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3 Mobile is shipping iPhone 4 today – along with T-Mobile UK, it was the last UK network to announce availability.…

Free On-Demand Webcast – Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

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(Source The Register)

The camel’s nose under Google’s tent

A trio of Apple filings seek to patent mobile-application “systems and methods” for travel and online shopping — and to move us three steps closer to a Google-free world.…

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(Source The Register)

Research In Motion (RIM) is rumoured to be preparing the launch a tablet
device.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

* – offensive humor may vary

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is preparing to launch an iPad competitor in November, and it will be called the BlackPad, according to a report citing two people familiar with the company’s plans.…

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(Source The Register)

Judas Phone ‘death grip’ proven fatal

More evidence has surfaced that Apple’s beleaguered Judas Phone does, indeed, have serious reception challenges — and today’s facts and figures come from a sophisticated source.…

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(Source The Register)

Independent tests carried out by PA Consulting Group have confirmed that
Apple’s iPhone 4 is more affected by the ‘death grip’ antenna problem than any
other smartphone on the market.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Owners of mobile phones are being asked to test the security of their network to see if enough is being done to stop eavesdropping.

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(Source BBC Technology)

As London’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme launches, there’s already a third-party Android app to go with it

As sure as night follows day, mobile applications follow location-based public pronouncements.

It should come as no surprise then that canny Android developers Little Fluffy Toys have knocked up a widget to follow on the heels of London mayor Boris Johnson’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Cycle Hire Widget, a free application, uses a mixture of live Transport for London data and crowdsourcing to display the availability of bicycles at the nearest docking stations. Because TfL doesn’t currently share details about the availability of bikes at specific locations, the application screen scrapes TfL’s data and repurposes it for the app.

(From my chair at Kings Place, you’re probably not interested to know, the nearest docking station is 506m south west, with apparently only two bikes taken from nine slots.)

We spoke to Kenton Price, director of Little Fluffy Toys, to find out more about what’s behind the app:

“Many of the cycle apps that existed for other cities already, and to be honest a bunch of the new London ones, are really not much more than a Google Maps mashup of a bunch of locations superimposed on a map.
“We also chose the tiniest widget you can choose – a 1×1 that takes 1/16th of one of your home screen. Into that we’ve packed information about the nearest three locations, including the direction and distance, and the colour-coded known status of that location: Green for all OK, red for closed, orange for not enough bikes, yellow for not enough slots.
“But we expect most users will then click it again to open it up. And inside there we show more info about each location, including the best info we have about the status of the location. If we have recent live info from TfL, we will show the number of bikes and the number of slots, and the time at which we retrieved it.
“If we don’t have info from TfL then we can use crowdsourced info. If a user is within 50 metres of a hire location that doesn’t have recent TfL data, s/he will be prompted to report back on its status. That info is then shared with other users. You can select a location for walking directions to it. If for some reason you don’t want to show a location, perhaps because you know it’s closed whatever the buggy TfL feed tells us, long-press to exclude it from the widget.”

TfL relaxed its terms and conditions (find them here) in preparation for the cycle scheme launch, with the aim of encouraging third-party developers to create “innovative” apps based on “reliable and accurate information”. But Price claims his attempts to access TfL’s live data have been met with a wall of silence – TfL, on the other hand, said they have been in conversation with third-party developers from early on.

Price says: “We wrote to them the day they announced the locations were free-for-all, asking for free/busy status. They replied saying [there were] no plans. And that’s the last we heard from them. This £100m+ scheme that said it was reaching out to developers – and we haven’t had any replies at all to our emails since. We’ve done the best we can – the BarclaysCycle Twitter tag appears to be publish-only, no one gets responses from them.

“It’s very disappointing that we’ve basically filled in the blatant holes in their massively expensive scheme and we’ve had no thanks or even acknowledgement that we exist – although Boris started following us on Twitter the other day.”

A TfL spokesperson refused to comment on particular developers, but told the Guardian third-party developers will have access to more data in time. For the time being, TfL said, the “fundamental information [being used by developers] has to be right.”

“The up-to-date information listing all docking stations that are live in London is available on the developers’ area and must be used,” the spokesperson said. “The first thing is to get that information correct and have up-to-date information about where the docking stations are. It might sound slightly dull but the first port of call is that we know where they are and that the information is correct.”

There is no timeframe for the next bout of data rollouts, TfL said, but they are “forthcoming”.

For now, Price is happy. As he concludes: “It’s been a riot, I’ve loved it. My favourite moment so far was when CNet said we had all that geeky goodness with our crowdsourcing stuff – I practically burst with pride.”

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(Source The Guardian)

Motorola to focus on next-generation technology in competitive smartphone battleground

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

Signs Voda UK for heavy lifting

TalkTalk is to launch its own mobile phone service, thanks to a deal with Vodafone UK.…

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(Source The Register)

The mobile phone market is undergoing a shift, thanks in part to new market
entrants stealing attention from the “big five”, according to IDC’s latest
Mobile
Device Technology and Trends report.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

The iPhone 4 is now available on the 3 network and offers are among the best we’ve seen.

For £45 per month you get 2000 xnet minutes, 1GB of data, 5000 extra minutes to mobiles on the same network and 5000 texts. For most customers this will effectively mean unlimited everything.

The offer is available with the iPhone 4 32GB, there’s £89 to pay upfront for the phone and £45 per month on a 24 month contract.

Highly recommended, but be quick as they have very limited stock.

Compare all iPhone 4 32GB deals

Samsung has announced record second-quarter profits of 5.01tn Korean won
(£2.7bn), an 88 per cent year-on-year increase.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Shaves tariffs

Last month, we reported T-Mobile UK’s price-plans for the iPhone 4. Today the telco start shipping the iphone, and has come in with lower tariffs .…

Free On-Demand Webcast – Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

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(Source The Register)

B2B unit of TalkTalk claims success of next generation broadband network within business market bolstered quarterly revenue

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

Free broadband firm TalkTalk promises competitive prices in mobile services deal with Vodafone

Internet and phone firm TalkTalk has struck a deal with Vodafone to launch a mobile service under its own brand.

TalkTalk, which helped revolutionise the broadband market by introducing “free” internet access four years ago, will offer both contract and pre-pay tariffs to existing customers from the autumn.

Market watchers will be looking to see whether the company, the second-largest residential broadband provider in the UK, will have as big an impact in the mobile industry as it did in on internet services.

Chairman Charles Dunstone said TalkTalk, which was spun out of Carphone Warehouse earlier this year, would make a “gentle” entry into mobile services, but would offer competitive prices.

“It will be a way to add a very good value mobile package to the account you have with us for your fixed-line phone and broadband,” he said.

TalkTalk entered the phone market in 2003 and the broadband market in 2006. Carphone Warehouse, meanwhile, still has its own mobile venture called TalkMobile, which also uses Vodafone’s network.

News of the mobile phone service came as TalkTalk announced first-quarter results which showed it added 34,000 net broadband customers in the second quarter, taking its total to 4.23 million. That puts it ahead of Virgin Media, which announced earlier this week that it had 4.21 million customers, having added 28,100 in the quarter. BT said yesterday it had 5.2 million broadband customers, adding 96,000 in the last three months, although it does not split out its residential customers from its large base of business users. The UK’s fourth-largest broadband provider, BSkyB, meanwhile, added 119,000 broadband customers in the quarter, taking its total customer base to 2.6 million.

TalkTalk’s average revenue per broadband user was £23.90, slightly up on a year ago. TalkTalk, which bought rival Tiscali a year ago, said its share of net broadband adds was about 10% this quarter, keeping it on track to add 140,000 to 180,000 customers over the year as a whole.

Revenues climbed 31% in the quarter to £444m, broadly in line with expectations.

The company said it remained confident it would deliver 6-8% revenue growth, and 20% growth in normalised earnings per share and dividends per share for the year to 31 March 2011.

Vodafone, meanwhile, has a number of other wholesale deals which allow companies to use its network to become what are termed mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). It provides network coverage for BT, Asda and Lebara, which targets the UK’s immigrant population.

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(Source The Guardian)

LONDON (Reuters) – Internet and phone provider TalkTalk signed a deal with Vodafone to launch a mobile voice and data tariffs under its own brand, creating a larger bundle of services from the autumn.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Dismissed with a ‘non’ and a Gallic shrug

French network operator SFR is thumbing its nose at Apple by telling customers to think carefully before upgrading to iOS 4.…

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(Source The Register)

LONDON (Reuters) – Internet and phone provider TalkTalk signed a deal with Vodafone to launch a mobile service under its own brand, adding mobile voice and data tariffs to its bundle of services to match competitors.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Motorola posted strong quarterly numbers on the back of solid sales for its
mobile handsets.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)