The Mobile Revolution: A Tale of Woe
This article was published in the 25th July 2001 edition of
Wireless Pro News.
I did it - I've finally got a mobile phone; and a WAP one no less. So, is the mobile revolution all it's cracked up to be? In a word...NO.
Mobile phones when used for their original purpose are great - you can turn them off if you don't want to be disturbed, or leave them on if you need to be contacted. The problem is combining mobiles with the Internet.
I'm going to take you through my experience with Genie - they offer a variety of mobile services, only some of which I was interested in. Of course, the services which I was interested were the ones which didn't work.
A Helpful Pointer
The literature inside the BTcellnet Pay & Go package includes a booklet entitled "Using the Mobile Internet". This contains information about the service which Genie offers and how to set them up. I never let free Internet CDs near my computer, except as coasters - instead I went to the Genie home page to sign up. The booklet states that you can "simply click on the 'Register' tab and follow the on-screen instructions". So I did.
The Registration Process
All was going well - I got to step four of the registration process without problems. Unfortunately, when it was time to complete the sign-up procedure it all fell apart. I clicked "Next" to create my account - my username was taken so I selected another and tried again. This time, I got an obscure server error which indicated that the username was, again, already taken. I wasn't sure if my account had been created, so waited for the validation code to be sent to my phone - it never came. I tried the same process again with the same result. After trying the 15th username I realised that maybe it was registering the accounts (I got a different server error message the second time I tried to register the same username).
Having already sent an email to Genie's customer support, I tried logging in with one of the usernames which I though was taken -- it successfully logged in. It turns out that the accounts (15 or so of them) had been registered for me, but the validation code wasn't being sent out. This activation code is a security measure, so you can't use someone elses phone number. Having logged in I could send myself the code to activate the phone-based services.
SMS Email Alerts
Hurrah, I thought - I could now use the service which I really wanted. From the aforementioned booklet:
Your mobile Internet phone can receive e-mail in the UK, from any Internet user. By registering with Genie Internet the mobile is allocated a special e-mail address <genieusername>@sms.genie.co.uk. The Internet e-mails you receive can be up to 140 characters long.
Basically, any email sent to the sms.genie.co.uk address is sent as an SMS text message to your phone. Great! Unfortunately, the Genie site refers to this as the "old" service. Instead you can now have all of your Genie email sent to your phone, or just those messages from certain people or with certain subject lines (e.g. a subject containing the word "URGENT"). Initially I tried to set up the sms.genie.co.uk method, only to be given the following response:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@genieinternet.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.So I decided to use the "new" service instead. There is a check box titled "Always Alert Me" which will send all email to your phone. This is what I wanted, as the Genie email address would only be used for text messaging anyway. I checked the box, clicked OK and then sent an email to the Genie address to test it. NOTHING. I thought that the SMS server could be busy, so I sent an ordinary text message using Genie. This worked immediately, disproving that theory. After playing with the settings and trying everything I could think of, I sent another message to "customer care". A few hours later I received an automated message in response, explaining the problems. The full message is available here. The key points are as follows:
In relation to the broken link for the "old" service:
Please note that "Email to Mobile" and "You've got Mail" are not yet fully functional. Also, if you have been using the old @sms.genie.co.uk service to have email forwarded to your phone, you will have noticed that this service has stopped functioning. We regret that we do not have a time scale for a fix at this time.
OK - but if it's not functional, why is it still there. At the very least the link should go to an explanation of why it isn't available, rather than a standard server error. None of the pages anywhere explain that the service isn't working correctly - you have to email Genie to get an answer. Personally, that doesn't seem like a very good way to keep customers.
And the rest...
After all of these problems I had a poke around to see if anything was actually working. I found that Chat wasn't working, neither was the Calendar feature. In fact, only the free text messaging seemed to working. Even the feedback form was broken!
All in all, a very bad day for me and Genie. I hope they get themselves sorted out quickly - or they won't be around next Christmas.
