Mobile Phones Blog

If you’ve been longing to put an Android phone through its paces, but don’t want to sign up for the T-Mobile service, the only option has been to obtain a code to unlock the phone – but this comes with serious compromises in functionality.

Now, if you’re prepared to shell out £265 (plus a £20 sign-up fee), you can get a G1 with its hardware and SIM completely unlocked, and no need to commit to a T-Mobile data contract for two years (although the minimum contract was reduced recently from £40 to £30 a month, that still makes the unlocked version cheaper over a year).

Officially, the unlocked G1 – the HTC handset that is currently the only device available based on Google’s Android software platform – is for developers only, but anyone can register as a developer for a one-off fee of $25 (likely to be £20 in the UK). This option will also be available to users in countries where there is no T-Mobile network – 18 countries at first, with more to follow next year, including India.

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The iPhone continues to attract interesting applications, despite concerns about Apple’s rigid policing of its App Store, and the latest highlights include software from online retailer Amazon, and a complex search engine from Proximic.

But according to the vendor, games dominate the league table of most popular premium (paid-for) iPhone apps.

In the five months since the App Store opened for iPhones and iPod Touches, some of the star performers in the gaming sector have included Apple’s own ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’, Freeverse’s ‘Moto Chaser’, Vivendi’s ‘Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D’, Sega’s ‘Super Monkey Ball’, and Pangea Software’s ‘Cro-Mag Rally’ and ‘Enigmo’. Other apps in the paid-for top 10 are Koi Pond, PocketGuitar, Retronyms’ Recorder and Hottrix’s iBeer.
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T-Mobile is raising its UK game to try to attract customers in the run-up to Christmas, launching a Game Club that tests out a new approach to the difficult mobile gaming market – and reducing the amount you have to spend to get an Android G1 for free.

Suscribers to T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk mobile internet service can get at least one game a week for free, with the carrier being the first to test out an advertising-funded free model in this sector. Some mobile operators like Virgin Mobile have already tested the demand for other forms of content, or even voice minutes, provided free in return for the user accepting ads on their handsets.

The T-Mobile Game Club will launch with the title ‘Poker Million II’, sponsored in part by Paramount Pictures’ new movie ‘Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa’. This takes one step further the common marketing tactic of tying major film releases into mobile phone content, as seen with the Batman and James Bond franchises.

Each free game will include two full screen, targeted advertisements before play begins, and two more after the game concludes. T-Mobile said it would not limit the number of games a consumer downloads or how many times each game is played.
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Google have just rushed out a patch for the T-Mobile G1, after it was recently discovered that typing the word ‘reboot’ shortly after turning the device on, caused the Android phone to do just that.

Google were quick to respond to user complaints and sent out the fix in the RC30 update, which was made available to UK users as of the 12th of November (this Wednesday).

Rich Cannings of the Android Security Team said that; “This is definitely a big bug,” and although he admitted that there was an element of security risk, any hacker would have had a hard time getting access to someone’s G1.

“An attacker might have [had] to convince a user to install a game with keyboard movement commands that typed out ‘telnetd’ to launch the phone’s telnet application to open the phone up to remote control,” said Cannings. The bug was announced earlier this week, with a fix written and released within a matter of days – anyone attempting such a high-level hack would have needed a larger window of opportunity than the one which was presented.

The bug, whilst fixed quickly however, reflects very badly on quality control of both the phone and the Android OS and presumably prompted a giant ROLF from iPhone users.

This story reminded us of that bit in The IT Crowd where Jen is convinced that Googling Google will break the internet. Would’ve posted the YouTube clip here, but as all embedding has been disabled by request, we’ll play nice and link to it instead…

More details have emerged concerning the forthcoming ‘Facebook Phone’ developed by INQ, an offshoot of Hutchinson, owners of 3 Mobile.

Designed purely with social networking in mind, the INQ1 – pronounced ‘ink one’ – is a slim tablet slider phone that looks set to take the wind out of the sales of the high-falutin’ likes of Apple and T-Mobile with their fancy pants iPhones and G1s – the INQ1 will retail for the very credit-crunch friendly price of FREE on 3 contracts costing upwards of just £15 a month for 18 months.

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The highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm 9500, developed by Research In Motion in tandem with Vodafone is set to open up an almighty downpour on the smartphone/PDA market upon its release here in the UK tomorrow.

The Storm marks a new venture for RIM, being as it is the first BlackBerry PDA to come with a touchscreen UI, and a rather nice one at that. The interface features a unique brand of haptic feedback which is as of yet unseen on any other touchscreen handset. Whilst other touchscreens will give you a neat little conformational buzz whenever you tap in a command, tapping and typing away on the interface of the Storm is a different proposition – the actual screen itself depresses slightly into the main body of the handset and satisfyingly clicks back out. Keystrokes are accompanied by a slight feedback buzz which is similar to, but altogether different from the type of haptic feedback were used to from the LG Viewty et al.

The BlackBerry Storm is RIM’s most media-friendly handset so far, designed to, er, rein in the typical hardcore Blackberry buyer who might have been swayed by the push email support available on some of the newer smartphones on offer from rival makers. Among its features is a 3.2 Megapixel camera, 3G internet access and sat-nav functionality. Up to 16GB of storage is available, enough space to store plenty of choice tunes downloaded from the Vodafone Music Store, direct access to which, is a fully integrated feature.

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The recently announced Nintendo DSi comes with a lot of spec and features that don’t sound at all out of place on any of the just released smartphones; 3.25″ touchscreen, Wi-Fi support, built in web browser, music player, camera, and the ability to download games; it’s only the lack of any calling or texting features which stop it from being sold on contract in the local Carphone Warehouse or something.

The new handset, which goes on sale in its native Japan on the 1^st of November (followed by an early 2009 worldwide release), follows on from the DS Lite, and incorporates two VGA cameras, which will be integral to some game titles, and can be used to take pics of mates’ faces and the like.

As the pictures here show, the DSi also comes with a microSD card slot, yet another feature synonymous with mobile phones. Naturally, the entire internet has been busy pondering about when or even if Nintendo will (hopefully) follow this leap forward with a DS phone.

It would make sense, seeing as the iPhone can handle titles such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sony (apparently) will be releasing a PSP Phone, Nokia are still surging ahead with their N-Gage series, and, well, who knows what might crop up on the G1 and future Android handsets?

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Not since the days of Netscape versus Internet Explorer have we seen a genuine battle for power in the browser market. But on the mobile phone the market is still wide open, and no vendor has yet delivered a really killer product. The latest to try to ensure Microsoft does not rule the mobile browser is the open source Mozilla Foundation, which has released its mobile product, Fennec, to developers.

Perhaps tellingly, the product has been spotted first on Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet, a mobile device without a cellular connection (just Wi-Fi).

This highlights that it is still a challenge to get a browser fully functioning on a traditional 3G cellphone, so a Linux/WLan product is a good first platform.

However, Mozilla – whose PC-based Firefox browser is the first since Netscape to provide a real challenge to Internet Explorer – will soon take the battle to Microsoft, with a Windows Mobile version of Fennec promised by year end.

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T-Mobile has confirmed that it will launch its G1 smartphone, based on the Android platform, on the 30th of October, a day earlier than expected and only a week after the device’s US debut.

The G1 will be available free to UK customers who sign up for T-Mobile’s ‘Combi’ and ‘Flext’ price plans, provided they commit to spending £40 a month a more for a year. Combi 35 offers 800 minutes and unlimited texts while Flext 40 gives up to 1,250 minutes or up to 2,500 texts or any mix of the two. The tariffs will also include unlimited internet browsing.

The operator, which has faced fears of running out of stock because of the level of pre-registration in the US, says that over 25,000 UK consumers have pre-registered interest in the G1 since it was unveiled in New York last month.

Not all reviewers are positive though. Common gripes include an “awkward” keyboard and short battery life; and lack of support for business applications such as virtual private networks and for corporate mobile email servers like Microsoft Exchange or BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

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Video applications like YouTube are the fastest growing driver of smartphone use, and nearly everyone viewing the mobile clips will be relying on Adobe Flash or Flash Lite technology, which is installed in almost 90% of high end handsets. But other vendors want to seize the initiative in this valuable area, and especially on the iPhone, which is one of the most used devices for mobile video. But Apple has kept tight control of its platform, barring alternatives to its own technology from the phone – first Adobe and now Microsoft’s challenger to Flash, Silverlight.

As Microsoft readies release 2.0 of its Silverlight rich media technology, it will need to make a better showing on the mobile platform if it is to prove a credible challenger to Flash. Like Adobe, the Windows giant has been angling to get Silverlight on to the iPhone, but has been rebuffed by Apple; and is now evaluating Google Android.

This would be a significant step on Microsoft’s recent path to decouple some of its key software technologies from Windows, which has failed to gain the dominance in mobile that it has on the PC.

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