A company-owned Nokia N82 happened to have a failed LCD display module when it was returned, and since replacing it yourself is an easy task (pop the screen cover off, unstick the LCD, disconnect the cable, replace with the new LCD, and close the cover), I went looking for spare parts. Nobody seemed to have the display in stock, other than DataKits UK. I placed an order for the LCD and a set of new covers, as the ones on the phone were quite damaged from use. First sign of trouble was when I checked the order, and the site detected either the language setting of the browser I was using, my IP address, or both – and it tried to load the site in a language that was not configured. There were tons of not found PHP includes, and when HTML was loaded it was full of default text strings.

I emailed the sales address telling them about this, and got an auto-reply a few minutes later: “Sorry for any delay in receiving your order. we will check the status and follow up the delivery company straight away. Thanks DataKits.co.uk” Second sign of trouble, an automated reply regarding possible delays in shipping. This can mean only one thing: they receive a ton of questions and complaints about shipping schedules.

On the order comments, I had specified that they should send me the Royal Mail tracking number once shipped, but last night I saw they had updated the online order status to: “19/02/2009 Dispatched rm”. Not very useful. After some googling, I came across this forum thread on PriceRunner, which details the many problems people have had with this company. I honestly hope they send me the LCD and covers, and have left them a message on their answerphone plus another email (which was auto-replied again with the same text), and have heard nothing back.

Today the 2009 Mobile World Congress got started in Barcelona. I was planning a couple of visits, but they got postponed at the last minute, so I went on a tour. Most impressive was the new iMate 810-F. This has to be the most rugged smartphone I have ever seen – with impressive specs, such as GPS, full QWERTY keyboard, QVGA display, a 624MHz CPU, 2Mpx camera, Bluetooth, and WiFi. And it also stands ketchup, salt, orange juice, and an array of crud and produce that was thrown at it live. Then, the demonstrator dropped the phone into a water bucket and washed it. He “rinsed” it by throwing it onto the stage, and he later faked tripping up and stepping on the phone. Finally, he picked it up and dropped it into a fish bowl while playing a video clip. In all, very impressive indeed. Yours for around $699, available in 3-4 weeks (got this straight from an iMate rep).

There wasn’t really anything else that caught my eye, other than the bigger stands being considerably more modest than years past, such as Motorola, Nokia, SonyEricsson, and other big players. They were also notably barren of any sort of freebie, not even leaflets! Congress tip for freebie hunters: go to Hall 2, the exhibitors there have tons of stuff.

If you are in Barcelona and want to grab a coffee, drop me a line in the comments.

I like iPhoto 09, it brings many cool features to the table. However, the Facebook exporter leaves a lot to be desired. Apart from not being able to push photos to pre-existing albums, as it creates albums with the event name for every photo set you upload, it seems to completely ignore the login credentials you supply.

Case example, I have my own Facebook account, and we have an account for our fire department. Since I was logged into my own account in Safari, entering the department’s login credentials in the plugin was futile – iPhoto wanted to publish photos to my personal account no matter what. When I logged out in Safari and logged back in with the department’s ID, iPhoto took the credentials and allowed posting to the department’s profile. I think this is a rather big bug for anyone using more than one ID in Facebook.

I got a call today from my account manager at Deutsche Bank, who was really worried about a ‘negative mark’ he had received from above. Turns out that DB is on the lookout for any kind of negative publicity, such as my recent blog post about their crappy online banking system, and they managed to dig out my account, then the branch that handles it, and the actual manager assigned to my account. And they transferred the hot potato to him, as if he was the cause of my complaint.

Nothing further from the truth. To those at DB reading this: the staff at my branch have actually been the only effective, corteous and professional elements during this whole process – they have nothing to do with my complaint, and I have nothing but praise for them. They actually activated my login within 30 minutes of sending the initial signed receipt, and have always been very helpful.

To further illustrate how badly put together this thing is, take a look at the date picker popup that is used when selecting from -> to dates in two different areas of the online banking site, one being account movements, and the other transfers and payments:

This one loads in an IE window popup, while the other is a Javascript popup:

So, instead of sending black flags to your branch staff, why don’t you start talking to the people who designed, cobbled together, and launched this heap? They are the ones who should be receiving your wrath. It’s impossible anyone at Deutsche Bank has done any usability testing of this, or they would be pulling our their hair (and the developer’s too) – another example, try to click the ‘Accept’ button when requesting account movements between two dates, without having selected the account number from the dropdown provided. You will get an error message informing you that you need to pick an account…and the ‘Accept’ button will be left in a disabled state, no matter what you do. You need to reload the page, select the date range again, make sure you select the account from the dropdown – even if you only have one account, you could pre-select it for crying out loud!