this useful link shows the coverage pages from the major mobile data providers and I continue to be amazed that they can say they provide coverage. Even just trying out 3G coverage in Belfast is disastrous. (note: some links have moved so just search around a little).

Orange, my constant companion and thorn in my side, claims 3G coverage all over Belfast. Which is why the majority of the time I’m connecting using GSM internet and getting a whopping 3K a second or something. The little 3G coverage indicator on the phone is constantly available right until I actually start to connect and then it drops out and with it goes my speed.

This is why 3G isn’t going to the answer. This is why we need someone to provide metro-WiFi in Belfast.

Worse…we ain’t even got decent 3G coverage and they’re all talking about 4G now. It’s all a smokescreen in my opinion so they don’t have to actually finish deployment of anything.

— Annoyed mobile internet user

Ars Technica took a look at the recent Safari Public Beta for Windows and came up with this gem:

Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won’t be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.

No, it won’t be as feature-complete but that’s by design, you pillock.

Since when were FEATURES the most important thing?

CoreData is Apple’s answer to EOF. A standardised way of saving local data which should be addressable in several ways, not least through a sqlite interface.

Google Gears is a method of storing “web data” in an offline mode. For example, making it so that GMail could be available when not “connected”. It’s got similarities but it’s very different.

Wouldn’t that be neat? I’d see that as really being useful to a device like iPhone. When your “low cost” WiFi connectivity might be unavailable, you have an offline cache which saves you having to use your per-MB 3G connection.

A product we’ve got on the drawing board is a a trouble-ticket system. Initially we’ve designed it to support an Apple Authorised Service Provider so it handles booking in machines for repair and goes through the whole process for them. Next, we’re going to be integrating it with Apple’s online systems for checking warranty status and ideally, part availability. After that - a remote rich client so that engineers can work on repair documentation while not in the office (rich clients are so much nicer than web interfaces). After that, an offline mode so that the engineer can create and update repairs on the system and have them synchronise with the server when a link comes up again. There’s more to this, enough to keep us busy.

Google Gears looks very interesting in this light. Even moreso when you realise that it also uses sqlite…

A couple of days ago I ragged on Microsoft for announcing what everyone else was about to ship just as they usually do when caught on the hop.

That said, the Scobleizer has a heap more detail on Surface

• There are a few roadblocks to getting one of these in your home. First, it’s expensive to build one because it needs holographic glass, an enclosure, a projector, two cameras, and a computer.
• Second, they still are working on software so that it actually does something beyond the whiz-bang demos they showed off this morning on stage.
• The demos you are seeing of photos flying out of a digital camera when placed on the device? That requires that digital camera to be synced and “tagged” with a bar code. The table can see bar codes on things, but you’ve gotta stick a bar code on them first.
• Some of the scenarios I saw demoed included scanning of paper and documents. That isn’t yet included in the current version.

Not quite as wiz-bang is it? I honestly don’t see why this will take the world by storm, why popular mechanics is so enthralled with it. A company with bazillions of dollars which has allegedly been working on this since the early 90s has only managed to outshine Jeff Han now? A year after his multi-touch quicktime movie did the rounds? I reckon it took them a year to knock up a demo? (and would it be prudent to ask where all the money went for surface computing since the early 90s if this is all they have to show for it)

As someone in Scoble’s comments put it:

Let me see. Microsoft didn’t make the software. I suppose they didn’t make the hardware either, unless the mouse and keyboard team got involved, right?

Or is it this?: $6 billion to make videos of products that don’t exist.

Quite.

Another comment:

Does it say “End of line” in a menacing deep voice when it shuts down? I’d love to watch Tron on it if that’s the case.

OK. If it has that, I’m buying two.

I want an iPhone and I want it now.

I need a phone with WiFi. I need a phone with a decent browser. I need a phone with a decent mail client. I don’t want to carry a laptop around any more.

And my alternative is to sign up another 18 months with a crapola carrier in order to get a Nokia e65 or n95, neither of which I really want.

My work consists mostly of reading email, responding to same and using Safari for web pages. I have very few needs outside this. None of the smartphones I’ve seen can even manage this half as well. I’m excited about the full-size screen which should give me some decent real estate to work with rather than the postage stamp screens on most phones.

So, I want an iPhone and I want it now.