O2 remove validation to spare customers continued iPhone 3G upgrade misery

If you are a UK iPhone user looking to upgrade or if you have been following the story on this blog you no doubt know the problems O2 have been having taking orders from their customers wanting to upgrade.

Now rather than trying to validate each order against their existing accounts and/or taking payments/credit checks at the time of order it seems the order form has been changed. Now all visitors to https://upgrades.o2.co.uk are pushed onto the failover form and the details are taken without processing and the user is greeted with this message: Thank you for your order. We are processing this and will contact you if there are any complications with the details you have provided.

While not a fix this is an improvement that spares users continually re-trying the site and allows O2 to process the information off-line at their leisure and contact users that have entered erroneous data or could not be validated.

Fingers crossed my details are not lost.

O2 botch iPhone 3G upgrade release

O2 are anticipating long queues at stores this Friday as the iPhone 3G is launched in the UK. To help reduce congestion existing iPhone customers are being forced to place their order online rather than come into store on the day.

This morning O2 users that had signed up to be notified when they could order their upgrade received a text message advising orders could be made from 8am today. The problem is O2 upgrade site couldn’t handle the demand and soon fell over and now there is only a maintenance page.

O2’s response when questioned about it was that the site went down due to “high demand”. Where they not expecting high demand? There will be very few iPhone owners not looking to upgrade to the 3G so they have to have expected a large number of people ordering. However, despite this rather than set up a robust site to handle the many orders the site was hosted in the US and they used a flash interface with frames!

Many users will not even have seen the flash interface as it often timed out and failed over to a HTML form that could not be processed by the back end system. I personally tried the form 4-5 times and the Flash interface I managed to get 2- stages in before it failed too. O2 eventually put an end to users misery by putting up a maintenance page.

Did they offer telephone orders to compensate for their lack of a site? No - infact the upgrades option on their phone system has been disabled and their sales team have been told they cannot take iPhone upgrade orders over the phone.

It’s embarassing for O2 and for Apple that they do not have the infrastructure to handle a big launch like this. Lets hope that Friday’s new customer release will be handled better. I suspect the majority of the demand for the phones will come for Apple fans who will already have an iPhone rather from the new user but we will see by this time next week.

Upcoming on from the front end

Posts have been few and far between recently but don’t worry I haven’t been sitting on my hands and have plenty to report. Just in the process of moving to a new server at the moment so want to complete that before making much new content.

Coming up:

Reviews:

• Gelaskins for iPhone and PSP - http://www.gelaskins.com
• Best Apps for jailbroken iPhones and which are likely to make it as an official app in future
• Best web hosts for developers/design studios with multiple clients

Features:

• Best new site or redesigns of 2008
• My recent projects including
  • why http://www.k9ulf.com ate up over 10gigs of bandwidth in it’s first month and looks to be increasing
  • On location photoshoots with clients at http://www.beecleanlondon.co.uk
  • How a re-design can help increase traffic, improve customer support (plus breaking out from frames) - http://www.woodside-security.co.uk
  • How a rush job doesn’t have to look ordinary - http://www.littledesignplanet.co.uk

Expect transfers and fixing links etc will take another few days and then I’m back in business. I will eventually be intergrating the blog into little design planet when that gets re-built this summer.

iPhone is Child’s Play

My 16 month year old is turning out to be quiet the technology wizz. Changing TV channels was one thing but taking photos on my wife’s phone and sending them as a picture message to me was quiet another. Today she showed me that she is perfectly capable of unlocking and using my iPhone. Apparently she has been doing this for months but this time it was caught on film. Can’t wait to see what she does when I get her an Eee PC next year.

Have Apple got it wrong with the iPhone?

At this year’s dconstruct conference Peter Merholz explained how just packing more features is not a good way of evolving a design and how the iPod and Wii are examples of that. Not the most technically advanced or feature packed compared to rivals but got the user experience part right and is a success as a result. ( here his lecture in the dconstruct podcast here)

The idea of not feature stuffing a phone seemed to be a great idea then. Especially when you consider 80% of people only use 20% of the features of their phones. However, at the price point Apple have launched with you would have to say the that it likely only the 20% elite/pro users that would pony up the record-breakingly expensive fee and contract combination.(see prices here)

Surely early figures will show great sales but hype and a shiny interface will only get you so far. Users that had basic handsets before will love the iPhone as it does the basics incredibly well. But if you have a top-end pocket-PC or symbian phone you’ll be hugely under-whelmed and may see you’re upgrade as a bit of a downgrade.

I’ve been using the iPhone since it launch in the UK a few days ago and the novelty has already begun to where off and I sorely miss my
XDA exec. It’s not just the big features like video calling, 3G Internet, and picture messaging - it’s even little things like being able to select text/numbers on a webpage and paste them into a word doc/email or being able to delete music/video/app without a computer. Also the camera seems to be such an after thought. The quality is so low - not just resolution but sharpness too. There are also no settings to adjust, or support for recording video.

These issues may cause iPhone sales in europe to reach critical mass sooner than Apple may have planned for. Once the mac fans that would buy a brick with the apple logo on and then those that are caught up in the hype/fashion statement of owning one have all purchased the price will have to drop to sub £50 for the real target audience - the 80% that like to use the basics - will start to lap it up. By then I am sure the novelty will have worn off for the serious phone users that like their features and so many will be looking to get out and buy a more feature rich phone. Perhaps by then the Apple iPhone 2 will be out - but will it be too late. Will the pro users be once bitten twice shy? Will Google Andriod be a serious rival by then? Will the next generation of windows mobile have surpassed the iPhone interface?

With all these questions hanging over the iPhone I wouldn’t put money on the long term success of Apple in the mobile market as readily as some who seem to think they will take it by storm like the iPod has with the portable music industry.

The current kings of mobiles remain symbian and windows mobile based smartphones - watch out for the new 8GB Nokia N95 (black) and the XDA Exec if O2 still let you buy them now that they do the iPhone.

Mafia Spammers (the cheekiest spammer ever?)

I received the cheekiest spam comment on my blog today.
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This is equivalent to <strong>Mafia asking for protection money</strong> when they are likely the ones you need protecting from.

My blog gets a lot of traffic and so I get about 1000 spam comments a week. My spam filter catches about 80% of them and as I don’t allow comments to be visible until I’ve read them personally the other 20% don’t make it either. So I see a lot of spam but that has to be the cheekiest.
1) He has no power over the spam comments on my site so has nothing to offer
2) He is a spammer himself
3) He is trying to con google into boosting his site’s ranking at the same time as trying to con blog owners

I hope no one falls for this and uses a free spam filter such as Akismet.

I am very tempted to use <a href=”http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39289916,00.htm”>the YouTube loophole</a> to spam his email address.

Technorati Tags: spam, spammers, mafia, google juice

Microsoft make a desperate push for IE7

With uptake of the latest Internet Explorer browser being slow compared to that of main rival Firefox, Microsoft have started a big push to encourage more users to make the change.

The first big advantage Microsoft had was having it pre-installed on it’s latest OS - Vista and not allowing the obsolete Internet Explorer 6 to be installed (which would undermine vista security anyway). However, with Vista uptake being slow and with the tech savvy already using firefox, opera or other browsers IE7 is struggling to make much ground.

Latest figures I have from various sites I run/developed show that on sites for web developers or tech savvy users Firefox now has the majority over both all other browsers combined.

On consumer sites it is about 30% IE7, 28% IE6, 40% Firefox and the remaining 2% using other browsers. So although overall Internet explorer has the majority users still, IE7 alone has not caught up with firefox.

On business sites the weighting is slightly more in favour for Internet explorer but then the figure is increased for IE6 rather than IE7.

In a bid to convert more users to IE7 this week we’ve seen them <a href=”http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39289859,00.htm”>remove the validation requirement</a> to download it.

Now they have sent out a newsletter promoting Internet Explorer 7. It seems to be targetted at IE6 users as it focuses on the improved security in IE7 and the fact that it doesn’t render correctly in Firefox:

<em>”The Internet is a vast place–and not every site is friendly. How do you help protect yourself online? With Windows Internet Explorer 7. Already, the Internet Explorer 7 Phishing Filter prevents nearly one million visits per week to known dangerous websites. In just a few clicks, see how the latest version of the world’s most popular web browser can help you be safer online.”</em>

The latest version of <strong>the world’s most popular web browser</strong> may not be a statement the internet explorer team can use for much longer…

As a developer I am happy with this push to IE7 - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the sooner I will stop having to support it. It is currently holding designers/developers back in what can be done as we have to ensure whatever we do is supported it. Binning IE6 will mean - less hacks, more advancement, less development time - resulting in savings for everyone.

Even Microsoft can’t develop HTML emails for Outlook 2007

HTML Newsletter Developers have been complaining about Outlook 2007 since it’s release as it uses word to render emails rather than a web browser. Some have described it as taking email design back 5 years. Microsoft defended their decision for various reasons - mainly for more consistent results for users of Outlook looking to forward/create html emails of their own.

Now it appears even Microsoft are struggling to develop HTML emails that will render correctly in Outlook 2007. The first line of the latest xbox live newsletter reads “Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007“. If even Microsoft can’t develop a newsletter that shows up consistently on it’s webmail (Live mail/hotmail) and Outlook 2007 client how are us as designers/developers supposed to manage. Clearly this should show it’s time to correct the mistake of using word rendering in Outlook 2007 or for designers to follow Microsoft’s example and simply ignore the latest Outlook and simply offer the users links to a page they can view in a web browser.

I don’t know how my employer would feel about me choosing to ignore Outlook 2007 when building the next newsletter but it will certainly be my recommendation. Our overseas offices seem to have ignored the client as I cannot read the emails that I get from them for the services I subscribe to if I use Outlook 07. If enough companies do this maybe this will prompt some action from Microsoft when there users complain.

Upcoming articles on From the Front-End

It’s been a while since my last post but I haven’t been idle. I’ve got plenty of articles coming up so watch this space for:

The low down on d.Construct 2007
Enhancing Web Standards sites with flash
Case Study: Experiments in SEO
Working on the move: Extreme Research

YouTube killer tries again (vume/eefoof)

When eefoof originally launched it was tipped to be a YouTube killer. It offered most of the YouTube features (user-generated video content) with a twist. Rather than just having the benefit of free hosting and an audience for your work they actually pay you for your submissions. They divide up the income they get (from the ads on the site) to all the contributers. The amount you get will depend on the popularity of the video(s)  you post. So if your videos are very popular and 2% of videos viewed that month belong to you then you get 2% of the advertising revenue - in theory.

The concept seemed great but the unusual name that was not only difficult to pronounce it was tough to remember or spell and so unless you bookmarked it or someone sent you a link you’d likely forget it soon after you visited. Also  during it’s early days there wasn’t that much to look at when you compare the huge database of video on YouTube and Google Video.

Now eefoof is relaunching as VuMe and have built up a more significant collection of content a comeback maybe on the cards. So stop ‘giving away’ your content to Google and make yourself some dosh on the VuMe.

http://www.vume.com

No I’m not on commission. No I have not submitted any video yet, but watch this space.