Shout About Mobiles

Stupidly o2 accidentally released their prices for the new iPhone 3G pre-pay on its website earlier this week before realizing and removing it. But judging by what we saw the price looks pretty good.

The cost of the iPhone 3G will be £300. This will include unlimited data use for the first six months, after which it will cost £10 per month for the unlimited option. There is an amazing choice of pre pay tariffs though. Of course if you have bad credit and want a contract you can have one but you will have to pay a £300 deposit to o2 which will be returned after 6 months.

The table below shows the new tariffs. Read more…

A report released this year questioned 6000 people in the UK and USA about the effect mobile phones and internet technology has on their everyday lives. The report highlighted the relationship people have with technology.

The younger generation and particularly teenagers see the mobile phone as a best friend and a must have gadget. The range of packages on offer has increased massively over recent times and it is now very easy for people to have access to a full range of mobile services that were previously limited to contract users.

The use of mobile services in the UK and USA such as text messages are varied indeed. When it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family both countries pretty much performed the same.

There is the ever growing demand for an increasing range of technology and mobile broadband is having a fairly major impact on the way we work, meaning we are no longer dependant on wires for internet meaning we can use laptops more and more and this is really useful for people who working from their virtual office environment and sometimes find themselves on the road most of time. They can now have access to the internet as and when required.

This demand for mobile internet means that networks have to invest more and more into it to make the service faster and more reliable. T-Mobile for example is launching their HSUPA service that will speed up broadband greatly and hopefully open up the service to more and more people.

Nokia look close to announcing its new handset, the Nokia 5800 Tube. More and more pictures of high quality are being found on the internet.

According to leaked information the new handset will have a 3.2 inch, 16m touchscreen TFT display with a 640×360 resolution and interestingly a vibrating feedback function. It will run on the latest S60 5th edition of the Symbian software with an accelerometer for auto screen rotation ala iPhone.

The phone will apparently only be a mid range offering with a 3 mega pixel camera. There will also be a quality Carl Zeiss lens and dual LED flash. As the phone also has built in GPS with a-GPS functionality there will be geo-tagging support.

Connectivity options on this phone include Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth and USB 2.0. There are also 3.5mm AV jacks and TV output.

There will be support for microSD cards up to 8 GB in size and 140MB of built in memory. With all this comes the need for battery power and we are not disappointed as Nokia have chosen to include their new higher capacity 1320 mAh unit.

Will the phone live up to expectations? Time will tell.

Taking our mobiles with us everywhere is now part of our everyday lives and unfortunately for most of us taking our debit cards out and spending excessively is also part of it too.

The banks love to punish those that exceed overdrafts by only a few pence and it really messes people up as the charges far outweigh the amount you went over. So what is the solution to the money problem?

Lloyds TSB has become one of the first banks to alert you via the text message when you are approaching your overdraft limit. How lovely, right? Well not so lovely as they want to charge £2.50 a month for the privilege, so they aren’t just a free business gifts. So it seems that in one respect owning a mobile phone can actually help reduce overdraft charges in the long term, as long as the extra fee doesn’t push you into the overdraft itself.

This is excellent news, especially if you are a compulsive spender. But this is not so good news if you aren’t happy to shell out £2.50 per month to pay for the privilege just to know details about your own money.

It seems staff in o2 stores across the country have been warned formally that if they do not sell the new Apple iPhone 3G properly and follow head office rules then they will be sacked.

Even with Apple claiming that you cannot unlock the phone it seems that o2 think box breakers will be able to accomplish this. O2 staff are not allowed to sell more than one iPhone to a customer and if the phone is being bought with a phone contract it must be activated in store. Previously customers could buy the phone and then take it home and connect via iTunes. This was a big help to the box breakers.

The prepay upgrade scheme is another helpful loophole for the box breakers as staff have access via the in-store intranet to the Pre Pay Customer Management Tool (PCMT) this allows them to reward high spending customers with discounts of up to £100. It is quite easy to search through mobile phone numbers and find one with high usage patterns and use their discount for a friend.

O2 staff are extremely worried about their jobs because they cannot tell the difference between a genuine customer and a box breaker. So what is needed to prevent this? Ideally what should happen is this; if a customer is not prepared to put pen to paper for a contract then networks should not subsidize the price of the iPhone. Simple.

If you look at a good deal of the new mobiles coming into the market, you have to say that WLAN as feature is becoming more and more prominent. As we look to the future when wireless working and wireless communication gets bigger WLAN as a feature on phones will grow too. At the moment there are 27 million phones that have WLAN and recent reports state that this could increase by 70% by 2012.

Previously mobile phone networks had data down as an extremely good way of making money but this has changed as more are offering flat rate or inclusive plans so using WLAN for internet access at home is not a threat to their revenues and helps prevent overload on the phone networks. In reality, using your mobile phone to access the internet has become the norm.

Do you use your phone to access the internet? How much do you use it? What are you paying for your data? We would like to know how you use your phone.

LG have announced that their profit has risen 84% from selling more than seven million touchscreen phones. They earned a total of £347.8m in the first three months of the quarter up to the end of June. This is up from £188.5 for the same period in 2007.

Their sales went up 22.5% to £3.5bn from £2.8bn in the same period last year. With a new record of 27.7 million phones sold, the future looks extremely good for LG. LG say that they work very hard to create phones that are easy to use with their advanced features and this is why they are in the position they are in now.

As the market continues to grow for touchscreen phones they will expand their research to add more innovative products.

What will their answer to the threat of Nokia and Blackberry be? This will be interesting indeed.

T-Mobile have recently spent millions of pounds in a new ad campaign stating that “you can’t get more minutes for £30”. Now this is true at the £30 per month tariff but not the £20 level, where you can actually get a lot more.

Three, the mobile network have lodged a complaint to the advertising authorities stating that they have a tariff for only £27 that includes considerably more minutes and texts. This can be reduced further to £20 for certain models.

Really T-Mobile’s claim could be described as misleading and the complaint will most likely be upheld. To be totally ruthless and render the campaign useless, Three could have increased their price by £3. This wouldn’t have been good for their users though.

So while we wait for the outcome of this complaint, let’s hope that T-Mobile have another couple of million set aside for the revamped and reworked campaign.

One site that has become really popular in the community is willitblend.com famous for putting all types of electronic devices into blenders and not one to date has escaped its sharp blades.

The marketing idea behind the website is to promote the Blendtec super blenders. A very inventive viral campaign indeed. Sometimes you can’t help think, what a waste of money, but what fun they must have doing it.

So what is to be of the iPhone 3G? As the first gen phone blended relatively easily you can expect this one to be just as quick.

An extremely gifted developer has made the GSM 850MHz band on the HTC Touch Diamond available. This feature was implemented but left inactive at the design phase.

Originally the Diamond was only Tri Band but now this ROM Update means that those in America can use it. Absolutely brilliant.

Why on earth HTC decided to mess up the phone, I don’t know. They also previously messed up the video drivers on some of the phones, leaving it up to gifted fans / developers to sort out. Not on really when we pay a fortune for these phones.

Something else to report is that the new ROM improves the battery life too and increased the signal strength of the device, which has been a problem on all HTC devices. All of a sudden the Diamond really looks like a great choice of phone. More than the iPhone? We are not sure yet, the next 3 -6 months will show.