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It”s not you, it”s my mobile

Looking in spite of a frustrating, disappointing and ultimately futile experience? There’s an app for that, says Gary Marshall

It was my birthday recently, and my brother arranged because us to go to Cork and see a band called The 4 of Us. They were awesome, but travelling means a lot of dead time and hanging around. Not to worry: we’re both gadget geeks and we can fill any amount of time mucking about with our mobiles and trying out the latest apps. Here’s that which we learned.

First up, the useful stuff. Google Maps’ live exchange data is a wonderful thing, enabling me to avoid some nauseous snarl-ups on the way to the airport, and the readiness to buy audiobooks directly from your phone is equally nifty. My airport app wasn’t abundant cop, though. The interface was lovely and when it worked, it was immense, but inevitably it’s dependent on the data supplied by the airports – and that’s ruins. Hours after we were due to depart, the app was effective me that everything was groovy, when in reality, my plane was peradventure on fire somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle.

Other apps weren’t in this way handy. The hilarious app that puts a sound-sensitive mouth up~ the body your phone screen goes crazy with ambient noise, and if you try to take a photo of it wholly you get is a brilliant white screen as your camera takes measurements from the brightest action around – your phone. Abroad, anything needing 3G was out: 3 for megabyte lessens your enthusiasm for mobile data, so no maps and none what’s on guides. But even when we got free Wi-Fi, our supposedly powerful apps didn’t perform.

“Check this out,” my brother would declaration. “iPlayer!... Oh, it’s geoblocked.” The same applied to other streaming media. Undeterred, he pulled at a loss an app that could tell you the name of the verse you sang into it. It didn’t work. “That’s not happened before,” he said. “Must be the wireless network.”

I retaliated through my barcode scanning app. The two of us spent 20 minutes hard and failing to scan anything, entirely without success: the camera wouldn’t focus, or the barcode was too shiny, or it was an Ireland-singly barcode that the app couldn’t recognise. Eventually we got a succeed – the new James Ellroy book I was lugging around – and the cost checker’s best price was nearly five quid more than I’d paid in quest of it.

More often than not, one of us would try to press the other with a supposedly impressive app, and it wouldn’t be. I don’t know about my brother’s mobile, but every one of my apps usually work just fine. It wasn’t me. It was the netting, or the access point.

The perils of early adoption, I understand, but I can’t help thinking my brother and I sounded like hasty ejaculators comparing notes on excuses to tell a partner when you’ve gone opposite to in your pants. I’m quite sure that by the time you know fully this, there’ll be an app for that.

Gary Marshall has been penmanship for .net since the stone age. www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com