Here's something that might interest anyone who does WAP or SMS services in the UK:

We've just been building a content distribution service for a TV production company, to help them sell a Java game. In the course of testing we noticed a really weird little problem: some (but not all) Vodafone handsets generated *2* hits to our server each time they accessed an address on our machine. Cue lots of double-takes.

Then we noticed that one of the hits was coming from these guys, Cerberian. They do content controls - I presume that they're therefore doing Voda's child protection stuff, and that they're hitting any site that CC-ed Vodafone customers go to. Seems like a strange way of going about business, but there you go...

Moral of the tale: operators do weird stuff that might have a bearing on your application, and there's nothing you can do but work around them.

Togs 10 most persistent design bugs.

Christian Lindholm on the problems 3G poses: "The future of mobility is not a bandwith problem. We have a screen problem and that is terminal. The only way to get around it in small handhelds is to design content specifically optimised for small handsets."

The Feature on push media coming to mobile: "It sounds quite similar to the ill-fated "push" concept of the dot com days, but does it make more sense when mobile?"

I always felt that "push" on the fixed-line internet suffered from 2 problems: firstly, it was the wrong context. Sticking information up onto a desktop PC when it's idle limits you to business users - I'll bet most home users turn off their PC when it's not in use.

Putting it into screensaver is utterly pointless: it mostly appears when you're away from your desk, and you'll see it when you're back at your desk and wanting to do something that doesn't involve staring at a screensaver. Very helpful.

The other problem was timing: push was a kind of pre-WAP, it was one of the first Big New Things I remember coming along after web browsers that failed to initially deliver and led to a bit of cynicism. I remember a few years later new ideas that would come along (e.g. blogging) being compared to push-media, with the comparison intended as a slight.

BUT on mobile... I still think the idea of using spare network bandwidth to drip-feed content down to a phone is a strong one. It makes good use of 3Gs ability to prioritise traffic (so you only deliver content whilst the network isn't doing anything better) and thus makes better use of the network. It can be used to deliver types of content (e.g. video) which can't reliably be delivered on-demand with current networks. And - if there's a way of viewing this content which isn't a screensaver, then I reckon it has a good chance of working.

MDA Touts GPRS/MMS Figures: "From a total active customer base of over 53 million*, GPRS active devices topped 26 million as of 30th September 2004, an increase of 10% on the previous quarter and double that of last quarter 2003 . This figure represents a 50% penetration rate for GPRS devices for the total UK market. This trend is expected to continue with the MDA predicting by the end of 2005 that 75% of all UK handsets in use will be able to access the internet."

It's not about early adopters any more... oh and it's women who are the big gamers...