turns out, I don't need to make a whole lot of telephone calls on my telephone.

So, I have a fiver of PAYG credit which is very slowly leaching away. When life returns to normal (when????) I wonder if I'll revert back to paying a tonne of money for data? All my usual haunts have decent WiFi, and I can always pony up for a few GB if I'm desperate.

Anyway, you can get £5 extra credit when you switch to GiffGaff using my link http://www.giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/edent.

To join the conference call, please dial 0306 999 0348, then type in your access number (07700 900 951) followed by the hash or pound key.

What a faff! If you're reading the message on your phone you have to flip back and forth as you try to remember which numbers to dial.

Well, there's a better way! You all know the standard keys on a phone - 0-9, *, and # - what if I told you there were two more?

Yes! That's right! Two hidden and incredibly useful commands.

• A comma , used for "Pause".
• A semi-colon ; used for "Wait".

Here's how they work, with a brief demonstration of how you can use them.

Pause

To introduce a pause in dialling, you add a comma to the number - e.g. 03069990348,07700900951#.

This will dial the number then, two seconds after the call has been answered, send the next set of numbers and the hash key.

You can add it, on Android, by hitting the menu button in the dialler, or by holding down the * key.

With that saved in your phone's address book - you can dial into just about any system with ease.

For example, if your bank has an automated telephone line which allows you to check your balance after selecting option 1, then 2, then 5, you might save a phonebook entry for them like:

03069990348,1,2,5

Wait

Wait is a slightly more complicated command. It will display a prompt to the user asking them if they want to dial the next set of numbers.

To introduce a wait prompt, you add a semicolon to the number - e.g. to enter your PIN after being prompted 03069990348;1234.

You can add it, on Android, by hitting the menu button in the dialler, or by holding down the # key.

Combining

It's also possible to combine the two. For example, when I want to pay for a car parking space, I have to press 1 to select the car I want to park - if the parking space is chargeable I can then dial my account PIN, followed by a # to confirm.

This is what's stored in my phone: +44 7700 900 307,1;7890,#

How To Use

Some phone operating systems are smart enough to recognise things like phone numbers - including pauses and waits. For those that aren't, simply including it as a single line of text will mean that it can be copy & pasted into the dialler.

If you want to include it in a web page, there is a registered URI scheme - tel: (RFC 3966). <a href="tel:+441483604781,4">Dial with a Pause</a>. Dial with a Pause.

<a href="tel:+441483604781;4">Dial with a Wait</a>. Dial with a Wait.

A quick word about security

('cause it wouldn't be an @edent blog without a security angle!) Some credit card companies will let you access your balance if you input your full card number, date of birth, and telephone pin.
+44113 496 0868,1;4644464359501543,040577,1234# If you store this in your phone book - and someone steals your phone, you're gonna have a bad time. Don't be silly - storing credit card numbers and passwords like this is a bad idea!

To deal with the multitude of different types of phone numbers - each with their own unique cost - and the rise of the mobile phone, Ofcom want this to be the norm by 2015:

Under new rules confirmed today, telephone users calling service numbers will in future see the cost broken down into an 'access charge' to their phone company, plus a 'service charge' to the company or organisation they are calling.

I think that's short sighted - and not a particularly simple way of approaching the problem.

There are all sorts of ways we could re-imagine calling charges. When in doubt, I tend to err on the side of simplicity. Why can't all calls cost the same amount?

A Little History

In the UK we have the following situations when called from a land line (that is to say, a non-mobile phone).

• Geographic numbers. The dialling prefix is based on the phone's physical location. If you are calling from an landline phone close to the location, you will be charged a "local rate". Calling from far away gets you the "national rate".
• Non-Geographic local rate. The number isn't related to a specific location, but is charged at the "local rate".
• Non-Geographic national rate. The number isn't related to a specific location, but is charged at the "national rate".
• Freefone rate. The receiver pays for the cost of the call. The caller isn't charged.
• Premium rate. The caller pays a fixed rate per minute of the call. The charge can range from the low pennies up to several pound.
• Mobile rate. A set rate to call mobile phones.

Different phone providers will offer various bundles which may see a certain amount of free calls (at certain times or dates) to some of the numbers listed above.

Calls from mobiles, however, are charged at different rates. Because mobile changes the paradigm of being fixed to a single location, there are no such things as local or national rates. Because of the higher charges from mobiles (to pay for the investment in building the network) there is an additional charge for calling "freefone" numbers.

The main reason there are different call charges for mobiles is because it costs companies money to build and run infrastructure. In order to recoup that money, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) charge access fees and interconnect fees.

Luckily, the UK hasn't imported the bizarre American notion of normal domestic customers paying for incoming calls.

A Simplified Explanation

Interconnect fees are interesting. Let's consider two fictional phone companies - MegaCom and TinyTalk.

MegaCom charges TinyTalk whenever a TT customer rings a MC customer. TT does the same for incoming calls from MC customers.

In an ideal world, there would be the same number of customers at each company calling each other and - over time - the interconnect fees would cancel each other out.

Because TinyTalk is a smaller company, the regulator has allowed it to charge higher interconnect fees than MegaCom. This means that TinyTalk earns more revenue from MegaCom customers calling in than MegaCom earns from TinyTalk customers.

This means TinyTalk can offer a price plan which is competitive with MegaCom. If it weren't for interconnect fees, new entrants to the market would either have to be run at a loss for many years, or compete against a lower-charging rival.

Similarly, the fictional foreign company PhonoVox charges interconnect fees to international rivals to call its customers. It hopes to generate more money in incoming revenue than it pays out.

Enter The Internet

For most domestic users, there is no extra charge for visiting a website which is hosted very far away, or on another provider's network. There's no incremental charge for sending email. Internet Telephony (VoIP) is free of charge. Call anyone, anywhere, and as long as their computer has speakers and a microphone it won't cost either of you a penny. Video chat is included in the price.

Behind the scenes, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to pay interconnect charges. They generally pay other networks ("Transit") or have reciprocal and free arrangements ("Peering").

Depending on the ISP's network, they may have to pay an infrastructure company (typically BT) to provide connectivity to the house, and rent space in one of their telephone exchanges. That's on top on paying for their own business costs.

To the consumer the proposition is simple - pay a single monthly fee and be able to send Internet traffic to wherever they like. Some ISPs will charge more for faster speed, or the volume of data which can be sent.

This is radically different from the way telephone companies operate.

Behind The Scenes

Telephone networks used to be all analogue. When you dialled London from Scotland, a set of mechanical robots would physically connect wires together up and down the country until there was an unbroken link of copper between the two parties.

Since the 1990s, the UK has had a purely digital landline network (System X) and a digital mobile phone system (GSM).

As the 21st Century wears on, both networks are transitioning to Internet Protocol as a means of moving sound between devices. In the case of BT, using 21CN - for mobiles the old network will be replaced by 4G VoLTE.

The Future

In the not too distant future, you will pick up your landline phone (if you still have one) and call a mobile number - the entire conversation will happen over an IP network. Just like the Internet.

Now, it's important to realise that the call itself may not be carried on the public Internet. Most probably the two providers will have a dedicated network link between each other for speed and security.

All the same, it's now clear that the way in which we are charged for phone calls no longer matches the reality of the network. Calling locally is no cheaper than calling nationally in an all IP network - not in any meaningful sense. Shuffling bits to non-geographic numbers, or to different networks doesn't represent a significant cost that can easily be charged for.

Landline and mobile networks still have an infrastructure cost to pay for - but it is not immediately clear if it is necessary to charge for calls at all any more.

This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that complex call charges should be scrapped. Indeed, it would make sense that calling plans (whether landline or mobile) should be charged on the basis of the volume of data consumed.

That could mean a fixed fee for "unlimited" reasonable incoming / outgoing calls - or a per MegaByte / minute charge which was identical no matter the number called.

Mobile networks now regularly include "unlimited" amounts of calls on their service plans. The only numbers which are generally excluded are non-geographic rate, international rate, premium rate, and freefone.

Non-geographic no longer makes sense in an IP network. A number could be routed to anywhere on the planet. Indeed, if you've ever rung a UK number and received a call-centre in India, you'll know this is already the case.

International phone networks are already moving towards IP networks. The network infrastructure for dealing with international VoIP is identical for dealing with domestic VoIP. Speaking over long distances is no longer a premium product for which a network can charge.

Freefone was excluded because the receiver didn't want to bear the higher call charges from mobile. If there is no difference in the charges for an IP interconnect, there is no reason why freefone numbers should exist at all. It is conceivable that a company or service may be willing to pay the charges of those with no way of paying for their own call (charities, emergency services) but I imagine that in a world where are calls are inclusive, they would be few and far between.

Finally, premium rate calls. When I am on the Web, my ISP doesn't get a cut of every £ I spend at Amazon. Nor does it take any part in the transaction when I pay a monthly subscription to a news site. Why then should my telephone company insert itself between me and a premium phone call?

There is a convenience factor for me of only needing to maintain a single financial relationship - but there's no extra cost involved for the phone network in routing my call, so it is not entirely necessary for them to profit from the call.

Free For All

Ofcom's proposed changes are - I think it is fair to say - a stop-gap. Well before 2020 I would expect a radical shake-up of the way telephone calls are charged for.

As more people move to Skype, Google Hangouts, and other VoIP products, phone service providers will be forced to come up with a competitive offering. A Skype call from the UK to New Zealand costs nothing extra to the consumer who is paying £20/month for broadband access.

As companies take more customer service queries via Twitter and email, they may well decide to ditch the expensive landlines and tell customers to get on to VoIP if they want to speak to a real human. The company may have to upgrade their networking infrastructure - but that will be cheaper than paying for phone calls.

Mobile companies are still able to charge a premium for the "novelty" of wandering around the country while you speak. As WiFi becomes more prevalent, will people ditch the mobile contract in the same way they ditched the landline? Why pay for a phone service you don't need when the high street is littered with free coffee-shop WiFi?

Voice is about to have its "MP3 Moment". A cheap iPod Touch, free WiFi, and a free VoIP app means people will "pirate" voice calls and deprive phone networks of their traditional revenue.

Tinkering around the edges with "access charges" isn't the solution the industry needs. The long term challenge is simply how does a company generate enough revenue to cover the costs of building a high-spec data routing network and make a reasonable profit?

Tricky Solutions

If I were the boss of the world (one day, dear followers, one day!) I'd look at a solution which was good for business and consumers. Accepting that voice becomes a near-zero revenue generating product, and that most modern CEOs want to be running exciting companies with fantastic profit opportunities, I think the solution becomes fairly obvious.

Mandate a national IP network. Ideally, government should be in the business of providing national infrastructure which is critical to the long term prospects of the country. The private sector isn't currently providing the technology needed for fixed-line services (BT hanging on to its ageing copper network and struggling to hit 76Mbps FTTC and Virgin Media having a reasonably fast Fibre Optic network to a tiny proportion of the country) - nor for mobile (massive coverage gaps with all the networks and data-speeds which are underwhelming by international standards).

Such a move could be accomplished by overt nationalisation. Imagine what we could accomplish with a Universal Service Obligation for ultra-fast Fibre-Optic Internet and 4G coverage!

Assuming that's not politically possible, networks should be mandated to share resources. We have already seen Vodafone and O2 (my current employers) enter into an infrastructure sharing project. T-Mobile and Orange have merged. Three still relies on T-Mobile for its 2G network.

Would a single national mobile network be such a radical change? It's going from 3 networks paying thrice for everything, down to one network which can benefit from economies of scale. The benefits of universal coverage would save MNOs a huge amount of money and mean they could compete on customer service, phone choice, and bundled deals.

I was once told that British Gas' main business wasn't supplying gas and electricity - it was convincing people to take out its expensive insurance products.

In the same way, most MNOs want to move away from the "boring" task of selling barely profitable voice, text, and data bundles - they want to sell music, apps, concert tickets, video subscriptions, and high APR mobile phone loans.

Voice and Data are utilities now. They're about as exciting as the energy or water markets. No CEO of a cool mobile brand wants to become the boring provider of a boring pipe.

That's what is happening right now - regardless of whether we end up with a nationalised network or not - voice is become data, and there's only one real way to charge for that; flat fee or per Byte.

Phone networks in their current configuration can't survive on selling access. They have to turn to selling a lifestyle, financing a device, supporting a must-have service, and constantly innovating new reasons for customers to stick with them rather than going down the "pirate" route of leeching WiFi to connect to their favourite VoIP service.

This is the consequence of the All IP Network. Everything is a bit - and large, lumbering, and expensive companies have to compete against small, nimble, and cheap/free providers of bits. Ofcom is right to make "freefone" numbers free to call from mobiles - but I worry that by the 2015 due date customers will simply have given up on traditional voice all together.

The BBC is reporting that the Government is so afraid of prisoners having access to concealed mobile phones, they want to introduce a ban.

UK officials are considering banning the sale of small mobile phones designed to resemble car key fobs.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it was discussing the issue with the National Trading Standards Board and the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

It follows a report by the Times suggesting some of the Chinese-made products were being advertised with prisoners in mind.

Having a mobile phone in jail is a criminal offence.

The article goes on to conflate a number of issues. As well as the illegality of having a phone in prison, there is the trading standards issue that some of these devices have unauthorised logos on them!

How exactly does one go about banning tiny phones? Two years ago, I reviewed the S16 watch phone. As the name suggests, it's small enough to comfortably fit on one's wrist.

A large percentage of the size is taken up by the touchscreen and the bulky battery. Since I reviewed it, sizes have shrunk dramatically - as have prices. You can now pick up a wrist worn phone for around £30. Now, all of the above are 2G phones. For 3G phones, there's the Micromax Modu. At around £50, it's a svelte 76 x 46.5 x 11 mm and features a reasonably competent Web browser.

Is the Government really going to try to introduce a ban on technology under a certain size? Or technology which looks like some innocuous other item?

Or is this just some sabre rattling to make people thing "well, at least they're doing something!"

Like many people, I no longer wear a watch. I've got a phone which tells me the time and data - why do I need something cluttering my wrist?

The Evolution of the Watch

I wasn't always this way, I used to love high-tech watches. Throughout my teenaged years I had one of those calculator watches - enabling me to add up my pocket money and write "5318008" for instant humour.

In 1999, I graduated to the seriously awesome Timex 78401. This was an immensely cool bit of kit. It could store hundreds of phone numbers and memos on its internal memory. Rather than wear your fingers out pressing buttons on the phone, you typed your data into a computer. The computer would make the CRT pulse in such a way that the data could be retreived by the watch's optical sensor. Futuristic!

Finally, a few years ago, I picked up an MP4 watch from eBay. Stuffed with a 2GB USB disk inside (large, for those days) the watch could play mp3 audio and mp4 video! Well, video had to be converted to something lo-res and low-bit rate - but it played video! On my wrist! It would also pick up FM radio, act as a voice recorder and - just about - tell the time.

The Mobile Phone Watch

Long considered the holy-grail of the phone world. Can you cram a GSM phone into a watch? The answer is a resounding yes... but...

The watch itself retails from anywhere between US$70 and US$200. My parents picked it up in Hong Kong for £50 - which is factory gate price. Thanks ma and pa!

The first thing you should know about this phone, is that is is shit. I don't mean "it is the shit". I mean it truly is one of the worst devices I have ever used. The touchscreen in unresponsive and inaccurate - even if it wasn't, the UI is a clusterfuck of every design mistake you've ever heard of. It's hard to use, has poor battery life, is far too fiddly for day-to-day use and has a non-standard USB plug. But, it's only fifty quid - and you do get to impress girls at parties* by saying "I've got a mobile phone in my watch!"

In short, it's cheap Chinese tat. I love it :-)

*I don't go to many parties. Is that how things normally work?

Camera, Video, Sound

The camera seems to be 640*480 - although it will interpolate up to 1280x1024.

Sample Image - click for full size

Audio is limited to 8KHz mono - good enough for voice, as this demo should prove.

Web Browser

After diving through 3 different menus, I finally got the Vodafone GPRS settings into it. It came pre-set with the APNs of a number of Chinese and Hong Kong providers. So, what's the web browsing experience like? Well, experience is a bit of a strong word. Imagine using the original Netscape Navigator, while peering through a tiny window, on sub-dial-up speeds, waiting for the inevitable crash.

The results from the W3C Mobile Test Harness show it supports virtually nothing.

For fans of browser statistics, the highly detailed User Agent String is

MAUI WAP Browser

Take a look at how unbearably bad the web browser is.

The Specs

This is a surprisingly feature packed phone. Although you'll be hard pressed to find all the features easily; who would think of looking for the BlueTooth settings within the "Organiser" menu?

A run down of the major features includes

• GSM Compatibility: 850MHZ, 900MHZ, 1800MHZ, 1900MHZ. So it should work everywhere that there is 2G coverage
• Language: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic and Chinese. What's most impressive is the handwriting recognition. It's marginally faster than multi-tapping on the tiny keypad.
• Screen: 1.4 inch, QICF touch screen, 176*144 pixels. Touch-screen is a bit optimistic. Use your fingernail to point vaguely at the screen hoping to elicit a response doesn't have quite the same ring. It does come with an integrated stylus.
• Vibration: Support
• Memory: MicroSD Card Support.（Up to 16GB in size). Didn't come with one, but happily accepted a 1GB card I had. Just as well; the internal memory is limited to 400KB. That's not a typo - less than half a megabyte of storage.
• Connection Methods: Mass Storage, Webcam, COM Port. Works on Linux, claims to work on Windows and Mac. Mass storage works well - if slow. Can also be set to be used as a webcam. I assume the COM port is if you need to connect to the Internet.
• Accelerometer. Well... sort of. There's a compass function built in - but it's hit and miss.
• GPRS Support: Browse WAP Website. Ha! Brilliant! Possibly the worst browser I've ever encountered.
• SMS/MMS/Email. SMS send and receive worked perfectly. No support for delivery receipts.
• E-Book Reader: TXT. Yes! Throw away your Kindle and read .txt files on this minuscule screen.
• Bluetooth Support: Bluetooth (V2.0). Pretty impressive, actually. Paired with my Jabra Clipper and worked as both a music player and headset/mic. Claims to support Handsfree, Headset, SPP, DUN, OPP, FTP, A2DP, AVRCP. It played music through my bluetooth headphones - although the decoder is shockingly bad.
• Net weight: 65g. Chunky - but not too heavy.

Conclusion

I asked my parents to buy me a knock-off phone for under £50. This doesn't disappoint. I think it's kinda nifty looking - if you dig that retro vibe.

As a phone, you expect it to make and receive phone calls. You can either hold it up to your ear - like a spy in a bad movie - use the supplied headphones, or BlueTooth. Call quality was adequate. As a basic phone, the best I can say about it is "it works".

The S16 will frustrate you and horrify you in equal measure. But, there's no denying - taking a phone call from your wrist is cool!

Assuming it doesn't give you cancer of the wrist. Which would be bad.