I’m getting really sick of news outlets calling Facebook pages ‘websites’. It’s really demoralising to the people who actually own websites and put effort into maintaining them. I mean, it even costs money! I bet you don’t get the people who create pages spending money on them.

So, Southern Cross News, WIN News, and even ABC News (this one, I admit, surprised me), please just stop confusing pages and websites. If you really want to get pedantic, a Facebook page is indeed a webpage, but it’s not a website. Facebook as a whole is a website.

It also alarms me that the easier it gets to create content on the web, the stupider the content gets (I’m talking about this and this). Which makes me wonder: were the book publishers and the newspaper publishers right? Has the quality of published work suffered because of the Internet? The fact that they might just be right… well, that scares me.

1. The public transport system. It sucks badly. If you want to go anywhere by bus after 6pm or on a weekend, forget it.
2. People complaining about the public transport system. People love complaining about Metro (I’m one of them). It smells. It’s always late. It goes nowhere near where you want to go. All this complaining is really bad; what we need to do is all get on the busses and give them the money they need to fix it. At the moment I can (and regularly do) catch a bus and be the only person on it.
3. Bogans. Individually Bogans are fine. I know quite a few, and they’re lovely people (mostly). It’s just when they get into groups; you start to get the feeling deep inside you that it’s no longer safe and you should leave. It’s not a good thing that The Powers That Be decided to build entire suburbs of public housing, which have now become ghettos.
4. There’s not very much to do. Assuming you don’t drink alcohol (which I don’t), there’s very few things of great excitement in Hobart (if you have ideas, leave comments please!).
5. Rubbish TV stations. People on the mainland get Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10, as well as digital radio. We get Southern Cross, WIN TV, and TDT, which are bad impersonations of the mainland stations. I know Tasmania is a small market, but wouldn’t it be cheaper then to copy the stations over exactly as they are on the mainland and just change the evening news bulletin?
6. Badly surfaced roads. I know this is a complaint pretty much everywhere in the world, but in Hobart’s suburbs it’s getting pretty ridiculous. Neither of the two electorates that Hobart covers (Denison and Franklin) are marginal seats (in fact pretty solidly Labor) so there’s not a lot of money spent pork-barrelling here.
7. Slow Internet. We’re at the end of the world and there’s only a few Internet cables coming into the state. Add to that the high prices charged by ISPs in Australia generally, and it’s a pretty bad situation. The National Broadband Network (NBN) promises to fix the speeds, but at what cost?
8. The jokes about two-headed Tasmanians when you travel to the mainland. It’s getting old guys, seriously.

The USB connector was broken, WiFi only worked half the time, I was starting to get jealous of the iPhone; a number of reasons contributed to the need for a new phone.

I did however love HTC. The phones seemed rock-solid and well designed, especially compared to some of the other manufacturers on the market. Other HTC owners I have met over the years agree; I am yet to hear an HTC owner complain about anything but the price.

I considered a few phones. The Apple iPhone was high on the list, as were a number of Nokia phones, most notably the N79. I will admit at this point to being a brand junkie; there was no way was buying a cheap iPhone clone.

What drew me in to buying the HTC Touch Pro2 was the full QWERTY keyboard and large 3.6″ WVGA screen. I know from owning a decent desktop computer that the most important parts from a productivity point of view are the monitor and the keyboard. They are the parts your body has to interact with, and they should be comfortable.

I bought my phone new in the retail box for $887 AUD from a shop in town. I have seen them as low as $650 on eBay, though I didn’t go this route because I wanted a solid warranty. It is a mobile phone with a hinge, after all.

Now onto the device itself.

It’s far and away the largest and heaviest mobile phone I’ve ever had, or ever seen, or even heard of (apart from the old analogue brick phones). It’s 17mm thick, 116mm long, and 59mm wide. Looking at it another way though, it’s the smallest laptop computer I’ve ever seen. It has a 480×800 pixel screen, as well as a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Although it is on the small side (naturally) the keyboard is very nice to type with, using both thumbs with the hands wrapped around the back of the device. The screen is also nice, not suffering from glare problems as much as other phones I’ve used (older Nokia phones were particularly bad). If you look closely you can see the individual pixels, but you have to look very closely. It is a very high quality screen.

The screen is a touchscreen, and this is one area where they might have done better. The level of touch required to activate a ‘click’ is in my opinion excessive. It’s far more than on my old phone, or the Apple iPhone. It’s still usable however.

Battery life, as expected for a smart phone with all the bells and whistles, is miserable. I have to charge mine every day, otherwise the battery does run flat. However, being human, I have to sleep sometime, and it’s convenient to charge it every night.

In the box comes a screen protector (very useful, it’s a large otherwise unprotected screen waiting to be scratched), a spare stylus, a USB cable, a wall adapter for charging without a computer, a pair of earphones, and a very nice leather case. The headphones that come with the device serve a dual purpose. The first is as a headset for using the phone, and for listening to music. The second is an antenna for the device’s FM radio. I have to say here that the shape of the headphones is abysmal. They do not fit in my ear at all, and the cable is far too short. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are required for FM radio, I would have just chucked them away.

Inside the device is a Qualcomm MSM7200A chipset running at 528MHz. It’s fast. There’s 512MB of storage onboard, of which around half is available to the user to store settings, documents, and optional applications. Program memory (RAM) is 288MB. More would have been nice, but I’m yet to run out of it.

HTC has gone to great lengths to ensure every piece of software you could desire is on the device, and they’ve managed well, with a few exceptions.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 some time in the future depending on which carrier you are with. It’s nice, though I notice no huge usability or performance increases compared to Windows Mobile 6.0.

HTC also put their custom TouchFlo 3D software on the device as an alternative user interface. If you’re not used to the Windows Mobile interface, you’ll probably find it nice. I just turned it off and used Windows Mobile as Microsoft designed it. The alternative interface does have a few cool features, mostly related to quickly turning communications on and off as well as turning emails into phone calls near instantly. I get the feeling it’s designed for the jetset business executive. As you may have noticed, I’m not one of them.

The device is also jammed with other software. A YouTube player is there, as is a choice of two browsers (Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile), Google Maps (with support for the GPS built into the device), and Microsoft Office Mobile. As well as a lot more. I loved the fact that Google Maps and YouTube were installed by default, saving me some download time. One application that is missing is Facebook, although given two browsers and a huge screen, it’s not so much of a problem. Opera Mobile even supports tabs, though having more than 2 or 3 tabs open at one time does slow down the device quite a lot, especially when multitasking with other applications as well. I would have liked a few more games installed by default, although I guess I can’t complain – this is a business phone.

Overall, I love this phone, and I’m very glad I bought it. Assuming you have the the money to spare, I would definitely recommend it.

Good:

• Huge 3.6″ screen.
• QWERTY keyboard.
• WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSPA, it’s all there.

Bad:

• Opera slows down when multitasking.
• Battery life is short.
• Included headphones are awful, and using your own requires an adaptor.

Overall: 4.5 stars.

I’m only a light caller (we’re talking a couple of sub-minute calls a week, tops), and only a couple of SMS’ a day. On the other hand, I use a significant amount of data. Every month I use at least 100MiB, and sometimes I go up to a gigabyte. For various personal reasons, I’m expecting to use even more than this over the Australian summer.

So I went through the options, with the goal of paying less (a good thing) or getting more for my money (also a good thing). I currently pay somewhere between $30 and $50 AUD a month.

Telstra - I like Telstra a lot. Signal can be found pretty much everywhere in Australia, and a 3G signal can be found in all the major towns and cities. Call quality is very good also. However, they are very expensive. The Telstra plans I looked at (in particular the Mobile Member Plan) confirmed this, being even worse value for me than my prepaid plan. Data usage (most important for me) is charged at $59 for 1GB, then 25c/MB after that (more info). This is HUGELY expensive. Even with a low-cost $20 plan though, I do get a new phone (but no data).

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve also had a Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle in the past. I liked it a lot and found it very functional, but the prices were very high. This is still the case, and the prices are about the same as they were 6 months to a year ago. I’d prefer not to have to have a seperate plan for data, but it is an option.

TPG – TPG have one of the cheapest post-paid plans on the market. It’s $9.99, includes $150 of cap value, with call charges being very reasonable rates. However, at this cheap price, data suffers. Data usage is $5/MB, which is much more expensive than Optus, Virgin, or even Telstra!

TPG’s more expensive plans ($49.99 and $79.99) do include data (500MB and 2GB respectively) as well as free calls to other TPG users in off-peak hours. However, at this price, other providers are cheaper anyway. In addition, none of TPG’s plans include a new phone (although for that price, you can’t blame them).

3 - After a friend’s experience with their accounts department, I’ll never go to them in my life. I haven’t even looked what the prices are, let alone care.

Virgin - Virgin Movile was one of the providers I looked at very closely. For $25 on their Rollover Caps Plus plan, I get more calls and texts than I’ll ever use in a month, as well as 300MB data, which is more than I use in an average month. Also included is a new phone, free voicemail, and free calls and texts to other Virgin Mobile customers (though this is nobody I know, making it a dud offer). It goes straight on the shortlist. If I do use over the 300MB in a month, I can buy a data pack which gives me 1GB (up to a total of 1300MB) for an extra $15 a month. There’s also the Velocity points I earn, but they amount to two parts of nothing.

Also worth consideration is the Beancounter prepaid plan. This has the benefit of really cheap calls and texts to everybody (10c SMS’ to anybody in Australia is very tempting), but falls down in the data department; I have to buy a seperate data pack ($10 for 300MB) seperately.

Optus – The ‘yes’ Cap plans have similar value to Virgin’s post-paid offerings, but without the possible bonus of free calls to other customers of the same telco. With regards to data, Optus is slightly more expensive than Virgin at $19.95 for 1GB. Virgin uses the Optus network (in fact, Virgin is owned fully by Optus, not by the Virgin Group as you would expect) so reception and signal quality should be very similar, at about 96% of the continent’s population at the present date.

Vodafone - Last but not least is Vodafone. They have two series of plans. The first is the SIM Only Contract Caps, starting at $20. This has quite reasonable value at $150, but my research indicates it comes with no data. A data pack can be added, $9.95 for 200MB. This would cover my needs most months, but leave me high and dry in a few.

Their other line of plans is the Contract Caps, starting at $29. These include a new mobile, and for the more expensive plans, some data as well (quite a lot of it, in fact). However, for the cheaper plans it’s the same $9.95 for 200MB as the SIM Only plans.

Another thing to be mentioned about Vodafone is that their network in Tasmania, from experience, sucks. It’s getting better all the time, and in other states is probably quite fine, but is still lagging behind the other networks in Tasmania.

Conclusion

So which one to choose? It’s a hard choice to make. Most of my friends are with Telstra, and would either kill me or not message me anymore if I moved away to another provider. On the other hand, being with Telstra is definitely the most expensive option for me (except for possibly TPG). I won’t go Optus, since I may as well go Virgin. I also won’t go Vodafone, since I like my phone to work around the places I live. 3 is ruled out for being incompetent. That leaves staying with Telstra or moving to TPG or Virgin.

I have no idea what I’ll do yet. I’ll let you know when I decide.

According to Wikipedia, Play School is the longest-running childrens television show in Australia, and more than 80% of young children watch it at least once a week. I’d say that’s been true for the entire running of the series too. Every person I’ve talked to on the matter has watched Play School as a child. Even though they’ve taken the Ning Nang Nong off the regular programming, it does occasionally get a run. And boy does it deserve it.

The Ning Nang Nong has so much pure win in it. It’s hilariously funny, completely insane, horribly addictive, and it impregnates itself in your brain forever. Very few Internet memes can pull as much win. From one comment on YouTube:

GreenCristina: [...] The amount of win it contains cannot even be articulated.

So after a bit of thought, I came to the decision that more Australians would be able to recite more of the Ning Nang Nong than they would of the Australian national anthem (Advance Australia Fair), without listening to either song before hand. I know that I know more Ning Nang Nong, for certain.

So tell me (in the comments), have you seen the Ning Nang Nong? Is it the highlight of your childhood? Can you recite more it than Advance Australia Fair? And is it the biggest pre-Internet win ever?

Facebook, along with its partner in crime MySpace, were touted as the all-singing, all-dancing duo of social networking in the Web 2.0 age. For a long time I didn’t catch on, until about March/April in 2008. It was at that point in time that I decided to open an account on Facebook, to see what friends of mine were up to. And that’s when the trouble started.

When I opened the account, it was quite interesting to see what some of my school mates had been up to since leaving school nine months previously. Some were at University, others were busy making themselves a pocketful working, yet others were having overseas adventures, lounging around on beaches in southern Spain. Altogether, quite interesting. I’m sure everybody who still has Facebook knows this all too well.

I started off by using Facebook once a week, just checking my wall for messages (usually there were none) and reading the current home page looking to see what friends were up to. Of course, to see what friends are up to, you need to tell Facebook who your friends are. You do this by inviting people (via Facebook) to be your friends, and then they accept. So I went around looking for people I knew to be friends with. All good and happy so far.

After a while, I started spending more and more time on Facebook. I also started adding (and got added as) ‘friends’ who I had never met. I can remember becoming friends with a French girl I’d never met, never seen, and only ever spoken ten words to. Our whole relationship was based on mutual membership of a fan club of an Internet hosting company. I mean, come on. If that isn’t tenuous, I don’t know what is.

By the time I quit Facebook ten months later (in January this year), I had 100 and something friends, only about 70 of which I’d ever met in real life (though I do have a number of really good friends I know through the Internet, my girlfriend included), and about 60 of whom I’d actually like to keep in contact with. That’s 40 or more people I added (or got added by) who we had no emotional connection with, other than passing each other in a corridor at school one day.

There were a number of reasons why I decided to quite Facebook. The spark behind each of the ideas can be attributed to an acquaintance of mine, Thomas Karpiniec (who closed his own Facebook account). I asked him about this on MSN, and he agreed to let me publish this:

Jack: If I may ask, what were your reasons for closing your Facebook account?

Tom: There’s a few reasons, some of which stand better than others on their own.

• Having an account makes it easy for people to tag me in photos and unfortunately some friends have no mercy.
• I like to be able to keep my social groups and family reasonably separated, particularly for work.
• The whole ad and annoying app economy of the site is frustrating to navigate around. [Tom says that in his opinion this has since been fixed].
• Web 2.0 is still new. Most people are content to throw all their personal information into the cloud but we haven’t really seen what the consequences of that are (data processing and rationalising is still catching up). I’m happy to put certain information about me online, such as what I write, and my name, and whereabouts I live, but who all the people I know are and their pictures of me is more than I’d want average people to be able to see at will.

As of writing this, Tom has since re-opened his Facebook account. From a more recent MSN conversation, he says that he was a “pain in the butt” for other people using Facebook who wanted to organize events. He mentioned one instance of a friend organizing a party via Facebook, and then sending a special email invitation to a single person: guess who.

You can view this from a couple of different angles, and there are a number of different questions to be asked. Firstly, is Facebook the best way to organize events? Probably. Only a few pieces of software spring to mind as substitutes, and neither of those are perfect. Not a whole heap of people outside the business world have Outlook (mostly because of it’s price, and despite it being the best email application ever) and Google Calendar still has some flaws in this area (it’s good, but not as good as Facebook). In addition, not everybody uses Google Calendar.

The second question raised is whether it’s Tom’s fault that he’s not on Facebook. Over-analyzing slightly, I don’t feel that it’s Tom’s fault that he doesn’t use Facebook. If we go back to the days when things were simple and invitations were done on paper, people used to print out some invitations, either hand them around or mail them out (and if you didn’t either exist or have a mailing address, you probably weren’t worth inviting to the party), and then give multiple options for RSVPing. From my childhood, I could remember being asked to either reply by SMS, send an email, phone up the host, contact them in person, or for more formal occasions, write them a letter back. Now if that doesn’t give enough options, what does? Squishing all our existences into Facebook for the purposes of making event management easy isn’t a good enough reason by itself to use Facebook, nor is it a reason to exclude.

Taking this further, we might suggest that Facebook makes us lazy. I have another example: Back in January my sister (who lives interstate) rang me up to wish me luck on my overseas holiday. My sister doesn’t ring me very often, so I was interested in what made her call now. According to her, she was just going to leave a message on my wall on Facebook, something along the lines of “good luck in Berlin”. However, my Facebook account had been closed by that stage, so she called me instead. Although it was only a quick call, I appreciated it much more than I would have getting a Facebook message. An email even would have meant more than a Facebook message. A bit of effort goes a long way in these things.

There are definitely upsides to using Facebook though. Let’s say you have an album of photos (say, of your birthday party), and you want to share them with your friends. You could email them (which would use a crapload of bandwidth), or you could mail a CD (which is a pain in the neck). You could post them on Flickr, but the average person doesn’t have a Flickr account, nor could be bothered with one. But almost everybody has Facebook (apart from the people who don’t). And of course, this argument is a logical fallacy, but most people couldn’t care less about that either.

The biggest issue with the Internet today (and especially the Web 2.0 part) is privacy. A lot of the time we give out more information that we either realise or would desire. A fairly standard Facebook page would have my name, full address, phone numbers, age, etc. Basically anything required to steal my identity. And I don’t have a lot of control over how that information is used. Once it’s on a Facebook page, any of your friends can see it, and depending how your security settings are set, everybody else as well. Compare that to say, this website, where I have full control over the information I give out (in my case, quite a lot, but others are more private).

We haven’t had Web 2.0 around long enough for the privacy thing to play out in full. This is the opinion of Tom, who I quoted earlier. He says that it’ll take some time for the consequences (if there are any) to show themselves and play out, and until that time he is going to err on the side of caution. Which I say is fair enough. Me personally, I give away a lot of information anyway, so it’s less of a concern, but I do like knowing exactly what information is out there. Facebook gives a false sense of security in that the ‘private’ information may not actually be private. I know my information is public.

Facebook is also, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. I have a lot of things to do, like go to Uni, do homework, cook, work, sleep, browse forums, write blog posts, etc. I find that Facebook takes up a lot of time to do properly, and worse yet is that the more time you spend on Facebook, the more time it begs you to consume. It’s a lot like smoking in this regard. People who don’t smoke (such as me) never feel like smoking a cigarette. Likewise, my father (who, as a policeman, sees the ‘un-private’ nature of Facebook every day) has no desire to even open an account. But once you’ve taken that first puff, you want more. So you have more, and the cigarettes keep calling to you. I’m sure cigarettes are addictive and crazy and bad, but you can see the parallels to Facebook.

One thing that a lot of Web 2.0 sites do (such as Flickr) is allow you to separate who sees what. On Flickr, you can set some images as only visible to friends, others only to family, and others to public, so that everybody in the whole wide world can see them. While on Facebook you can (in theory) set some things private and some public, you can’t separate family and friends, not in a meaningful way at least. You can set them as relations when friending the other person, but this does nothing meaningful in terms of information sharing.

A lot of people would remember a chain email sent around a few months back (during the Australian summer, traditionally a time of copious drinking). For those who haven’t, a brief history: An employee emails her boss, saying she is sick and can’t come to work (the ‘sickie’). Boss emails back with the contents of her Facebook page, where her status is something along the lines of ‘X is not going to work today… bit hard on the drink last night’. Although it was actually a fake, it does illustrate a point. You don’t want your boss knowing that you were drinking last night. Nor your clients, or probably your mother either (though, mothers being mothers, she probably already knew).

I find the biggest problem with Facebook is that you can’t actually delete your account. If you decide that Facebook is bad, like I have, then you want to close your account. Well you can… sort of. What happens is that after filling out 10 minutes of forms and “why are you closing your Facebook account?”, they ‘suspend’ your account so you can come back to it later, but you can’t actually delete your information off their servers. Which, in my honest opinion, is a big flaw. A VERY big flaw.

As for ‘… and why you probably haven’t noticed’, consider this: there are millions of people using Facebook. If one of them disappears, even if it’s one of your 150 friends, you’re unlikely to notice.  It’s just hard to keep track of that many people.

I’ve reached the end of my spiel now. I think I’ve said everything I need to say. In conclusion then, I hope you’ve found these points useful. Let me know if you do close your account because of this, or whether you think I’m talking crap, or whether you think I’m crazy (although I already know that). If you don’t have a Facebook account, I urge you not to open one without thinking long and hard about the issues of privacy on Facebook.

Update: Tom has published his side of the story, here.

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Do you have any ideas for a tenth item for the list? What is your pet peeve on forums?

So, this time, in an effort to remain connected for the duration of the stay (2 weeks), I’ve purchased myself a prepaid wireless broadband USB dongle, courtesy of Telstra. For those of who don’t know how these things work, they are basically a device (looks a little bit like a flash drive) that plugs into your USB port, connects to the mobile phone network, and lets your computer talk to the mobile network as if it was a phone. More specifically, it allows you to access the Internet via the mobile phone network and send and receive SMSs.

The Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle costs around $150AUD retail, and with this you get $10 included credit (which isn’t much at all, trust me). For $89 you get 4GB of data usage, which is a fair hunk, and more than enough for most people just doing browsing and so on. It easily lasted me two weeks of browsing, email checking, Skype video calls (about 3 hours a day) and the occasional small download.

The box it comes in is the same rough size as a DVD case, but a bit thicker. It’s mostly empty space, but there is a manual (which actually tells you most of the things you need to know) as well as an extension cable for the dongle (roughly about 50cm long). The rest of it is filled with not-so-environmentally-friendly foam.

Installation was fairly simple, once I read the instruction manual. First of all I just tried plugging in the device (which picked up as a CD-ROM drive, auto installed some drivers, and then brought up a window with a ‘Connect’ button). This didn’t work. After reading the installation manual I found I had to ring Telstra to activate the SIM card. After doing this, the connect button worked as normal, and I could get on the Internet just fine. It works much like a 56k dialup modem, but with a custom interface.

On the night I bought the device, I couldn’t be bothered ringing Telstra to activate the SIM card. So I experimented with taking the SIM card out of my mobile phone (also a Telstra SIM) and stuck it in the dongle (it’s a fairly easy process to change the SIM card). To my surprise, it worked. I was then able to use the significant amount of browsing credit I had on my phone’s SIM card to browse the Internet on my laptop. A handy feature, I think.

Telstra (or rather, ZTE, the manufacturers of the actual device) had a few more handy tricks up their sleeves. On the side of the dongle is a slot to put a MicroSD card into. I wondered what it was for. This is a modem, not a camera. On reading the manual, I read that it is so you can turn the dongle into a USB flash drive as well (though it only supports up to 4GB cards). Cool idea, though I’ll probably never use it.

The software that Telstra have devised to control the dongle (connect, disconnect, send SMS, see credit, etc) is all proprietary custom-written stuff. While I hate it when companies do that (what’s wrong with using Windows’ dialup connection manager?), Telstra have actually managed to do it well this time. The software only starts when you plug in the device, there are limited things to go wrong (but you are still able to change the most important options), and it stays out of your way on the taskbar while you’re browsing the Internet. Compared to some of their older efforts at wireless broadband connection software (which I used to set up as part of my job occasionally), this software is brilliant.

In addition to that, ZTE have actually bothered to sign their drivers. If you’ve read my review of the PreSonus AudioBox, you’ll know how much unsigned drivers piss me off. They have also distributed updates to the drivers via Windows Update. This is a miracle; the number of smaller hardware companies bothering to do this is far too few.

I’ve been using this device for the last two weeks as my sole Internet connection. I was located in the suburbs of Hobart (where mobile coverage is fairly good), though I experienced three dropouts during that time (mostly during the peak evening time). Speed is fairly good. According to speedtest.net, I got 1840kb/s downstream from a server in Melbourne, and 384kb/s upstream.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this device. While the data is hugely expensive for the amount you get, that’s the only problem I can pick with this device. Other than that, it’s a well thought out, well implemented piece of hardware, backed up by some good software and a decent user manual. 4.5 stars.

Update 21/11/09:  You might also be interested in my look at various high data-usage mobile phone plans, here.

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