Vodafone, 3 and T-Mobile have just called last orders at the bar for Christmas shopping –customers wishing to order anything from Vodafone or 3 online will have to place their order before 5PM this afternoon if they want their orders processed before everyone goes home for Winterval.
Orders can still be placed at the respective websites, but due to the festive holiday season, the orders won’t be processed until Vodafone and 3 staff have finally woken up after the yuletide dietary onslaught of turkey and multiple Baileys.
So if you had your eyes set on getting either the Sony Ericsson K850i or the LG Viewty on either of those networks, or were planning on getting a mobile broadband dongle for someone’s Chrimbo stocking then you should get busy.
Speaking of mobile broadband, 3 have just released a range of fancy coloured dongles for the fashion conscious laptop user – Noir for the gents and Rose for the ladies.
Orange have informed us that their last day of online trading before Christmas is Thursday (i.e. tomorrow) and O2 will be the last to shut up shop on Friday.
Posted by Tom on December 19th 2007 in General, LG, O2, Orange, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, Three
Some O2 customers will have received a text from the network this morning, informing them that basic signal coverage in their local area has increased. Mobile Phones logged in and checked the UK Coverage section of the O2 site and saw that standard coverage – voice calls and SMS – has greatly extended across areas where signal was variable and patchy at best.
Posted by Tom on December 18th 2007 in O2
Orange announced the development of their IPTV service back in September, with a view to having it ready for its broadband customers to start using by Christmas – noises from the company indicate that nationwide roll out isn’t due to happen for a while yet.
Despite Orange inking lucrative deals with the likes of Disney and ABC, initial trials held in London and Leeds seeming to be going off without a hitch, and the mobile network’s parent company running a successful IPTV operation in France, the telco seems to want to expand its base of broadband customers before going ahead.
Currently, Orange’s broadband footprint is said to cover slightly less than 50% of the UK population; more investment in infrastructure is required before the service can be launched, in order to maximise the earning potential of the venture, say analysts.
Network rivals Virgin Mobile are part of the Virgin Media Quadplay group, and are competing directly with Orange in the converged mobile-broadband markets - Orange’s entry into digital TV would see the network and ISP compete with Virgin on a third front as well. Also embroiled in the multi-market melee is O2, who recently launched their ADSL2+ broadband service to users on the Be Broadband network.
Posted by Tom on December 17th 2007 in General, O2, Orange, Virgin Mobile
We get a fair amount of feedback here at Mobile Phones, and so as a sort of early Christmas present to our readers, we’ve recently launched our shiny brand new My Account section, from where you can upload your own thoughts, views and reviews on your old and existing mobiles, networks, tariffs and any comments you might have on mobiles in general.
Your comments and reviews will be posted on the relevant phone pages and network pages of the main Mobile Phones site for all to see, read and comment on. You can sign up or login to your My Account page from the links in the top right corner of any of the pages on this site, or on the ones we’ve helpfully embedded in this very sentence.
From the main My Account page, you can update your account settings (name, email address, password etc), post your reviews/comments and subscribe/unsubscribe to the newsletter, our blog and the various news feeds.
My Account - you saw it here first!
Posted by Tom on December 17th 2007 in General
It was only really a matter of time before it happened – Wiltshire Constabulary police are on the lookout for two men who pinched a pair of smartphones from the local Carphone Warehouse store yesterday afternoon.
According to a post on thisiswiltshire.co.uk, the two men entered the shop and asked to see a demonstration of the iPhone, along with a Sony Ericsson K850i – they then swiped the phones and did a runner.
CW store manager Steven Harbour is quoted saying: “They knew what they were looking for. They had this story about their girlfriends wanting these phones but they wanted to check if they were right for them. When we put them on the counter they jumped grabbed them and ran. We heard later that they got stopped by a traffic checkpoint and the woman driver was arrested. The two blokes ran off. Who said chivalry was dead?”
The 25 year-old unnamed driver, thought not to be from the area, has been arrested.
Posted by Tom on December 15th 2007 in General, Sony Ericsson, iPhone
Picture messaging is becoming more and more popular in the UK according to a report published by Orange yesterday - 15.4 million Orange customers revealed a 37% surge in picture messaging since May this year. Orange says the growth is down to the improved quality of cameraphones and the growth of platforms such as Bluetooth which simplify data transfer.
According to Orange, there were more than a million upload of photos from handsets to online photo albums in August alone. “Coupled with mobile operator tie-ups with social network brands such as Bebo, mobile phones are quickly providing customers with yet another way of connecting with others in the way that text messaging did 10 years ago,” said Orange director of portals Matthew Kirk.
More than 7million MMS messages are sent each month, and slightly more by girls than fellas. There has also been a rise in the popularity of mobile games such as Sudoku and hangman, again put down to technological improvements and the rise of smartphones with large displays.
Orange says one of its most popular games on phones is a mobile version of the TV show Deal or No Deal, which fulfils a growing demand for short games that fill gaps like a bus journey. “Figures suggest a growing trend of casual gaming - more people downloading a game simply to kill time,” says Orange’s head of entertainment, Gavin Forth.
Downloads of music files are also up 15% from six months ago; Orange predict that mobile music downloads will have more than doubled by the end of the financial year.
Posted by Tom on December 11th 2007 in General, Orange
It’s no secret that the iPhone was inevitable after the arrival of the iPod and the proliferation of mobile phone use. With Apple’s emergence into the mobile market, the main players are wary of the new wonder product having a similar ‘Death Star’ affect on the mobile market as the iPod had on the music industry and so a rather predictable scramble for deals between mobile operators manufacturers and music companies ensued.
Edgar Bronfman, the chairman and chief executive of Warner Music, has said that the mobile platform represents “the biggest opportunity for entertainment generally and music specifically”. Kim Bayley, director-general of the UK Entertainment Retailers Association, recently voiced the opinion of many that DRM is “stifling growth and [is] working against the consumer interest.”
We’ve taken a brief look at the main players in the mobile music market and how they shape up against the mighty iTunes.
iPhone/iTunes – The iPod, iTunes Store and the iMac – the Holy Trinity – reversed the fortunes of Apple at the turn of the century after several water-treading years in the mid-nineties, and fundamentally altered the landscape of the recording industry. Apple has recently taken the bold step to un-DRM a wide selection of their library. iTunes is available for download on Macs and Windows PCs and, of course, the iPhone. Average track price: 79p
Vodafone MusicStation – Launched this September, Vodafone’s MusicStation offers Vodafone mobile customers access to a vast catalogue of 1.2million tracks for just £1.99 a week. There is a social networking/Last.fm/Facebook element to MusicStation as well – users create profiles on sign up and can add friends and share playlists. The service, run in conjunction with music company Omniphone, is set to be rolled out to BlackBerry users and other handsets soon. Average track price: £1.99 a week for unlimited track downloads (FUP applies).
Orange Music Store – Running using the Musiwave platform, which is rumoured to be bought out by long-standing Apple rival Microsoft, Orange’s own Music Store offers a wide range of tracks drawing on an extensive library – still has some way to go in terms of matching iTunes for variety though, and it is not compatible with Macs or Firefox. Average track price: 99p
Nokia Music Store/Comes With Music – The N95 and it’s 8GB brother have both been hailed as iPhone killers. Nokia operate two mobile music platforms; their own Music Store and Comes With Music, with the former offering customers individual tracks from as little as 80p and whole albums for £8, and the latter (due to launch ‘mid-2008′) offering access to a ‘free’ library of DRM’d files. Average track price: 80p
Mobile Music Morgue
Virgin Mobile’s Virgin Digital platform was canned earlier this year after the Windows Media-based iTunes alternative failed to take off. Because of DRM restrictions, customers presumably resorted to backing up files of the music that they’d already paid for to blank CD-Rs. O2 Music has been quietly dropped from their website, presumably a clause of the deal done with Apple.
Posted by Tom on December 11th 2007 in BlackBerry, General, Nokia, O2, Orange, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone, iPhone
Some people have all the luck – as if entering the history books and having your picture taken for the red tops whilst hobnobbing with supermodels wasn’t enough, Formula One legend in the making Lewis Hamilton has been given a free Samsung F700 phone for Christmas, courtesy of McLaren sponsors Vodafone.
The gift is part of the sponsorship deal the mobile network has with the McLaren team – Hamilton turned up at the Vodafone Store in Oxford Street this week along with Tim Yates from Vodafone, and Mark Mitchinson from Samsung.
Along with LG’s Viewty, the F700 has been touted as a contender to the iPhone crown. It features a touch screen, five megapixel camera, HTML browsing and slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The main menu features a dedicated key which takes users straight to the Vodafone Music Store, which boasts an archive of over 1.4 million songs.
Lewis Hamilton did his bit for the promotional jaunt: “The F700 is very useful as I can now listen to music and contact people all on one device. It’s great having access to the Vodafone Music Store as it gives me access to so many tracks, which is important to me as music plays a big part in my life.”
Presumably Hamilton isn’t doing this whilst behind the wheel – police are still reigning in drivers who continue to use their phones, despite figures now showing a 40% fall in in-car mobile use.
Posted by Tom on December 7th 2007 in General, LG, Samsung, Vodafone, iPhone
BlackBerry makers Research in Motion (RIM) said last week that they intend to push their top selling range of handsets toward small to medium (SME) business clients, and in their own words, take the BlackBerry “out of the boardroom”.
James Hart, head of marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa said that “SMEs make up about half of the UK’s organisations. It’s fundamental to deliver our platform in a more streamlined way.”
RIM have just launched BlackBerry Professional Software Express to facilitate this – up to 30 users can sync their handsets to their business networks’ email, which should be more than enough for most SMEs with staff who require mobile email access.
Focusing to drive SME sales however, is only part of RIM’s strategy for 2008. “We’ll continue to invest in large enterprises, which is our core business.”
Posted by Tom on December 6th 2007 in BlackBerry, General
O2 UK CEO Matthew Key has been promoted to chairman and CEO of Telefónica O2 Europe, replacing former head honcho Peter Erskine.
Formerly the financial director at Vodafone, Key jumped ship to O2 in 2002 as chief financial officer, becoming CEO three years later. Over the last year he has steered the network through a remarkable period of growth, ratcheting up a string of successes, including bagging the exclusive UK rights to the iPhone, the acquisition of the Be Broadband network and subsequent launch of O2 Broadband, and the sponsoring of many live performances including the stage version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the rebirth of the Millennium Dome, now almost exclusively referred to as the O2, as a live music venue.
Telefónica executive chairman César Alierta said: “Under Matthew’s leadership, O2 UK has grown its revenue and profitability more than all of its competitors combined and has become a partner of choice in the UK market, with highly successful collaborations with world-leading brands such as Tesco and Apple. In his new role, I am confident that he will continue to build on the strong position of Telefónica in the highly competitive European markets.”
Key will replace Erskine on the 1st of February 2008, but the current chief executive will remain a member of the Telefónica board.
Posted by Tom on December 6th 2007 in General, O2, Vodafone, iPhone
