That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

It's been a hectic week, hence the lack of posts. The ArabNet Dubai Digital Summit sucked down more time than I'd ever have thought it was going to - but what a time it's been. The week's flown by in a whirlwind of panels, chatting, eager startups and blethering about all things online.

Not even HSBC's decision to mount an insane war against their SME customers, reported upon excellently by the Al Arabiya English website, tempted me to post. Truth be told, there just wasn't the time and anyway, what could be possibly said that would make any sort of sense of a bank unilaterally shutting down business accounts in the United Arab Emirates with just 60 days' notice - just before the summer and Ramadan coincide to ensure 60 days' notice is insufficient?

Even HSBC's assertion that it 'remains committed to the SME market' wasn't enough to break the ArabNet spell. Although now looking back on the story that comment still provokes wide-eyed astonishment. We've wiped out the Marsh Arabs but remain committed to all indigenous peoples. Right.

I got to have a little gentle fun with banks myself at the ArabNet banking solutions panel, when Graham from Radical outlined some of the cool stuff his company had been doing with banks internationally and the very brave Pedtro from Emirates NBD took to the stage to speak for the Middle East's own banks. Perhaps starting the panel with the assertion that all Middle East banks are rubbish wasn't terribly PC of me (I realised my introduction to the topic had turned into a spittle-flecked rant only when the audience started to turn into a mob hefting burning brands and demanding to march on the monster), but I thought if we could all agree that basic principle, we could then move on and not spend an hour throwing custard tarts at Pedro.

And that's the way it worked out, generally - but I came away from the session with the feeling that people like Pedro are fighting against legacy systems and legacy-minded management, while banks in other parts of the world - leaner, meaner and generally more competitive - are providing some really smart digital services. You wonder what's holding us back and then something like HSBC vs SME happens and you realise that yes, it is pretty nigh hopeless.

I enjoyed many of the talks and panels I attended at ArabNet, there were few 'duffers' in the mix which was a blessing - and with three tracks on the go, rare was the moment when something interesting wasn't happening somewhere. Skills marketplace Nabbesh was raising money on startup crowd investing platform Eureeca, Wally got Dhs 1.5 million funding for its blisteringly smart expenses tracking app (it scans receipts and lets you track locations, venues, expenditures and the like), Restronaut took everyone out for dinner (the latest brain-child of Make Business Hub founder Leith Matthews) and private car booking service Careem offered everyone a free ride. There was a lot of stuff going on, I can tell you.

I had the dubious honour of being the last speaker at ArabNet Dubai and so was surprised to find a packed room in front of me - that's a testament to the engagement and commitment of the audience at the event. There were a few grumbles of 'three days is too long' but I'm not so sure, myself. It wasn't a stretched out agenda by any means. Anyway, I spent fifteen minutes gibbering and railing at the audience in tongues, the usual shamanistic display of erratic behaviour. And then I got to lead a panel on women's content and branded content. 

With one client and three publishers on the panel, it was always going to be hard to get a good challenging debate moving - and the publishers were determined not to have the fight I was so keen to goad them into, so the panel was a tad tamer than I'm used to. Tragically, we didn't have the Twitterfall displayed on the stage monitors, so couldn't see the howls of outrage taking place on the projected screen behind us. As the panelists talked about why marketing managers didn't understand women in the region and why women's content was Chanel and handbags, a furious cry rose from the significant female element in the audience who felt women were, well, worth more than that. I couldn't see it and so the opportunity to square the circle between audience and panel was lost.

And then, in a trice, it was over. The developers' awards saw Lebanon taking the trophy and a couple of hours later, the Atlantis conference centre was back to being a vast expanse of strange nautical primary colours and Dubai was filled with little pockets of partying geeks and, no doubt, a very relieved and exhausted ArabNet team.

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner

100 Reasons Why The Internet Is Cool. Reason 82. Crowd Investing.

So you've started a digital business and you want to take it through to the next level without giving away all your equity to an greedy angel investor or venture fund. You've got some options - you would win a reality TV show, for instance, or perhaps even look at crowd investing. Or even both!

I first met LouLou Khazen Baz last year, we worked together on a project to position the company she and co-founder Rima had dreamed up, Nabbesh. LouLou was in the interesting position of having won the Dubai One TV show, 'The Entrepreneur' - in which startups competed to be the winners of a Du-backed prize of a cool million UAE Dirhams in cash and half as much again in 'kind'.

She won the show, which gave Nabbesh much-needed funds to see it through to its next stage of development. In interviews, LouLou was always noting - having herself worked for a VC - that the longer you can keep going without asking the market for money, the more value you could build in your business and consequently keep when the sharks lovely investors come knocking.

Nabbesh is a skills marketplace - an online exchange where people can post their skills and talents and then others can hire them for those skills. So if you want a bunch of developers or copy writers, designers or a tennis coach, Nabbesh is the place to go. It means you can hire talent from the Levant or further afield - or from home - although there is some debate as to the legality of freelancing in the UAE, Nabbesh is also somewhere where people with trade licenses can offer their wares too.

Nabbesh has just signed up with PayPal - that's the business model: the business partnership between talent and hirer takes place over the site and it skims a slice off each transaction. The model works elsewhere in the world, Nabbesh wants to localise the service for the MENA area.

So now LouLou has taken something of a brave step - in that she's put her need out in public - and sought funds through crowd investment platform Eureeca.com - take a look here for the Nabbesh proposition. Note you have to sign in to Eureeca before you get all the info. 

The really cool thing is she's already 25% 30% of the way there, one day into the campaign...

Emirates ID. One Card To Rule Them All...

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is going to be interesting to watch in October. Apparently, by then, the Emirates ID National Identity Card will be used to access all Dubai government services. That's according to a report in Gulf News. The first phase of the MyID initiative will open up 20 government departments to the use of an Emirates ID rather than individual logons and passwords for each government entity.

Which is a good thing, right? Rather than having 20-odd IDs and passwords, you can just whip out your trusty deicer  National ID card and proudly cry, "This is me! Open up your services to me, government department!"

Except that most of us don't need to access 20 government departments. I guess RTA for Salik payments, Dubai Police for registration and naturalisation and immigration for labour cards, visas and Emirates ID cards is probably about my lot. I suppose the NMC and Ministry of Youth and Culture when I'm publishing books. Oh, Ministry of Health for the biennial blood test.

And if they get just that lot together, functional and inter-operating seamlessly with the National ID that in itself will be an achivement. If they get all 20 working by October? I shall be sore amazed.

I'm not saying Dubai can't do it. You should never say Dubai can't do something, because you'll more often as not lose your shirt on it. But then the Emirates ID has amassed considerable form in the "announce now clarify tomorrow" stakes.

We can only wait and see...

Mobile Madness - The Middle East's Smartphone Spring

(Photo credit: Kalense Kid)

Got a lovely ring to it, hasn't it? Smartphone spring. If you wanted it to sound really cool, chuck an 'i' on it - Smartphone iSpring. Ah, what the hell, let's go for broke - The Arab Smartphone iSpring 2.0!

All the UAE's English papers have stories today on BlackBerry's Z10 and the high demand (and low supply) of the Handset That Could Save The Company. Tuesday is technology supplement day for Gulf News, so its coverage of the relative merits of the various handset choices is more in-depth - laced with original editorial and locally sourced comment, which is great to see. Retailer Axiom got a couple of smart media hits by sending out pictures of customers at its outlets.

Compared to Nokia's relatively low-key entry with the Lumia, BlackBerry has certainly managed to create some headlines, although not everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid. There are major unanswered questions over quite what services will be supported in the UAE - and users are going to have to pay more for data packages and  effectively lose the free roaming benefits the 'old' BlackBerry BIS brought - as I point out in this here post the other day. Quite why you'd queue up to buy a mobile without knowing what services it'll support is a mystery to me.

Mind you, it's funny how media-friendly the smartphone story has become. While other areas of technology are considered most definitely un-sexy, anything to do with mobiles or tablets is a sure-fire winner. One is left wondering how long this love affair will last and when the media will simply tire of trotting out new smartphone features and speculation about who's going to launch what when.

The mobile handset has undoubtedly been transformed - and done more than its fair share of disintermediating on the way. The first thing to go was the radio pager, killed off by SMS - the world's most accidental killer app (SMS was originally only intended as an engineering tool). But how many people have bedside alarm clocks these days? The 'point and shoot' camera has been rendered virtually redundant, mobiles are now music players, video players, personal trainers and all sorts of other things. How many payphones are out there these days? When you start adding payment capabilities, you've got a transactional network access device that will be a wallet, ID card and a window to information and content of quite stunning capability - so mobiles will continue to play an ever-increasingly important role in our lives.

Behind the handset, though, there are important ecosystem choices to be made - and each of those ecosystems is working hard to lock you in. If you buy your content and apps from Apple, you'll effectively lose it all by going Android - a situation you'll experience with any ecosystem hopping you do unless you go Kindle, in which case you can install reader apps on any of the devices. There's a Kindle app for the old BlackBerry, I'm not sure whether there's one for the BB10 yet. That's one problem with the new BB - it's a new operating system so its ecosystem is effectively being bootstrapped from scratch. And BlackBerry has little of the sheer grunt of Microsoft, Apple or Google when it comes to developers. Those third party innovations are key to making today's mobiles work.

It's one reason why Amazon has perhaps stayed clear of the handset market while being so happy to dive into the tablet wars with its fists flailing - the Kindle app lets Amazon support any of the players and effectively place a cuckoo in each ecosystem's devices.

How long that will continue to be Amazon's sole interest in mobile remains to be seen - it's the only major ecosystem player without a mobile handset. My money says it won't be able to stay away. The rewards are irresistible and Amazon has an enormous vested interest in putting content in your hands...

Disable The Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touchpad

Chuck Norris EX2 01 (Photo credit: (vhmh))

You CAN disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra notebook computer.

One of the least endearing aspects of my recent technology shift from a dead Lenovo T61 and Windows 7 to a sleek Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook and Windows 8 has been the lack of documentation. Remember documentation? When things came with user manuals?

Ah, no. These days we have the Internet and so we don't need those nasty, papery manual things. You just go to our Internet-based resource centre and we'll answer any questions you might have.

What if it's something I don't know? I can't ask about what I don't know can I? And you're not actually telling me. You're just expecting me to sift through a wodge of data, rather than structure and present useful information to me.

That's okay, you can go to our user forums and see the answers our socially enabled peer group conversation community present to you. They're really committed and useful guys.

And what if I just want someone from Samsung to tell me how to do something? You know, someone who actually knows something about the product?

Simple! Talk to one of our trained customer support executives using email or our online chat facility!

Great. That's precisely what I did, because the otherwise very lovely Samsung Series 5 Ultra comes with the world's biggest touchpad and it doesn't have an off switch or appear to have a driver with that functionality. Which is mad, right? All laptops have drivers for their touchpads that allow them to be disabled, surely. And, yes, in the main they do. Except for this machine, with its aircraft-carrier sized, guaranteed to be touched at all times, touchpad. It's huge. I've found flies playing cricket on it. This, let us be abundantly clear, is the Chuck Norris of touchpads. You don't touch it - it touches you.

Samsung's support operative came back in response to my email, confirming my worst fears. "You can't disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultra."

Which had me consigned to typing tweets six times as each attempt saw a feather-touch of the ball of my thumb select all and then my next key press replace the text. Cursors would appear in random places around the screen, replacing and deleting lumps of text and objects before I realised it'd gone again. My language, never particularly temperate, has become decidedly nautical.

I evolved an insane typing technique, like a digital tai-chi movement, The Crane Over The Keyboard. Repetitive Strain Injury loomed on the horizon as I picked my way over the huge expanse of the Monster Touchpad From Hell. Sure enough, every couple of minutes, a brush on that vast, hyper-sensitive surface would bring on-screen mayhem.

It's so unfair. This machine is the dog's, seriously. It's sleek and titanium-shelled, as light as a feather and slimmer than a supermodel with amoebic dysentery. It is in every way perfect. Apart from Chuck The Touchpad.

I took to tweeting at @SamsungGulf, but that was about as much use as nailing cats to a hovercraft. They're too busy using Twitter on relentless promotional broadcast mode to actually talk to anyone who isn't giving them some sycophantic, pandering guff they can retweet. (This, to Samsung, is presumably 'engagement')

It's one of the worst Twitter accounts I've seen in a long while. Absolutely zero back from them. Just a constant tide of 'Tell us your favorite way of inserting a Galaxy SIII'...

And then a conversation with Sheheryar at @LaptopsinUAE about something completely different turned to the S5. I'd decided to break the warranty and have him crack the case and neuter Chuck by yanking the connector. And he came up with the idea of hitting Fn F5. Because that is how you disable the touchpad on a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook.

So here's a big, fat THANK YOU to Sheheryar, for doing what Samsung's support droid and their useless Twitter account should have done. For knowing his way around laptops and being able to help someone who just wants to get on with using a functional tool. I didn't have to retype a single word of this post and that feels oh, so good.

Chuck is dead.

Windows 8. Regrets, I've Had A Few...

I have to report, the road  to Windows 8 has not been a smooth journey. There's much to like about Microsoft's new OS but the whole experience has left me feeling rather as if I'm the only person in this place to have actually upgraded to it.

First there was the great Firefox debacle - the badly documented fact that Firefox doesn't support Windows 8 (and, by the way, Chrome doesn't support Windows RT) only came to light after I had gone on a long journey to find out why Skype had stopped working. It's stopped working again but this time around I simply can't be bothered. I'm using the iPad for that instead.

Now Explorer, by no means my browser of choice, has also stopped working and I don't know what to do. There's no obvious option to repair or reinstall it. You can almost hear Barney's whiny Midwestern sing-song, 'Heyy, li'l guy! That's under the bonnet! You don't wanna go snoopin' around under the bonnet!' The support forums for Windows 8 have each got four or five topics on them, as if there are only about a hundred people in the world using this software. Microsoft support is so hard to find (particularly with a half-broken browser), I've just given up and installed Chrome.

The great selling point for Windows 8 is that it's touch enabled. If you've found yourself habitually reaching out to swipe a laptop screen, you'll appreciate the fact that you can now do it and have something happen. All of the great versions of Windows have had a 'raison d'etre' - Windows 3.0 sealed Microsoft's outright leadership not only of the OS market but of the application market, by breaking the DOS 640k barrier and simultaneously leading competitors to develop for OS/2. Windows NT didn't break. And Windows 7 wasn't  Vista.

With that in mind, Windows 8's great USP is touch, but it hedges its bets with a desktop. So you have, effectively, two interfaces - the 'Metro' swipey interface and a desktop interface that isn't quite so touch friendly. So don't go putting that mouse on Dubizzle quite yet.

There are some parts of Windows 8 that really work. It's more intuitive and things are generally where you'd expect to find 'em. There's very little 'getting started' help - I had to Google how to close an app (a much clunkier gesture than Apple's) because there was nobody from MS telling you. Likewise, the relationship between the Metro interface and Desktop is something you're left to find out for yourself. Microsoft's Mail app is cool, but won't let you use the Search features within Gmail. It all feels a bit 'give a little, take a little' to tell you the truth.

And this is why I fear for Microsoft and Windows 8. If there were a major, mass-market interface competitor (if Google were hardcore about Chrome OS), this would be a very dangerous time indeed for Microsoft.

Windows 8 is an inflection point - and inflection points in technology are always terribly dangerous times. We're locked into technology by familiarity, and the greater our investment in an interface, the greater our 'stickiness' as users is. When you ask me to relearn that interface, you're asking me to go through the same pain barrier as deserting you and going with another provider.

The trouble with Windows 8 is it's a halfway house. The next version of Windows will have to complete the move to touch and finally junk the desktop, because Windows needs to do something huge, not something whimpery and tentative. That means applications written for touch - and there are very few of those out there right now outside games and the like. At this rate of adoption, developers won't be leaping to embrace Windows 8, either.

Having moved to Windows 8, I would probably counsel anyone thinking about it to stick with Windows 7. The pain of the move has been infinitely greater than any benefits I have gained. If that's the feedback from other users, the already reportedly slow adoption of Windows 8 is not going to speed up anytime soon.

I never thought I'd see the day, but Microsoft looks extremely vulnerable right now. 

New Year

Tom the Cafe Owner (Photo credit: Rob Young)

This normally relatively well maintained little corner of the Internet has been a quiet sort of place for almost a month now and is, as a consequence, a little dusty - for which I can only apologise. A combination of technology disaster (the failure of my mobile and my laptop in quick succession) together with going on leave for Christmas (very nice, thank you for asking) have combined with a return to booky writing to form an almost overwhelming list of things that took precedence over updating the blog.

The laptop failure came hard on the heels of the Great Phone Disaster and the unexpected brilliance of Nokia's Lumia 920 (A phone shopping trip into Dubai to get Sarah a new Android phone turned into a Lumia 820 buy on the strength of it) led to me having a 'what the hell' moment and getting a Samsung touchscreen Windows 8 Ultrabook thingy. The other factor in buying a touchscreen was the combination of Smartphone and iPad had led to me reaching out to my Lenovo's screen to touch things, which leaves you rather feeling as if people have caught you licking windows in shopping malls.

There's little doubt touch is the future - and it's interesting to note how many applications and websites aren't optimised for touch yet. But once you get touching and swiping, you tend to rather depend on people making their stuff, well, touchable. Too much of my past three weeks has been spent getting to grips with Windows 8 and the 'Metro' interface - a typical example was the unexplained shutdown of Skype's video calling. Many, many frustrated hours later I had finally worked out that Win8 doesn't support Firefox, which causes Adobe Flash to crash. And Skype uses a Flash plugin. It's all not terribly well documented - you can tell it's early days for Win8 - and your average Joe shouldn't be expected to have to deal with issues that complex in what is, let's face it, a consumer product. Meanwhile I've had to migrate browsers to IE10 until Mozilla catches up - and that's been a painful transition.

Microsoft hedged their bets with Windows 8 - you get the distinctive tile-based 'Metro' interface as well as a desktop to play with. It doesn't take long to work out why - Metro alone is not enough if you're going to start getting serious about creating and storing stuff. It's all very exciting and new, but the very newness of Win8 is evidenced by a lack of applications, support and 'critical mass'. And the passing of Windows' dominance, together with slow uptake of Win8, is hardly helping matters.

Anyway, weeks later I'm feeling almost back on track. Technology really can screw you up, can't it?

Technology, Dubai and the Nokia Lumia 920

Nokia 638 (19,06cm de alto), Nokia 2160 EFR (16,42 cm), Nokia 5160 (14,84 cm), Nokia 6070 (10,5 cm) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been a funny week for technology in general. The Great Phone Meltdown led to Nokia Middle East lending me a Lumia 920 and The Great PC Meltdown resulted in me taking to my iPad while I tried to sort out my notebook. And even tried to sort out what I use a notebook for!

The result has been, for me at least, fascinating. I've moved a lot more of what I do to 'the cloud' but find the single tasking nature of the iPad precludes much of what I want to use a system for - sure, it's great for doing email and consuming content, but it's not great for producing content. And in my day job as well as my hobbies, I'm a relatively constant producer of content.

But the iPad is now my 'out and about' device of choice. The notebook, ironically, stays rooted to the desk. It's stopped tottering around before hurling itself at walls but after this week's performance, it's definitely EOL.

The great surprise for me out of all this technofailure has been the Remarkable Triumph Of Lumia. They say brands ascend when low expectation is met by high performance and that great truth means Nokia better slow things down before it gives itself the bends. The Lumia is a stunner.

Let's start with the basics. As I mentioned before, it's solid - some would say weighty. As time has gone on I have come to find that weight reassuring. Seriously. It's built out of polycarbonate, which means scratches don't show. There's no user access, no back cover to prise off to get at the battery and SIM, instead the SIM is inserted in a sprung carrier at the top of the handset (it's a MicroSIM holder, so I had to get my Vintge Mubashir chip SIMcumcised at local phone shop. A clip and a wince and dirty deed done.

The screen is raised out of the unit's body and seemed to be significantly more fingerprint resistant than the HTC and, it has to be said, the iPad. The display is clear, bright and the resolution is stunning - retina display eat yer heart out. The back of the handset has a Carl Zeiss lens (WooOOOoo), a flash unit and a black strip that looks decorative but is actually the location of the inductive charging coil. The base has two speakers and a conventional charging socket. That's it, minimalist and sleek.

But you'd expect Nokia to make a great handset, wouldn't you? Until I gave up on them (about 6 months after the Symbian Blog posted a last, despairing post saying 'We give up') and flung my N86 at the wall, I'd been a Nokia punter for nigh on two decades. My first Nokia was an Etisalat 'HudHud', a grey/green brick with a pingy antenna. My favourite Nokia ever was the 6800. Seriously. When they didn't upgrade that to colour and 3G, I fled to Sony Ericsson only to flee back to the N series a few frustrating months later. But then, post 2007, I started to hear about people doing things with their handsets I couldn't. By about 2009 it was starting to get embarrassing. Great build quality doesnt make a dumb smartphone any smarter.

But now there's something new behind the screen - Windows Phone 8. I can't begin to tell you how set up I was to loathe this. Microsoft has always sucked at mobile - from Windows CE right through to those awful handsets OEMmed from HTC by that Scottish bloke who went bust, Microsoft just hasn't managed to compete on mobile. Ballmer's laughter at the iPhone rings hollow down the years - he was laughing at the halo product in a segment where Microsoft had not only always sucked, but had ignored until dangerously late. Today MS and Nokia have much in common beyond their partnership. They're both comeback kids. And I have long stopped considerinng Windows a 'cool' product - Vista killed off the final vestiges of respect I had for the interface (and in case you're interested, I have used every iteration of Windows ever built. Windows 1.0 was pretty gnarly, I can tell you!). After the plane crash of Vista, Windows 7 was usable - that's all I cared about by then.

They shouldn't have called it Windows at all, IMHO. It has nothing in common with the WIMPs interface on your desktop. Those squares of colour quickly worm their way into your sensibility, the interface is highly intuitive, fast as hell and an absolute joy to use. You almost forget it's there, which is the highest praise I can think of for technology. The screen is very bright indeed, bright enough to withstand the UAE's sunlight - no more hunching over the screen to try and read it in your own shadow. Taps do what they're supposed to do, menus flip into place with a flash and everything's pretty much where you'd expect to find it. I was shocked at how quickly I found myself navigating around with ease and, yes, enjoyment.

Nokia's mapping software is cool and works, Nokia Drive in particular gives you  fully functional and capable GPS (I had occasion to use it yesterday and I can tell you it truly did save the day), including voice guidance. The augmented reality city app turns curious onlookers into gurgling idiots and the information layer works in Ajman. If you know what I mean. The camera is simply superb, particularly in low light conditions. There are loads of nice little touches going on - haptic feedback gives you a little 'bump' sensation when you use the three 'big' navigation controls ('back', 'home' and 'search'), you can save profiles to your Google contacts (not just Hotmail) and Gmail integration is a dream.

I tried a couple of games out, slick, fast and colourful. Pretty much what you'd expect. There's a lot more on the app store and I haven't really had time for a 'play' yet.

Rowi was the first Twitter client I tried out and I instantly loved it. There's no TweetDeck yet, the WP8 'ecosystem' is yet young - and no Instagram, although that has now become irrelevant to me as I typically load photos to Tweet rather than share on Instagram.

The million dollar question, then. Am I a 'win back'? One of those millions of customers Nokia is looking to woo away from the iPhone and, crucially, Android? I'm going to play with a Galaxy S3 at the weekend to make sure it's 'Apples to apples', but I'm broadly headed Lumiawards. It's a truly smashing mobile and no wonder it's selling, according to Jacky's COO Ashish Panjabi, like hot cakes.

The Great Meltdown

I'm not sure what it is with me and technology right now, but following on from the recent Great HTC Self Destruct, my PC has now decided to pine for the fjords.

It all started yesterday with some strange behaviour over a hotel's WiFi network. Whether it was triggered by malicious software, a failed AVG update install or the Will Of The Gods will forever be a mystery, but the machine descended with great rapidity into a constant cycle of great meltdowns, gibbbering fits of tearing around the room pulling its hair out and screaming obscenities followed by curling up in the corner and wailing silently to the heavens before lapsing into long periods of insensibility. It is not, to boil the situation down to its essence, well.

I have long been a fan of IBM laptops, a product choice originally made because of the inevitable sound of indrawn breath through teeth that would accompany every presentation at my lovely client's premises. It got wearing eventually and I succumbed to the black keyboard with the little red button. The move was propitious - these babies are reliable, take a pounding without complaint and just, well, deliver. I have no reason to think that Lenovo has let quality go, but there's little doubt that my current machine, a T61, has for some time been End Of Life. Its hard disk is almost full, the keyboard's worn shiny and MacBook Air users titter when I pull the great slablike wodge of scratched matte black plastic with shiny edges from my enormous laptop bag.

It's a bit like breaking up with a girl you've come to dislike but can't quite muster the energy to go through with the scene. It's a huge relief when she takes the plunge before you. So it is with my PC - it actually feels good to be letting go. The pain has been considerably lessened by the agency's move to Google mail and Docs, although I hadn't quite managed to wean myself away from Office. Now I'm going to see how far I get using the iPad, although I know it's not going to deal with the heavy lifting terribly well - and especially not the video editing or book stuff.

The PC, in the meantime, is sitting curled up in the bathroom, occasionally spitting at passers-by but mostly just staring at the tiles with a lunatic fixaty. I've got the data off it, so I don't care any more.

Anyway, it never really understood me...

A Tale Of Two Revolutions

Photo credit: Wikipedia

They are the best of times, they are the worst of times.

The Industrial Revolution changed the world and brought us to the world we have today. The compelling combination of innovation and communications transformed society, at first in the United Kingdom, where it had its roots, but then spreading to America, Europe and the rest of the world. The confluence of mechanisation, improvements in transport and communications and entrepeneurialism transformed agrarian societies and created industrial powerhouses that brought wealth and opportunity - and created poverty and appalling illnesses, too. It tore society apart and remade it. Constantly.

In the latter C18th and into the C19th, that revolution built cities as it emptied rural communities. The old ways had changed and people, from legislators down to the common man, had to find ways of adapting to the furious pace of change our world was suddenly pitched into. Life would never be the same again, from our views on community, family and morality through to the expectations we had of our rights and place in society.

Sound familiar?

Imagine, then, a country that took one look at the industrial revolution and threw up its hands in horror at the very prospect of change. Oh no, not for us these naughty steam engines, looms and ironclads! We'd rather stay tilling the land! These countries would arguably be the ones that would subsequently fall to the inevitable rush for empire - because an entrepeneurial revolution sustained by free market economics will inevitably cause expansion into new markets. And the sheer force of the explosion will open those markets by hook or by crook. As it did in the C18th, as Europe's powers jostled to dominate smaller, less able countries who were still in 'the dark ages' compared to these new, brash economies.

An alternative model might be to try and cherry pick from the revolution. We want the steam engine and the mill, but we'd rather not have looms if that's all the same to you. And we'll take canals, but pass on the roads. The trouble with this is that innovation revolutions are integrated - any part of the set of available innovations that is not embraced and made competitive will create a market opportunity for the expanding revolutionaries.

And so it is with the Internet Protocol in the UAE. And although the Internet is the core technology of our new revolution, it is merely a road network. The producers of raw materials, the refiners and manufacturers need hauliers to find their markets, but once the canals and roads are built, that's about it. You can build roads and charge tolls, but you can't own the traffic or the goods that pass over the roads.

Critically, you can't dictate to road users what they must pay to use your road if you are competing with other transport networks - the market then defines price. So when you have a Microsoft retiring Messenger and replacing it with Skype, the global VoIP provider whose website is blocked in the UAE, you face a very clear choice - one you have failed to face,  but known about, for years now. Do you reject the revolution (an attitude that has long been your inclination) or do you accept that you have no choice but to compete in the newly transformed environment or inevitably fail?

Both of the UAE's telcos now work on wholly IP based infrastructure. And yet we pay Dhs1.50 for a text message. That's the most expensive 160 bytes of data imaginable. Extrapolate that to a 1Gbyte month and you'd be shelling out about nine million dirhams ($2.5 million) for a normal data package. You can see how WhatsApp starts to look attractive, can't you?

Telcos have no choice but to adapt to the IP (and by that I mean VoIP) era. Their revenue models will have to change, they'll have to lean up and cut staff. I watched thousands of jobs go in the years I worked with Jordan Telecom going through just such a transformation. It's not pretty, but that's revolutions for you. They'll have to find new ways of creating products and services relevant in an IP world. I'd say the solution lies in transactional commerce over IP networks, but hell I'm just a PR guy what would I know?

Right now, we're busy sitting on a chair squawking 'go back' at the waves. But they're waves of innovation and they're inexorable...

How The BBC Microcomputer Became The Heart Of Your Mobile

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning - Ancient Geek Post

Ever heard of Advanced RISC Machines or ARM for short? Few people have, but this British company's designs power over 95% of smartphones and tablets in the world today and they're now starting to be used in next generation low-powered servers by major players like Dell and HP.

Where did that come from? From the BBC Micro, if you please. Any British Ancient Geeks out there will remember the cream boxes with the black and red keyboards that were made by Acorn Computer to accompany the BBC's computer literacy push back in the early 1980s. It was an odd offshoot of an odd little industry - long sidelined by Silicon Valley, the Brits had been consistent pioneers of computer technologies, but their innovation never seemed to gain traction and company after company was doomed to fail while US corporations powered to dominance.

One of the earliest pioneers of computing - in the 1950s - was actually British tea company Lyons, believe it or not. And the early 1980s was a time when it looked as if we might actually make it back to the top table of innovation - Acorn Computer, Dragon and Sinclair were at the forefront of the British microcomputer boom. It was an exciting time as I can testify as I was, albeit painfully young and utterly clueless, involved in a ground-breaking British startup myself.

Acorn got up to some ground breaking innovation in its BBC computers, which at one stage looked like they might conquer the US educational market as they had conquered the UK. One aspect of that innovation was its groundbreaking adoption of RISC technologies. Reduced Instruction Set Computing was an approach to processor design that threw less complex tasks at the processor at any one time, resulting in faster, more nimble systems. In fact, Acorn's follow-up to the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, was technically superior to its competitors, but it lacked one thing. It wasn't a PC. Acorn ceded the British educational market to PC clone maker RIM and its Nimbus machines.

Acorn span off its RISC chip design business into a joint venture with Apple and silicon valley chip maker VLSI Technology. By 1998 Acorn, now struggling to remain afloat, took the company to IPO, raising some $29 million. Though handy, the money wasn't enough to stop Acorn being split, stripped and sold. VLSI was to last no longer and was acquired by Philips. That left only ARM and Apple standing.

ARM carried on in the background, quietly designing its clever RISC processors and licensing the technology rather than trying to make the chips itself. Its smart, fast, low-power core processors and graphics chips were licensed by a growing number of chip makers around the world. And then in 2007, after almost three years of secretive R&D work, Apple launched the iPhone. At its core, the beating heart of its System on a Chip architecture, a high performance, low-power ARM Cortex 8 processor.

When Google's Android came along, based on the Linux open source operating system (which ARM had presciently worked to support), the world changed. The combination of Apple's innovation and Google's wide-ranging alliance with handset manufacturers transformed mobile, sidelining Nokia and creating a massive inflection point in technology. These new systems needed smart, powerful, small chipsets with low power consumption. And that's precisely what ARM was offering. This week saw Microsoft, painfully late to the market, unveil its Surface tablet computer based on Windows RT - its mobile operating system and the first Microsoft operating system ever to be based on a non Intel processor.

It's based on a chip from a small, 2,000 person company in Cambridge called ARM...

Barbarians At The Windows 8

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's a wonderful moment in the film Barbarians At The Gate when the beleagured CEO of RJR Nabisco tries out the 'smokeless cigarette' that's going to save the company from a buyout and discovers it tastes like a toilet when it's lit with a match - the R&D team have been using lighters all along.

The moment when Nokia CEO Stephen Elop was told that Lumia was Portugese for 'lady of the night' must have felt similar. If you're going to bet the future of your company on a single product, you really want to get it right. Totally right.

October 26th is another such moment, when Microsoft launches its Windows 8 operating system in six cities across the world, including - Gulf News tells us - Dubai. Windows 8 is really about Microsoft's future - the company arguably can't afford another Vista scale disappointment but it desperately needs to stay relevant in a world where iOS and Android are the talking points and most people have either stuck with XP or wished they had. The days of everyone flocking to 'this year's Windows' are long gone now. Windows 8 is going to have to be special - I'd argue it's going to have to be as special as Windows 3.0 was - a true game changer. And there are major question marks about that.

Early reviews have been mixed, with a great deal of disappointment and frustration expressed by reviewers. The 'tablet friendly' interface is actually a highly dangerous move for Microsoft. It's an inflection point - if the burden of navigating the new interface is as great - or greater - than the burden of change, users are more likely to make that change. Especially those of us who have been vexed by Vista and living with the nice but dim Windows 7. Microsoft's saving grace may be that the options out there are limited right now, but it's doubtful Google will give them too much 'wriggle room'.

October 26th is a Friday. It's also the first day of the Eid Al Adha holiday. It's not the day I'd pick for a Dubai product launch, but then what do I know...

This rare technology themed post comes to you courtesy of sponsor the UNWired radio show on technology, online and all things digital I co-host every Wednesday with Rama Chakaki and Siobhan Leyden. Today we're broadcasting live from GITEX - 12-2pm Dubai time (GMT +4) on 103.8FM or streaming live at this here handy link. This'll be my 24th GITEX and also marks my first meeting the girl who would become the future (and long suffering) Mrs McNabb!

The Quietest Office

Image via CrunchBase

Apple has an office in the UAE. Operating out of Abu Dhabi media zone TwoFour54, it would appear to be something of a 'best kept secret'.

Where was the fanfare? The dancing girls? The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowds? Companies typically waste no time at all in trumpeting office openings - look at the fuss Facebook and LinkedIn are making.

Tech website itp.net ran a couple of speculative stories on Apple opening a UAE office back in 2010 - one based on channel rumours of an office opening 'this year' and one quoting distributor Arab Business Machines (ABM) on how the opening wouldn't materially affect their business. And that's it. Nothing else. no announcements, no interviews. No Tim Cooks talking about commitment to the Middle East. Silence.

The only reason it came to light at all is that I mentioned on the weekly Unwired radio show yesterday that Apple had famously never opened a point of presence in the Middle East. In all these years, Apple has provided highly capable Arabic language support (it was very early to market with Mac Arabic language support for the burgeoning desktop publishing market, which it dominated in the Middle East) but never actually been here as such. A listener texted in 'not so' and so I asked Twitter.

The result was surprising. Not only did people come out of the woodwork with affirmatives, but one former journalist at The National even pinpointed the office building at TwoFour54 and mentioned that he'd been asked to desist from following up his story. Apple itself doesn't list out any worldwide offices on its website but does identify Apple UAE in its map of training centres.

So there we have it. Apple is actually here on our doorstep. They're just being very, very quiet about it...

Are Tablets Microsoft's Bitter Pill?

Microsoft Corporation - 1978 (Photo credit: Brajeshwar)

Microsoft missed the Internet. The story of the company's recovery from the blunder is not only fascinating, it's still unfolding.

Bill Gates literally turned the company on a sixpence, refocusing on the new technology and the very real danger of Netscape's Navigator, a layer of software that threatened to disintermediate the Windows operating system. The browser wars and the DOJ case that followed saw Microsoft accused of using its desktop dominance to punch out its rivals. Fascinatingly, Microsoft quietly acquired some 800 patents from AOL a couple of months ago, which AOL owned following its acquisition of what was left of Netscape.

Back in those days, Apple was The Sick Man Of Computing. Ironically, it was Gates who provided Jobs the loan he needed to get the company back on its feet. Jobs went on, as we all know, to create the world's most valuable company out of the wreckage. Along the way, he also created the most existential threat Microsoft has seen since it missed the Internet.

Microsoft missed the tablet. Not just the device, although it did, but the concept of a company built around hardware that accesses a content repository. The new big dogs on the porch are Apple and Amazon, with Google in attendance. All three companies have millions of tablet devices in consumers' hands, being used to access paid content. Google's model is slightly different to Amazon and Apple's, but all three share one important thing in common. Unlike the vast majority of PCs in the world today, none of these tablet devices uses a Microsoft operating system. In fact, none of them has a byte of Microsoft code installed.

Can Microsoft turn on a sixpence again? Its recent partnership with Barnes and Noble gave the company access to a content repository, as well as a powerful US retail channel. There has been much speculation that another partnership, with Nokia, would result in a tablet product. Now, with pundits eagerly awaiting a 'mystery launch' announcement by Microsoft today (well, actually tomorrow Dubai time), there's much talk of a Microsoft 'own brand' tablet. We've seen similar noises in the past, notably 2010's 'Courier' dual-screen tablet concept, a project that was reportedly 'killed'.


But an 'own brand' Microsoft tablet cobbled together with B&N and probably bits of Xbox content streaming won't unseat the iPad. And if I'm a tablet manufacturer, I couldn't really see why I'd ship Microsoft Windows on my products when I'm already shipping Android - particularly if Microsoft is a hardware competitor, too. On top of that, it won't take long memories for manufacturers to recall what being in thrall to Microsoft felt like.

Watching Microsoft's next move is going to be fascinating, but you can bet on one thing - MS no longer has the dominance it needs to turn on a sixpence and force its product on the entire market. You could argue that the three musketeers - Microsoft, troubled Nokia and Barnes & Noble are actually three companies that have had their time.

Youth will have its fling...

Where Did Nokia Go Wrong?

Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ratings agency Fitch has just this minute cut Nokia's stock to junk bond status, reports Reuters. Five years ago Nokia was the undisputed world market leader in mobile handsets. Today it's routinely referred to as a 'struggling Finnish handset maker'.

Where did it all go wrong? How on earth can you take global market dominance, a near-faultless track record of innovation and product excellence and a loyal base of customers around the world and simply blow it?

The answer is Steve Jobs and a small issue of perspective.

Jobs saw the mobile as a computer. Nokia saw it as a telephone. Nokia was working on making your phone smarter, Jobs was putting a content access device in your hands. Even Nokia's early N series phones tacked a keyboard onto a phone, a bit like a mobile One Per Desk rather than using the powerful combination of smart access device, applications and content wrapped up into a flawless user experience.

For me, the rot truly set in when Nokia first started shipping 'smart phones' that could link to its Ovi store and download apps and stuff. The store was pretty much empty for a very long time indeed. Nokia seemed to miss the whole idea that the mobile was to a handset manufacturer what a SIM is to a mobile operator - a cash cow. Ovi could have been an open platform for application developers and content owners. It should have been.

On June 29th 2007, Jobs took to the stage in his turtleneck sweater and launched the iPhone. Nokia's executives must still have been laughing when, in September, Apple sold its millionth iPhone. They must still have been laughing when Time named it Invention of the Year in 2007.

Apple's iTunes and Jobs' app-centric approach created a revolution. Nokia, in common with mobile operators around the world, persisted in a circuit-switched mentality. When Google joined in with Android, the writing was on the wall. They started fitting the brass handles when Elop announced Nokia was ditching Symbian a year before it was ready to replace the operating system with the Great White Hope - Microsoft's Windows, the operating system that never 'got' mobile. Remember Windows CE anyone?

Today, Apple and Samsung between them account for something like 50% of the global smartphone market. And Nokia is a junk bond. Its first Windows based 'phone, the Lumia, has a name that means prostitute in Spanish.

Am I writing Nokia's obituary too early?

Playing with Evi

So you've got an Android phone and you're jealous of those iPhone wielding pin-heads who are rattling around saying stupid things to Siri and getting wildly amusing responses, right?

Be green no more. For now we have Evi, the AI-driven personal assistant for Android phones that not only says funny stuff when you ask her to open the pod bay doors, but is also more Euro-centric (well, UK-centric, let's admit it) than Siri and also answers questions directly from her own databases rather than constantly pointing you to search engines as an answer.

Apple has already threatened to remove the iPhone version of Evi from its AppStore as it is "Confusingly similar to Siri" (or possibly just too good). This is obviously no problem for Android users, as their very own mobile operating system was considered so strongly to be 'confusingly similar' to Apple's own operating system.

Best of all, Evi works, although she sounds a lot more robotic than Siri:

What is the square root of 69?
The square root of 69 is 8-some - more accurately 8.30662386292.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
The chicken was on her way to the rail station. I told her there was a train to London leaving in 10 minutes.


What time is it in Beirut?
The time in Beirut is 10:16:58 Eastern European Time.

Where's the nearest McDonald's?
I couldn't find anywhere suitable, so here's Yelp results for McDonald's in your nearest town, Dubai.

Open the pod bay doors, Evi. (Well, I had to, didn't I?)
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

What do you think of Siri?
Siri is a great product in the iPhone4S. it controls the phone and retrieves information from Wolfram Alpha and Yelp in the US. But my technology differs. While Siri uses technology Apple got from Siri Inc, I use technology developed by True Knowledge. These technologies work in completely different ways. I'm also available on most Android phones and most iPhones and soon will be available on other channels. You can talk to me with voice or keyboard. Siri is only on the iPhone 4S and you must use voice.

How many calories are there in a Snickers bar?
There are 467 calories in 100 grams (3.53 ounces) of Snickers bar.

Evi is available on the Android market and is a free download. You can thank me for the time you wasted playing about with Evi later...

The Future Of Money

Image via Wikipedia

Dubai's transport regulator, the RTA (Roads and Transport Authority) has announced it is planning to open up the use of its Nol card to retailers. The slightly oddly named Nol card (nol is apparently an old Farsi word meaning 'fare') is similar to the UK's Oyster, a rechargeable swipe card that uses near field communications technology to process 'no touch' transactions. You just wave the card at a reader and the card is appropriately debited.

Opening Nol cards to retailers in the UAE is an interesting idea. It means that people unable to afford credit cards would be able to swipe their cards for goods now. However, the downside is that the silver and gold Nol cards are not personalised, so if you lose your card, there's no way to recover the money that's on it (the card can be charged up to Dhs500) and anyone could use your lost (or stolen) card in a wide range of retail outlets. The blue Nol card can be personalised and is therefore secure, but I'd be interested to see how the RTA handles reimbursing balances in the case of loss, theft or dispute - and how they propose processing retail refunds in future.

Visa debit cards are already on the market here that have implemented NFC technology, although no retailers here yet have NFC readers installed. (I have one of these cards from HSBC but daren't use it in case something goes wrong). And you can only guess at how prepared banks are to implement the complex infrastructure needed to support an entirely new payment method.

Reports in today's press don't say anything about charges for this service, either. The Nol card currently costs Dhs35 on issue (from metro stations only - it's usually Dhs70) and there is no charge for the 'cost of money', but this could well change once the cards are being used for third party transactions.

But the real kicker is not card based at all - it's mobile.

Android and Blackberry mobiles already support NFC, although Apple phones don't - apparently the iPhone5 is popularly expected to have NFC support. The RTA is already talking about porting the Nol system to mobiles, which is surprisingly advanced thinking. Now you have the benefit of total personalisation based on your mobile's SIM. You also have a lovely clash between the RTA, the telcos and the banks. Who will 'own' mobile money?

And this is where the Nol card idea becomes really interesting. Because if the RTA gets in there fast, they'll potentially completely cut the credit card companies out of the whole mobile payment scheme. If I were Visa I'd be offering retailers free readers and beating a path the RTA to sell them the idea of working together to make this happen as a team.

But then, what do I know? Maybe they already have..

Phished or Hacked?

Image via WikipediaIt's yet another very odd story coming out of Dubai Courts and I'm not sure whether that's because Dubai Courts are an odd place or because the journalism itself is odd. Gulf News reports today on a woman whose account was "hacked by a phishing syndicate". The story's here.

It's a very confusing story indeed - her account is variously described as having been hacked into and she as having been victimised by a phishing syndicate. Well, being hacked is one thing, being phished is quite another - and the core of the story, surely, is whether one or the other situation applies. If she was phished, she willingly gave away her account details which then would have been used by a criminal to access her account - no hacking involved. If she was hacked, someone illegally accessed her account by manipulating the bank's security systems.

And where did a 'syndicate' come from?

The story also makes mention of a mobile notification service which didn't kick in until four days after the transactions, but not why the service didn't kick in. Are we saying that all banks now have to notify all clients of all transactions or face liability for any fraud howsoever caused?

The court brought in an expert, a banker. I wonder why it didn't bring an expert on security in to clear things up a little? The whole report left me with a great deal more questions than answers - and that's not what journalism is supposed to do, is it? It's supposed to give us 'context and analysis'...

It's GITEX Time Again...

Image via WikipediaAs The National points out today (very kindly quoting me babbling on about the show) in its GITEX story, this will be my 23rd GITEX. I should really stop counting... I've done ancient geek reminisces about GITEX posts before, like this one right here, so I'm not going there again.

This year is the show's thirtieth birthday. There was much talk about GITEX being 30 last year, but they jumped the gun a tad. The miracle is that it's still with us at all - all the other great horizontal computer shows barring Hanover's CeBIT have tanked. Comdex is no longer with us, the Which Computer show died years ago, along with many others. Why have CeBIT and GITEX survived?

One part of the answer is that both are essentially government owned shows that have a wider agenda than just filling exhibition space. GITEX also fills pretty much every hotel room in Dubai and acts as a great showcase for new companies looking for a Middle East base or to expand their sales/distribution network to the region. That government support also means not necessarily having to face the grim realities of commercial pressure quite as much as a private sector organiser - particularly over the past three years when, like CeBIT, GITEX had lost a number of large, high profile exhibitors. But both shows have seen a return to form this year, in GITEX' case thanks to a concerted effort by the organising team behind 'GITEX Technology Week 2011' to package things up attractively for exhibitors as well as to add stronger vertical elements that made it more interesting for companies to attend.

There's also the resurgence of technology in business to thank. The IT industry had grown stale, innovation was no longer compelling companies to invest in technology and the great rollout of technology as we all bought our little slice of the internet had slowed. IT vendors discovered that slapping a new number on a CD in a box didn't make us all rush out to buy the New New Thing.

Now, buoyed by mobile, tablets, the cloud, social media and other innovations, technology is becoming sexy again. People are looking at new stuff and, what's more, investing in new stuff. Dubai has always been the regional centre for the technology industry and has always been very much the 'shop window' for sales organisations targeting the Middle East. It's been that way ever since technology companies first started to open up regional offices - generally, the decision on location was taken by the person handling the region who was often the person who would have to come out here to live. Given the options, virtually to a man they chose Dubai as the most pleasant place to live. And so the technology industry came here - a process that took place some ten years before Dubai Internet City was conceived and launched. When DIC came along, they just all moved up the road.

When I first moved to the UAE, my old pal Bob Merrill, the GM of Ericsson Saudi Arabia, told me (in his Southern drawl), "You're going to Dubai for three reasons, son. Golf, women and hooch. Why, I could take your Dubai and put it here in Sitteen Street Riyadh and we wouldn't even know it was there." He had a point, although I think you'd notice Dubai if you plonked it in Sitteen Street these days!

Many of the companies who set up shop here first encountered the region through either attending or exhibiting at GITEX. If you were obsessive enough, you could trace the process and see how many exhibitors have stuck to Dubai over the years and added technology to the city's list of re-export businesses. How many executives, in fact, who have turned up to the multi-hall extravaganza that is GITEX - a show, if the truth be told, that has always been bigger than its market - taken one look around and said 'We gotta be in this market, boys'? Over the years I have personally witnessed a great number of them.

GITEX is good for Dubai, which is why they'll never let it die. This year will see whether the re-invention of this most venerable of computer shows will provide the right mixture of showcase and meeting point to drive it forwards. And whether the new found burst of innovation in the technology industry will continue to make it relevant once again.

Reconciled

I am delighted to be able to report my mobile and the car are now reconciled. The last three days have been an absolute hell of long snitty silences on the road. I don't know what sparked this awful long-running marital, but every journey has been a miserable stretch of yawning quietude.

Let me explain. The new car is wired up for Bluetooth, and it works. The last three words are the critical ones. Once you've paired a mobile with the car, you can program in your contacts or just say a number to have the mobile call that number. This is not new, but it's new to my Pajero - and the voice recognition is competent to the point where it never misses. It's sad, I know, but I still get delighted when technology actually, you know, works.

So when you hop into the car and press the little button, a rather fetching female voice says, 'Link system ready. Alex's mobile is connected.' You might say 'Sarah' and then she'll pipe up, 'Dialling Sarah' and you're away.

I have got used to this very quickly indeed - I've never had a competent hands free system - I've tried, and junked, Bluetooth devices before, including the little ear-mounted microwave ovens. So you can imagine when, the other day, the car started ignoring the phone I was worried, vexed and quite quickly in a state bordering distraught.

I tried re-pairing the phone, but they simply refused to try and put things behind them. I tried restarting everything I could find to restart. And eventually yesterday I made one last desperate attempt after spinning my tale of silent woe during a chat with young Jonathan Castle and found an obscure setting in the phone that had somehow been toggled off. I still have occasional iterative feedback loop fail sessions with the Android interface which result in me threshing around in menus and options so many people of my acquaintance have now got used to receiving random calls from me or messages that offer the chance to smite the bungalow with a bratwurst or some such gobbledygook.

So they're talking again and all is well with the world. The relief is not inconsiderable.