igb's posthaven

Radio 4: Now Radio 5

The 8.10 on Today this morning was nicely set up: Alistair Darling and Michael Fallon on the removal of Sir Fred's knighthood. Darling was against it, mostly on the principled grounds that it seemed arbitrary and without due process, but really because his government had approved it. Fallon was in favour of it, on the grounds of accountability, public opinion and common sense, but really because the other lot had approved it. So far, so dull.

But the whole thing was deliciously derailed by the caller on line 2, in the new exciting 6-0-6 style Today programme: Sir Jackie Stewart, memorably described by Max Mosley as a certified half-wit who goes round dressed up as a 1930s music hall man. To which, of course, one might reply that it's better to be thought a '30s entertainer than actually being a '30s fascist, but we can't blame a man for his parents. On the grounds that he's Scottish and has a knighthood --- the same might be said of Sean Connery or, were he not dead, Harry Lauder --- Sir Jackie was allowed to witter on about his views on the banking crisis, the actions of the FSA (or, as he aptly put it, the SFA) and the nature of honours in a modern society. At length. It had all the insight you might expect from a man who drives cars quickly, and was what one can only describe as a car crash.

Tomorrow on Today: Iain Duncan Smith on mid-corner oversteer and why Labour failed to fit softer roll bars.

ian

Why Apple Own non-Geek Smartphones

In my "people who I support the IT for" circle there are three iPhones: mine, my wife's, and my father's. Dad's was first, my wife's and mine came later. Yes, we do the easy thing: all of us have Macs, and there's a "family pack" MobileMe subscription sat behind it, so all the stars are aligned for easy navigation. I have, I think, spent perhaps as much as thirty minutes over the past couple of years fiddling with iPhones, mostly when (as all three of us have done) we've shifted from PAYG to Contract, and in my case having the phone (legitimately) unlocked and changing carriers. They "just work".

My daughter wanted a smart-phone for her 15th, and for various reasons (not least the adverts) we agreed on a Motorola Defy. They're allegedly tough and waterproof, and being slightly smaller than an iPhone better in young pockets. And lot lot cheaper, too: free on quite sensible-price contracts. So I agreed to buy her one.

First hassle: email. It turns out that if you want to connect to an IMAP server that uses TLS the sensible way (ie, connect on port 143 and send STARTTLS) you have to turn _off_ "use TLS". That's intuitive, isn't it? If you turn that option on, it selects old-style "it's already running TLS" semantics, even if you force it to port 143 rather than 993. I had to get a copy of tcpdump out on my Cyrus mailserver to spot that one, which I've never had to do with an iPhone. But perhaps, being charitable, had I read the documentation I'd have spotted that one.

Today was her birthday, so she at last for her hands on it. And this evening came the bad news: she couldn't install any apps. They just went into state "starting download" and hung. A swift poke around revealed that it was the same both over 3G and WiFi, and a quick look at tcpdump on my router (again!) showed that it was communicating with the outside world, but the connections were hanging after TCP established and exchanged some packets --- so the problem was unlikely to be firewalls, uPnP or anything low level like that.

To cut a long story short, after three hours, endless google searches and two hardware resets, I found the problem. When she first tried to download an app, she was led through setting up a Google account to access the Marketplace. For whatever reason, the wizard that she was presented with by the phone automatically set her up as xxx@googlemail.com. But Marketplace hangs --- because Google write quality software, and error messages are for wusses --- when presented with @googlemail.com, and you have to sign in with @gmail.com (or it might be "anything except googlemail.com"). But the Google account you set up is "locked", and to change it you have to do a complete backup and restore, even if you get as far as knowing you need to change the address.

So, Google/Motorola have managed to (a) ship a phone which leads you through a wizard that sets up the wrong domain on an identifier you need for a vital function, (b) doesn't give any error messages, but just hangs and (c) requires a hardware reset to reconfigure to the correct setting, which isn't documented anywhere. It's a top quality product, it really is. Looking around forums shows lots of people with this problem, and I suspect it will affect anyone who buys on who does not already have an @gmail.com email address available to use for downloading.

Should have bought her an iPhone.