UK iPhone

So I’ve had my iPhone 4 for a couple of weeks now. I waited in the queue outside the Regent Street Apple store for about 4 hours, having reserved one for pickup (those who didn’t had waits in excess of 8 hours). There were a couple of snags:

• I switched to Vodafone as my O2 contract was up a while ago. It took Vodafone from Thursday, launch day, until the following Monday, to port my number. Annoying!
• Even more annoying: when my number finally ported, at 4pm on Monday afternoon, I discovered that Vodafone do not support Visual Voicemail!

It had never even crossed my mind that Visual Voicemail would not be available on other networks. Having used an iPhone for nearly three years, I took it completely for granted, simply part of the iPhone experience. I suppose I assumed Apple would enforce it on all the carriers. But this is not the case.

I immediately phoned Vodafone to cancel the contract and get my number back to O2. Vodafone, however, said that this was all up to Apple, and said that Apple would have to take the phone back. They also said Apple probably wouldn’t do this.

I went back to the Apple store on Regent Street on Tuesday morning, and spoke to their Vodafone specialist. He said there was no problem taking the phone back and cancelling the contract; Apple give you 14 days to return any item for a refund. He also said that if I had bought the phone at a Vodafone store, I would not be able to do this, and that Apple enforce their policy onto Vodafone. So basically they would force Vodafone to cancel my contract.

But there was a problem. When I activated the phone on Voda, it became sim-locked. So Apple would not be able to turn around and give me the phone on O2, they would need to give me a new phone. And they didn’t have any. Best estimate was two to three weeks.

I said I would think about it (I still had 9 days or so to return it), but I sort of knew I wouldn’t be giving the phone back. I decided to give HulloMail a try. It’s an app that was said to duplicate Visual Voicemail functionality.

Apart from a pretty crap logo and some mediocre graphics, it actually works very well. It’s a completely free app, and after diverting your voicemail to their servers, you get a push notification when someone leaves you voicemail. Clicking on the notification launches the app, which then downloads the voicemail and shows it to you in the familiar list. It’s even a bit better than Visual Voicemail because it includes the picture from your contact list, if there is one for that person.

Sometimes the voicemail is a bit slow to play, and obviously it depends on the data network, not the voice network. But I can’t pretend that Visual Voicemail always worked flawlessly, so it’s certainly no worse.

So if you’ve moved from O2 and miss Visual Voicemail, or if you’ve never been on O2 and wonder what the fuss is about, it’s definitely worth a try. It costs nothing, and setup is really simple and well-thought-out: the app adds two contacts for activation and deactivation, all you do is call the number, and it’s done!

UPDATE: The new version of Hullomail is out. It’s an incremental improvement rather than a drastic overhaul: there are some tweaks (like hints and tips on how to use the app) but nothing major. The user interface is still a bit “cartoony” for my taste, if I were the developer, I would get the interface tweaked by an iPhone design expert like the guy who did WeightBot. But as Hullomail is multi-platform, I suppose they would rather have a design that works reasonably well on all platforms, rather than tweaking the iPhone app to take advantage of the iPhone’s unique benefits.

When the National Rail Enquiries iPhone app debuted at £5, it came in for some criticism from rail users used to free train info apps. But the company behind the app, Agant Ltd, have strongly defended their right to make money from providing a quality app, and have pointed out that others are free to make apps using the same data that they license from NRE. They also point out that there are free apps available still.

The best free app that we have found is the Trainline one. Presumably it can be offered free because it supports purchases of tickets from theTrainline.com. The Trainline app is a competent journey planner, able to plan trips using either an alphabetical list of stations, or your nearest station (using the iPhone location service). You can see maps of the stations on Google Maps. The journey details screen includes a button to search for that leg on Twitter, for no easily apparent reason, and there is a handy “next train home” button on the main screen, which uses iPhone location and your previously entered home station to calculate the quickest route home from your nearest station.

The whole thing works reasonably well, without being strikingly brilliant, but then it is free! Get it here:

The National Rail Enquiries (NRE) app also has a very competent journey planner, including Google map locations, and the legs that traverse the Tube have detailed descriptions of lines and platforms. It also has a “next train home” button, and in general has a well-engineered feel to it; using it is easy and intuitive, like using an Apple app.

National Rail Enquiries app

If that were all there were to it, though, you’d be hard-pressed to justify spending money on it when the Trainline app is free and does the same thing, albeit a bit less elegantly. But the NRE app does have another feature: live departures and arrivals. Your chosen home station appears top of the list on the home screen, and you can select any other station as well. The live screen loads incredibly quickly, showing a series of trains, and tapping on a train gives a really nice display of the entire line, with your station highlighted in blue, and the train itself shown as a gently radiating blue dot as it moves down the line. Really nicely done, and a fine example of the attention to detail shown throughout the app.

If £5 is really a big deal to you, and you’re happy to do without the live departures and arrivals board and live progress, then the Trainline app is a workable make-do. But if I travelled regularly on mainline trains, I’d buy the NRE app in a second. iPhone users are generally people who are able and willing to spend a bit to get a really nice user experience (otherwise you’d be using a WinMobile phone, no?) and so it really shouldn’t be a problem to spring for it. Get it here:

If you don’t use mainline trains, but are stuck on the Tube most workdays, the best Tube app for us is TubeDeluxe. Get it here:

And if you take the same train every day, you know where to stand on the platform to get the carriage that’s closest to the exit on arrival. But what if you need to catch a different train? The brilliant Tube Exits app shows you where to stand for every conceivable train journey:

Not content with stealing license fee money from a helpless British public, the BBC has now turned its attention to iPhone app developers trying to meet a need. The Rewat.ch app, which would have helped iPhone users to find and watch BBC shows using its iPlayer functionality, has been trashed by the BBC legal department, despite every effort by the developers to meet any requirement, including making it free.

There are two possible conclusions: either the Beeb is shooting itself in the foot again, or it has plans to release its own app, and is clearing the way by eliminating the competition, in the same way that the free and useful railway timetable apps were shut down by National Rail so that it could launch its own ridiculously overpriced paid app with no alternative for long-suffering train passengers. Good old government monopoly strikes again.

UPDATE: The developer of the National Rail app has pointed out that his company is completely independent of National Rail, and that they have developed the app completely off their own bat. They pay a license fee for access to National Rail’s data, which is available to anyone who wishes to pay the fee. Furthermore there are free apps available still. So this is NOT an example of anti-competitive behaviour! Apologies to Dave and all at Agant.

We’ll be doing a full review of all the rail apps shortly. The review is here!