(PS, I just discovered something even odder, they have WiFi in the restaurant but not the guest rooms. Some strange Australian definition of surf & turf I guess).

And now I’d like a bit of help from those people who don’t use Apple. I know you’re out there, it’s OK to speak up even if you get spammed by a million fanatical Apple evangelists, just remember you’re the silent majority. On Wednesday at Symposium I have a public debate with Robin Simpson (one of my Australian colleagues) about Apple. I have been cast as the bad guy here, I have to support the proposition that Apple is not an enterprise vendor, doesn’t understand enterprise needs, and doesn’t care about enterprises. Which is probably true, especially when talking about iPhone (excuse me a moment while I duck the storm of hate mail from Apple addicts). After all, this is the company who designed earlier models of iPhone to report to Exchange that they had encryption even when they didn’t. So if you have any great stories I can use to illustrate Apple’s deficiencies as an enterprise vendor, let me know. I have some interesting examples – but I’m going to keep quite about them until Wednesday, because Robin is probably reading this.

Finally, last week Dell finally officially announced they were going into the smartphone business. This is an odd decision because superficially the business case is dubious; how can a company with limited mobile device experience hope to make an impression on a handset market which is owned by a few megavendors each of whom ships tens to hundreds of millions of units a year. The conspiracy theorists however have an explanation. I’ve seen some suggest that this isn’t about Dell but about Intel. Intel needs line up some vendors to use the new Medfield and Moorestown chips in smartphones. They don’t have much leverage with big mobile vendors like Nokia and Samsung, but they do have a lot of leverage with PC vendors like Dell. So, the theory goes, maybe Dell gets a deal on PC chips in return for developing some Intel powered smartphones. As I said, at the moment it’s only a conspiracy theory…..

I noticed a real difference in sentiment between Cannes and Orlando. In the USA there was a lot of buzz and activity around mobile. People had projects under way and a lot of discussion was about implementation as well as strategy. In Cannes the Europeans were less advanced than the Americans, more discussions were about strategy than implementation. Partly this reflects a fundamental difference in attitude between Europeans and Americans. Europeans tend towards interminable analysis before action, which can be frustrating if you’re a vendor trying to sell things to them. This isn’t altogether surprising, Europe includes nations such as France whose primary export for the past few hundred years has been philosophers, so we can hardly blame them for intellectualising. Americans lean towards action before analysis, sometimes followed by action in a different direction if the first action failed to deliver as expected. In the long term things probably even out, the Europeans make less mistakes, but the Americans get places faster. The Europeans in Cannes also seemed less positive and optimistic than the Americans in Orlando, but much of that could be explained by national attitudes; Europe after all includes traditionally miserable and undemonstrative nations such as we Brits. Overall, I think it could be 6 months or so before the Europeans catch up with American mobile optimism.

While I’m on the subject of undemonstrative Brits, Reuters reports a survey from T-Mobile showing the rise of the British metrotextual. Apparently 22 percent of British men are signing SMSs to male friends with a kiss (x). Some of my colleagues think this is positive indication that the Brits are getting in touch with their feminine side and maybe soon grown British men will actually embrace male friends in public as the French and Italians do. I think it’s a sign of serious degeneration of British moral fibre.

Chronological age – the tragic number you reluctantly admit to when filling in forms.

Physical age – the age you appear, which depends on how hard you’re trying on any particular day, and the amount of botox and plastic surgery you can afford.

Subjective mental age – how old do you think you are? Most of us seem to freeze in our teens or twenties which explains why I still fantasise about becoming a rock star.

Objective mental age – how old do you seem to external observers? The colleague whose comment triggered this thought seems to be under-achieving here.

Technological age – it used to be that techno-habits such as IM and social networking were the prerogative of youth, but now they’ve spread way beyond their early adopter age groups. We see silver surfers, tweeting grannies, middle-aged fashion-phone users, and 10 year olds playing games on their parent’s iPhones. Anyone who’s been a parent will remember those times when you’d risk your treasured technology just to get a few minutes of peace. There’s still a lot of technological ageism however, a while back I was depressed by one of our young focus group subjects who remarked that “mobile email is for middle-aged men”.

What fascinates me are the massive mismatches between these different ages. I can think of people with a chronological age of 50, a physical age in their 30s, a self-image frozen in their teens, an early-adopter technology mentality, and an apparent mental age that oscillates between 10 and 60. So I guess the message is that you need to be cautious when interpreting the results of surveys that correlate mobile habits with age. And as for me, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

Goofy originally appeared in 1932 and hasn’t changed much, and that traditional attitude seems to have permeated other aspects of this hotel. I’m posting this from a room whose default option for “high speed” broadband is 384K and if I paid more I could to upgrade to a warp-speed 700K or so.

The mobile space is a bit Goofy-like too, some things like the strange attitudes of mobile operators are amazingly persistent. I was hiding behind the New York Times at breakfast desperately trying to avoid eye contact with not one but two Goofy’s when I noticed an AT&T ad extolling its 3G network. One of their key sales points was: “The only 3G network that lets you talk while emailing or browsing the web”. Is this supposed to be a benefit? I don’t know how American spouses behave, but I can imagine my wife’s reaction if I weren’t paying sufficient attention because I were emailing & surfing the web while talking. It wouldn’t be pleasant, and I couldn’t blame her. At this moment AT&T would be far more likely to impress me by pointing out that they’re a lot faster than in-room hotel broadband.

I’m looking forward to Symposium and will be talking with lots of people during the week. The meetings already in my diary show a pretty even split between technology and business mobility topics, but I’ll post some updates in a day or two reporting on what clients and vendors see as their hot mobile issues. If you’re attending and want to meet me face to face there are still some free slots on Wednesday and Thursday.

I’ve just read an article about a UK art show where volunteers were allowed to climb on one of the plinths in Trafalgar square in the centre of London and do pretty much anything they wanted, in public, in the name of art. This included dancing, standing naked, pretending not to be a pigeon, advertising, heckling passers by and desperately trying to get a date. Now I’m not going to get sucked into arguments about whether such pythonesque activities constitute art, but in my humble view some of these probably qualify. I guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Airport lounges are boring places where the mind wanders, and mine just wandered into thinking about mobiles and art. For some reason the artistic community seems to have pretty much ignored mobile phones. This seems a shame, a device which is personal, ubiquitous, communicates, computes, can display information, senses things in its vicinity and takes photos and videos ought to provide a thousand opportunities for creative art. And exhibits of photos taken on handsets don’t count. Mobiles haven’t been entirely ignored by artists, I know of installations where phones were hung from the ceiling to display things, collaborative works of literature created using SMS and MMS, mobiles as musical instruments, and one artist created a work using 5000 discarded handsets as a comment on waste and recycling. But many of the examples I’m aware of tend to use the mobile for audio or imaging, or as an object in a construction. They don’t really exploit its potential as an information device, I guess that’s because art colleges don’t teach useful skills like mobile application development.

If you know of any interesting works of art that use mobiles let me know. And if you’re an artist maybe it’s time to learn Symbian or iPhone programming so you can do some really innovative things. And following the principle of citizen-artists demonstrated in Trafalgar Square why don’t we all try to create some ironic mobile screensavers with slogans such as “I could have been a work of art” to comment on the boring state of mobile handset design. If I do this alone it’s just the act of a single sad Brit, but if thousands of us do it, it might just count as Art.

On an altogether different topic, I’m regularly amazed and entertained by the dubious behaviour of some web sites, and today’s prize for web weirdness goes to British Airways. One of my little jobs this week is to book flights for US Symposium plus some West Coast visits I’ll be making on the same trip, so I tried the BA web site to see what they could offer. The route I wanted was London -> San Diego -> Orlando -> London. BAs web site suggested a bizzare 30 hour trip for the leg from San Diego to Orlando that went via Chicago and London. So it looks as if I won’t be using BA.

One trend I’ve noticed recently and will likely return to in a future blog is a revival in network operator interest in WiFi . Network operators seem to have got a lot more positive towards WiFi recently, probably driven by the fact that they see LTE retreating somewhat because the handsets are late and they don’t want to spend the money, and partly because the growth in data traffic is stressing their networks faster than expected. As operators become more enthusiastic about WiFi they’ll range more WiFi handsets which in turn will encourage developers and vendors to create interesting applications using WiFi, for example integrating with home entertainment systems. More WiFi handsets at lower price points may benefit people like retailers with real-estate who can experiment with WiFi as a bearer for in-store customer applications. Someone at Nokia World commented that “the cellular network is becoming the network of last resort” for data. Maybe that’s a bit extreme, but I do wonder if looking to WiFi as a quick fix for network problems is opening a Pandora’s box the operators will regret.

However, despite a wonderful lunch, this wasn’t a great week to be out of the office because so much is happening on the mobile front. Every day brings more Nokia news such as new devices, organisational changes and mobile payment systems, Microsoft announced emerging market services, Motorola admitted they will officially announce Android phones on the 10^th Sept, and some of the US operators announced they would ramp up capex in H2, presumably because they have at last realised that the network is one area where they can compete without facing scary opponents like Google.

There has been a lot of interesting and fairly positive news from Nokia this week (apart from the Booklet 3G about which I’m unenthusiastic). But one other Nokia announcement truly puzzles me – the new N900. This is a touchscreen handset-sized gadget running Maemo, but it also has phone functionality. I’m confused, I’m very confused. A few years back Nokia realised they had a lot of problems caused by platform proliferation and spent much time and effort getting rid of S90, S80 and so on. But now the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way with the introduction of handsets running Maemo. Why does Nokia need both S60 and Maemo handsets? I suspect Nokia believe that Maemo is a computer platform and S60 is a handset platform but that seems like a distinction the average user won’t appreciate. My personal view is that the last thing Nokia should be doing at this moment is confusing users and splitting their own R&D and third party developer effort with two handset platforms. Nokia’s most urgent need is for a handset platform which is competitive with iPhone, which implies either fixing or killing S60. I predict we’ll have some heated discussions on this topic at Nokia world next week.

And while on the topic of blogging here’s something that fascinates me – the psychology of Apple and Microsoft users as exhibited by their attitude to blogs. If I blog about Apple, dozens of Apple users leap in to support Apple. So if I’m critical they rush to tell me how misguided I am, if I’m complimentary they rush to agree and add their comments about Apple. If, on the other hand, I blog about Microsoft then, whatever I write, I seem to get a disproportionate number of people saying how much they hate Microsoft. This is an odd polarisation, after all there must be satisfied Microsoft users out there, but they seem reluctant to admit to it. Equally there must be unhappy Apple users, but they won’t go public either. I feel there’s some fascinating sociological research to be done on human attitudes to their vendors, maybe all the Apple users are extroverts and the Microsoft users introverts. If anyone has seen anything published about this please let me know.

I’ve been having several discussions about mobile application development strategy because it seems to pose even more challenges than usual here. South Africa has a amazingly broad social spectrum ranging from serious wealth to very low income. No-one ever throws a phone away in Africa while it still works, so we have everything from ancient low end devices all the way up to the top end smartphones. This poses a challenge because SMS or USSD works well at the bottom end but is a bit unexciting if you have the latest Samsung or Nokia smartphone. So selecting the right mix of technology to balance quality of user experience with audience size is even more challenging here than in Europe. And if your application needs a lot of data, Cape Town has pretty good 3G but if you’re planning to deliver it into the remainder of the continent its sobering to remember that only about 8% of African subs will be on 3G even by 2012.

South Africa has also evolved some interesting local variants on applications like social networking, take a look at Mxit (pronounced “Mixit”) which is a popular mobile social networking tool for young people in Africa. Mxit has about 15M members and its own virtual currency. It was even used by President Obama to answer questions posed by locals during his recent visit to Africa.