I’ve just gotten back from a wonderful trip around Italy and have discovered a second endemic fail-point for mobile technology solutions: assuming you always have network connectivity. I suspect this really only applies to mobile phones more than mobile devices that only have wifi. When travelling internationally, your mobile phone becomes incredibly expensive if you leave international data roaming on so while you’re away you only have internet via wifi. When travelling in Italy (and Australia), this means you don’t have internet access, period.

In the two weeks I was over there, touring around quite a lot of country, I found two places where I could get free wifi and one of them required a photocopy of my passport to get a login! Otherwise the going rate was about €5/hour. So when I had internet it was very brief and I’d just download everything and read it while offline. Therein lies the problem.

Firstly, it was fantastic to have NetNewsWire as a real application on the iPhone since it could then cache the thousands of unread news items. Similarly, having a native email client enabled caching – this has to be the single biggest advantage of native clients over web apps, even if you only notice when you travel internationally.

Secondly, being offline a lot really highlights Mobile Fail Point #1 – synchronization. NetNewsWire has always been rock solid with synchronization even if it did require manually hitting the refresh button at the right times. It all went horribly wrong when I got back from Italy though. I think the sheer volume of posts that I read while offline and the length of time involved just pushed it over the edge. I must have read 4000 posts while offline between the two times I got internet and when I got home. Unfortunately, NetNewsWire on my laptop never seemed to get the message and even after doing all the refresh mumbo jumbo required the laptop said I had 2000 unread items and the iPhone said I had 400. There was no way to tell who had what so I just marked everything as read and moved on. There’s no way I could hope to reproduce it or really explain what went wrong, things just got confused after a very complex and unusual usage pattern. Oh well.

What was perhaps more interesting though was that in amongst those posts was an announcement of Google’s adapted-for-iPhone translation service. It really couldn’t get any more useful – I was in a foreign country trying desperately to remember the Italian I learnt in primary school and desperately wanting to know a few really key words. Sadly, the service requires an internet connection. So the optimum point of need for the system coincides with the time you are least likely to be able to use it. Now a completely offline system, even if it had a much more limited set of words would be infinitely more useful. That said, while a hard copy phrase book adds to weight, it’s cheap enough to leave in your pocket in touristy areas where the risk of pick pockets is high – iPhone’s are not.

The other thing that mobile applications need to embed is opportunistic publishing. The iPhone does this for email – if you send a message while offline it will just sit in the outbox until you next get connectivity and then it sends. It doesn’t provide a way for other applications to do this though (except if you specifically open them of course). It would have been nice to write blog posts and have them automatically publish whenever they could.

PS: The key words I should learn before going to a non-English speaking country has expanded from just hello, goodbye, yes, no, please and thank you to include: left, right, ticket, parking, why, where, when, what, who and help! (with exclamation mark, it’s only needed when you’re being chased by scam artists dressed as Roman Gladiators). Police works as a stand-in for help if you need it, as does a really loud, blood curdling scream.