/Big Mouth/ It’s not you, it’s my mobile
26/07/2010 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth
Looking for a frustrating, disappointing and ultimately futile experience? There’s an app for that, says Gary Marshall
It was my birthday recently, and my brother arranged for us to go to Cork and see a band called The 4 of Us. They were awesome, but travelling means a lot of dead time and hanging around. Not to worry: we’re both gadget geeks and we can fill any amount of time mucking around with our mobiles and trying out the latest apps. Here’s what we learned.
First up, the useful stuff. Google Maps’ live traffic data is a wonderful thing, enabling me to avoid some nasty snarl-ups on the way to the airport, and the ability to buy audiobooks directly from your phone is equally nifty. My airport app wasn’t much cop, though. The interface was lovely and when it worked, it was great, but inevitably it’s dependent on the data supplied by the airports – and that’s rubbish. Hours after we were due to depart, the app was telling me that everything was groovy, when in reality, my plane was possibly on fire somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle.
Other apps weren’t so handy. The hilarious app that puts a sound-sensitive mouth on your phone screen goes crazy with ambient noise, and if you try to take a photo of it all you get is a brilliant white screen as your camera takes measurements from the brightest thing around – your phone. Abroad, anything needing 3G was out: £3 per megabyte lessens your enthusiasm for mobile data, so no maps and no what’s on guides. But even when we got free Wi-Fi, our supposedly impressive apps didn’t perform.
“Check this out,” my brother would say. “iPlayer!... Oh, it’s geoblocked.” The same applied to other streaming media. Undeterred, he pulled out an app that could tell you the name of the song you sang into it. It didn’t work. “That’s never happened before,” he said. “Must be the wireless network.”
I retaliated with my barcode scanning app. The two of us spent 20 minutes trying and failing to scan anything, entirely without success: the camera wouldn’t focus, or the barcode was too shiny, or it was an Ireland-only barcode that the app couldn’t recognise. Eventually we got a hit – the new James Ellroy book I was lugging around – and the price checker’s best price was nearly five quid more than I’d paid for it.
More often than not, one of us would try to impress the other with a supposedly impressive app, and it wouldn’t work. I don’t know about my brother’s mobile, but all my apps usually work just fine. It wasn’t me. It was the network, or the access point.
The perils of early adoption, I know, but I can’t help thinking my brother and I sounded like premature ejaculators comparing notes on excuses to tell a partner when you’ve gone off in your pants. I’m quite sure that by the time you read this, there’ll be an app for that.
Gary Marshall has been writing for .net since the stone age. www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com
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Comments
steven / 26/07/2010 / 20:28 / http://www.welovechief.com
£3 per mb!!!! can't see them screaming about that on the next ad campaign...VILLIANOUS RATBAGS...
Rob D / 05/08/2010 / 17:44 / http://marketinggrin.com
Agreed with Steven. I was very unimpressed to find that a YouTube video I roamed while on holiday cost me £15.
Anyway, Mr Marshall is right - what is it about apps that just fail to work when you're excited to show them off to someone? It's like a Murphy's Law of apps.
