Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
And modern laptops have battery life that is generally good enough for a train journey of the usual kind of length.
Your point being? It's not as if no other company has never made something that's a bit below par. Anyway, this was storm in teacup - it was an issue which seemed to affect some users in the way they held the device in areas with low signal strength. It was fixed in the next iteration but in any case this 'non-working' aerial 'problem' made no difference to sales as can be seen from this list. Sales per Fiscal Year (Oct to Sept), figures rounded:
2007: 1.3 million
2008: 12 million
2009: 20 million
2010: 40 million
2011: 72 million
2012: 125 million
2013: 150 million
2014: 170 million
The 'aerial that didn't work' didn't seem to have been much of an issue for the users.
I note only that this is an attitude that treats passengers with contempt. You can make the same argument about air conditioning - the passengers will travel in the same numbers over these short distances if the trains don't have it but we've saved mass, cost and energy. (But the fares won't be reduced for the absence of these things).
Don't be surprised if 'the railway' gets a bad press - it only has itself to blame.
Again - an arrogant approach. If 'the railway' wants people to use their smartphones as tickets then it has to help them keep the things working as 'the railway' is - presumably - also bright enough to realise there are issues with battery life.
There could be a thousand and one reasons why the phone is not fully charged at the start of a journey - what if the journey is being made at the end of the day and the passenger has not had a chance to re-charge the device since the night before? Or, because of high data use the battery runs down during the journey. Not all of these are due to incompetence - and why is the railway trying to demonstrate to its customers that they, the customers, are incompetent? If one insults the customer then one should not be surprised if they bad-mouth the railway or avoid it if possible.
I agree with you about the short journeys expected with the Class 707s. But the passenger could have spent a day 'on the road' and the battery could be about to expire.
Portable electronic devices are here to stay - and people will want to use them. Throwing one's hands up in the air and proclaiming its all too difficult and the passengers' wants and desires are unreasonable is no longer an acceptable attitude.
I would assume there is a 110v-240v feed available already otherwise what would the lighting and other systems come off.
In fact, why not the S Stock - at least on the Met line services - too?
Sales of what is more and more a fashion accessory don't have much to do with the technical efficacy of the products. As has been said here before, Apple is a computer company that tries to make mobile phones.
Sales of what is more and more a fashion accessory don't have much to do with the technical efficacy of the products. As has been said here before, Apple is a computer company that tries to make mobile phones.
I do hate it when history is rewritten. The iPhone is a massive success and nobody can take that away from Apple, but it didn't really invent anything.
No. But not many people carry toasters around either.
Nokia made smartphones too. Think Series 60, 80 and 90. Remember the Communicator range?
They became complacent and then sold out to the devil, which effectively killed them. But Apple didn't invent the smartphone - it just created a non-geeky, very simplified, device with a capacitive screen (although LG beat them on that too).
I do hate it when history is rewritten. The iPhone is a massive success and nobody can take that away from Apple, but it didn't really invent anything.
I'll agree that Apple made things mass market, as smartphones were geeky gadgets before that. However I am not sure the relevance now that you've acknowledged smartphones were around for many years before, and Nokia had been about more than just 'mobile phones' before Apple.
Symbian (S60 and UIQ) once had almost 50% marketshare, which was a smart OS with touch screen UI, apps and access to fast 3G data. All before the iPhone hit the scene.
Battery life was therefore already through the floor before 2007 too, bar for those still buying emergency phones for a glovebox. Even 3G feature phones already brought battery life down to one or two days, from one or two weeks previously.
At a risk of going further off topic. 3G feature phones were not that popular, and could actually have a decent battery life (I got 4-5 days out of an SE W880i and those things had tiny batteries)
Yes the early 3G feature phones had crappy battery life (The NEC e606 came with 2 batteries because you would struggle to make it through the day with one!)
Nokia's core business was never smartphones. You look at this from a British perspective where Symbian phones were reasonably popular. Nokia's core market for years was Africa. Until Android came along, smartphones were unheard of over there.
To be fair, the first commercially successful smartphone was the Blackberry, and it really had one purpose on top of calls. Email.
Apple's genius has always been and will always be its marketing and software.
They never say they invent something. They say they re-invent it (Branson like PR spin whilst acknowledging that something of that type had been done before)
No one could spin hype like Steve Jobs, and to be fair he insisted that Apple products looked good and were easy to use.
The iPod was far from the first MP3 player, but it was the one that brought it to mass market by putting an intuitive user interface on it. All down to the software making it easy to use, and the hype of Jobs.
The iPad was not the first tablet PC (It had been a dream of Bill Gates for over a decade before the iPad came out and there were windows tablets that ran on Windows 98), but it was the first that was intuitive, yet again good software and Jobsian hype.
It was the same with the iPhone. They got the software right and knew how to push the product.
You have to admire them for it.
Anyway back to class 707s. Personally they can't come soon enough for SWT. The capacity they will give is desperately needed.
Let's take coppercapped's estimate of 10kg per carriage, so an extra 120kg per 12 car train and an extra 8kg per 8 car train. The fleet average then works out at 99kg per train (55x12 cars and 60x8 cars). Doing some rough and ready calculations, there will be 144 trains across the peaks (24x2x3) and then some 500 odd trains during the off peak (14x2x18) for a grand total of somewhere in the region of 650 trains across the day (although if someone more knowledgeable than I can give actual figures, I couldn't find anything that accurate hence the approximations). Thus in that extra day, there would be about an extra 65 tons of weight passing through the core (about 2 extra class 700 cars). Whilst inconsequential, it does add up in the long term track maintenance cycle.
Whilst the quantity of passengers that you carry is something that can't really be controlled, the weight of things like plug sockets, seatback tables, and other amenities are things that you can control, so they are what you minimise.
I dont buy the weight argument at all for the Thameslink core. The line includes two airports and all the passenger luggage that entails.
Plug sockets are regularly in use by commuters for laptops and phones. Not everyone has the luxury of a fixed desk job with convenient charging (and certain uses of the iPhone are battery drains - messaging services like whatsapp and Skype, as well as map-services and uber). Given house prices and cross London service, a significant number of commuters arent doing short journeys (and thats before you include the delays ). St A to St P might be a nippy 22 minutes, the rest of us travel further - 47 mins peak from Leagrave to City; closer to an hour on a stopping service. Those that do Bedford or Brighton have even longer journeys. Some of the intercity services on other lines over greater distances actually seem quite quick compared to commuting
Whats Brighton and Bedford on the fasts? about an hour or so? Is your phone that bad it wont last that long?Even my laptop lasts 5+ hours if just doing documents without playing music or games so why have them?
I think people need to get better equipment, which, if its work, then itll be provided and if work and they dont provide then do your work in time.
On TL the lack of tip down tables was to aid boarding and alighting at key stations (namely the core) so having wires would be even messier when the person in the window seat wants to get and pass the person in the aisle seat with food/laptop charging.
The downside is how this ruins it for those going Cambridge to Brighton.
Although the proportion of those travelling that complete journey is probably miniscule.
...The additional mass of installing a USB socket at every/most seats in metro/suburban trains is negligible. As is the cost - retail a 250V AC to 5.25v dc 1 amp switched mode power supply with a USB socket costs about £4 each. With 40 seats, and no volume reduction in the price, plus wiring, probably about £500 total extra in a railway carriage which costs £1.5 million.
Basic consumer-grade power supplies for passenger use would not be installed in a train on safety, reliability or EMC grounds. The installed (hotel) power supplies on a train are suitable for loads that are proven and train controlled such as heating, lighting and passenger used kit such as door openers. The associated wiring for this kit is minimal using power bus-connected auxiliaries, and controlled by can-bus or ethernet connected local controllers. There aren't going to be any passing low voltage domestic-quality ac circuits that anything can just camp onto.
Passenger plug-in devices need dedicated supplies that are immunised against the sort-of large surges that can occur from both traction operation and power switching at section breaks etc..
That is why I previously posted that it would be cheaper for the TOC to issue free portable chargers to regulars.
I'm not suggesting that domestic grade equipment should be used - I am quoting it as examples of what the mass and cost of such things actually are instead of some of the inflated suggestions which have been posted. Domestic equipment does have to meet EMC and safety standards as well - it's just that the equipment is not laid out to cover industrial strength physical abuse. Industrial grade equivalents of these things (13A outlets and USB-type power supplies) are available - the mass is similar and the costs are not that much higher.
A power conditioner can be fitted to every 13A or USB socket as appropriate and be fed with any ac or dc voltage that is convenient - it doesn't have to be 230v ac. Switched mode power supplies are surprisingly robust.
In the Class 700s and 707s the traction equipment is under the floor and most of the other equipment is fixed in the roof space so it can be reached by maintenance staff working from inside the coach. Separating the circuits to reduce cross-talk is not as difficult as it used to be. It may have been the case when the AM9s were built - but things have moved on since then...
Although the proportion of those travelling that complete journey is probably miniscule.
but there will be many journeys within that route of decent distance. Brighton to St Pancras for example or even to Farringdon (with is gonna be a pretty useful destination when crossrail is complete) is a long enough journey for these "extras".
The decision has been made so the few that make longer journeys regularily will no doubt make their own arrangements for portable devices. I doubt that they will switch to the roads out of necessity or spite. I think that the clue is in the description 'portable' or 'mobile'. Devices that can be carried between more formal locations tend to be called 'transportable'.
The recent fad for buying phones in which the manufacturer puts style over function has resulted in the rash of devices with inadequate battery life. It looks like the 'new must have' is a better battery life so maybe this problem will fade away soon and certainly within the earliest years of new trains' working lives.