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Editor's Blog: Rage against mobiles on planes
Welcome to my blog...

By Tony Hallett

Published: Tuesday 08 August 2006

It may well be August, the height of silly season, but there have been some interesting things going on in the past 24 hours.

As a silicon.com reader, there is a good chance you are a frequent business traveller. We know that stories about connectivity on the road, airline systems, even the humble hotel get you going. But we never knew how much the ongoing mobiles-coming-to-a-plane-cabin-near-you saga would raise the collective blood pressure - see our latest poll results.

Yesterday we had the exclusive that those now defunct 'no smoking' signs in cabins (are all routes in the world non-smoking?) will be converted to 'no mobiles' signs.

I await the handy logo - the design of which someone with lawyer friends will probably patent.

OK, so it's perhaps not the biggest exclusive but I think this is a subject that we won't tire of discussing. (Snakes on a Plane? I suspect one or two of you might get angrier than Samuel L Jackson. What was that line of his?)

Elsewhere, in the realm of the slightly more important, Sunday saw a story from the Observer criticising the Connecting for Health (CfH) scheme - the NHS' big tech upgrade.

The gist seems to be that we'd be better off without the upgrade. Just what is the alternative? The tech savvy among us might suggest a series of smaller projects. That could be an answer. Unfortunately many seem to be saying 'do nothing'. That is simply not an option and anecdotally we know of plenty of instances where Luddite clinicians have made no secret about clinging to 'good old-fashioned' ways of doing things, sometimes at the expense of patient care.

It's a depressing subject at times but needn't be, I think.

In other news, I notice 3G operator 3 has done a deal to stream ITV, the commercial TV channel. (Or channels, now. Isn't it four of them, at last count?) Interesting but as with other TV over 3G options, this is limited.

As senior reporter Jo Best makes clear, others are opting for one of several mobile broadcast systems to distribute TV to thousands of handsets. I happened to catch a broadcast trialled over one such system in Germany this summer and the picture quality was better than on a nearby terrestrial digital TV.

Don't tell me this is another dead end for ITV.

Footnote:
Whenever I've read someone else kicking off a blog, there is usually plenty of hand wringing, sometimes even hundreds of words on the reason for the undertaking. The worst even talk about the nature of blogging.

I won't waste your time. Suffice to say these pages will be mostly about events in tech, occasionally about my working life. Well done for getting this far.

More soon.