Month: May 2009

Like most people who have broadband, my account doesn’t have excess charges, just ‘shaping’ – dropping back to crawling ‘dial-up’ speeds until the end of the billing period. It is just horrible and I really do my very best to avoid it.

Obviously the best way to avoid it is to keep a close eye on your usage. Easier said than done, my ISP usage page is behind a login and they don’t have an easy way of keeping an eye on it, so short of visiting a really boring page on a regular basis, there’s no easy way of keeping track. Enter the wonderful NetUsage Firefox plugin, which has helped me ration my bandwidth down to the last day on a couple of occasions.

So, when I changed my plan and NetUsage encountered some sort of error, I was a little disappointed. A week or so of checking the ISP page convinced me that this was a situation that had to be resolved. I checked the documentation for NetUsage – tried (I really did!) to understand how it worked – then gave up and emailed the author… this was a Sunday afternoon.

A couple of emails to and fro and by Sunday evening, the author has emailed me a patched version of the plugin which worked perfectly – amazing reponse. I am delighted to once again be able to monitor my usage at a glance – actually, mostly my daughter’s usage – streaming trashy US soaps!!

Nokia today launched it’s OVI store, an attempt by the company to jump on the tidal wave of success that is the Apple Store (along with about a half a dozen other imitators). Many industry pundits are touting it as some sort of competitor, but I’m afraid that’s an uphill battle, and one they’re never going to win – not by a long shot!

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the success of OVI store should not be judged against Apple’s App Store, instead the success of OVI store should be judged on how well it serves the market that is Nokia mobile phones… a group of hardware far more diverse than anything Apple has to deal with!

Being a Nokia owner myself (can’t afford an iPhone and detest the G1 hardware!), I hopped onto this new store for a look around. Nice simple interface, quickly got me browsing apps that suit my hardware – applause for the use of html/css instead of flash – obviously this is driven by the need to work on the browser in their phones, but a nice touch anyway.

Unfortunately, it all fell apart when I saw the prices! Who are they kidding? A game like Touch Physics on the iPhone costs $3.99 and gives hours of gorgeous, fluid gameplay. Games on my Nokia feel pathetic by comparison, yet on OVI store I’m being asked to fork over between $6.60 and $12 for crummy games that bore me after 5 minutes! Then there’s some ‘City Guide’ travel apps which are (probably not) selling for over $30! They want $16 for a twitter client?!? You have got to be joking!! Who is making these pricing decisions?

Lonely Planet city guides at least represent fair value at $8. Weirdly, this compares favourably to the same guide on the App Store, which can be had for $18.99. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the distinctly poorer user experience offered by Nokia’s hardware… who knows?