Mobile Phones Blog

The so-called Crackberry addiction is now so endemic that business clients can’t seem to leave their PDAs alone, even on a family day out. It has got so bad that leading UK theme park Alton Towers - home of rides such as the Nemesis and Oblivion - have issued a ban on Blackberries, smartphones and any similar PDA-type device being used by adults.

Russell Barnes, a director of the theme park, said: “We feel it’s so important for parents and kids to focus on nothing more than having the best possible time, we are prepared to take drastic action to ensure that parents really leave their work behind.”

‘PDA Police’ will be onsite to enforce the ban and any adult caught using a PDA whilst at the park will be asked to report to one of five “PDA Drop Off Zones” where they can safely leave their PDA’s for the day. The scheme is to pilot over the half term, and if successful, will become a full-time policy.

Arun Sarin has just announced a shock departure from Vodafone. After nearly five years of helmsmanship which saw the mobile group’s profits pass £10bn for the last business year, the chief executive stood down, making way for his deputy Vittorio Colao to take over the reins. The handover will take place after the mobile firm’s Annual General Meeting 29 July 2008.

He said: “I feel that I have accomplished what I set out to achieve, particularly in developing and implementing a new strategy… I know that the business is in capable hands with Vittorio Colao. Having worked with him for many years I know that he has the experience and vision to take Vodafone on to future success.”

Since taking over in July 2003, replacing Sir Christopher Gent, Sarin successfully saw off a boardroom revolt which nearly saw him removed from his position, and steered the company into new territory, expanding the Vodafone brand into Eastern Europe, Turkey and India. Sarin also invested roughly £6billion in 3G licences, giving Vodafone the lead in unrolling high-speed mobile data and mobile broadband products.

The fashion phone battle takes yet another turn as it emerges that renowned French fashion and perfume powerhouse Christian Dior have followed in the pedicured footsteps of fashion rivals Prada and Giorgio Armani by lending their designer talents to a mobile phone manufacturer.

Unlike Prada and Armani, who went overseas to work respectively with Korean giants LG and Samsung, Dior have opted to keep their business partnership a more domestic affair by hooking up with the French phone company ModeLabs Group SA - a fitting union seeing as ‘Mode’ is French for ‘fashion’.

The handset itself is of the clamshell variety, with its exterior styled to resemble a perfume bottle, and features a touchscreen display, camera, quad band, and a unique ‘micro phone’ device called My Dior - we’re not quite sure how it works, we think it’s meant to act as a remote control which clips to the exterior of a handbag (which, naturally, would also be by Dior) in order to act as a sort of life line, avoiding any frantic scrambling for incoming calls.

At $5000 a throw, the Dior look doesn’t come cheap, meaning that this catwalk queen has more in common with Nokia Vertu’s exorbitantly priced Ferrari Phone.

Bit of an unorthodox offer from us here at Mobile Phones, but it’s such a good deal we couldn’t resist. This little Bank Holiday saver, again, from E2Save, allows customers to sign up for an Acer 5315 laptop which comes with a 120GB hard drive, 1GB of memory and Windows Vista Home Premium for just £29.00 - a tenth of the RRP!

The deal also comes with a T-Mobile Web n Walk Plus Mobile Broadband contract, which allows you to connect to the world wide interweb wherever there’s mobile phone signal, at speeds of 1.8Mbps.

This 18 month contract costs £15 a month, which more or less sees you paying out the same total amount for the laptop (£299.99) over the period of the contract, so you’re effectively getting a new laptop with a free mobile broadband contract thrown in to the bargain. Contract details are below - note that the one-off charge for the laptop (£29.00) is not included.

Network: T-Mobile
Tariff: £15 a month
Minutes: N/A
Messages: N/A
Data: 3GB per month
Cost: £15 a month

To order, please click here.

Bank Holidays suck, it’s an official fact. No one will be able to go anywhere because the roads will be congested, the price of petrol has apparently been climbing at a rate of a penny a second, and the holidays effectively mean that everyone gets paid a day late.

For this bank holiday weekend, E2Save have begun rolling with a series of exclusive deals that are maddeningly good value for money. The first one we’re featuring gets you the Silver version of the Samsung Soul FREE on Orange, on a Dolphin £35 contract which gives you 600 minutes a month, and unlimited texts.

This is a pretty good deal in itself and it gets even better when you realise that it's possible to claim back half the value the first 11 months of this 18 month contract by redemption, bringing the effective monthly cost down to under £25. Can you say bargain? Tariff details are below:

Network: Orange
Tariff: £35 a month
Minutes: 600
Messages: Unlimited
Data: N/A
Cost: £24.31 a month (providing successful claims are made)

To order, please click here:

OK, so the iPhone is here, combining all the functions of a mobile phone and a sophisticated multi media playing device, pretty much negates the need for people to carry around both an iPod and a mobile.

But like, church and state, peanut butter and jam, rap and rock, some people like to keep things separate. Mobiles.co.uk are currently giving away 8GB Apple iPod Nanos for free with a whole host of handsets on selected tariffs. We picked the Nokia N73 on T-Mobile because we felt it was one of the better deals going - 1000 mins, Unlimited texts for £40 a month with a free iPod Nano (RRP £99.99) thrown in - but there are plenty more available on the site. The full details for this particular deal are featured below:

Network: T-Mobile
Tariff: £40 a month
Minutes: 1000
Messages: Unlimited
Data: N/A
Cost: £30 a month

To order, click here.

Leading web content providers uClick have just announced that IDW Publishing, producers of the cult horror graphic novel series 30 Days of Night, will be bringing their titles to uclick’s burgeoning GoComics platform, which allows smartphones users to read comic books on their mobile phones, panel by panel.

GoComics has been running for some time now, but we were only just alerted to this the other day when we were Googling for rumours of Sin City 2 - 30 Days was fairly recently turned into a feature length film, starring Josh Harnett, who also featured in the original Sin City.

This got us thinking that of all the potential mobile media formats, comic books could work very well, as more and more handsets - iPhones, Viewtys, BlackBerrys - are coming with bigger screens with sharper resolutions, and those with touchscreen interfaces could implement some kind of ‘page turning’ effect once you reach the end of a series of panels. We reckon it’s only a matter of time before a mobile phone version of The Sun’s Dear Deirdre's Photo Casebook is launched and becomes an internet phenomenon.

GoComics already boasts an impressive roster of titles for mobile customers, including Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, and Garfield and IDW Publishing join the ranks alongside big-name publishers including Image Comics, Virgin Comics, and TOKYOPOP.

UK customers can sign up with GoComics by simply entering their mobile number and following the SMS instructions, or heading over to m.gocmics.com on the mobile browser.

A post over on the Mobiles.co.uk blog has alerted us to the presence of the forthcoming Nokia 5220 music mobile, a slimline candybar handset that’s part of the Xpress Music range of phones which are focussed primarily on music playing capabilities.

Boasting a mighty 24 hour MP3 playback time on a single battery charge, the 5220 comes with dedicated music keys, and a 3.5mm audio output jack, allowing for a variety of headphones to be used with the phone. Full Bluetooth 2.0 support is included as standard for headset pairing and file swapping, and stereo FM radio is also on board. The handset comes with 30MB of internal memory, but this can be increased with the addition of a microSD memory card, beefing capacity up to 8GB.

Despite coming in a more conventional candybar shape, Nokia haven’t forfeited design and style with the 5220 - as you can see from the pic, its outline conforms to a pleasing, asymmetric, curved shape, and as you can’t see from the pic, the backlights of the handset flash and pulse in time to the rhythms and beats of the song the phone is playing.

As we’ve said, the main focus of the phone is music playback - with this in mind, people should not be so disappointed to learn that the on-board camera is only a mere 2 Megapixel affair. There may be more powerful cameraphones on the market, but how many will be able to match the 5220 in terms of dedication to music playback?

The Nokia 5220 measures up at 108mm x 43.5mm x 10.5mm, weighs in at a very lightweight 78g and is expected to ship sometime during Q3 2008.

The recent £100 iPhone price drop move by O2 and Carphone Warehouse has been a success - perhaps too much of a success. Both O2 and CW have had their iPhone coffers cleaned out - neither the network nor the retailer have any iPhones left to sell.

When it was announced that the iPhone package slashing was due to happen, O2 did, warn that the £100-off deal would end when stocks ran out, so any new 8GB models will come with the previous price tag.

This iPhone drought has sent Apple rumour fanboys and fangirls into apoplectic states of frenzied speculation. According to our own resident iNoob, this is the traditional “Apple way of doing things” right before a new product goes live. 3G iPhone sooner than you think? Perhaps…

Vodafone have just announced that their fast 7.2Mbps mobile broadband network will be expanded this summer to encompass an extra three million residents living in major urban centres including Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Reading.

“The recent acceleration in the take up of mobile broadband has demonstrated just how hungry consumers are for internet access wherever they are,” said Nick Read, CEO of Vodafone UK. “As a result we are significantly investing in our network so that more customers can experience our award winning, fast and reliable mobile broadband network.”

This is good news for customers who have purchased the Vodafone Stick (pictured) the shiny white plug and play device which promises faster speeds in a greater number of locations - until now, top speeds have only been available in London and in and around major airports.

The timescale for this massive network upgrade is to begin this June, with completion provisionally slated to end by the autumn. “From June we will focus on providing additional relevant information with details on everyday usage scenarios, which will ensure customers can continue to make the most of Vodafone’s high speed mobile broadband service,” says Read.

Vodafone have also recently halved the price of their Mobile Broadband to just £15 a month for 3GB, and have launched a 5GB monthly package for the sum of £25.