Real World Computing

Terrorist or tourist?

On my way back from a meeting in London last week, I happened to pick up a copy of Metro, the ad-funded free newspaper, published by the same group as the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. Flicking through its mainly content-free pages, one item in particular caught my eye, saying that the public should suspect and report to the police anyone who owns more than one mobile, as that person might be a terrorist.

Now I know from your emails that many of you own several phones and will use different handhelds, depending on what you're doing and where you're going. Some of you have separate work and weekend devices, while others keep special phones (with great battery life) they take on long journeys or overseas trips. And loads of BlackBerry and other push-email users will swap to a dumb phone when on holiday, so they don't get bombarded with work-related stuff while they're supposed to be relaxing. Having more than one phone doesn't seem to me at all unusual, at least among the readers of this column, yet the caption under a photo in Metro says: "Mobile phone: having more than one of these is suspicious, police say."

No matter which side of the "liberty" vs "the innocent have nothing to fear" argument your sympathies lie, I think you'll probably agree with me that reporting people just because they have a couple of mobiles is complete and utter nonsense, so I decided to investigate further. It turns out that this "news" item is based on an advertising campaign that the Met Police is currently running, one of whose ads states: "Terrorists need communication. They often collect and use many anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, as well as swapping SIM cards and handsets. If you're suspicious of the number of phones someone has, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take." That isn't quite so alarmist as the Metro's caption: you only need to be "suspicious" of the number of mobiles someone has, rather than reporting them immediately for being a gadget freak. But this still leaves me with a big worry: if I become suspicious of someone's vast mobile phone collection and want to turn them in to Crimestoppers, should I call on my TyTN II? Or my Nokia N85? Or one of my BlackBerrys? Or one of my Touch Duals? Or my Treo 500? Or...

The HTC slow video problem revisited

For all of you whose HTC phone has slowed down since reading last month's coverage of the HTC video drivers issue, here's some important news you might appreciate. US-based website DailyTech is reporting a conversation with an HTC spokesperson where the company announced that a fix is being worked on. But interestingly, it says that this fix will just be a software tweak rather than a release of proper drivers for the video- acceleration hardware built into the devices, even citing licensing issues as a reason why drivers won't be forthcoming. It does say that the tweak will provide a significant speed increase though. It'll be interesting to see just how much difference this software update makes, and also whether it's enough to appease the people at www.htcclassaction.org (why do I somehow suspect that it won't?).

What this whole affair really boils down to is that many current HTC phones use Qualcomm hardware platforms such as the MSM7200 (3G) and MSM7500 (CDMA). These chipsets support a large set of features such as accelerated video, GPS, stereo sound, Wi-Fi, camera processing, VGA and TV outputs, Bluetooth, USB and more, but not every phone uses all of these facilities. What ends up in the final product is down to a combination of engineering, form factor constraints, pricing and market placement considerations.

Continued....