I HAVE A HUAWEI E585 WIFI DONGLE on its last legs but when it's working, it occasionally delivers faster upload service than a higher spec Vodafone broadband USB modem.

I can normally get the Voda USB modem to run two or three times faster than my O2 dongle, especially in the Dublin metropolitan area. Today, along the banks of the River Liffey in County Kildare, the O2 dongle is kicking its Voda brother in the speedtest stakes.

I can't imagine life as a mobile warrior without a mobile tethering service. I use both the dongle and the USB modem to successfully run Online Meeting Rooms video sessions and Google Hangouts. Last week, I used the O2 dongle as a wifi hotspot service for third level students in LIT-Clonmel when a piece of network hardware failed. The Huawei E585 permits the connectivity of five devices simultaneously and that was fine for several project teams working on campus.

My speedtest screenshots.

mobile

ONE OF THE FIRST things friends do when I hand them my Nokia Lumia 800 is flick through the phone's apps to see how many familiar icons they see. They often mutter something when handing back the phone.

Nokia have a lot of work to do during the next year if former Nokia users can be prised from their iPhones. Those iPhones were a quantum leap from Symbian for most owners because they did things faster and used an interface that people enjoyed. When people started buying iPhones because their friends had iPhones, they often started connecting through apps, not voice or text. Now those apps represent the mobile environment through which people define their worlds. And as a late starter in the touchscreen game, Nokia has an apps deficiency.

It will take two years before Nokia's apps for Windows Phone are more compelling than the bog-standard iOS apps, the Windows Metro interface and its better live notification system will pull people back to Nokia--if people returning to Nokia's handsets can continue using most of the apps they loved with their iPhones.

In two years, Internet Explorer will have a very capable HTML 5 rendering engine for mobile phones. I believe Nokia phones will have a CPU core dedicated to rich media rendering which means no real need to depend upon apps to see the mobile web.

But these things are two years away and Apple will continue selling millions more handsets than Nokia in the meantime. For me, a long-time Nokia owner, it feels strange to watch the brand being reduced to a fraction of its formidable self. I'll be on board for a Nokia handset in 2015 and hope all the apps I treasure from my iPhone will be running of the Windows Phone OS as well.

Composed on my Nokia Lumia using Evernote and Typepad's mail2blog service over O2-Ireland's towers.

nokia