Vista

Or “How Sony Ericcsson took a good thing and very nearly made it bad.”

I love the X10 Mini Pro. I’ve had it for a few weeks now and am still marvelling at how light and compact it is and that I once again have an FM radio with me at all times.  However I am struggling to adjust to the customisations that Sony Ericsson have made to to Android.  For example:

• Right now, as I type, there’s an annoying blue bar occupying the bottom sixth of my screen. On the left-hand side it tells me, in no more than three letters, what language I’m currently set to.  On the right-hand side it tells me what mode the keyboard is in (letters vs. numbers, upper, lower or title case) and provides an option to hide the bar.  It’s information I’d rather do without, in return for a larger usable screen area. So I hide it, only to discover that it reappears with the very next key press…  I’ve had a rummage through the phone’s settings and haven’t yet found an option that enables me to hide it for good.  If you know of one, please let me know.
• The default calendar widget has less functionality than the default one on my G1 – and that was just enough to make it useful!
• The default email client assumes that my email account name is the same as my email address (which it isn’t).
• Although I’ve disabled the on-screen keyboard (it has a hardware one) it still pops up if when the cursor is placed in a form field and I haven’t yet opened the keyboard. I understand that some people might want this sometimes but, personally, I’d like “off” to mean “off”.  This could be solved using  finer grained preference settings.

However, every cloud has a silver lining:

• Luckily there’s a fantastic email app called K-9 Mail that does everything I need and more, so that’s my email problem solved.
• And as I’ve yet to find a decent calendar widget so I’m thinking of taking a stab at creating one myself.

Although my G1 has a touch screen, I don’t seem to be able to select and copy text unless it’s in a text input field or clickable. So, for example, I can’t simply copy and paste a reset password sent via email; I have to switch back and forth between email app and browser, entering the random squence of numbers and mixed-case letters a few at a time.

I make a lot of purchases online and of late am having to deal with Verified by Visa (VbV) more often than I’d like.  Aside from whether or not I think such a process improves security or aids phishers, I have some serious issues with the way it’s conducted.

I have yet to complete the process, end-to-end, without having to detour through the “Forgot Password?” section, followed immediately after by a call to my bank, who then walk me through the reset and/or re-registration process.  The things that (often repeatedly) trip me up are:

1. Password restricted to no more than 10 characters I find it difficult enough to remember passwords without a false limit being imposed on their length – especially as I’ve been trying the increase the length of my passphrases because I’m under the (maybe false?) impression that the longer the passphrase the harder it’ll be to crack.
2. Name on Card I have learnt now that what this field is really after is my forename and surname.  Not my name as it’s actually written on the card.

   Also, during my most recent re-registration experience, it occurred to me to wonder if, as I was required to enter my name in lowercase during the registration process, should I be doing so during the actual verification process?  If so, there’s nothing to say I should.

3. Inconsistent date patterns For my date of birth, I am required to follow the pattern ddmmyy but for my card’s expiry date I am required to follow the pattern mmyyyy.  This is especially disconcerting because the pattern used ON my card is mmyy.
4. Obscuring non-password fields The values I enter in the “Card expiry date” and “Postcode” fields are obscured as they would be when entering a password, making it trickier for me to spot mistakes.  These are not fields that are typically obscured and it puzzles me why these are considered to be more sensitive than either my 3-digit security number or my date of birth.
5. Card expiry date This is not specific to the verification or “Forgot Password?” processes but a general database issue.  During my most recent re-registration process it was revealed to me by the person walking me through it that a mistake had been made the previous time and my card expiry date erroneously recorded as “2100″.  Given that Visa set the maximum lifetime period for their cards, it should be possible to use today’s date to calculate the upper limit for a valid expiry date and use that to identify and flag up such mistakes to prevent them getting as far as the database.

I find it difficult to believe that Visa would consider this good customer experience so and as, so far, they’ve not had to take the brunt of my annoyance each time the process has broken down (I love you First Direct, really I do) , this evening I’ve written to them so that I can be sure that they’ve at least been alerted to these issues.

Although I’m sure there are many people who remember their password each time and sail through effortlessly, my experiences have been so consistently bad that I find it hard to believe I’m alone in this.  If you’ve had the same/simliar/completely different issues with Verified by Visa, I’d love to hear about them.