Mobile Phones Blog

From the 1st of February, O2 will go live with new pricing plans for iPhone customers, providing more minutes and texts.

Customers on a £35 per month contract will now get 600 minutes instead of the previous 200, and the 200 texts has also been bumped up to 500 a month. £45 a month now gets you 1200 minutes and 500 texts, the same as was available to customers on the previous £55 contract.

£55 a month customers will have the option of being able to switch to the new £45 tariff, thereby saving £10 a month, or upgrade to a new £75 tariff which gives customers 3000 minutes and 500 texts.

A new £1 flat rate for occasional mobile surfers is also being introduced for those who have exceeded the FUP of the unlimited data plan. Charges are billed at approximately 5p a page but users will be capped once they reach the £1 ceiling limit.

Edit: Existing iPhone customers will be eligible for a contract upgrade as of the 7th of February 2008.

LG’s Viewty has been a runaway success. The manufacturer recently published sales figures for the ultra stylish smartphone; 550,000 units since its launch in November, making it the most popular LG model yet, which is a massive boost for the mobile phones division of the Korean black goods company.

LG CEO and President Dr Skott Ahn said: “We knew we had something special when we created Viewty, and it turns out that over half a million customers agree with us.” Following on from the success of the original Viewty, LG have announced the launch of the new Dark Silver version, apparently due for a release next week, although we’ve not been able to coax anything resembling a European release date out of our sources. We can reveal that LG are planning on releasing a number of Viewty handsets in other colours as well.

The same great features that made the original Viewty a winner remain - 5.0 Megapixel camera, 3” touchscreen interface, HSDPA and 3G capabilities. The only real difference of this version, besides the shiny silvery chassis, is that the responsiveness of the jogwheel had been tweaked slightly so scrolling through pages and menus is now that little bit smoother. This aside, the Dark Silver is the same great smartphone dressed up in a new metallic jacket.

Social networking giant of the moment Facebook is in talk with Nokia over a mobile app that could see the site built into hundreds of thousands of phone handsets as a standard feature, echoing the YouTube link on the main menu of the iPhone.

Echoing the earlier deal with BlackBerry manufactures Research in Motion, Nokia is said to be working on configuring handset-specific versions of Facebook which will be optimised on the specifications of each phone, i.e. screen size, processing power, memory etc.

Nokia is also reported to be negotiating with Facebook about buying a small stake in the company and an unnamed executive confirmed that “a partnership is in the works”. Both developments would give Facebook a healthy foothold in the mobile market.

Facebook’s success has been attributed to it’s layout - Spartan in comparison to the infinitely customisable clutter of MySpace - which distils the essence of online social networking; friend and contact lists, blogging and picture galleries. We would like to see Nokia implement a function for camera phones which would allow pictures to be uploaded to a user’s Facebook profile immediately after it had been taken. O2 currently has a deal with Facebook, which allows users to browse the site without eating into monthly data costs.

Facebook already offers its own mobile application that can be used to upload photos, notes and to exchange messages on the site, and a search function for user’s phone numbers.

Touch-sensitive phones seem to be LG’s forte. After the huge success of the Chocolate, which responded to the touch with its signature red inner glow, LG then dolled itself up for the catwalk with the PRADA, a sort of proto-iPhone for the über-fashion conscious which paved the way for the equally fetching U990 Viewty.

For their next trick, LG have come up with an interesting design for their forthcoming touchy feely product. The KF600 handset comes in the form of a typical slimline slider, with the main numerical keys hidden underneath, but comes with two front-mounted displays. When the phone is opened, the multi-function softkey touchscreen on the lower part of the front - called the InteractPad - is activated.

When viewing images, the InteractPad is used zoom in and out, rotate and send images, and when playing music, play, pause and skip keys are displayed.

In terms of spec, all we know is that it comes with a 3 Megapixel camera, GPRS/EDGE connectivity, and Bluetooth 2.0/USB for direct file transfer. No price or release date for western Europe has been specified yet, but expect it to cost a pretty penny.

Vodafone is punting a new USB modem for their mobile broadband service called ‘The Stick’.

Currently only available in parts of central London and at major airports, but with a nationwide rollout expected to follow very soon, the Stick allows users to enjoy download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps and upload speeds of up to 1.44Mbps, and is available for £49, on a £25 a month 18-month contract.

Both Mac and PC users will be able to use the Stick, which is significantly smaller than your average USB dongle, resembling a standard USB Flash drive. The Stick marks Vodafone’s HSUPA high speed mobile broadband service which was launched in December.

“Vodafone was the first to improve download speeds with HSDPA and the first to increase upload speeds with HSUPA,” says Kyle Whitehill, Enterprise Director at Vodafone UK.

O2 are currently giving away 20 new iPod Touches to customers who top up £20 or more before the 31st of January. Dialling 4444 and topping up £20 in a single transaction on an O2 Pay & Go contract sees you eligible for entry (topping up £10 twice in one day won’t), and customers can enter as many times as they like.

The 20 winners will be selected at random from all the entries, and the draw will take place on Friday 15th February, with the winners being notified the following Friday on the 22nd.

Apple has announced that within the next six months, the prices of music tracks on the UK iTunes Store will have to drop to fall in line with other European countries, or it will withdraw the sale of music in the UK from record companies who refuse to play ball.

Currently, UK customers pay as little as 79p per track on iTunes, whilst European punters pay the equivalent of roughly 66p - iTunes pricing has more or less harmonized across the rest of Europe, whereas customers in Rip-Off Blighty have, since day one, paid more for the same.

Apple lays the blame at the doors of certain record companies, and said in a statement that it “will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months.”

This move has not entirely come of Apple’s own volition - it is more than likely they were given a nudge in this direction by the EC, who have also been sniffing around the majors as part of the same investigation into tiered iTunes pricing. Apple have argued that they have always been for a single, pan-European pricing structure, but have been forced to up UK prices due to greater distribution charges.

Seemingly seconds after it was announced that the iPhone was getting its first proper firmware overhaul, Nokia released details on update15.0.015 for the 8GB version of the N95.

The Nokia code monkeys have been busy tinkering so that the overall performance of the phone will be generally faster. The start-up time of the phone is significantly faster, and the speed of data transfer over USB has also been pimped out.

Among other minor tweaks to the overall performance of the phone, is the addition of Flash 3, which means that videos incorporating Flash can be viewed on YouTube et al.

Us lot at mobile phones took a well deserved break and went to the pictures this weekend; although it turned out even at the cinema there was no refuge.

Sampling the pre-feature adverts and trailers is part of the movie going experience - but we couldn’t help but note the volume of mobile phone-related ads doing the rounds.

First up was the Orange advert where people launch and unroll a series of rainbow-based streamers and rolls of carpet across a cityscape, as sort of spiritual cousin of the ad for the Sony Bravia flatscreens where the paint explodes all over the blocks of flats and the Guinness ad where the dominoes, books and mattresses all topple over.

There was a new Phones 4 U ad, featuring the sharp-suited sign language guy, a kid looking out to sea with binoculars - but sadly not the Bobby Gillespie lookalike who said ‘Yeah!’ a lot - promoting the LG Viewty.

The Nokia N95 8GB is represented by an unbelievably pretentious piece, which could rival car adverts in terms of scope for ridicule. Ostensibly meant to simulate a film trailer, the ad does little to promote the features of this brilliant piece of hardware, apart from a few seconds at the end of the clip, which shows the phone playing movie footage, a Gradius-esque videogame and displaying hi-res piccies. It instead features the repeated phrase ‘the next episode is about to begin’, some shots of urban skylines and a smug git in a rollneck pullover.

Before the main movie started, there was of course, the now-institutional Orange turn-off-your-mobile ad, this time with an all-grown up Macaulay Culkin trying to shed his ‘kiddie’ image by doing a prison movie, whilst Mr Dresden and his assistant Burnley, this time punting Orange Home Broadband, have other ideas.

Broadband, fixed line and digital TV supplier Tiscali intend to turn up the heat on its main market rivals Virgin, BT and the Carphone Warehouse this year. The Italy-based communications company is planning to launch mobile phone network services in the UK in the last quarter of 2008 - Tiscali chief executive Mary Turner said to The Telegraph: “The assessment is not if, it is who and when. The business case has already been approved by the board.”

This will see Tiscali following in the footsteps of Virgin Media, by becoming the UK’s second ‘quad-play’ provider, should they beat Orange - supposedly getting ready to launch their own IPTV platform - to the punch.

When Tiscali purchased the ISP Toucan last summer, they also acquired the developing Toucan mobile phone service, which piggybacks on T-Mobile’s network.