Our top 3 support requests: 1

Can't see all the Mobizines

The most popular issue is a bit knottier: the Mobizines you get depend on the way you get the Mobizines Reader, who your network operator is and what your phone is. Quite understandably people come to the Web site and look at the 70 or so titles in the UK, and wonder why their phone is only listing a subset. It's a bit complicated but I'll try to explain:

Limited memory phones

The first thing to point out is that we have to limit the number of titles listed on the phone for some phones. If you have a Siemens C75 or a Nokia 6100 you'll only see 12 titles because if we add more your device will run out of memory and Mobizines won't work.

Text to 63333, 692355 or 82200

If you got your Mobizines Reader by texting to the UK, US, South African or German shortcode numbers you'll get a selection of titles that are related to the title you texted in to subscribe to initially. You should see about 25 titles on the phone to add. So if you come in for Fast Car, say, you'll get Evo in the list because we've made the assumption that you like cars.

Texting to +44 7624806310

If you got your selection by texting into the International number you'll get our world selection of titles. These are titles that we have permission to distribute globally - not all of our content partners want us to distribute their titles all around the world, usually because they only own the content for the country they're in.

Downloading from GetJar etc

The same is true if you download your Mobizines Reader from GetJar or one of the less official phone software sites (we distribute the installers officially on GetJar, AllAboutSymbian and Handango: if you see it somewhere else you might want to check it's the latest as people have been known to download our software are distribute it themselves. We don't mind, but it does mean that there are multiple versions about.) Because GetJar is global we load the GetJar clients with content that is OK for every country. If you want a UK version to download you can get the Jar from our website.

Installing from the NCD

The Nokia Content Discover has a special group with some exclusive Nokia content in it. Again, it doesn't have the full gamut of content.

BBC Headlines

Yep, that's us. If you have the BBC Headlines service (not the BBC News Select application!) you have Mobizines loaded with only BBC content. You can get the BBC news and all the other Mobizines titles by texting "bbcopen" to 63333 in the UK.

Three

We also operate the Mobizines service on the Three network in the UK. This costs three pounds a month (with a penny change) and Three choose the titles. At the moment, for example, the RSS Mobizine is not available on Three.

UK Mobizines outside the UK and (vice versa)

If you're in the USA, Germany and South Africa there are local services set up for you. We understand if you want to access UK content as well (or vice versa if you're in the UK and you want to read titles from one of the other countries we're in). Unfortunately licensing means we need to keep things separate.

But I want {insert name} Mobizine!

We feel your need. We try to work with our distribution channels and our content partners to make as much content available everywhere: it's what we're about. Sometimes for reasons legal, technical and metaphysical this just isn't possible. If you're in the UK and you want another Mobizine you can simply text 63333 again and we'll switch your subscription.

You can also sign up for My Mobizines and subscribe to stuff outside the list on the phone that way: this will be particularly useful for people with the limited memory client (check out the GetJar mobizines-tiny.jar details for a list of affected handsets.)

We're also pushing hard for new content for the global group: keep checking the Add New Mobizines screen in Mobizines Reader and you should see some exciting new stuff coming soon.

(The picture? That's actual rocket science that is)

More on Canadian data costs

Google Spreadsheet of the price of data in Canada (and some other places).

Note that Rogers Telecom helpfully multiplies your costs by 6 if you wander into that big country south of the 49th parallel, taking you from 0.5 cents a kilobyte (yes, kilobyte: I've seen phones that send more than two kilobytes in request headers alone) to 3 cents.

Putting it in a Google Spreadsheet is a really cool and powerful way of demonstrating how twisted data prices are, so top marks to Thomas Purves for putting it up as a part of his post reported on here.

We'd like to expand on that so - I'm trying to put together a "best deal" spreadsheet in Google.
But modelling it is evil.

Cost is the thing we get asked about most of all, and its a really thorny issue to crack, largely because the mobile operators go out of their way to make it as hard to compare as possible.

In the UK alone, for example, you have operators that operate tariffs with a daily cap and an excess, (eg, Vodafone will charge you a pound each day you go online, so long as you use less than 15Mb of data, with a £2 surcharge for each megabyte over the 15Mb), operators who charge per service (eg, Three) and operators who charge a flat rate for all you can eat so long as you don't take the mickey, (T-Mobile, ray!).

Unfortunately, that's usually only one tariff in a portfolio of tariffs so, for example, T-Mobile's pay as you go offering looks a lot like Vodafone's, with a daily surchage, and Three also offer flat-rate pricing via X-Series.

Why's it so difficult to compare? The argument goes that if users were able to compare easily between mobile tariffs (and data's only one part of that) they...gosh!... would move to operators that offered better prices, thus increasing churn and starting a price war. I used to work for a small web agency that did some consulting work for a large airline. One of the ideas we came up with as a sales promotion was the concept of the Isoquid. The idea was to draw lines on a map of the world showing how far £200 would take you by air, so that if you did happen to have exactly that sum of money in your pocket you'd be able to book a ticket from the interface we designed. The idea was turned down because it showed all too graphically how European flights were artficially expensive compared with flights to the US. The £200 that got you to New York would drop you somewhere short of Geneva. (Bear in mind this is before the budget airlines really kicked off.)

On top of that confusion the amount of data that you use reading Mobizines (which are free from us to you, except for Three users, and the three quid a month is a bloody good deal) depends on the number of titles you have and the type of title.

Take the example of someone who only subscribes to Sudoku, (it's okay, we still love you, but you're missing out on a world of fun). The Java client version of Sudoku, which is one of the most popular downloads we have at GetJar, is 168 bytes to update. That's right, you can fit it in one line of BBC Basic. Refresh to get a new puzzle daily and Vodafone's new pricing means you'll end up paying £30.

On the other hand someone with subscriptions to Evo and Monkey (say) which are 225 times more data will only pay four quid because they only update on a Wednesday.

So while we hear your requests for a simple way to calculate how much subscribing to a Mobizine is going to cost, it's extremely hard to build up the comparisons without ending up with something that looks like a City trader's desktop. We're working on clarifying the proposition (or make things simple, in English) so watch this space.

So why does a gigabyte of data cost £20 in New Zealand and £2908 in Canada?

The polite answer is that New Zealand has a more competitive market than other territories. The impolite answer is that the operators are petrified of ending up competing on raw price as simple ISPs so they're very very gently deflating costs.

Eventually they will be bit pipes and you'll be able to choose whether you want to use the add-on voice service from your mobile operator or just stick with your Skype subscription but it's gonna be a long time coming. (And perhaps the wifi providers will eat their lunch while the telcos are still trying to decide which wine goes with Sea Bream.) In the meantime expect a very distorted market.

Oh and all of the above and the fact that the regulatory authorities have enough on their hands dealing with things like cutting voice roaming costs to worry about data yet...

Orange joins the data club

This just in from the Blogroll via Ewan @ smstextnews:

"Well, will WONDERS never CEASE?

Butter me in jelly and call me Christopher!

Look again. Yes, Orange, uh huh, ORANGE are launching an unlimited data add-on. This is from the company who most recently brought us the unbelievable and downright laughable ‘unlimited’ off peak data deal if you signed up to their 75 quid a month price plan. As if ‘off peak’ was any use.

Muchos kudos to SMS Text News reader Barry O’Connell for spotting this in The London Times!

So, the future’s bright, right? Have a read..."

The link Ewan is referring to is here.
But cutting to the meat of it - (as we do often do) - it works out like this:

Contract: Internet “snacks” – 30p for 15mins with daily cap of £1.50 or a “bundle” priced at £1 per day or £5 monthly for evening/ weekends or £8 monthly “anytime”.

Pay-as-you-go: Internet snacks – 40p for 15 mins with daily cap of £2 or a daily £1 bundle

Orange has (at last) joined the elite!

This is great news for Mobizines users -

T-Mobile, 3 and now Orange are clearly leading the way with their data bundles...
Vodafone are following up this summer and o2?

Well put it this way - they're not on our Christmas card list.
What about yours?

PAYG or FAYG?

Are you Pay As You Go or are you Fleeced As You Go?

That is the question...

We all know the Mobizines Service is Free right? RIGHT?!
Right.
And we all know that the operators are very slowly coming round to the idea that we might not want to pay through the nose for our data charges, right? RIGHT?!

And although some people take issue with this - at least the operators are trying...
They are trying right? RIGHT?!

WRONG!!!

I get in this morning and start my usual 'pre-work blogroll browse' and thanks to the lovely Technokitten...

(whom I also happened to meet at a mobilistic soiree last week - cheers lass)

...I have now been enlightened to the world of PAYG Data Charges.
To use a common web phrase... OMG!

Vodafone seems to be leading the way with a whopping £7.50 per mb!

That's insane!
Almost as bad as their (current) contract prices!
But hey - it could be worse...

You could be paying for mobile data in Canada, OUCH!
Now THAT hurts.
(thanks to Ewan @ smstextnews for that one)

Edit: I've just been told off for being too negative - I'm going to go and do some research on PAYG prices - see if I can find the best offering.
Not just the worst.
BBS.

Not all that quickly though

Maths-phobes look away now.

Something about James' post struck me as a little odd. Not anything James said, but the quote from Voda: "Currently, you’re charged £2.35 for each MB. But from June 1st 2007, you’ll only pay £1 for up to 15MB per day. That’s 30 times more pages for the same price."

Huh? How does that work out? If 1Mb equals £2.35 before the change, and 15mb equals £1 now then actually you get 35 times as much data per pound! (35.25 to be precise).

No wonder it's taking the mobile operators so long to figure out that flat, or at least predictable, data tariffs are what we want. They can't even work out the basic maths in their pricing models.

Incidentally, that comparison above is only valid for the 15Mb you get for a pound. Stray over the 15Mb and Voda will charge you £2 a megabyte. For £2.35 you get 15.675 megabytes. Put another way that means you only get 15.675 times as much data for the same price as before not 30 times.

The thirty times statement comes from the proposition that you are paying for the first 0.5Mb of use per day and the other 14.5Mb are free. This is what's know in the trade as a bit of a strange 'un, rather like buying a chassis and getting the rest of the car for free. You can't buy a smaller bundle than the 15Mb offer, so the actual price of the thing is a pound for 15 megs however it's presented.

Slowly but surely...

The operators are coming round to the idea that not all of us want to pay hideous fees for our data! As you can see here, the Mobizines service is FREE(ish). However - with some network operators it can cost you an awful lot of cash for that little thing we like to call Data.
As one of the lass' here at Refresh Towers used to say:

"Mobizines! Getta Bitta Data on ya Dog! Innit?!"

The T-Mobile Web 'n' Walk is clearly leading the way with their 'all you can eat' tariff. That combined with Three's X-Series demonstrates that very soon, draconian data download charges will be a thing of the past.

Good news today (well - ish) - Vodafone have just announced some of their plans for their data strategy...

The link is embedded up there ^ but for those of you who just want the meat - the site says:

"Currently, you’re charged £2.35 for each MB. But from June 1st 2007, you’ll only pay £1 for up to 15MB per day. That’s 30 times more pages for the same price."

It's not exactly the tidal wave of change we were hoping for but it's a step in the right direction (if only a little one).

To be fair to the guys at VF - they do allude to a monthly web browsing package but unfortunately give no details.

So we wait...