Mobile Phones Blog

The hottest smartphones could be coming to UK users at rockbottom prices from May, with O2 set to slash the cost of owning a 16Gb iPhone 3G, reportedly in advance of a new iPhone launch, and T-Mobile doing the same for the G1.

It looks increasingly likely that Apple will release an upgraded iPhone 3G this June or July in the UK, but it is still very unclear what this will look like. The pundits are split between those who expect a ’superphone’ to fend off the Palm Pre, LG Arena and others – with heavyweight memory, video, camera and other features where the iPhone has lagged behind the big hitters of the smartphone market; plus enhancements to the browser, widgets and multitouch experience.

After all, Apple’s place at the top of the multitouch pile, which has been proven to drive mobile web usage, is now threatened by Palm, LG and others, and even the lawsuits that Apple is said to be preparing won’t stop the challengers if users take to their upgrades.

But most major players, like the Android community and Nokia, are still lagging behind on multitouch and other important user interface features, and so other commentators think Apple will stick with its advantage at the high end and focus on a whole new format for the iPhone to increase its appeal to the midrange mobile web users and those feeling the credit crunch.

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The HTC Magic - the second HTC handset to feature the Android OS - will be touching down in April, according to a recent update on the Vodafone site. Vodafone, who have exclusive carriage rights of the phone for a limited time, have not yet given a specific date for the release, although you can sign up at their site to receive more details as and when they become available.

This aside, no further details have been made available, although curiously, the Coming Soon section of the Vodafone site (pictured) lists the camera as being ‘3.0 - 4.0 megapixel’ - we’re not really sure what that means.

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It has just been announced that Vodafone have inked a deal conferring exclusive carriage rights of the forthcoming ‘G2′ phone - the successor to the T-Mobile G1 - for a limited period.

This morning Vittorio Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, confirmed that the network operator had secured the rights to supply the new smartphone, which like its predecessor is manufactured by HTC and runs on Google’s Android operating system.

The G2 - aka the HTC Magic - is due to be unveiled by the Vodafone chief executive at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later today. Negotiations between Vodafone and HTC continued right up to the last minute, with the reports of the two parties talking about the deal as late as yesterday.

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Free, and available on BlackBerry, S60 and Windows Mobile handsets - with Android and Apple phones to get it “in the next few days,” and “very soon,” respectively - Google Latitude is a new mapplication feature from Google which allows you to keep tabs on your contacts from your smartphone or PC.

Whilst Latitude allows you to “see if your spouse is stuck in traffic on the way home from work,” or “notice that a buddy is in town for the weekend,” or “take comfort in knowing that a loved one’s flight landed safely,” it has also raised concerns from privacy rights campaigners.

Privacy International director Simon Davies said: “Many people will see this as a cool technology but the reality is it will be a privacy minefield. I would be concerned about any integrated use across Google services as their security is so poor and it’s becoming the world most pervasive system.”

Whilst it could be used to keep track of your friends and colleagues, it could also be used to track a potentially unfaithful spouse by a jealous partner or monitor the movements of a work rival, or it could be used by criminals or sexual predators to stalk potential victims.

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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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