O2 Wifi Hotspot Insanity

I have been frustrated on each occasion over the last three months that I have visited a public wifi hotspot. Frustrated because while I have been paying O2 for wifi access it hasn't worked ever since I upgraded my iPhone for an Android HTC Desire (see the backstory).

More generally my problems have been, the inability to "merge" two or more calls into a single conference and more significantly an error message each time I attempted to access to a BT Openzone hotspot or a Cloud hotspot.

I have had a complaint with O2 for many weeks and have provided details to numerous people but received little help.

A few weeks ago I did resolve the merge call problem. The solution to this is that O2 only provide this on their iPhone tariff. Changing back to the iPhone tariff, from a same priced smartphone tariff, resolved this immediately. They don't admit this anywhere but this was the only change required. Suffice to say that an iPhone is not required but the standard iPhone "bolt on" tariff includes the merge call feature and other tariffs do not. No-one I ever spoke to at O2 understands this. Hopefully this will save some-one else some grief.

Regarding the wifi access, my fix is to change the the user agent string so that the browser reports itself as an iPhone.

The default user agent reports

"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; HTC Desire Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"

This clearly identifies the phone as an Android HTC Desire. Changing the user agent string to the same as the iPhone gives

"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16"

This can be trivially changed under Android Froyo version by typing in "about:debug" in the location bar of the stock browser and then selecting menu -> Settings -> UAString and then selecting iPhone.

This works for both the Cloud and BT Openzone hotspots. This is only required to register the device for the first time. Thereafter the MAC address is recorded and access is automatically granted to future connections. This problem has cost me many hours of phone calls and numerous cups of coffee in various hotspots to resolve. It is good that the solution is so simple but annoying that O2 themselves were never able to resolve it.

Using the iPhone user agent string is likely to be only appropriate for customers on the iPhone tariff but I believe that O2 checks for only a small, exact, set of user agent strings during the hotspot registration process. Thus if you get an error across all hotspots then it may be that the user agent reported is not one that O2 is looking for. This is a system that is so brittle and error prone that they should at least have the appropriate logging in place to diagnose these problems but alas they don't.

I hope this helps someone avoid some of the frustration I went through.

update - 4 Nov 2010

O2 has offered a £30 goodwill credit for my trouble.

Apple I{Pad/Pod/Phone}

So today Apple announced that 8.75 million iPhones were sold in the last quarter since the start of the year. This is around 95 000 each day. The iTunes market place for applications has grown making it the largest platform for smart phone applications and I have a habit of checking, or stroking, my iPhone several times an hours during the day. From Twitter feeds and FB to news, weather, SMS and email it seems difficult to remember an existence untethered from the internet. So what is the problem? Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Well maybe, except that confidence breeds arrogance and contempt and us customers are fickle creatures. On Thursday 25 March I tweeted the following -

"Have fallen out of love with my iPhone, this happened on Tuesday but I've been in denial since. Will keep it next while for sake of children"

followed by

"It is it's lack of multi-tasking, inflexibility and I lust after and android phone. Curses on google and their evil plot to rule the world."

and

"OMG just realised how insensitive it is to breakup via twitter/fb and from the handset in question. Sometimes I can be a real jerk."

Ignore the inappropriate apostrophe and focus on the content. The phone that did everything I wanted had, over the course of 12 months, begun to grate. Just as the missing toothpaste lid begins to sour a relationship the following began to niggle at me:

1. The Lack of Multi-tasking. This prevented the download of news feeds in the background, the streaming of music while tweeting, the ability to map my bike rides or runs while taking a picture.
2. The need to have a mac in-order to develop applications for the platform. In this day of multi-platform development, to limit to development tools to a single development platform might make marketing sense for Apple but it is just not cool.
3. The Google Android OS was released on the HTC Hero, Desire, Legend and Nexus One phones, along with several other models from Motorola, Samsung and others.
4. The Android OS is open-source, multitasking and exposes much more of the phone functionality to the developer. While Apple is creating a walled garden Google is sowing wild flowers that are starting to bloom.

There is reason to believe that Apple is worried. At the same time as Steve Jobs announced the iPhone OS 4.0 upgrade Apple also made a change to their developer agreement that controls 3rd party development of applications for the iTunes marketplace. This change enforces the constraint that applications must be developed using the tools developed by Apple - the same ones that only run on the mac. This is very unusual in that typically a software company will simply publish "look & feel" constraints and APIs that must be used and satisfied but this is much more controlling and I can't think of a precedent. Almost, but not quite unlike, dictating that your novel must be written with a HB pencil.

So why would they do this? One reason is that it kills a large piece of Adobe's business of producing applications that run across various platforms including the iPhone. There appears to be no love lost between Apple and Adobe and this supposes a school ground squabble between a bully and slightly weird kid that has spiralled out of control.

I believe a more significant reason is that this precludes the porting of applications developed for the Android to the iPhone and iPad. Given that the Android is an open platform it is much more tempting for developers to target this platform. Especially if they can port their applications to the iPhone and its many millions of users.

Will this work? Well according to Eric Schmidt, Google partners are shipping 60 000 phones a day and with new Android phones being released each month this is likely to increase. The hardware specifications of the new Android phones exceed to the specifications of the iPhone and with the intense competition there is likely to always be at least one manufacturer bringing out a new model ahead of Apple's one a year release date.

GetCliky gives provides some trend data for mobile operating systems. Although this varies from country to country.

I still have my iPhone, but I am developing for Android and conducting serial adultery with several Android phones before easing into stable, long-term relationship.