Review of the Cheap ZT1 ePad I Bought off eBay

Ecert omcre n a hile I bui a pircw of techjokogy...

Let's start that again. Reviewing this device with itself clearly won't work.

Every once in a while I buy a piece of technology which will, my friends warn me, be awful. Because I am an idiot I disregard this and base my decision solely upon the pretty eBay pictures and cheerful engrish item description. I wouldn't buy a car and a house like this but what the hey, it's £152 and I was drunk and curious.

I spend half my life reading other people's diligently composed reviews of random electronic tat and figured it was time to give something back to the world...

The ePad arrived this morning, about ten days after I ordered it. While good this was something of a surprise - when I checked the parcel tracking website ("International Mail Tracking System") linked from the supplier's email it claimed to still be in Shenzhen. Actually it still claims to be in Shenzhen! Maybe I am in Shenzhen too and never realised.




The tablet comes with:

1. Nice packaging. Very Apple-ish. Probably this is intentional.
2. No CD's or manuals, even though the auction promised one. Hm. Never mind, real men don't need instructions.
   
3. A dinky little telescopic stylus, possibly useful for selecting fine items on screen if you have fat fingers.
4. Cheap earphones which I immediately threw away.
5. (possibly) micro-usb - ethernet adapter. Given the device has wifi I don't know why. Perhaps I'll find a use for it someday.
6. A USB - MicroSD adapter. This is a bit weird since the device already has a MicroSD socket. Attempts to use it on the ePad (yes, with a MicroSD inside) result in a "Preparing Udisk" alert that never goes away and no apparent disk. Plugged into my Mac it works well enough.
7. Four square inches of cloth.
   

Physical Hardware

In the eBay auction it looks awesome. Shiny black fascia, metallic case, great screen full of icons. Friends have asked for pictures but there are plenty around already - check this article for a good idea.

In the flesh it is serviceable but less awesome. The fascia is made of thin, flexible plastic rather than glass and sits unevenly in the frame. You notice this most when it catches the light - reflections go wibbly-wobbly like a disturbed water surface. While the screen fits acceptably in the plastic body you can slip your nail between them. If you're like me you'll eventually ruin your tablet by levering off the screen off to investigate what's inside. But I won't, not yet. Not for at least another half hour.

What's inside is supposed to be a "ZT1" 1.2Ghz ARM chip, 256Mb of RAM and 2Gb of NAND flash storage. Very little of the NAND is taken up by Android but there doesn't seem any way to use it for your own stuff since all apps insist on loading their data from a "SD card". Really they mean MicroSD card. Maybe once I've rooted the device I'll fill it with a 1.7Gb file made up of the text "I am a fool who buys cheap plastic tat" repeated over and over again.

There's no 3G. You're on wifi or (wtf?) ethernet baby. Allegedly more modern firmwares may let you taste the 3G goodness if you plug an approved USB 3G dongle in but I haven't tested this.

And talking of that, whoever designed this thing really loves ports...

1. Power. That's right, it charges off a proprietary 9V adapter rather than USB like every other device in the galaxy. The adapter fits American two pin sockets and needs an adapter-adapter (supplied) for use in the UK.
2. Earphones. Probably this works but for reasons discussed later I haven't tried it.
   
3. USB. You can plug a whole bunch of things into this including a keyboard. In fact if you want to use the included development terminal application you'll need to since there's no way to coax the on-screen keyboard out of hiding.
4. Mini-USB (labeled "OTG"). Like the one which charges most phones. I'd like to say this is for charging or mounting the tablet as a drive on your computer but when connected up nothing happens. I don't know what it's for.
5. Micro-USB (I think; labeled with an ethernet icon). Presumably this is for the included ethernet adapter. I haven't tried this because the twentieth century ended some time ago.
6. MicroSD (labeled "TF"). Ought to take a MicroSD card. Recognizes mine but won't read it.
   

Also around the edge we have:

1. Nowhere for the stylus to go. You'll lose it in minutes.
   
2. A tiny hole labeled with a microphone icon. A microphone might live in there.
   
3. A hole labeled 'reset' which is too small for the stylus to fit. Unfortunate, since this hole's going to see more action than yo momma.
   
4. A rocker-button which looks like it ought to be a volume control. In most situations it isn't; instead "up" means menu and "down" brings up the standard Android task switcher.
5. A power button. We might hope this would put the device into some low-power standby mode like the power button on my HTC Hero but instead it raises a power off dialog that says in the finest engrish "Are you sure shut down?". And then it does. And takes about 15 seconds to start up again. Instant on this ain't.
   

On the front by the screen there is a single iPad-esque button which in most places seems to mean "back" and an LED (red for charging, blue for running). I don't know why we need a blue light to say it's turned on: the presence of icons, programs and well, y'know, stuff on the screen already tells the user this. In fact the constant bright LED is a bit distracting. I might stick some tape over it.

The whole device feels a bit cheaply made and it creaks when flexed.

Nerds! Here's the processor it admits to running:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 5 (v6l)
BogoMIPS : 1005.97
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture : 6TEJ
CPU variant : 0x1
CPU part : 0xb36
CPU revision : 5

Hardware : IMAPX200
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000

A quick peek at /proc/meminfo suggests only 192Mb of ram exists. I don't know where the other 64Mb went - perhaps it's used as screen buffer. Perhaps someone in China got hungry and ate it.

Perhaps the biggest weirdness about the device is that it's damn hard to figure out who made it. It might be made by a company called ZeniThink. "WE ARE MANUFACTORY DIRECT OF Tablet PC!!!" claims the eBay auction Apparently in China companies copy other companies copies of Apple products. Maybe this is a bonafide ePad, maybe it's an ePad rip-off. Hell, can the real ePad stand up? No?

Those kooky communists sure have a weird attitude to intellectual property.




OS and User Interface

The first thing you'll want to do with this baby is charge it. The eBay auction suggests a full 8 hours. It looks like you can still use the device while charging so here we go...

Switch it on for a warm-boot (power button on the side) and you're presented with an "ePad" logo. They've pinched the "e" straight out of the Internet Explorer icon. After a few seconds the home screen pops up - as promised in the description it really is running Android 2.1. It's standard Android fare: taskbar-type-thing at the top and a slider at the bottom to bring out the programs menu, the browser or a file manager.

The next thing that jumps out is how sparsely populated with icons the home screen is. There's a reason for this - even though it's a 1024x600 TFT and the icons are only about 50px tall everything is arranged on a 4x4 grid pattern. It looks downright weird - icons & widgets appear at their usual Android resolution but there's so much space left between you could drive an SUV between them. A 5x10 grid would suit it better.

Another oddity is the android top-bar (someone tell me the correct name for this?). It's grown to about 40px tall to suit the larger screen and has a collection of stuff: time, home button, back button, battery, wifi strength and the volume up/down looking confused after its surprise eviction from the rocker on the side. Icons added by the manufacturer are colourful and fit it well but the standard Android ones (wifi power and, bafflingly, phone signal strength) have been poorly enlarged - they look dithered and bitty.

I start by setting up access to my home wifi. It works well enough for the first half-hour (I browse a few websites) but after turning the device off and on again the tablet loses the ability to see any wireless networks - either my own or the my neighbours. It takes a hard-reset to clear this (hello mr paper clip). A booting screen pops up with a picture of an ashamed-looking Tux and in 30 seconds or so it's up and running again.

The screen is acceptable. It's a 10.2" 1024x600 TFT and the viewing angle's not great but is glossy, colourful & has no dead pixels. Contrast is acceptable but it's far from Apple's high standards. No multitouch (so no pinch-to-zoom) but you can live without it. Applications are fairly responsive - the tablet is packing a 1.2Ghz ARM and it makes all the difference.

Like most Android devices it contains a tilt sensor so the screen automatically rotates to show things the right way up. It's a smart idea; books are best read in portrait format but movies are landscape-shaped. Unfortunately the ePad's tilt sensor doesn't work very well. Sometimes it'll flip the screen around at the slightest provocation, at others it'll stubbornly refuse to and leave you to shake the living daylights out of your tablet until things until "up" becomes up again. I bet they get a lot of returns due to shaken tablet syndrome.

The on-screen keyboard - there's often between a half and one second delay between pressing a "key" and something happening. This might not sound too bad but believe me, if you're used to typing at anything more than five words per minute it's gonna hurt. If you're writing your opus on this you'll want to plug in a USB keyboard.

Next I try to install a MicroSD card (known-working, tested a moment earlier in my Mac). A notification pops up saying "preparing". Sadly it never goes away and the card never becomes usable.

There's no Android Market app - instead it comes with some weird third-party installer. Click on an application to install and nothing happens. Using the browser I visit the websites for a couple of Android app projects and try to download .apk files to install directly. A dialog helpfully tells me that since there's no SD card I can't download anything.

Now I come to test the music & library applications. It ought to make a good media player and ebook application, right?

Wrong. Both tell me "Cannot read SD card". Bummer. Shame, given the whole reason I bought the damn thing was to read documents on.

The browser (standard Android 2.1 fare) works pretty well. Despite this device having twice the CPU grunt of my HTC Hero and hanging off a 10Mbit broadband connection it's still very slow to load pages but once rendered they're pretty and very easy to read. Bookmarks & zooming work in the usual way.

Some of the built-in apps are so bad they're funny. There's a diagnostics app (left in by the developers to help you finish their OS?) which claims a temperature of five degrees celsius (wrong, even my flat is warmer than that) and a battery voltage of zero. Uh, no. There are settings options for "show compass in maps" (uh no, there's no compass built in) and "haptic feedback" - again no, there's no motor built in to make it buzz.

Here I'm starting to touch the root cause of why the ePad is not-great. Android may or may not be ready for use on tablets but the guys who adapted it for this device did a totally half-assed job. There are lots of places (showing more icons on home screen, removing menu options for missing hardware) this shows and the whole interface has an unfinished feel to it.




Conclusions

The ePad is cheap, shonky and plasticy but hey, it costs a third as much as an iPad so I'll forgive it that. The build quality was never going to be great and it has a generous number of ports. Hardware-wise it's good enough.

What really lets the device down is the build of Android. I won't whine about the engrish dialog boxes (they're cute!) but aligning apps & widgets in a 4x4 grid on the home screen is downright strange. Absent hardware is still listed in menu options and the absence of Android Market is absolutely painful. The whole power of IOS & Android is the ease with which you can customize your device with third party apps and without that power you might as well have bought a typewriter. One without any physical keys.

This could be a neat little device. It's light, thin and has a reasonably good screen. I won't be chucking out my Macbook anytime soon but for browsing websites, reading PDF's and watching the odd show on iPlayer it would be perfect. But right now the software totally lets it down.

Tomorrow I'm going to snag myself another MicroSD card then try installing an alternative firmware and try turning it into a useful reading device. But it feels like by the time I've turned an ePad into a useful tablet I might as well have given in and got an iPad.

Buy this if you are poor or a masochist.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 3

The final part of our mock challenge-documentary, where our eyeoreish self-absorbed hero finally makes it home. Or tries to. It's a bit like Ulysses 31 but with public transport instead of spaceships.

If you haven't already seen them read the rest of the series (one, two, three, four) first.


08:25: Awaken from a night of blissful sleep five minutes before the alarm goes off and launch straight into the shower. Launch straight back out of the shower five minutes later to switch it off. Today's improvised shaving substance is "Radox Shower Gel". It also helps remove yesterday's coal from my hair.

09:00: Arrive at station well in time for the 09:47 train to London my notes say I'll be taking home. It doesn't exist. A quick assessment of the timetables reveals the only East Coast train from Inverness to London left two hours ago. Why did the timetable I scribbled down a fortnight ago say otherwise? Damn my handwriting. Am reamed to the tune of £40 for a single ticket to Edinburgh and hop on a local train (full of bloody tourists, not local people) just before it leaves. From there my magic Willy Wonka ticket will start to work again.

09:18: Realise I've left a pair of miniature thumb-cuffs on the window sill at Mrs Thrills' boarding house. I wonder what she'll make of them.

10:59: At Perth I have an idea. When life gives you lemons you should make... a cocktail! I text an old friend in Edinburgh and we arrange to go for Mojitos at Harvey Nichols.

10:50: Hurrah, Forth Bridge after all. It's ancient and rust-coloured, built in a bygone era when everything was constructed for giants by giants. In the space of three days I've seen everything good in Scotland.

13:19: Edinburgh is sweet. So is the friend. Suddenly I'm pleased my notes were wrong.

17:00: After cocktails at Harvey Nicks I board a southbound train. It's packed with millions of uncontrolled kids. I find a seat but meh, no power and the free wifi's dropped from its usual, awful standard to just plain broken. I scrunch up into a very tiny ball and, 8 hours after leaving the Highlands, start to read my tattered copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps. No view but that's okay; after the last two days I'm all landscaped out.

19:47: Leave York late. It's still packed with rowdy children. On closer inspection there are only two children but they are rowdy enough to seem like thousands. Immerse self in Underworld and deliberately fixate upon a combine harvester at work in the evening sunlight. It couldn't symbolize the end of summer harder if it tried.

20:00: The horrid children persevere in their mission to drive everyone mad. Worse still there are two posh, loud, obviously spoiled and very annoying girls sat opposite and I can't decide whether to fancy or loathe them. I settle for both.

20:15: Depart Doncaster 15 minutes late due to "a rowdy passenger on the train which required attention from the police". By now the bog is starting to resemble something from a nightclub. The tannoy keeps going "bong! bong! bong! Attention train guard, please contact the driver". Maybe he can't get the wifi[1] to work either.

20:48: It's getting dark outside. And colder. No matter what direction I travel in it's always getting colder. Heat death of the universe taking effect? Whiny posh tarts are getting restless; without power for their laptops they're having to resort to the lost art of conversation. Despite working in media they aren't good at it.

21:40: Arrive London KX on time. Only kidding.

21:59: Arrive London KX for real.

22:43: HOME


---


Day 3 statistics: Mojitos: 1. Forth Bridges: 1. Apparent rowdy children: 2.96*10^15


So. Like a good arbitrary challenge documentary, what have we learned by the end?

• Complaining works. If they ignore you just complain harder. I've traveled about 1,400 miles this weekend and paid for hardly of them.
• Nothing will make you loathe humanity more than 22 hours spent on public transport.
• Neither of the East Coast trains I used this weekend ran to time. Maybe I'm due a refund on my magic Willy Wonka ticket - compensation on the compensatory offer so I can do the whole thing again? The Highlands must be gorgeous in winter.
• The Scottish Highlands are beautiful. Just don't stay at Mrs Thrills' boarding house.
• A friend says I'm an emotional masochist for doing this. She's probably right.
• Harvey Nicks do great cocktails.

THE END
?




[1] Truth in advertising: all over their literature and trains East Coast trumpet their free wifi. And indeed there is free wifi - you may associate a laptop with the "eastcoast-wifi" network to your heart's content. They do not, however, make any promises that eastcoast-wifi be connected to the Internet.


---


Edit: photos of the expedition here.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 2

It's day 2 of my expedition to the North. Yesterday - battling terrific odds - your hero made it as far north as Inverness. Will his luck hold out or will he suffer a fatal beating with Irn Bru bottles? Read on...


05:00: Can't sleep in this bunker anymore. I get up, shower and read a book.

06:30: After five hours sleep ever I limp out of Mrs Thrills' boarding house. My night has not been eased by the automatic "Freshmatic 3000" air freshener in the bathroom (it precisely simulates the experience of sharing a room with an influenza patient by going "a-shoo!" every five minutes) but at least I slept. I shave with squeezy soap and resign myself to a serrated face for the rest of the day.

07:00: Since breakfast at Mrs Thrills' [1] boarding house is served between 07:30 and 07:31 my bed and breakfast was just "bed". I'm starving. Limp around Inverness to find nothing but tramps and detritus from the night before. It's reassuring to find that even the most picturesque of towns look awful in the morning. A German on a bicycle directs me to the bus station; like bus stations the world over it's fucking grim. Even the obligatory bus-station-man-drinking-Diamond-White agrees.

07:40: Bus arrives. It smells just the way you'd expect the 7:45am Sunday bus in an overcast Scottish town to smell. The clock inside - as it is on all buses throughout the world - reads "22:35". Return ticket to the other side of Scotland costs a bargain £11. My fellow passengers clearly came to Inverness for a night out and haven't yet been to bed; they immediately take their seats, burp and fall asleep. But the driver is... Scottish! I have met my first Scotsman of the trip. Better still he appears to be some kind of bus racing driver.

08:25: The bus climbs out of Inverness. The scenery out here is wild: sheer precipices, mountains on all sides, waterfalls, you name it. The mountaintops are shrouded with mist and soon we are too. It's idyllic, just the way the Highlands are supposed to look.

08:30: St Columba's Well is a real place! Since the rocket-bus is running early I disembark to forage for supplies. St Columba sells me a snickers and a bottle of orange juice for breakfast but he has a suspiciously Midlands accent.

08:50: As we round Loch Ness the sun emerges. Plastic roadside Nessies give way to plastic roadside stags. A succession of even more weirdly named Lochs follow: "Oich", "Lochy", "Eil". No wonder the Romans were too freaked out to conquer Scotland.

09:40: (or "00:30" if you ask the bus) Arrive Fort William five minutes early. All my worrying about late buses was for naught. The Hogwarts Express waits in the station looking like a beautiful thing overrun with tourists. In Harry Potter nobody needed to spend a night in Mrs Thrills' basement or go on a bus smelling of stale highlanders to get to Hogwarts and I rather envy this.

09:55: Board the Hogwarts Express and have a fascinating chat with the driver. Sadly he says I can't have a go. Spoilsport. Get coal all over my jacket anyway.

10:18: Board the boring part of the Hogwarts Express and find my table occupied by a family of frogs with three hyperactive tadpoles. They elect to ruin the next two hours of my life. by squarking constantly (did you know tadpoles can do that?) and playing with bleepy electronic crap. The parental amphibians reinforce this behaviour by giving their little bastards affection whenever they get very rowdy out of the misplaced belief that it'll calm them down. If those kids were mine I'd sell them for glue.

10:31: As the brochures say, this is stunning. Great scenery, remarkable engineering (they literally hacked half the route out of solid granite) and lots of fresh mountain air. I lack the flowery vocabulary to describe how beautiful the journey is but trust me it's worth every penny. The only detraction from this is that many others think so too - the train is packed with noisy tourists. The Hogwarts Express people have a more relaxed attitude to those passengers who elect to ride outside the train, merely remarking "Please take care to avoid hitting trees as they may injure you". Sage advice indeed.

12:25: The steam train arrives at Mallaig perfectly on time. Are you spotting a pattern here? Modes of transport not operated by East Coast tend to be on time, even those run in some of the world's most difficult terrain using antique machinery maintained by hobbyists. I spend the next two hours exploring the harbour and eating lunch.

13:50: Before leaving Mallaig I have decided I must dip my toe in the water. The 20 feet of rocks to clamber down and a fractured ankle are no impediment; I dip the injured appendage into the healing waters of the North Atlantic and in my imagination it heals. [2]

16:30: I find a small park to laze in until the bus arrives. Since Fort William is at the foot of Ben Nevis I call a couple of friends who rented a log cabin here one Christmas and laugh at them for coming out of season. In summer it's great. If the bus wasn't due in 90 minutes I'd climb Ben Nevis, take a photo of myself at the top, name it "You_are_all_pussies.jpg" and mail it to them.

18:10: Bus appears. This one's clock shows no time but at least it smells of perfume instead of Sunday morning. Just as we depart the Caledonian Sleeper pulls into the station; I sigh at it with nerdy glee. The return journey is civilized and uneventful but even prettier than the way out - evening sunlight filters through the trees as it winds around mountain passes and I keep my eyes peeled for fairytale castles, of which there are many. The pubs are still open in Inverness and a pint of Belhaven Best is just what the doctor ordered.

21:30: Back at Mrs Thrills' boarding house. Tonight's room is above the ground, has a comfy double bed and comes with bourbon creams, curtains and a view of Poundland. Truth be told it's pretty habitable and not at all like last night's which was suitable only for masochistic vault-dwellers.


PROPER SLEEP NOW


---


Day 2 conclusions: AWESOME. The Highlands are stunningly beautiful. Steam trains plus Highlands = something even more than stunningly beautiful.



[1] This is a very obscure Spike Milligan reference

[2] I broke my toe a couple of weeks back after betting my father he couldn't cycle across a thousand year old causeway and needing to prove it possible myself. In reality it doesn't heal and Mallaig seawater is no substitute for a knowledgeable podiatrist.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 1

The fated day has arrived! It's time for my Bloody Minded Rush to the North. Armed with only a laptop, a change of clothes and a fractured ankle I'll head for "Mallaig" - a small fishing port on the northern coast of Scotland. An overnight stay in Inverness, 6am start the next day, a two hour coach ride then a further two hours on the Hogwarts Express to dip my toes in the freezing northern sea.

On the spur of the moment I opt to plagiarize the format of the Guardian's blow-by-blow cricket coverage. Ten hours later I will be glad of this.




11:30: Arrive at King's Cross after a sleepless night to discover serious delays; track pizza at Knebworth. Ask the East Coast desk "Can I upgrade to first with this ticket?" - they reply "Yes".

11:40: Train is announced. Platform six. I'd secretly hoped for the newly invented Platform Zero for its weirdness and sentimental value[1]. I find an unreserved seat in first class. It'll cost £25 but hey, given free tea & coffee for eight hours, tons of space and a big window it's worth the expense. A wee Scots girl who can only be described as a young Amy Pond is deposited in the seat opposite by her grandfather. I keep my eyes peeled for Daleks, cracks in time and dizzy Shoreditch timelords.

12:00: Screw the delays, we leave on time. I call the B&B to make sure everything's in order. The well-spoken Scottish gentleman tells me it is.

12:06: Diversion en-route to Peterborough announced due to Knebworthian under a train. They say it'll add a 15 minute delay. It sounds too good to be true. Fortunately the 12:00 to Inverness is too venerable a train to require electricity and so a 20mph trundle around Hertfordshire will circumnavigate the mess. I pity the poor souls who attempted to visit the Edinburgh Festival via more modern transport.

12:40: It's sunny outside and the train is still moving. That's the best I can say about it. Young Amy Pond seems engrossed with her walk-in laptop (it's bigger than she is) - I hope she's writing an East Coast travelogue all of her own.

12:50: We regain the main line. Full steam ahead! A pleasant guard finally appears and boots out all the freeloaders sitting in first class with standard class tickets. I pay my £25.

13:55: The wifi is, as usual, shit. It's been shit ever since East Coast's predecessor made it free - a limited amount of connectivity with several hundred twits all trying to watch iPlayer was never going to work. Scarce resources only work with a nominal free imposed - charging £1 for a password would instantly solve the problem. But I didn't come here to dick around with the Internet, did I. DID I.

14:00: Lincolnshire passes uneventfully, much as it did for the first 18 years of my life. The sun is out. Few things in life are better than racing across the English Landscape on a summer afternoon.

14:40: York. 40 minutes late. If we arrive at Inverness an hour late can I have a refund on my refund? No food remains in the buffet car and passengers are showing early signs of cannibalistic rage. I hide my emergency mars bar.

14:41: I Spy Tornado! [2] She's parked outside York railway station having a drink. Being similarly unencumbered by the requirement for electricity a steam engine is pretty much the only thing to arrive on time today.

15:09: We shudder to a halt somewhere south of Darlington. A shaky-sounding guard squarks "This is a safety announcement: please *do not* stick your heads out of the windows, especially on the right-hand side because this is where the signals are". Oops. Did somebody leave their head behind? Wasn't me.

15:15: We're on the move again so the errant head must have been located. But "problems with the lineside signalling" mean the driver must stop at signals, get out and telephone control for permission to proceed. Somewhere back in York a steam engine is laughing at us.

15:38: The train roars over Durham. In a past life I dated a girl from here. She was horrible. Probably I was horrible too. I eat my Emergency Mars Bar and snarl at the one twunt in this carriage shameless enough to be using an iPad.

15:54: Newcastle. At this point I have to stop imagining I'm Michael Caine in the opening credits to "Get Carter". We're 55 minutes late. Our guard hazards a guess we'll arrive in Inverness at 21:10. Our "person under a train" at Knebworth is now officially a fatality. That's one less fish in the gene pool.

16:45: I can see the sea! The tide's in and Berwick upon Tweed is pretty as a postcard. I want to visit it someday. Judging by how transfixed she is with the view young Amy Pond seems to agree. A poster at the station proclaims "The best of colliery bands - out now!" and if the wifi wasn't so broken I'd buy it to listen to right now. From here the train skirts the clifftops for some miles and the views are stunning.

16:50: Scotland! I hide my Pret a Manger Pomegranate water for fear of a kicking. Everything here is gorgeous, even the nuclear power station. I always listen to All About Eve's "best of" album on this part of the journey; as a result I'll always connect the goth-hippy song "What kind of fool?" with the power of the mighty atom.

17:30: Edinburgh; 1 hour late. Amy Pond disembarks with her own bodyweight in luggage and an angry parent on the phone. Kids, don't carry mobiles - your parents will only use them to tell you off.

17:40: Still Edinburgh. "We are sorry for the further delay; this is due to a defective door on the driver's power car". I put on the Cocteau Twins' calming "Heaven or Las Vegas".

17:45: Depart Edinburgh 72 minutes late. Seriously, can I get a refund on a refund ticket? And hmph, I thought we were going to cross for Forth Bridge. It emerges that the "problem with the power car door" was that at a previous stop someone had put luggage in there, the staff locked it and then lost the key. They had to crowbar it open.

18:10: Pottering around Scotland at 20mph - apparently we are stuck behind a local train since nobody expected the express to turn up an hour and a quarter late. I'm strangely not furious - at least it's a sunny evening and everybody's being pleasant about it.

18:30: Stirling - 1h15 late. As we leave I notice something adorable: even in the year 2010 civilized people still teach their children to wave at trains. The landscape grows increasingly hilly; it's still sunny out there with the occasional low-lying cloud. What a beautiful evening. I hope I there's a pub near the B&B.

19:07: Perth. 1h09 late. At least the staff have found some more food and are keeping us well fed. Cannibalism outbreak aboard the 12:00 has been averted. At least one passenger is started massaging her legs for fear of deep-vein thrombosis. Staff are handing out refund forms, which is nice of them.

19:51: I finish catching up on a fortnight's worth of New Scientist. Glance out of the window and spy... geese! Weather is getting cold and ominous-looking. Perhaps I should have brought more than a thin jacket. Perhaps I'll die up here.

20:04: Mountains. Loads of the buggers. And dark, brooding clouds. Scotland is so dramatic.

20:19: The guard (did I mention he's lovely?) turns up, stamps my free compensatory return ticket and opines that I'm probably due a free compensatory compensatory return. I joke "see you again next month then". If it really happens I'll eat my hat.

20:36: The train continues to trundle around little Highland branch lines. Think single-track, clinging to mountainsides, that sort of thing. A team of mountain ponies would find this hard going. Why did we bring an Intercity 125? Only a handful of passengers remain, mostly looking scared and confused. It's getting cold and dark. I thought at these latitudes it was supposed to stay light all night?

21:11: Arrive at Inverness. Hobble to taxi rank. Cab to B&B.

21:30: ...who've never heard of me! In fact the well-spoken Scotsman who took my booking has been replaced by a brusque Eastern European lady with poor English. I press them and point out, repeatedly, that I've had the room booked for a month and even telephoned nine hours ago to check. The cross Eastern European is forced to sort it out. Emerges that the well-spoken Scotsman is Somewhere Else and merely handles the bookings, texting them (along with credit card details!?) to her to action. And the first day of my booking was lost. Nice. I make them give me the one remaining room for the price of a single and am tempted to report them to VISA.

21:45: Basement room is, uh... well it has a bed in it and cost £35. It'll have to do. It lacks phone coverage, daylight or a working TV and would suit even the most demanding of masochists. At least the place has wifi.

SLEEP NOW.



---


Day 1 conclusions: it is quicker to fly to New York from my house than it is to get the train to Inverness. East Coast trains seem very accident prone but at least the staff were nice. B&B's are atrocious. Always travel with an Emergency Mars Bar.

Day 1 statistics: Suicides: 1, Signal failures: 1, Keys to the engine lost: 1, Atrocious B&B's: 1.





[1] I once spent six months on a project to build a high-performance web architecture known as "Platform Zero". It was not a success.

[2] For the uninitiated: Tornado is a steam engine constructed by epic nerds in their shed. My dad built one of the lamp brackets. Having made their own locomotive from scratch they now drive it around Britain's railways for shits 'n giggles. No train journey is complete without a game of "I Spy Tornado" - it's a bit like "Where's Wally" only the protagonist eats coal and needs a 5,000 gallon drink from the Fire Brigade every couple of hours.

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 2

Apropos of the original post...

Arrived home in London last week to discover... one free Anytime Return to Inverness valid from August 14th. They even booked me a seat.

Have arranged B&B and a copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps to read on the way.

Will I stay for one night or spend a few days exploring Scotland? Place bets now!

Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition

Let's start with the backstory.

Two months ago I had a crappy experience with East Coast. Terribly late, poor information about the problem, bad organization[*], rude staff, the works. Ticked every box on the "crap railway journey" checklist. Arrived back in London too late to get home and had to harangue the few remaining staff at King's Cross into paying for a cab (initially they insisted I take the night bus back to SE4 - two hours of pot smoke and ringtones with a high chance of stabbing. Thanks guys, that's real courtesy.). Others came off even worse - one poor girl needed a taxi all the way to Aldershot.

Never one to miss a bit of righteous indignation I wrote them a letter.

A bit self-important but hey, if you treat your customers like crap it shouldn't go unremarked. If the British weren't such masochists they'd get a lot more respect from business. I mailed it off with proof of purchase like their website asks and because I'm an untrusting sod took a copy of the tickets first.

Lucky I did. Six weeks later, nothing. Rather than letting it drop I get really mad. Phone calls never work - nothing said on the phone is provable (except if you're the one who recorded it for "fact verification purposes") so I write another letter. This time it's sent recorded delivery and by now I'm really, really pissed off.

Four days later, something. Three pages of it. "I have checked our records and your original letter never arrived" [paraphrased]... "we aim to answer all queries within 10 working days" ['aim', not guarantee - I might similarly express an aim to swim to the moon]... "I am concerned that you are unhappy"... "offer you a standard class complementary return journey for one person on any of our services...".

Probably the best I'm going to get. It's reasonable to protect their employees privacy by not cc'ing an irate passenger customer[*] into the disciplinary process but asserting that the complaint never arrived? Hm. My cynical side wonders if it's just an foolproof way to deter the laziest 80% of complainants.

Something in their response catches my eye.

You say any of your services...

Most people (well, the tiny subset of most people who care at all) think East Coast run their trains from London to Edinburgh. A handful continue to Aberdeen. Time for a chat with my train buff father...

It turns out they don't. Heaven knows why but East Coast run one train a day to Inverness. Departs London at midday and arrives on the icy northern tundra, 568 miles away, precisely eight hours and eight minutes later. About the same time it takes to fly to New York but with fewer skyscrapers. (I don't actually know what goes on in Inverness, I've never been there before). Do it at the weekend and for £25 each way you can upgrade to first. North of Newcastle it's one of the most picturesque rail journeys in the world and there's free wifi all the way. Two days programming time with excellent views, free at-seat refreshments and hell, I needn't even log off Facebook.

So I do what any footloose and fancy free IT consultant would. I'm off to the Scottish Highlands in a 125mph air-conditioned office powered entirely by righteous anger in...



"Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition"


Watch this space.





[1] When a train's already so late the passengers are due refunds why delay it even more to catch a fare dodger? What revenue have you lost? Muppets.
[2] At what point did passengers become customers? What's the difference? Semantic juggling at some mid-privatisation 90's head office for shits 'n giggles or do "customers" have fewer rights?

Privacy, you and the 2010 Election

I've been in two minds about posting this. It's preachy and inflammatory (woohoo, Internet!) and an illiterate squeal. Others discuss these issues more lucidly. Besides, there's nothing so unsexy as talking politics.

Really I feel like I have to. Sticking one's head in the sand and going "lalala" instead of criticising actions you think are really, genuinely bad would be the lamest thing of all.

Before starting let's make something clear: if at any point while reading this the phrase "but I have nothing to hide" crosses your mind, read this then drown yourself. You either don't have much imagination or go to bed every night cuddling a well-thumbed copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.





If you support Labour in the coming election you're supporting:

• State powers to snoop on your email, facebook, location, web, SMS and call history and preserve them for months via the Intercept Modernisation Programme. Ask your Labour MP (I did) and they'll spin a yarn about only reading the headers / it being vital to stop evil in the world / we promise only to use it for serious crimes. Google some phrases from their response and you'll most likely find they parroted it from the officially supplied literature. Press them (again, I did) and they'll waffle tabloid-friendly claims about how much safer we'll all be when the police know our every movement. Get that? They want to record your email traffic, web usage and physical location at all times.
• HMRC powers to open your letters (!) - ostensibly "to combat tobacco smuggling" but really usable whenever a tax inspector deems it necessary.
• Policy-based evidence making. This isn't just a funny term - it describes how those in power choose a policy to follow then invent evidence to justify it, usually supported by a lazy media. Cf. war in Iraq, banning of ill-defined "violent porn".
• ID cards. They'll keep on trying.
• Mandatory CRB checks for anyone who works with children to combat the utterly overblown paedophile threat. This means you need, effectively, to seek the state's permission before going near anyone else's children. This is moronic; apart from the insult implied by deeming everyone a potential nonce the chilling effect it has on voluntary work with kids (Scouts? Football practice?) will be greatly to their detriment.
• Unmanned spy balloons operated 24x7 by police to watch people from many miles away to "greatly extend" the government's surveillance capacity and "revolutionise policing". Don't you love the phrase "revolutionize policing"? Just think of the possibilities...

Policymakers in the current government have a heartfelt belief in the ability of a controlling state to cure all ills and bring about their version of utopia. "We watch you", they think, "to save you from yourselves". The slew of laws they've introduced prescribing widespread state monitoring of the populace demonstrate an utter disregard for the privacy & liberty of individuals. Which means us. And if they win the next election it's going to get a whole lot worse.

Please, don't vote for these thugs.