Posts Tagged “card”
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The HTC Desire is basically an enhanced Nexus One, which makes it possibly the most advanced phone available. It adds an optical trackpad in place of the Nexus One’s trackball, plus HTC’s excellent Sense user interface. Ergonomically, the HTC Desire just slips naturally into the hand with its all-round soft curves, on paper it’s slightly larger than the Nexus One but in real-life this isn’t noticeable.
The HTC Desire has a fantastic 3.7 inch widescreen, AMOLED display, delivering 720×480 pixels resolution. Arguably crisper and clearer than any other display on the market, it delivers touchscreen responsiveness definitely in the ballpark of the iPhone and, moreover, it is fast. The combination of Android 2.1 sitting above a Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM and ROM really does enable you to zap through opening up applications and then moving between them.
Its multimedia credentials, are quietly competent rather than superb – such as the 5 megapixel, autofocus camera with LED flash and its 32GB memory card capacity. Where the Nexus One really impresses, though, is in what could be called its charisma, if it could walk into a crowded room, heads would most definitely turn. Its Teflon-coated back and sides are simultaneously rubbery and tough yet soft and almost sensuous, a strangely compelling tactile experience.
Tags: 12, 3, all, android, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, HTC, iphone, latest, latest deal, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, phone, room, sim, sol, test, Touch
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Fanboy credit cards at the ready
Want a the 3G-less Apple iPad? The Mac maker will begin taking advance orders for the product later this week, it has been claimed.…
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work
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(Source The Register)
Tags: 10, 3, apple, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, source the register, uk
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The annual showcase of the latest games, marketing wheezes and software updates for the mobile telecoms industry is opening in Barcelona
From tiny start-ups looking to get their games and gizmos in front of Google, Vodafone and Microsoft to veterans of the telecoms industry who will be glad-handing old contacts, this week’s Mobile World Congress will host a clutch of British technology firms hoping to turn back the tide sweeping in from the US and far east. UK Trade & Investment, the government body that supports British firms overseas, is helping out 120 companies at the show and part-funding the attendance of 50.
The Cambridge-based Hypertag is typical of the firms being taken there. It has developed pioneering technology that makes it easy for advertisers to connect with consumers through poster sites that use short-range Bluetooth technology. Advertisers can use the technology to offer people anything from free music and game downloads to money-off vouchers direct to a phone.
After being funded by the Technology Strategy Board, set up by the government three years ago to invest in innovative technologies, Hypertag has worked for 18 months with the billboard firm JC Decaux and PSI, the airport advertising part of Aegis. Having tested its technology in Luton airport, Hypertag is looking for partners in Barcelona. “We’ve got technology which we know companies want to use and now it’s all about sales,” said director Jonathan Morgan.
UKTI is also helping Movirtu, which is targeting the billion people in developing countries who live on less than $2 a day and cannot afford a mobile phone but may spend 30% of their income on phone calls. Its MX Share service, already tested in Africa, allows people to make and receive calls and texts on someone else’s handset, without them needing their own expensive sim card, handsets or additional software.
At the show, Movirtu will launch a new service that will give users easy access to information on healthcare, education or even agriculture through mobiles. It is also looking for network partners in developing countries, said the chief executive, Nigel Waller. “We would like to move forward with a number of operator agreements to give us scale.”
Also eyeing the developing market is Synchronica, which will showcase two new low-cost MessagePhone handsets that offer all the functions of a BlackBerry, such as emails and texting, but at under $100. Other UK-listed firms include Intec, which specialises in billing systems for mobile networks, the Bluetooth-chip designer CSR, mobile marketing specialists 2ergo and mobile banking experts Monitise.
But it’s not all about gadgets. Also plying their wares will be Foof Productions, the Gateshead-based mobile phone game creators, and the Middlesbrough-based developer, Fluid Pixel. They are the creative parents of Animentals, a mobile game that takes a twisted take on the virtual pets craze spawned by Tamagotchi in the 1990s.
Already available on Nokia’s Ovi store and with an iPhone version due out soon, Animentals takes place in the hospital of Dr Foof, who must nurse a collection of crazed pets back to full mental health, partly through a series of challenges. The Animentals range from the depressed Goth penguin Pingoth to the highly unstable Furball. “What Dr Foof is offering is rehab for damaged digital pets,” says the game’s producer Andy Banks. After four days in the hothouse of the congress, it’s a need many of the attendees will recognise only too well.
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(Source The Guardian)
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The only way to encourage developers to create great apps for all mobile phones, and not just Apple’s iPhone, is to reward them – and that means paying more
Easy to use mobile applications of the kind that Apple is pioneering are a huge economic opportunity to generate growth and jobs but also a conundrum. At a time when the whole world of computing is migrating into the “cloud”, with data stored out there on the web rather than on our computer desktops, the mobile world is moving in the opposite direction: nearly all of these games and services are being downloaded on to our mobile devices.
The result is that we are using our apps – and few more so than me – through dedicated silos rather than on the web. This has advantages, not least because data stored on your phone can be accessed more quickly, but also a big downside. This is partly because you are a prisoner of your service provider such as Apple, but mainly because if these apps were made for the web, then every phone would be able to access them, users would have big opportunities to share and developers wouldn’t have to spend money they haven’t got making multiple apps for incompatible phones.
At the moment, if you want to port an iPhone app to devices running Google’s Android operating system, you have to start building again from scratch. Apps would be much cheaper if they could be built to run across different platforms. Tom Hume, managing director of Brighton based FuturePlatforms, points out that Apple developers have to work in the Objective C computer language, whereas the HTML5 standard requires only minor changes between platforms.
FuturePlatforms operates a Google-style “gold card” system, allowing staff time off to do their own things. One developer used this option to produce an unofficial app of the Guardian for phones using Google’s Android operating system which in some ways is more flexible than the iPhone app (eg, it can download the paper during the night).
Make no mistake, something really big is happening with apps as this amazing device we still call a mobile phone extends its tentacles ever deeper into our lives. Today it is games, social networks, reading, search, location-based services; tomorrow health, work, painting, education, who knows what.
The stats are startling. According to technology research company Gartner, physical downloads of apps reached 2.5bn last year. These were overwhelmingly on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. But since iPhones amount to less than 1% of all phones, you don’t have to be a genius to realise the enormous potential. It could be that Gartner’s predictions of 4.5bn downloads this year and an astonishing 21.6bn in 2013, equivalent to more than three for everyone on the planet, will prove an underestimate.
The good – or bad – news, is that a staggering 87% of these downloads will be free for users. That’s great for you and me, but it is not an obvious way to encourage a growing industry to hire people to make up for the black hole caused by the banking collapse. Many of these “free” downloads will be supported by advertising and others will be corporations promoting their brands. But most will be free because creators don’t think they can charge for them.
At the moment, there is a grave distortion in the balance of power. Most of the money is going to the app shops such as Apple – which controls the gateway to the developers, who are often on £60 or more an hour – with the content providers squeezed in the middle of an increasingly crowded market.
I have been talking recently to developers – partly to research this column and partly because I am trying to do an app of my own to see how difficult it is (more of that at a later date, maybe). The overwhelming message is how difficult it is to make enough profit to justify the investment when costs are so high and the market flooded with freebies. Sure there are some who make good money, such as existing branded games being repackaged in mobile form and niche services. The most successful income-earning apps last year – satellite navigation guides at £30 a pop – have been undermined by Google bringing out a free turn-by-turn street navigation option.
Unsurprisingly then, ustwo of Shoreditch – maker of, among other things, mouthoff, an app that enables the phone screen to mimic movements of your mouth, which had mouth-watering publicity here and in the US – couldn’t make a respectable profit at 59p. Indeed, the company admits “the bottom line is that it’s impossible to make money at the 59p price point for 99% of studios”.
Toiluxe, a neat 59p iPhone app that uses satellite signals to tell you where the nearest toilet is in London – whether the Ritz hotel or a public convenience – got publicity in several newspapers but not enough to make a respectable return given that the developer only ends up with only 60% of income after Apple and Vat (levied at higher Irish rates where the servers are based).
The obvious answer is to raise prices, but that is easier said than done in an environment where so much is available for nothing – as newspapers in a different neck of the woods know full well.
It is all quite crazy, really. People who pay more than £2.50 for a cup of coffee that is gone in a few minutes are reluctant to pay £1 for a paper that will last for hours or an app that will be with you for ages, probably with free upgrades. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find an app among the hundreds of thousands on offer on the iPhone despite the growth of apps helping you to do just this (ie, looking for relevant apps) such as Chomp, or Mplayit on Facebook or Apple’s Genius. There must be hundreds of great apps that hardly anyone has discovered. Goodness knows what it will be like in a few years time.
There is an elephant in the room even though it is invisible at the moment: the bedroom programmer, shorthand for individuals working on their own. The reason is that it is very difficult to write code for a phone in the way that kids could program their BBC or Spectrum computers in the 1980s, a phenomenon that led the same kids to create a thriving computer games industry. Uncle Steve won’t let you near his phones except on his own terms. It may start to change with Google’s Android operating system based on open source, and I know of at least one developer working on an app to enable people to do their own coding on a phone in a (relatively) simple way.
If that happened maybe a new generation of cloud coders could send the apps revolution off in a whole new – and much cheaper – direction. The best things in life are not always free.
twitter.com/vickeegan
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(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, android, apple, bbc, best, card, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, free, google, growth, iphone, line, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, prices, room, sam, service, sim, sol, three, Touch, twitter, uk, world
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
Only £79.95 on Vodafone PAYG. The LG Pop GD510, according to LG, is the most compact 3 inch full touchscreen phone ever made. LG have compromised on some features to produce a phone that appears to be high end, but is priced in the mid range. The Pop looks fantastic with the 3 inch touchscreen covering almost all of the handset and just one multi-functional button used to start and end calls, or to access the menu. The brushed aluminium frame is only 4.8 mm wide and gives the GD510 a simple and sleek look that is sure to stand out.
The LG Pop has style over substance, making it an affordable touchscreen phone with some mid range features. It has a 3 megapixel camera to capture all those unexpected moments. There’s video recording and playback, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, a very nice MP3 player and an FM radio. Memory can be expanded to 32GB using a microSD card.
Tags: 10, 3, all, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, latest, latest deal, lg, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, payg, phone, pink, prices, sim, sol, test, Touch, vodafone
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
The Google Nexus One is now available SIM free at Pixmania for £599 plus delivery.
Manufacturered by HTC, Google’s first own-brand mobile phone is undoubtedly a superb piece of engineering. Ergonomically, it just slips naturally into the hand with its all-round soft curves rather than the hard edges of, say the Motorola Milestone. At 130g the Nexus One is lighter than an iPhone (136g) and Milestone (170g) as well as being narrower and thinner (at 11.5mm) than these two most striking competitors.
It has a fantastic 3.7 inch widescreen, AMOLED display, delivering 720×480 pixels resolution. Arguably crisper and clearer than any other display on the market, it delivers touchscreen responsiveness definitely in the ballpark of the iPhone and, moreover, it is fast. The combination of Android 2.1 sitting above a Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1GHz with 512Mb of RAM and ROM really does enable you to zap through opening up applications and then moving between them.
Its multimedia credentials, are quietly competent rather than superb – such as the 5 megapixel, autofocus camera with LED flash and its 32GB memory card capacity. Where the Nexus One really impresses, though, is in what could be called its charisma, if it could walk into a crowded room, heads would most definitely turn. Its Teflon-coated back and sides are simultaneously rubbery and tough yet soft and almost sensuous, a strangely compelling tactile experience.
Tags: 12, 3, all, android, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, free, google, HTC, iphone, latest, latest deal, mobile, mobile phone, mobiles, moto, motorola, new, new mobile, phone, prices, room, sim, sim free, sol, test, Touch, uk
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Big iPhone, tiny card
O2, Orange and DoCoMo are all apparently stocking up on micro SIMs suitable for Apple’s iPad, though taking a sharp knife to an existing SIM is always an option.…
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work
Read Full Story…
(Source The Register)
Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, iphone, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, o sim, o2, orange, phone, sim, sol, source the register, uk
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
The new Nokia X3 has some fantastic deals on T-Mobile’s new tariffs. £20 line rental gets you a free Nokia X3 with 100 mins, 100 texts and unlimited mobile internet, plus £198 cash back. The deal is available now at e2save or Onestopphoneshop.
The Nokia X3 is the first S40 phone to be compliant with Ovi Store. The new X Series has been created for multimedia phones for ultimate entertainment. The X3 is a compact slider phone, measuring 96 x 49 x 14mm. It has been designed to make you stand out in the crowd with metallic colour accents and ‘high tech’ design. A key component of the X3 is its music player which boasts stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and a 3.5mm audio jack. There is also an FM radio that doesn’t require earphones for a signal as the X3 has a built-in antenna.
There is a 3.2 megapixel camera to capture those special moments and you can share them with friends by uploading them straight to Flickr or Ovi, or transfer them wirelessly with stereo Bluetooth. The phone comes with a 2GB microSD card but can be expanded to 16GB, providing plenty of storage for music and pictures.
Tags: 10, 3, all, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, free, latest, latest deal, line, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, nokia, phone, phones, rental, sol, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, test
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Apple says it will not reveal UK pricing for iPad until its launch at the end of March
Apple has surprised would-be buyers of its new iPad touchscreen computer, saying it will not announce UK prices before it launches at the end of March.
Although it announced US prices for all six versions of the touchscreen “tablet” device with and without 3G connectivity at the launch on Wednesday night by Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs, the UK office said today that there will be no UK prices offered until the launch, expected in 60 days’ time – or 90 days for the 3G versions.
However, the MacWorld magazine website takes an “educated guess” at UK pricing for the iPad, which it predicts will range from £388 to £591 for the Wi-Fi model, and £490 to £693 for the Wi-FI and 3G model.
The iPad is a 9.7in tablet computer with a virtual keyboard which can surf the web, do email, display ebooks and play video. US prices start at $499 for a basic version with Wi-Fi wireless networking but no 3G connectivity, rising to $829 for a 3G version with 64 gigabytes of storage. However iPad users in the US will have to pay separately for 3G data plans being sold separately by Apple’s exclusive mobile partner there, AT&T, which already supplies the iPhone there.
Mobile phone companies in the UK – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – are looking to strike similar deals in Europe ahead of a launch later in the year. The Guardian understands from multiple source that no choice has been made.
Apple initially sold the iPhone through exclusive partners in the US, UK, France and Germany, but for the iPad the British mobile phone networks are not expecting Apple to offer exclusivity. None was willing to comment on the iPad.
Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, commented: “To me, the really interesting thing is what we are seeing is devices designed with how the consumer uses the internet very much in mind, rather than just a computer that was made for business use trying to fit the consumer.”
Bloggers and commentators had mixed reactions to the device. It cannot run Adobe’s Flash software, used by many advertisers and games companies online to create eye-catching motion on web pages, which some see as essential to web browsing. Many women were dismayed by the name: the San Francisco Examiner pointed out that “for North American women the word ‘pad’ means but one thing, a sanitary napkin”. But Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, about the move towards cloud computing, described the launch as “the day the PC died”, saying that Apple “wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age.”
Without a price ahead of the launch it may be difficult for retailers to judge the public’s interest – and so whether the device will sell in large or small numbers. Amazon’s Kindle, which includes mobile networking in the price, only launched recently in the UK, and Amazon has never disclosed sales numbers, though it is reckoned to have sold only about 500,000 to the end of last year.
The decision to keep the UK price under wraps is unusual for Apple, which usually announces UK pricing simultaneously with any launch, and could either indicate concern about exchange rate fluctuations, or a desire to keep people intrigued about the device, or that non-US networks are seeking to sell it with some sort of subsidy.
Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499.
However, Apple has forced AT&T to give up persuading customers to sign long-term contracts in order to subsidise the iPad; instead, it will effectively be available on what in Europe would be seen as a 30-day rolling Sim-only contract such as those offered by O2 and Vodafone.
“It does not look as though it has the traditional subsidy model,” said Harrison. “If you put Wi-Fi and 3G in it, it is actually more expensive not less expensive.”
In a note relating AT&T’s financial prospects following the news, Jonathan Schildkraut, analyst at Jefferies & Co investment bank said the tariffs are “in line with the current data add-on options available with voice packages, and well below the roughly $60 plans currently offered by wireless carriers for a laptop card. The prepaid plan can be activated directly from the iPad and, because there is no contract, can be canceled at anytime.”
Meanwhile anyone who already has a wireless broadband “dongle” under a long-term contract and is thinking about installing its SIM card into an iPad will be disappointed. The iPad is the first mass-market mobile device to use micro-Sim cards, which are smaller than the current range of Sim cards and were designed for small consumer gadgets such as Birmingham-based Lok8u’s range of wireless-enabled wrist watches.
The iPad is also likely to prove a major headache for makers of similar devices, especially Taiwan’s Asus which recently announced plans for its own tablet, and Nokia which last year unveiled a “booklet” computer with built-in 3G. There are also understood to be several tablet computers running Google’s Android software in the works, with France’s Archos rumoured to be planning to release one in March.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Several mobile phone carriers keen to sell Apple’s iPad in the UK
Steve Jobs has fired the starting pistol in the race to bring the iPad to the UK, with several mobile phone operators and retailer Carphone Warehouse interested in selling Apple’s new tablet computer to consumers this side of the Atlantic.
Jobs announced on Wednesday that a version of the device that can access 3G mobile phone networks as well as Wi-Fi will start shipping in the US in April under a deal with AT&T, which already supplies the iPhone in North America. Mobile phone companies in the UK – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – are looking to strike similar deals in Europe ahead of a launch later in the year.
Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse, welcomed news of the Apple device, adding: “To me, the really interesting thing is what we are seeing is devices designed with how the consumer uses the internet very much in mind, rather than just a computer that was made for business use trying to fit the consumer.”
Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, was Apple’s exclusive third party retail partner for the iPhone and Harrison obviously hopes to repeat the experience with the iPad.
“Our perspective is we play in the world of connectivity and particularly mobile connectivity and this device fits well within that; we think there will be a whole range of them. This is an extension of a smartphone perhaps even more than it being a smaller PC. It is much more in the territory that we operate in,” he said
“We have done a phenomenal job with the iPhone and smartphones in general and bringing connectivity is something we would be delighted to talk to Apple about.”
But the AT&T deal shows that Apple may be approaching the involvement of mobile phone operators with the iPad in a very different way from the way that it uses them for the iPhone.
Traditionally, mobile phone companies “subsidise” the up-front cost of hardware – usually mobile phones, but increasingly laptops – in return for persuading a customer to sign up to a long-term contract. The operator assumes it will make the subsidy back over the life of the contract. That is how the iPhone is sold in the US and Europe, while even Google followed this model with its Nexus One, signing a deal with T-Mobile in the US which sees the phone’s $529 price tag fall to $179 in return for signing a contract. Vodafone is expected to sell the Nexus One in the UK at roughly the same price point as the iPhone.
Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499.
But with the iPad, Apple has forced AT&T to give up on persuading customers to sign long-term contracts. Instead the iPad will effectively be available on what in Europe would be seen as a 30-day rolling SIM-only contract such as those offered by O2 and Vodafone.
Customers have two pricing options in the US, a mere 250MB of data for $14.99 a month, or unlimited data for $29.99 a month. That means that while the basic version of the iPad – without wireless capabilities – will start at $499, the 3G version of the device will start at $629. Under the traditional operator model, the 3G version of the device would have been cheaper.
“It does not look as though it has the traditional subsidy model,” said Harrison. “If you put Wi-Fi and 3G in it, it is actually more expensive not less expensive.”
In a note on AT&T following the news, Jonathan Schildkraut, analyst at Jefferies & Co investment bank said the tariffs are “in line with the current data add-on options available with voice packages, and well below the roughly $60 plans currently offered by wireless carriers for a laptop card. The prepaid plan can be activated directly from the iPad and, because there is no contract, can be canceled at anytime.”
“Given the prepaid nature of the service associated with this product, including the no contract/cancel at any time feature, we expect that AT&T would not have to subsidise the device. We would view this as a significant positive – given the large subsidy associated with the iPhone (estimated at up to $400). Additionally, this would imply better overall economics around the device (without the initial margin dilution of an iPhone sale),” he said
“The flip-side, of course, is that the usage patterns of this type of device are unknown. However, given the multimedia capabilities, and the video functionality in particular, we would assume that iPad could be another network hog. This could drive incremental congestion issues on AT&T’s already strained network – leading to further network dissatisfaction, and potentially a need for ongoing higher levels of capital spending”.
In other words, not getting people to sign a contract gives the operator very little chance to factor the potential cost of future infrastructure investment into its pricing plans. Then there is the worry that applications which allow internet telephony – such as Truphone and Skype, which are already available on the iPhone and will port to the iPad – will further erode the network’s profitable voice and text traffic.
Apple initially sold the iPhone through exclusive partners in the US, UK, France and Germany, but for the iPad the British mobile phone companies are not expecting Apple to offer exclusivity. None of the mobile phone companies was willing to comment on the iPad.
Incidentally, anyone who already has a wireless broadband “dongle” under a long-term contract and is thinking about buying an iPad and putting the SIM card from their laptop card into the iPad will be disappointed. The iPad is the first mass-market mobile device to use micro-Sim cards, which are smaller than the current range of Sim cards and were designed for small consumer gadgets such as Birmingham-based Lok8u’s range of wireless-enabled wrist watches.
The iPad is also likely to prove a major headache for makers of similar devices, especially Taiwan’s Asus which recently announced plans for its own tablet, and Nokia which last year unveiled a “booklet” computer with built-in 3G. There are also understood to be several tablet computers running Google’s Android software in the works, with France’s Archos rumoured to be planning to release one in March.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, android, apple, card, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, Deals, drive, free, gadget, gadgets, google, iphone, largest, line, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, nokia, o2, orange, phone, phones, sam, service, sim, Sim Card, sol, sony, sony vaio, sony vaio laptop, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, uk, vodafone, world
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
The Nokia X3 is the first S40 phone to be compliant with Ovi Store. The new X Series has been created for multimedia phones for ultimate entertainment. The X3 is a compact slider phone, measuring 96 x 49 x 14mm. It has been designed to make you stand out in the crowd with metallic colour accents and ‘high tech’ design. A key component of the X3 is its music player which boasts stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and a 3.5mm audio jack. There is also an FM radio that doesn’t require earphones for a signal as the X3 has a built-in antenna.
There is a 3.2 megapixel camera to capture those special moments and you can share them with friends by uploading them straight to Flickr or Ovi, or transfer them wirelessly with stereo Bluetooth. The phone comes with a 2GB microSD card but can be expanded to 16GB, providing plenty of storage for music and pictures.
If you are conscious about the environment and like to be green the X3 uses a large amount of recycled material in the packaging, the phone itself has been designed to be highly recyclable and the charger gives you a handy reminder to unplug it when the battery is fully charged, which is a nice touch. The Nokia X3 is a fantastic device for those who are looking for a music phone, that’s super cool and doesn’t have a huge price tag.
Tags: 3, all, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, latest, latest deal, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, nokia, phone, phones, sol, test, Touch
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
The new Nokia 5230 XpressMusic is now available to order and you can get £100 automatic cash back or a free Sony PSP (with FIFA 09), when you buy the phone on a 12 month contract. With Orange Racoon 30 you’ll get 200 anytime minutes per month to any network, plus an extra 200 minutes to call UK landlines and 300 texts per month. Mobile internet can be added for an extra £5 per month.
Nokia 5230 XpressMusic is a super cool music phone that shares the same design and scratch-resistant touchscreen with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It has an excellent battery life, 3G, HSPDA and GPS. Unlike the Nokia 5800, there is no Wi-FI support with the Nokia 5230, and the camera resolution has been reduced to 2 megapixels, yet it can still record VGA video at 30 frames per second. The 3.2 inch touchscreen supports handwriting recognition and it has a built in accelerometer to auto rotate the screen.
Touchscreen aside, the music player is one of the main features. There is a dedicated audio chip to enhance the sound, a slider to instantly turn the device into a music player, a 3.5mm audio jack and built in speakers for music or the FM radio. With the Nokia 5230 XpressMusic you can download music at mobile broadband speeds, there is also the ability to transfer music to and from your device via a USB cable or Bluetooth. The 5230 has 70MB of internal memory but can be expanded to 16GB with a microSD card. Up to 33 hours of music can be played with a single charge of the battery.
Tags: 10, 12, 3, 5800, all, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, contract, deal, Deals, free, latest, latest deal, line, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, nokia, nokia 5800, orange, phone, sam, sol, sony, test, Touch, uk, xpressmusic
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• Personal data and tutorials in hacking offered online
• Founder of site traced to London internet cafe
To the casual observer, there was little to distinguish the Java Bean internet cafe in Wembley from the hundreds of others dotted around the capital. But to surveillance officers staking it out month after month, this unremarkable venue was the key to busting a remarkable and sophisticated network of cyber criminals.
From the bank of computers inside, a former pizza bar worker ran an international cyber “supermarket” selling stolen credit card and account details costing the banking industry tens of millions.
Renukanth Subramaniam, 33, was revealed today as the founder and a major “orchestrator” of the secret DarkMarket website, where elite fraudsters bought and sold personal data, after it was infiltrated by the FBI and the US Secret Service.
Membership was strictly by invitation. But once vetted, its 2,000 vendors and buyers traded everything from card details, obtained through hacking, phishing and ATM skimming devices, to viruses with which buyers could extort money by threatening company websites.
The top English language cybercrime site in the world, it offered online tutorials in account takeovers, credit card deception and money laundering. Equipment – including false ATM and pin machines and everything needed to set up a credit card factory – was available.
It even featured breaking-news-style updates on the latest compromised material available, while criminals could buy banner adverts to promote their wares.
So vast was its reach, with members in the UK, Canada, US, Russia, Turkey, Germany and France, the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which helped bust it, said it was “impossible” to put a figure on how much it cost banks worldwide.
Subramaniam, who used the online soubriquet JiLsi, was remanded in custody at his own request at Blackfriars crown court today after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud and five counts of furnishing false information. Judge John Hillen warned it was “inevitable” he faced a “substantial custodial sentence”.
A Sri Lankan-born British citizen, Subramaniam was a former member of ShadowCrew, DarkMarket’s forerunner, which was uncovered by the US Secret Service in 2004. “JiLsi was one of the highest in cybercrime in this country with what he managed to achieve setting up a forum globally. No JiLsi, no DarkMarket,” said one Soca investigator.
Its 2,000 members never met in real life. Quality, not quantity, was the key. DarkMarket was fastidious in banning “rippers” who would cheat other criminals. Honour among thieves was paramount.
It operated an “escrow” service, with payments and goods exchanged through a third party – “like a PayPal for criminals”, the judge observed, and an arbitration service resolved disputes. To keep off the radar, the rules were strict: no firearms, drugs or counterfeit currency.
Built on a pyramid structure, administrators decided who joined, moderators ran specific site sections, and reviewers vetted wannabes – each demanding 5% or £250 per transaction as a fixer’s fee.
To get on, criminals had to present details of 100 compromised cards free of charge – 50 to one reviewer, 50 to another. Reviewers would test the cards and write an online review of customer satisfaction – just like eBay customers. “If the cards did what they were supposed to … they would be recommended. If not they weren’t allowed in,” said the investigator.
Payment was via accounts on WebMoney, or E-Gold. “It was the QuickTime method of sending money anywhere.”
Subramaniam was one of the top administrators. He kept his operating system on memory sticks. But when one was stolen, costing him £100,000 in losses and compromising the site’s security, he was downgraded to reviewer. Surveillance officers caught him logging on to the website as JiLsi unaware the fellow criminal MasterSplyntr he was talking to was, in fact, an FBI agent called Keith Mularski.
Considerable money was exchanged, though actual transactions took place away from the site for security reasons. One buyer spent £250,000 on stolen personal information in just six weeks.
Described as “a very quiet man”, Subramaniam worked at Pizza Hut and as a dispatch courier. “He owned three houses but was largely itinerant,” said Sharon Lemon, Soca deputy director. “The key to investigations of this sort is finding the evidence to connect the online persona with a living, breathing person.”
Harendra de Silva QC, defending Subramaniam, said the “evidence was unchallenged” but said the “question of interpretation does arise in certain areas” and there would be submissions on “nuance” of the fraud in so far as it applied to his client. He is charged alongside John McHugh, 66, known as Devilman, also a site reviewer who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and at whose Doncaster home officers found a credit card-making factory. The two will be sentenced later.
But the battle against cybercrime continues. “This was one of the top 10 sites in the world, but there are more than 100 we know of globally, and another 100 we don’t yet know of,” said the investigators.
In the DarkMarket
DarkMarket price list
Trusted vendors on DarkMarket offered a smorgasbord of personal data, viruses, and card-cloning kits at knockdown prices. Going rates were:
Dumps Data from magnetic stripes on batches of 10 cards. Standard cards: $50. Gold/platinum: $80. Corporate: $180.
Card verification values Information needed for online transactions. $3-$10 depending on quality.
Full information/change of billing Information needed for opening or taking over account details. $150 for account with $10,000 balance. $300 for one with $20,000 balance.
Skimmer Device to read card data. Up to $7,000.
Bank logins 2% of available balance.
Hire of botnet Software robots used in spam attacks. $50 a day.
Credit card images Both sides of card. $30 each.
Embossed card blanks $50 each.
Holograms $5 per 100.
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(Source The Guardian)
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Lauded as a contender to kill the iPhone at its US launch last year, this Motorola Android phone has already been slain itself by Google’s Nexus One
For a phone that seemed to cause such a stir in the US when it launched last year, the Motorola Milestone (called the Droid in the US) has barely raised a ripple this side of the pond. No network has signed up for the device – in fact, only Orange lists Motorola handsets at all in the UK – and while enthusiasts snapped up the first batch from online retailer Expansys before Christmas, it has all gone very quiet since then.
It’s easy to see why Motorola might now be feeling a little bit sheepish about its much vaunted iPhone killer. There is a new kid on the block: Google’s Nexus One, which sports an updated version of the Android operating system that the Milestone contains, a better screen and a sexier look.
It’s also easy to see why Google has got fed up with mobile phone manufacturers putting its increasingly elegant Android software into a bunch of ugly bricks and decided that it needed to be in complete control of its own handset in order to stop the iPhone stealing the smartphone show. From the uninspiring T-Mobile Pulse and the chunky Motorola Dext to the HTC Hero, with its weird “chin”, and the temperamental Samsung Galaxy i7500, Android devices have hardly been trend setters.
The Motorola Milestone continues disappointingly in that vein. It is a similar size to the iPhone, though slightly heavier and when placed on its side so that the qwerty keyboard slides out – in an admittedly reassuringly solid manner because the build quality is excellent – it juts out past the screen on the right-hand side. This makes using the keyboard rather awkward as it is off-centre. The screen on the Milestone is inferior to the active-matrix organic LED (AMOLED) touchscreen on the Nexus One, which certainly dazzled our reviewer Bobbie Johnson .
But the Milestone does include multitouch, unlike the Nexus One, Dext and its US variant the Droid. Like all Android devices, however, the Milestone is still waiting for developers to start creating the sort of applications – not least games – that really bring multitouch to life. For an example of what multitouch can become, look no further than the game Eliss being played on an iPhone.
The Milestone is far more responsive than the Motorola Dext – which in my experience suffers from dreadful lag – in part because Motorola’s first stab at an Android handset was running version 1.5 of the software as opposed to the Milestone’s Android 2.0. The Nexus One, meanwhile, is on Android 2.1. But the Milestone actually represents something of a step backwards for Motorola.
The Dext – sold as the Cliq in the US – included Motoblur, which brought social networking updates direct to the device’s homescreen rather like Vodafone’s 360 service. But Motoblur is conspicuously absent from the new device.
All the usual Android features are, however, present: email integration is easy, setting up contacts and downloading what applications there are from the Android marketplace is simple. The Milestone also has a better camera than the iPhone – weighing in at 5 megapixels and including a similar variety of bells and whistles, such as flash and a digital zoom, to those included on the Nexus One – but I found it incredibly slow to process images. The Milestone can take a 32GB MicroSD card, the same as the Nexus One. Both the Nexus One and Milestone, meanwhile, allow for multitasking, meaning you can flit between applications without having to close them down, which the iPhone has yet to achieve.
The ultimate question with the Milestone is why bother to buy it when the Nexus One is a better phone? Yes it has a keypad, but anyone who desperately needs a keyboard should just buy a BlackBerry – RIM is the only handset manufacturer that can be trusted to produce one that will not end up inducing carpal tunnel syndrome in long-term users. The Milestone’s off-centre keyboard will cripple you in a matter of weeks.
The big drawback with the Nexus One is it is currently only available direct from Google. This makes it expensive – at about £425 – as there is no network operator to subsidise it and leaves any customer who has problems with the device with no other option than emailing Google and waiting for a response. That, however, is going to change later this year as Vodafone, and possibly T-Mobile, will sell the Nexus One in the UK later this year. Anyone desperate for an Android phone would do well to wait; treating this latest Motorola attempt as a Milestone on the road to something better.
Pros: It’s not an iPhone – for those that cannot bear the thought of becoming “one of those people that has an iPhone”.
Cons: It’s not a Nexus One
motorola.com
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(Source The Guardian)
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What would you want from a wine app? Or have you already found one which suits you?
Although I enjoy chatting to sommeliers (once I’ve laid my cards on the table regarding my meagre budget) and will always pick staff brains in a proper wine merchants, the fact is that sometimes you find yourself on your own when it comes to choosing wine. Disappointingly few supermarkets or chain off-licences employ anyone on the shop floor with a real passion for wine, so the idea of applications which can help you pick out a good bottle on the hoof, or identify an unknown grape on a restaurant wine list, is potentially a very exciting one.
Although the wine writers I contacted for recommendations all claimed to be technophobes (it must go with the territory), I found a fan in amateur wine buff and professional expert on mobile apps, Tim Harrison. He’s tested most of what’s out there and, he says, “came to the conclusion that there was a gap in the market since most of the apps I had tried failed either in the area of catalogue, functionality and relevance (and usually all three!)”.
The problem, in his opinion, that many apps are targeted at what he calls ‘vinoraks’, who have large cellars to manage, and the dedication to input detailed tasting notes for every glass, and the majority are aimed at US consumers, which makes price and stockist details irrelevant to the British user. However, there are a few which are worth their modest price-tags.
Wine Enthusiast Guide, £2.99 (MobileAge)
This is useful tool for anyone who’d like to pretend they know more about wine than they actually do (that’s everyone then). Puzzled by a word on the label, or unsure whether 1995 or 1996 was better for Alsatian whites? This app puts the information at your fingertips. It also features reviews from its namesake American magazine and allows you to create a list of your favourite wines, although annoyingly you can’t add your own comments. Search is by price, rating, style, varietal and region, so you can get quite specific and this one seems to have more of a world view than Drync (although still no English wine, sadly).
Wine Chap, £2.99 (Wine Chap)
A good-looking app that claims to be the first to evaluate restaurant wine lists, rather than individual bottles – so should you find yourself, say, at The Box Tree at Ilkley, you can mug up on their selection in the loo, and then breeze out and say authoritatively, after a mere glance at the wine list, “oh, the 2006 Cristom Vineyards Pinot Gris is terribly good value, we must order that!” There are also ‘first date wines’, ‘old school classics’ and ‘treat yourself’ options, specifically tailored to the menu, so, for example, a red from the Luberon at Edinburgh’s The Kitchin is recommended as ‘a sound pick for [chef] Tom’s game specialities’. This is an app which will become increasingly useful as their selection of reviews expands – at the moment, the list is very London-centric (although, for the frequent traveller, Hong Kong and New York are also well served).
Drync Wine Pro, £2.99 (Drync)
If you’re looking for information on a particular wine, then this is almost certainly the app for you as it searches 10 online databases, including Snooth, to bring you ratings on over 80,000 wines and reviews from the likes of Robert Parker. You can also build your own virtual cellar, add your own ratings, and see what’s top of other users’ wish lists. It’s rather US-centric, both in terms of featured bottles (strong on France and the Americas, not so hot on Australia or Eastern Europe, for example) and reviews (you won’t find anything from UK critics here), but it’s easy to use, and if you get lucky, there’s a few wines that can even be bought online from British stockists – although not many.
Wine Quiz, £1.19 (Berry Bros & Rudd)
This is an ideal app to have on your phone, being utterly frivolous and guaranteed to leave you feeling cross and worthless. It’s nothing fancy – just endless rounds of questions on the world of wine, with enough easy ones to keep you motivated and sufficient brain teasers to stop you throwing the phone away with a contemptuous curl of the lip; I’d like to think I’m not alone in failing to name the grapes used to produce ‘the Hungarian wine Egri Bikavér’.
Pair It!, £1.79 (Pair It)
This app is, as the name suggests, a tool that helps you match food with wine, and vice versa, and contains over 20,000 different suggestions, from the standard (Stilton and port) to the extremely niche (spicy citrus bourbon ribs with Asti Spumante, anyone?). Some of the dishes featured are so specific that a link to a recipe would be helpful, and a few of the suggestions are rather general – it suggests nearly 40 styles to go with a beef lasagne – but it’s not a bad tool to have with you in the supermarket, even if you’ll never need to know what to drink with a Sloppy Joe (white zinfandel, apparently which frankly sounds even worse than the thing itself).
There are of course mobile devices other than the iPhone available. We asked Neil Davey how those apps which run on the BlackBerry match up, and this is what he told us.
Wine of the Day, £2.79 (Enigma Games)
Does what it says, suggesting a new and interesting wine each day, but it doesn’t tell you what food to match with, where to buy, what the grape is (well, not all the time), or the price. The descriptions are pretty good though.
Cellar Rat, £2.09 (Telltale Social Media)
A wine rating app that uses emoticons rather than numerical ratings. Rates over 60 regions worldwide, and two decades of vintages. Designed for everyone from the novice to the expert. Generally favourably reviewed, it can help steer you to something on a wine list or a supermarket shelf – but it’s very general, not specific: hence Napa Valley is apparently good for 2005. Er … OK, but is that ALL wine in Napa?!
R-Vintage Lookup, £2.79 (REGARD Solutions Corporation)
Again, rates vintages – numerically – and also suggests “drink” or “hold”. A few reviews on the BlackBerry, mostly of the 4, 5 star variety. Not comprehensive by any stretch but would appear to be the best of its kind on the BlackBerry. Nice interface, simple to use.
Useful as these are in their own ways, none tap into what either Tim or I really want from a mobile wine guide – which is to have a trustworthy sommelier in our pockets, ready for all eventualities. We both agree that a regularly updated app which collated the recommendations of British critics would be helpful, so we could see at a glance what Jancis or Victoria or Jonathan were recommending that week, as would one which noted our favourite styles, and then alerted us when, say, our beloved Sicilian reds were on offer locally.
Tim, who has big ideas, even dreams of a programme which uses the barcode scanner tool already available on the iPhone to give you information about bottles on the shelf – “Wouldn’t it be great to scan something in Sainsbury’s,” he says wistfully, “read a few views from the press and your mates and then go and buy it more cheaply at Majestic?”
So, what would you want from a wine app? Or have you already found one which suits you?
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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In 2008, Chinese ministers reorganised the telecoms sector, strengthening China Unicom and introducing a new mobile rival, China Telecom
It might seem perverse for the Chinese government to pit three state-owned carriers against each other, but Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based telecoms and IT specialist, says officials believe competition is good for consumers – and if consumers are happy, they are happier with the government. It is also a mark of their ambition, he suggests: “If you are going to compete globally you need to become a truly competitive operator.”
So, in 2008, ministers reorganised the telecoms sector, strengthening China Unicom and introducing a new mobile rival, China Telecom. To level the playing field they gave China Mobile the domestically-developed 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, awarding its competitors international standards: WCDMA and CDMA 2000, widely used elsewhere.
“This is fairness and anti-monopoly behaviour with Chinese characteristics,” says David Wolf, of corporate advisory firm Wolf Group Asia. “The government handed the most common system to the weakest player, and the toughest to the biggest.”
The decision can be read in another light: as a way of ensuring the Chinese standard succeeds. “China Mobile is really the only one which could bear that burden – the one most likely to be able to make it succeed and least likely to die under its weight,” says Natkin.
The stakes are even higher because at present consumers can switch easily between services, buying handsets and SIM cards separately. The varying standards for 3G will change that.
Daniel Yu, an analyst at Pyramid Research, points out the firm has already announced billions of dollars in subsidies for TD-SCDMA handsets, to counter their relative scarcity. “By providing low-cost or even free 3G handsets, they might be in for a fight,” he adds. “Nevertheless, they will need to be quick with network coverage and not under-deliver.”
Observers say it is hard to imagine the authorities allowing the Chinese 3G TD-SCDMA standard to fail. But the issue underlines the difficulties China Mobile can face in reconciling the interests of its owners. Wang Jianzhou, chief executive of China Mobile says: “The government is our majority shareholder, but we also need to balance the interests of society and our partners and vendors … If the company is very profitable it will benefit both our subscribers and shareholders.”
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(Source The Guardian)
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Customers buy the cheap VX1i Party Phones instead of more expensive models and some are buy them in addition to their existing phones
The rise and rise of expensive smartphones has also seen a rise in sales of more disposable phones that people can take on nights out without fear of losing them.
One of the best-selling mobile handsets at Tesco over Christmas was an £18.99 “party phone” aimed at forgetful consumers who prefer to leave their iPhones and BlackBerrys at home.
Tapping into a disposable trend pioneered by budget high street fashion stores, Tesco’s telecoms arm sold more than 10,000 VX1i Party Phones in the two weeks leading up to the New Year.
The phone comes without a SIM but allows users to put in their own card and so keep their own number. Tesco said some customers are buying the cheap handsets instead of more expensive phones while others are buying them in addition to their existing phones.
“Our handset was developed as an affordable replacement, temporary phone or alternative to a more expensive phone, but its popularity really has taken us by surprise,” said Lance Batchelor, chief executive for Tesco Telecoms and Tesco Mobile.
Tesco Telecoms said the phone’s slim design was intended to meet the demands of women who do not want to carry handbags on nights out and also to coincide with a trend for skinny jeans.
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(Source The Guardian)
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Dr Paul Jacobs entertained the audience, raised his company’s profile, promoted his company’s Snapdragon processor, and showcased smartbooks from HP and Lenovo in his first CES keynote speech — success all round
Perhaps because it was his first keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, Qualcomm’s chief executive Dr Paul Jacobs put on an excellent, if slightly overlong, show. He featured a string of chief executives with interesting new products using Qualcomm technology, and announced support for Google’s ChromeOS. Then, to end on a high, he gave 300 free FLO TVs to members of the audience.
Jacobs’ guests included HTC boss Peter Chou, Lenovo boss Yuanqing Yang, Todd Bradley, who runs Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Systems Group, and D-Link boss Tony Tsao. These may not be household names, but HTC makes Google’s Android phones, including the Nexus One, Lenovo is the biggest PC maker in China and took over IBM’s PC business, and HP is now the world’s largest technology company.
All of that should worry Microsoft. HTC has always been the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile phones, while IBM’s PC division and HP have been two of Microsoft’s three most important supporters (the other one is Dell). And both HP and Lenovo showed smartbooks, a format that Qualcomm is promoting as an alternative to netbooks.
When I suggested that CES would see the start of a battle between ARM-based smartbooks and Intel Atom-powered netbooks, I imagined that the smartbooks would come from a dozen or so small Asian suppliers. Instead, the most interesting smartbooks have been shown by two of the largest PC manufacturers.
To be fair, Yuanqing Yang said the Skylight smartbook was about extending the PC’s reach, and HP’s Todd Bradley stressed that he wasn’t making a product announcement. But it won’t help Microsoft if these companies sell lots of smartbooks running Linux rather than netbooks running Windows.
For all these gadgets, the Qualcomm connection is the ARM-based Snapdragon processor used in Google’s Nexus One phone. Jacobs believes that the chips used in smartphones will go into many other consumer electronics devices in the future. They might look different but they’ll all have mobile phone technology inside.
One example is the ebook reader, and Jacobs showed one using Mirasol. “You’ve seen E Ink displays in devices like the Kindle, so this display technology does the same thing, except does it with full colour and with full-motion video,” he said.
But the highlight of Jacobs’ keynote was the appearance of Eric Topol, who is, among other things, chief medical officer of the West Wireless Health Institute. He showed an impressive range of health gadgets including Zeo’s device for measuring sleep quality, a Corventis Piix heart monitor, and a small machine for doing echo cardiograms — a sort of high-tech stethoscope.
Jacobs isn’t a big-name presenter and didn’t attract the capacity crowd that went to see Steve Ballmer’s opening keynote, but I’d bet more people ended up better informed, and happier.
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(Source The Guardian)
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Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage … where was I right and wrong about the year just gone?
Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let’s see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up …
Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business.
They didn’t. Did they? That’s 0/1
Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? “Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11,” he explained. And of course there’s Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn’t. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register.
In fact, companies didn’t withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren’t making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business.
Prediction 2: There will be more “netbooks” – aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC – than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market.
Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2
Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won’t have a near-death experience, but it’s going to keep shrinking.
True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn’t made it grow. 2/3
Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I’m sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying “interest” (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That’s just not sustainable, and debt isn’t going to get cheaper to service, either.
Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4
Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it.
Its latest figures show that it didn’t do well, and the Pre hasn’t actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5
Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive.
Tricky, this. Twitter’s growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their “real-time” search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google “Twitter users”? I don’t see why not – I’ve previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough.
So, 4/6
Prediction 7: Many – as in thousands – of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there’s a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don’t need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?).
(The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7
Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you’re coordinating the project, or you’re doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less.
This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon’s S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We’re still hearing that there’s a skills shortage in IT – but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There’s less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let’s call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.)
5.5/8
And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft.
Prediction 9: Windows 7 will be pushed out of the door in time for the end of the year, and particularly for Christmas sales. It won’t be perfect, but it will get corporates interested in an upgrade from XP, which Vista didn’t.
It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it’s not perfect, it’s considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that’s solid.
6.5/9
Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it.
Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo – well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn’t challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it’s wrong.
6.5/10
Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks.
Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn’t formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it’s been declared dead ages ago) but it’s vanishing.
7.5/11
Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome.
Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping.
8.5/12
Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either.
Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried – er, hoped – no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn’t launched a Zune Phone (it’s doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod’s transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe.
9.5/13
Ubiquity
Prediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it’s a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they’ll become pervasive. Let’s put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year.
Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely.
10.5/14
Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it.
It’s an enduring mystery why this hasn’t been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don’t tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That’s not, though, what I’d imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though “more” DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn’t happened.
10.5/15
Prediction 16: Femtocells – which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection – will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product.
I also said during the year that femtocells weren’t going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can’t be anything but correct.
11.5/16
Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter – rather than last year’s favourite, Facebook – via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.)
Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you’d be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter’s penetration on my part – though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts.
11.5/17
Linux
Prediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be “the year of desktop Linux” while the bugs are ironed out this year.
This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April.
11.5/18
Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it’s best-selling year for desktop Linux ever.
Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn’t going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still:
12.5/19
Apple
Prediction 20: Let’s start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone’s OSX by the end of the year.
Correct. It always is, year after year.
13.5/20
Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 … this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard’s release in October 2007 – which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule.
Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009.
13.5/21
Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don’t think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy – which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers.
Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn’t announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.)
14.5/22
Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade – just as much as it has for previous upgrades.
Yes, it did charge – but not as much as for previous upgrades. That’s a miss.
14.5/23
Prediction 24: ZFS won’t be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it’ll be an optional install, for server honchos.
In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare.
15.5/24
Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn’t.
Hmm – technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs’s illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn’t such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right – no more.
16/25
Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won’t be updated before the autumn.
The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere.
16/26
Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time.
It was, and it did. Finally.
17/27
Environment
Prediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies – even quite big ones – to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
This is the move to cloud computing, and it’s one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud?
18/28
Free Our Data
Prediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey’s data available for free unfettered reuse – and will do it.
I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I’d have traded all the other predictions for this one – but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it.
19/29
Processing
Prediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts’ predictions about how in five years we’d all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn’t. … [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly.
Er, we didn’t. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we’re still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we’re always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.)
19/30
So that’s 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what’s a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we’re seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that’s better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.)
And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google – the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That’s going to be huge this year, I think – so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Contactless credit card allows holders to make purchases by swiping it over a reader
Mobile phone firm Orange has joined forces with Barclaycard to launch a contactless credit card.
Contactless cards allow users to make payments of a few pounds by swiping them over a card reader. More than 20,000 retailers now have contactless pay points in store, according to Orange, and figures from Visa show there are currently 5m such cards in use.
Yesterday’s launch is the next stage in the relationship between Orange and Barclaycard, who announced last year that they will launch a mobile phone with contactless technology that can be swiped like a card.
Orange claims the contactless card gives users “a new level of control over their account” by allowing them to set daily, weekly or even category-based spending limits.
Users who are also Orange mobile phone customers can choose to set a limit of, for example, £50 a week, and would be sent an SMS alert when they come close to this. The card can also be used for ordinary transactions if a contactless pay point isn’t available.
The usual credit checks from Barclaycard will apply before the card is issued, and it comes with an interest rate of 18.9% for purchases or 29.9% for cash withdrawals. Customers buying Orange products or services will get three months interest free on their first purchase if they use the card.
Customers will also earn one Orange credit card reward point for every £1 spent, which can subsequently be spent at high street shops, to get discounts on Orange products, or to get tickets for trips and special events.
The two main contactless cards are Visa’s payWave and Mastercard’s PayPass, with Barclays the main bank signed up to them.
Not all customers have welcomed their introduction, however, with some fearing swiped payments are less secure than those made by traditional credit cards. However, Barclaycard said there was demand from customers.
“We are seeing demand from both retailers and customers for ever more convenient ways to pay and accept payment, and believe that mobile and contactless technologies are key to meeting those needs,” Chris Wood, managing director at Barclaycard, said.
“This announcement shows how, in partnership with Orange, Barclaycard is starting to make mobile contactless payments a step closer for UK consumers.”
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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