Russell writes about a recent survey where only 4% of people questioned said they'd like to upgrade to 3G.

Well, duh. I'm sure if you'd conducted surveys in the mid 1990s asking the public what they thought of v32bis modems, you'd have had blank stares and "no I don't think I need one of them"... despite the fact that they drove the uptake of the consumer internet. 3G is a network technology which no-one outside of the telecomms industry should care about, just as no-one cares about ADSL or cable.

I'm with Russell when says that 3G needs to be sold on benefits, not features; but similarly, if you're going to conduct research into this area, your research should be similarly aligned - if you want to get any meaningful results.

Out of interest - anyone know what the "bewildering number of features" on 3G handsets refers to? Whilst many 3G handsets have appalling user interfaces, I've not seen much on them that isn't available on 2.5G or lower... so was this survey measuring public perceptions of 3G by people who've not used it yet?

Nokia on Push-to-talk: "Push to talk service users are typically engaged in some other activity than a telephone call, and they listen to the group traffic during their activity. A user can be contacted by the name, or he may occasionally want to say something to the group. Half-duplex traffic is ideal for such use cases. This simple, real-time direct communication serves the diverse needs of both business users and private consumers ranging from controlled team management to spontaneous sharing of experiences."

Quite an interesting (if tech-heavy) weblog here, from a guy who's currently a Microsoft intern.

Monkeys will pay for porn.

Lovely things:

1. The knocking machine: "You put it on a table and knock on the table: the device detects the knock through a shock sensor in the bottom, copies and repeats it till you hold the hammer to stop it."

2. Beautiful barcodes - that actually work.

3. FlickrGraph - is there no end to the wonderful windows that Flickr users are opening onto that service?

4. Planes that never got built.

5. Networked pac-man - a lovely mod to the original game. Coincidentally, we've just implemented a similar sort of thing for a client using Bluetooth; maybe I'll be able to post about it one day...