I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes  and have a 3G USB dongle fall out, they’re getting so common. They may be convenient but they’re not the most efficient way to get a 3G connection on a laptop. A notebook with a built-in antenna gets 25% better bandwidth (because the better the signal, the more data throughput you get). And given that most 3G cells have only a 1Mbps pipe connecting them to the Internet , you need all the throughput you can get. 

The rumblings about EU regulation of SMS and mobile data costs carry on in the background along with OFCOM’s proposals for a voluntary code of conduct for ISPs to make sure your DSL line gives you the speed you’ve paid for, and OFCOM has also been making noises about checking out what speeds mobile broadband really offers. It’s a nice idea and it might concentrate the attention of the operators on the issue, but the speed you get depends on a mix of your handset, the Internet backhaul of the base station, how many other people are using data on the same base station - and the weather, so it’s hard to be precise.

I was impressed by the independent tests that Vodafone was trumpeting last month claiming they have the fastest HSDPA network. They’re claiming up to ten seconds faster to download a 2MB MP3 file (13.54 seconds) and four times faster to open a Web page (6.7 seconds). Anecdotally, Vodafone does feel faster than T-Mobile and Orange in the areas of London we visit, on EDGE and on HSDPA. With BT’s announcement today that it’s dropping backhaul pricing, if the mobile operators put in connections from the base stations to the Internet that are as fast as your connection from your phone to the base station, we’ll start to see which side of the network really needs to speed up.

I expect better battery life is also going to be better when you’re using built-in 3G than when you’re going through a USB port. The voltage won’t be much different but you can have much more sophisticated power management - and of course if you have a better signal, you don’t have to keep turning the radio up to try and improve things.

So Lenovo’s Centrino 2 announcements caught my eye today. Either the growth in the dongle market means Ericsson has dropped the prices of its 3G modules (scale, competition or a mix of the two) or Lenovo has decided that 3G is the best way to fight off the buzz around ultra-cheap machines like the Eee PC and Aspire One that cut features along with the price. Whichever it is, Lenovo is dropping the price premium for built-in 3G from around £100 to around nothing: from August 4th notebooks with a mobile broadband module will cost, and I quote, ”approximately the same price as those without”.

Although BT is now referring to the still-in-draft 802.11n proposal as a standard and putting it in the shiny new BT Home Hub (the rotating ten foot model of it at the BT event last night was a little scary), the n debacle drags on. At this rate, we might have HSDPA built into more laptops than 802.11n…
-Mary

I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon

I’m guessing that most of you  have already emailed your MEPs with a message roundly condemning the stealth attempts to pass legislation that will allow media companies to disconnect ordinary people from the Internet permanently just for the suspicion that they may be filesharing.

If you haven’t may I join my voice to those urging you to do so? It won’t take long (thanks to the folk at MySociety.org) and it will help preserve your rights online as well as saving the small and medium sized ISPs that do so much to keep Internet access prices competitive. It’s that last bit that’s key to IT professionals - the measures that the legislation proposes are too expensive and complex for most ISPs to implement, which will mean you’ll be left dealing with with just BT and Virgin for your business internet access - and I can guarantee that your monthly connectivity bills won’t go down as a result…

Here’s my letter. Don’t send exactly the same one - it’s your thoughts and words that matter:

I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; not only that, but they are an attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member. The European Parliament has already voted against them - they should not be passed by hiding them inside other important and much needed legislation.

Not only are they disproportionate, putting the onus on ISPs to detect and implement the measures required by the amendments is both an unfair measure and technically unfeasable. Many UK ISPs are small or medium sized businesses, and do not have the funds required to invest in wholesale tracking of their users’ actions. The amount of work required to implement these measures is large, and the techniques complex. The only organisations able to do this will be the incumbent carriers, reinforcing what is a de facto monopoly by putting small ISPs out of business.

There is, in fact, no way of identifying the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic in the manner described in the amendments. Many users use the same tools that are used to download copyright violations to install Linux, or get updates from Microsoft. If the tools proposed by the legislation aren’t perfect these innocent users will be tarred with the same brush as anyone violating copyrights. Even if it is possible to determine the type of data being accessed, it’s impossible to determine the actual state of the rights associated with it, or the intentions of the rights holders.

Innocent users also face the risk of having their home networks hijacked by third parties without their knowledge - and losing access as a result of third party actions. I’m more technically aware than most people, but it still took several weeks for me to find that someone elsewhere in my street was using filesharing software over my wireless network. Most home users don’t have access to the tools or the skills to find and identify these situations, yet the proposed legislation will make them liable for whatever happens on their home wireless networks.

I’m a technology journalist by trade, but I come from a technical background and helped found one of the UK’s first national ISPs, and also helped build the online presences of many major high street brands. The Internet has provided a boost to the economy, and these measures will reduce access to the Internet and by closing down small ISPs will increase the costs to the very users the European online economy needs.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I’m sorry that I’m sending this message with less than 24 hours to go, but I only found out about this today myself: so please do what you can to prevent these egregious and dangerous measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Bisson

Remember you have a voice and a point of view, and it’s one that deserves to be heard.

–Simon

Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.

We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.

It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.

It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.

Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.

Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.

Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.

I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.

Vale Sir Arthur.

My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.

I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.

I’ve used Navizon on Windows Mobile for the last year to get locations and I like it but the desktop version is a Java applet and although the API supports time as part of the location info I haven’t found a timezone utility for it.

Skyhook’s Loki will do the locating and publishing bit. It’s pretty good at locating too; this is the service used by Google Maps on Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it knows where we live. Skyhook can use a combination of GPS, IP address, Wi-Fi and cell tower to cope with a range of environments.

Navizon uses user-contributed data for Wi-FI and cell tower and is either very accurate or about 2 miles out; Loki (and Google Maps Mobile) are either very accurate or not working at all.

Loki s obsessed with search; that’s because ads you click on make money. Personally, results in the same town as me may or may not be more relevant to be depending on how far ahead I’m planning and I don’t actually want any more browser plugins, thank you. But digging through the options - yes, it will change my timezone for me, or ask if I want to in case it’s wrong.

This would be a good service for tools like Xobni to use; this handy Outlook plugin shows a ‘heat map’ of the times of day a particular person sends and replies to email. That’s pretty useful already - it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting a reply from me between 10.30 am and 7pm or between 11pm and 1am than at any other time. Assuming I’m in the office; the location timezone service could tell you if I’m in California - and if Xobni was really smart and I said it was OK for you to know where I am (cue my usual call for an identity abstraction layer for the Internet), it could shift the heat map to California time. Or better still, it could calculate a different heat map for when I’m in California, when you’ll reach me between 9am and 11am, 2pm and 6pm and 9pm to midnight most days.

At the moment you can look at my Dopplr trips, or my Facebook status, or my most recent personal blog post or the last photo I posted on flickr to work out where I might be - if I’ve remembered to update them and you remember to check them (a friend assumed I’d be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress this week, and ended up having a night in instead of coming round for dinner). That’s both of us doing extra work that the computer should be taking care of and I’m sure that’s the wrong way round. 

There’s two halves to this. One is that location is a really useful service (see my 2008 Technology Resolutions), especially as more of us work from home, travel around more and run out of time to arrange meetings with friends. And that’s the really big thing. I want computers to start saving me time and getting more done for me, not by making it faster to get my accounts done or by letting me try 90 versions of my Web site in the time it used to take to write one, but by working out the context and giving me opportunities. If my To Do list says I need to get something from the Lurgashall Winery for a friend and I get a message from a friend in Billingshurst needing help with something and a mail from a client in Horsham wanting to talk about work, having my PC suggest that I’m in Guildford on Monday is handy (and we think it’s why Microsoft wants Yahoo!); having it know I’m actually in Guildford today even though I didn’t update my calendar and give me an itinerary for the afternoon is even more useful. And it’s the computer doing the running around, not me. For that, I’ll put up with another browser plugin.
-Mary

The usual round of email press releases dropped into the SandM mailbox this morning. One caught our attention, from the folk at PC World, which signals something we’re pretty sure is going to be one of the big IT trends for 2008.

In a tie up with 3, they’re going to be offering a free cheap laptop (or £350 off most) along with one of 3’s 3G dongle modems. You’ll need to sign up for a £35 a month data tariff for the cheap laptop, which gives you 3GB of data (with 10p/megabyte for anything over) at up to 2.8Mbps.

Ignore the free laptop (after all, PC World have a lot to get rid of, if you remember their recent results!) - it’s the 3G modem that really interests us.

It wasn’t long ago that 3G data was the province of the technophiles, using cards with complex drivers and expensive connections. Pricing models have changed dramatically in the last 6 months, as networks try to compete with WiFi - and as a new, lower cost, set of 3G chips arrived. Hardware is now cheap, and the latest USB designs self-install software as soon as they’re plugged in. Even the current tariffs are affordable - T-Mobile has just introduced a pay-as-you-go Web’n'Walk for just £4.50 a day.

That’s where things start to change.

Look at the cost of WiFi. Sit in a Starbucks and hook up to a T-Mobile WiFi connection and you’re already payig more than that (and let’s not go into the costs of BT OpenZone or The Cloud). HSDPA data is more convenient (if a little slower), and it’s now cheaper. You can use it anywhere, and with any PC. In fact, if you’ve got a recent laptop, there are reasonable odds that all you need is a SIM and you can use the built-in 3G WAN hardware.

3G data is here to stay. With higher speed HSUPA networks going online, things are going to get faster still.

My guess? The WiFi networks in places like Starbucks are going to become a loss leader. WiFi prices need to drop to compete with 3G - and we’re also going to see more deals like T-Mobile bundling WiFi with new contracts for it’s Web’n'Walk (why not for us existing subscribers?) and O2 providing free Cloud access to its iPhone users. O2’s also tweaked its data pricing to compete with the rest of the industry.

The endgame is going to be good for us users. WiFi will become free or very low cost, and 3G prices will continue to drop as operators finally start to digest the effects of data usage on the rest of their revenue in the light of voice becoming a commodity…

–Simon

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

Luckily there was a solution. I had my trusty old HTC TYTN with me, and Vegas is on of the few places in the US with decent 3G connectivity (I’m writing this in the heart of the tech world, in a coffee shop in less than a mile from eBay’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where 3G is a rare and precious thing). Microsoft has added support for Internet Connection Sharing to Windows Mobile 6 (it’s in 5 too, but well hidden) - which means you can use a Windows Mobile 6 phone as a Bluetooth internet gateway.

Getting it working is pretty easy. You’ll first need to pair the phone with your laptop. The rest is simple. Click the Internet Sharing icon on the phone to start using it as a gateway. You’ll need to choose whether it uses USB or Bluetooth (we’d recommend plugging it in to the mains and using Bluetooth, as that way you won’t flatten the phone’s battery running two radios).

Click connect, and go back to your PC. Right click the taskbar Bluetooth icon (if it’s not there, enable it first). You can then select the option of joining a Bluetooth PAN. This is a Personal Area Network, an IP network running over a bluetooth connection. In the dialogue box that pops up, click to choose the device you’re planning on connecting with.

Hey Presto! You’re online.

It’ll be slower than WiFi, but at least it’s a connection. Of course you don’t need to be in a Vegas motel room to use this - it’ll work in Starbucks (no need to pay T-mobile, unless you’ve got one of the new Web’n'Walk contracts that let you use WiFi as part of your standard mobile contract) or in the park, or on the train, or in even in the back of a taxi.

My shiny laptop is so shiny and new it doesn’t have a PC Card slot. That’s a bit of a problem, when the only 3G mobile data cards we have in the office are PC Cards. It’s even more of a problem when you’re in the car park at Costco and need to get a file from your home PC…

Express Card slots are great - if you’ve got an express card.

Built in antennae for WAN modules are even better - if you’ve got a module fittted.

It took me a while to get around the problem, but the solution turned out to be easier than I expected. All I needed was a Windows Mobile 6 device and its built in Internet connection sharing tool (the same feature is in Windows Mobile 5, but it’s hidden away in the file system).

I installed the Windows Mobile Device Center on my laptop so I’d have all the drivers I needed, and then plugged the phone in for an initial synchronisation.  The phone was recognised, and I was able to make a connection. I disconnected the phone, and clicked on the Internet Sharing icon. You can use USB or Bluetooth connections - USB is probably your best bet, as there’s no point in using up your limited battery capacity powering multiple radios (of course if you’re able to power both your laptop and your phone from the mains, Bluetooth suddenly becomes the best option).

Click connect and wait for your phone to hook up to the network, before plugging it in to the computer. When you connect your phone to the laptop, it’ll install a new set of drivers. These, well, they just work. Your phone becomes another network connection, and you can download files and email and browse the web just as much as you like (or at least as much as your bandwidth allowance gives you…).

(You can find a walkthrough of the process on Microsoft UK Windows Mobile Evangelist Jason Langridge’s blog.)

A useful tool for extra on the road connectivity.

– Simon

There’s number portability, and there’s number portability.

Last time I changed phone providers, it took over a week for my number to follow me to my new phone. We’re living in a world of personalised communications, where our mobile numbers are as much a part of our identity as out primary email addresses, and a week of number limbo is a long time.

Things look set to change, and OFCOM is on the case.

From September 2009 number portability should take only two hours. Switching operators should be a simple process, where you buy a new phone, turn it on, and your personal number follows you to your new device. It’s a process that should mean more people start following the coolest devices from network to network - as other OFCOM rulings mean that competition between networks will lead to devices being the only differentiating factor.

Of course the increasing length of contracts is going to have an impact - but number portability will mean that businesses should have the upper hand in any contract negotiations with their providers. If you can just up and take all your business numbers with you, your account manager is more likely to listen to your concerns - and the operator will be more likely to offer the services your business needs, rather than the services that are cheapest to offer.

It’s interesting to look at the effects of fast number portability on markets like Hong Kong, where competitive pressures have led to extremely low contract costs - and where consumers chose networks based on the devices offered - and business look at the services. Mobile telephony is becoming a commodity, just like landlines, and operators will need to move themselves up the value chain in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Certainly if operators don’t do something fast then they’re likely to be in the same place as the music industry is today. Big changes are already underway: in the US Google is bidding for a slice of the 700MHz spectrum. Meanwhile, Apple has already asserted its control over AT&T (and the European iPhone networks), by separating the device experience from the network. It’s all adding up to a future where mobile operators are increasingly irrelevant.

One response is coming from Verizon, which has just announced that it will open its network up to any device. That’s a brave move, but one that means they can move out of the handset business, leave that to the manufacturers (along with the support costs!), and can concentrate on building out and improving the network and the network services. That’s where Verizon’s strengths are - it’s a network. The phones are access devices that can come from anywhere and anyone. As long as they meet the standards, they should be able to connect…

So who’s going to be first to offer the same service in the UK?

–Simon

It’s dark. The South Bank is brightly lit, but Jubilee Gardens is a dark stretch of grass between the London Eye and the road, with only an avenue of trees garlanded with fairy lights for illumination. And there’s five of us with one iPAQ Traveller, one camera, one backup set of paper instructions, three GPS-labelled mole holes and ten moles to whack. And we’ve forgotten which hole is which. Is this the future of mobile gaming? I hope so, because it’s huge fun.

The London Girl Geek Dinners are a mobile feast, meeting wherever the technology company sponsoring the evening suggests. This time it was upstairs at the British Film Institute, and the serious business of the evening was Helen Vaid, managing director of HP’s Snapfish photo printing service in Europe talking about being an entrepreneur and balancing that with working for a large company and Jo Reid of HP’s Bristol research labs talking about some of the projects she’s worked on, including mscape.

Reid has a vision of pervasive computing overlaying a digital layer on the world around us. Geotagging is one way to do it, but that’s after the fact and away from the place. Geocaching is another, but the GPS is a tool that you use like a map rather than part of the fun. Short for Mediscape, mscapes are games, stories and guides triggered by your location; they run on an iPAQ Traveller, which is a Windows Mobile 5 device with a built-in GPS - so it knows when you’re in the right place to give you clues, directions and instructions and when to record your score. Think scavenger hunt or virtual hide and seek…  It’s harder to explain than it is to do and that’s how we spend 90 minutes before the main meeting, in teams of five, in the dark, running up and down the Embankment.

We head out of the BFI into the cold, trying to listen to the instructions as they go - full volume is still too quiet but Jo Reid has already told us the basics. We get a GPS signal as we pass the National Theatre and a clue pops up on screen. Unfortunately I don’t stop in time and we walk out of range and walking in circles watching the little figure on the map approach the push pin where the clue should be doesn’t bring it back up. We give up on the first clue for now and head for the next pushpin; we think it’s going to be the pier but it shows up as we pass an ad hoarding: who did Avril say See you Later to? We pore over the hoarding by the light of the iPAQ screen and then realise the answer is just a little further on at the skate park.

Up pops a message on screen to climb the stairs; this could have saved me half an hour waiting for my sister in the summer when we discovered our interpretations of ‘in front of the Royal Festival Hall’ differed by a height of some 20 feet. Outside the RFH the game asks us to enact a scene from Misdummer Night’s Dream; here Simon is the Wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe kiss.

There are more questions as we walk down towards the London Eye, answered by looking on lamp posts, sculptures and the poetry in the paving stones. The 5-15m accuracy of GPS means that sometimes I have to stand in the right place to see the question while the rest of the team wanders around looking for the right place to see the answer; we resort to Google to find out what to look for one occasion. And then as we get to Jubilee Gardens the map shows two ‘agility’ challenges and a logic puzzle and this is when we start running around in the dark.

Ben takes the first agility challenge, which is holding the iPAQ up to his chest to record his heart rate, taking 25 long strides and then running back and forth at shorter and shorter intervals until the game asks for a second heart rate and gives him a high score. He lights up a cigarette to celebrate and we try the logic puzzle. This is a combination of Battleship, Boggle and Mastermind as we mark a playing area, hunt for unexploded bombs that are randomly positioned and have to be found by GPS and disarmed by solving a colour code or making words from letters - and get blown up three times. We keep getting the colour code puzzle and we keep getting it wrong. In the end we give up and try Whack a Mole.

This is much simpler; we pick three spots not too close together as mole holes, station the photographer to catch us in action and when the game says there’s a mole at hole one the runner dashes there with the GPS and taps the screen to whack the mole. Repeat for all ten moles and then rush back to record our final time and have the scores read from the devices…

The games and questions aren’t taxing - though I want to have another go at UXB in the daylight after I’ve practiced Mastermind a few more times - but they’re involving and the time limit keeps you going. If you’ve got a Windows Mobile device with GPS you can download several mscapes including UXB and Whack a Mole as well as a game for escaping from the Tower of London and a ranger-guided hike through Yosemite from http://www.mscapers.com/home; you can also get the software for making your own mscapes.

Second Life and virtual worlds don’t appeal to me because the real world is so rich and in-world always seems a quantised second best - IM with a fancy screen saver. Mediascapes and what I think of as place coding adds virtual experiences to the real world; it could be an adventure game with prizes, a guided tour that knows what building you’ve reached even if you take the wrong turn, restaurant reviews for the restaurant you’re standing in front of… I’d like it to link to Linked In or Facebook for my friends and Dopplr or online calendars for where they are and pop up an IM window if they’re within getting-together distance. I could get bus and train timetables as I get close to the bus stop or station. Post It notes for the real world. And a really fun way to spend a cold evening. Try it out - and if you work out the colour code puzzle, come play a game with us some time.

-Mary