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No iPhone Apps, Please — We're British
GMGruman writes "The BBC has stirred up quite a row in Britain about a shocking use of taxpayer funds: creating iPhone apps to provide citizens services. As InfoWorld blogger Galen Gruman notes, it's apparently bad in Britain for the government to use modern technology during a recession, a mentality he likens as a shift from 'cool Britannia' to 'fool Britannia.'"
One of the apps was for the Job Centre which tend to concentrate on lower paid jobs to help people on the dole find employment. So the target audience for the app are those least likely to be able to afford an iPhone to use it! If, instead of being distracted by a shiny new toy, even a minimal level of thought had been put into the planning stage this would have been obvious.
What the article completely seems to miss is that the scandal is about stupid, ineffective use of technology not the use of technology itself. Innovation is certainly to be encouraged but if your new innovation is a square wheel you should expect to get shouted at for wasting money.
There are two things wrong with that number. Firstly, it is for Smartphones only, not Feature Phones, which are regarded as a separate segment. Symbian owns over 70% of the (much larger) Feature Phone market. This includes phones that can install and run arbitrary apps, browse the web, send emails, and so on, but for some segmentation reason do not command a premium price.
The second problem is that it's a US number. The US mobile phone market sucks. You have competing standards, no interoperability, and a lot of carrier lock in. In the UK, it is very common (even among non-geeks) to buy a pre-pay SIM and pop it in your existing phone, to buy phones unlocked, and for the person on the fastest upgrade cycle to pass their phone on to one of their friends and have the whole thing trickle down.
In a completely unscientific study, I tried counting the types of phone I saw on the train when I last went to London. I saw two iPhones, no blackberries, and I lost count of Symbian phones some time over 70. I didn't see any Android phones until I got very close to my destination (Google London). I've not seen a N900 in the wild yet, though I'd be quite tempted by one in a year or so when you can pick them up cheaply.
For reference, my current phone is one I picked up for under £50 (including a bluetooth earpiece) when I lost my last one. It runs Symbian, supports UMTS and WiFi, can act as a bluetooth modem, and can make SIP calls (over WiFi or UMTS, although I only use it over UMTS). It has a built-in web browser and mail client, although I rarely use either. I can install my own apps on it - for example I installed an app that lets me carry around and view a local copy of the OpenStreetMap maps for my local area (I also installed the Google Maps app, but it requires a network connection, and most of the time I need a map it's when I am in the middle of the countryside). This phone is counted as a Feature Phone, not a Smartphone, so would not count in the statistic that you quoted.
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The BBC is probably the one thing that Britain is best at in the world. No other English-language country has anything as good as it (can't comment on others); it is quite wonderful. I think you underestimate how much it would cost to subscribe to ABC1-friendly 6Music, Radio 4, BBC2/4 if it were not cross-subsidised by the 90% of the population who never watch them- but can if they like. Cultural ghettoisation is bad for all of us. And, of course, who makes a huge % of the high-quality programmes you see on non-BBC tv?
I totally agree with you re: news reporting. However, allowing Sky/Fox to be the arbiter of news agendas sends a violent shiver down the spine.