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Adam Elgar hopes a mobile broadband dongle will do for his daughter, who is moving into a house with no fixed line internet access.

My daughter is moving into a house with no fixed line internet access, and she’s sceptical about going down the dongle route with her laptop. Her mobile phone signal will be adequate, but not great. How could she best achieve the bandwith needed for (for example) watching TV online? Your 8 October 2009 answer — Can 3G replace a landline? — suggests that only a landline will do. But are there now other solutions that you’d recommend?
Adam Elgar

I would love to be able to recommend WiMax (IEEE 802.16), which is much like a long-range version of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11), but it’s very unlikely that your daughter is living in an area where it’s available. Given the UK government’s/Ofcom’s lack of interest in WiMax, I don’t see that changing. I would also love to be able to recommend LTE (Long Term Evolution), which is the 4G service of choice among phone network suppliers, but it is probably still a couple of years from common use.

Since I can’t do either, I’d suggest your daughter either looks into the cost of a landline or tries to find a friendly neighbour who will share an existing Wi-Fi network. Or, particularly in a rural area, considers two-way satellite services like Astra2Connect.

While I wasn’t very keen on mobile 3G dongles last October, I’m even less keen on them today. I had been using my 3 dongle inside the M25 for email and Twitter but I’ve stopped because it’s often not worth the effort — and 3’s HSPDA seemed to me to be the best service!

Even with a dongle, you’re not connected the whole time, so it’s not really “mobile broadband”: it’s more like “mobile dial-up”. And because of line drops/tunnels/tall buildings/whatever, you can spend more time connecting and disconnecting (and downloading 3’s pointless home page) than you do tweeting. I wouldn’t usually try to watch a YouTube video or iPlayer programme via 3G, though it might be possible.

The actual throughput your daughter will get will depend on exactly where she lives: results can vary on the same street, or even inside the same house. However, I’d be a touch surprised if she got much more than 2.2 Mbps, regardless of the “headline speed”. I wouldn’t be shocked if she got 1 Mbps, or even less. By contrast, a fixed phone line or cable connection should normally be able to deliver 3 Mbps to 7 Mbps for a lower cost. (You would also have to include the cost of installing and renting the phone line, but sometimes this can be shared between four or five people.)

You can perhaps get some idea of the likely performance and the deals on offer by entering your daughter’s post code in the “Speed in my area” page at Broadband Speedchecker. This takes users’ speed test results from the past six months and plots them on a Google map. There are a few pins for mobile broadband services, though it could do with more.

In the end, I’d guess that mobile broadband is now worse than it used to be because many more people are using it. The market has grown with the arrival of better smartphones (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android etc) and the cheaper deals for dongles and bandwidth taken up by mobile netbook and notebook users, me included.

Are the network providers going to expand capacity (which costs money) faster than required by the number of new users? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• HTC’s Legend smartphone will come to UK in April
• Analysts hail design classic in same league as Apple
• Vodafone snaps up handset for Europe

HTC has come of age. The Taiwanese mobile phone manufacturer, once known only as the maker of Windows phones under the SPV brand, today unveiled a new phone sporting Google’s Android software which analysts are predicting could steal a march on Apple in the smartphone design wars.

The HTC Legend, which runs the latest Android software called Eclair, is made from a single block of aluminium and has a very bright and clear 3.2 inch AMOLED (ultra-bright LED) display. Vodafone has grabbed the handset in Europe, wary of losing out after missing the iPhone in some of the company’s key European markets.

The Legend will come to the UK in April and already analysts are predicting that it will be a design classic following its launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Legend’s clever use of milled aluminium casing could scoop Apple’s direction for the next iPhone design,” said CCS Insight.

Despite its body being engineered from a single piece of aluminium, the HTC Legend has a removable battery – something which the iPhone conspicuously lacks – which slides out from a compartment at the bottom of the phone. The back of the battery casing also contains the phone’s antenna so that its metal body does not hinder signal strength.

HTC has updated the user face – called HTC Sense – that sits atop Android on the device. Alongside refinements to the phone’s address book, so that contacts can be organised into groups such as business contacts and friends, it pulls information from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter into a single Friend Stream of updates.

The Android platform has been the making of HTC. It created the first phone, the G1, using the software, while the Legend is the new version of another successful Android phone, the Hero. The Legend, however, has a rather less intrusive “chin” at the bottom of the device than the Hero.

Alongside it, HTC also unveiled the HTC Desire, which also uses HTC Sense. It had previously been codenamed the HTC Bravo and several UK operators have been vying to get hold of it as it is essentially the same as Google’s own Nexus One device, which HTC also produced. However, it has an optical trackpad rather than a roller ball, and is understood to be cheaper than the Google device.

Orange said it will be stocking the HTC Desire from April and it will be free on selected monthly tariffs. It is likely to be priced the same as the iPhone, a policy Vodafone is expected to follow with the Nexus One in the UK when it launches next month.

The HTC Desire will also be available in the UK on T-Mobile from 26 March.

The Desire has a large 3.7 inch AMOLED screen, like the Nexus One, and contains the 1GHz Snapdragon processor which is also found on the Nexus One. It includes such iPhone staples as pinching to zoom on web pages while it also automatically recalibrates text so that when you zoom into a page, you do not have to scroll left and right to get to the end of a line.

Crucially, it also supports Flash, which Apple still resolutely refuses to back.

HTC also announced the HTC HD mini, which uses the 6.5 version of Windows Phone rather than the series 7 platform launched by Steve Ballmer yesterday.

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(Source The Guardian)

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The mobile operator has introduced a package that allows customers to get 2MB of data for a day, while they are in Europe

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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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)

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A change of heart has helped Tiscali customers left worse off after merger with TalkTalk. Miles Brignall reports

The home phone and broadband supplier TalkTalk has been forced into a U-turn after telling customers of the recently merged Tiscali that it would not be honouring contracts offered prior to the takeover.

As Guardian Money revealed shortly before Christmas, the merger of the broadband and phone giants, originally announced in May 2009, has resulted in a big price increase for some Tiscali customers pushed on to the higher TalkTalk tariffs. Some broadband-only customers face costs rising from £14.99 to £19.99 a month.

It was initially thought most of those affected were out of contract. However, in the past two weeks, TalkTalk has been telling customers who had recently signed new agreements it would not be honouring those struck with Tiscali salespeople – even if it was just a few weeks before the known-about merger. Some say they were told by TalkTalk staff that the fact they had signed an 18-month contract at an agreed price was “meaningless” as they were TalkTalk customers now.

One such customer is new mum Sarah­ Gladwin. The bank manager, who lives in Richmond, Surrey, was contemplating leaving Tiscali and finding a better deal after reading our original article.

Out of contract and free to take her business elsewhere, she called the Tiscali sales team in late December and was offered line rental, broadband, and free calls in the evenings and at weekends – its basic phone/internet package – for a very attractive £12 a month, with the first three months free.

She had to sign up for 18 months. “I was very happy with the deal. Confirmation came by email the same day and later by post. Both stated that my Tiscali package had been successfully upgraded, as per my order. We received a new wireless router in about three days. All great, or so I thought.”

A few days ago she received a letter welcoming her to TalkTalk and saying that, in future, she would be paying £18.50 a month. Other readers have contacted Money complaining about the same thing.

“Obviously, I didn’t want to pay nearly 50% more, so I phoned them to say ‘no thank you, we’ll continue with our agreed contract made last month’. But the call centre did not understand. It offered me three months free after speaking to a ’supervisor’.

“I explained I already had an 18-month contract with three months free, and a cheaper monthly fee, but all she kept saying was ‘we’re Talk Talk now’. After 45 minutes, I gave up,” says Gladwin. A second phone call elicited the same take or leave it response.

“How can you deal with a company that treats its customers in this way?” she says.

TalkTalk originally said it wanted to streamline its complicated range of tariffs down to one. “Our aim, at the end of this process, is to have one clearly understood set of prices. That will mean no one is paying more than the TalkTalk tariff and is fair to everyone,” it said in December, seemingly unaware its colleagues at Tiscali were offering different deals to retain customers.

Consumer law expert Dr Christian Twigg-Flesner at the University of Hull says telecoms companies and financial services providers rely on “unilateral variation clauses” to allow them to vary prices in this way.

“Most of the banks have these in their terms to allow them to change interest rates and the like. However, in this case, customers might be able to argue the company was misrepresenting its offer.

“But, as a consumer, you can’t force a company to honour a deal. Unfortunately, English law is reluctant to hold companies to contracts as long as they give the consumer the chance to opt out,” he says.

After Money raised the issue with TalkTalk the company had a change of heart, and says it will now honour the contracts with Tiscali – albeit with a rather complicated billing arrangement.

A spokesman says: “Customers who signed up with Tiscali or altered their package between September and December­ 2009 will be offered six months service at half price when they sign up to a new contract with TalkTalk. Those customers who want to stick with the original deal they signed, can do so. They will have to pay the TalkTalk tariff, but their account will be credited, up-front, with the difference, meaning they will pay nothing for the first few months.”

He explained the company’s recent downturn in customer service on the poor weather, during which just 25% of its staff were able to get to work at its Preston and Warrington centres.

“It caused us big problems in terms of answering calls and it came at the worst time, but we are now back to normal,” he says.

Meanwhile, the regulator Ofcom may have had a hand in the about- turn.

“Ofcom is aware of this issue; we are monitoring complaints and we are in touch with TalkTalk,” it says.

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.

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(Source The Guardian)

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HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia will drop the ailing “Comes with Music” offering from the new version of its flagship music phone X6, hoping a one-third cheaper price tag would boost sales of the model.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Companies may look to cash in on the upcoming mobile market rather than invest millions in video games. Will it work though?

Monopoly – the game – has had a long and complicated pedigree. It first gained traction in the 1930s, partially stimulated by a need to escape from the economic woes of the depression.

If it has an equivalent today it is Farmville, available on the social website Facebook, which claims an astonishing 74 million regular users. It is the most successful of a number of similar games on Facebook which are themselves part of a wider boom in gaming during the recession.

Farmville is like a real farm. If you don’t crop your harvest in time or feed your cartoony animals regularly then you face disaster. Like Monopoly it is power-driven to the extent that everyone wants to beat competitors and have the biggest farm. Like Monopoly its success has been generated by its users.

Parker Brothers, who later acquired the rights, famously turned Monopoly down in 1934 as “too complicated, too technical … took too long to play”. They listed “52 fundamental playing errors”, and it was only later when they became of aware of huge demand spontaneously generated by the public – which the small company which then marketed it couldn’t cope with – that they changed their minds and bought the company and earlier patents.

Gaming would probably be on a roll anyway but during a recession there is an added impetus to play video games you already own more intensively rather than spend money on entertainment or to savour some of the burgeoning free games on offer. The boom is difficult to quantify partly because aggregated statistics for all forms of gaming are difficult to find but also because so much of it is free.

We are experiencing an explosion of games based on the “freemium” model whereby publishers give it away in the hope that at least 5% of players will trade up to a paid model or else trigger advertising revenue.

The boom is being experienced everywhere except on the bottom line. Widespread redundancies among traditional publishers and developers are coinciding with a surge in demand in other sectors.

The casual gaming site miniclip.com of Hatton Garden, London, was at one stage claiming 50 million unique users a month, while Getjar.com, another UK-based indie company, claims to be the biggest app downloader after Apple. Playfish.com, another big casual gaming site, was bought for $275m in November by the games giant Electronic Arts, which has experienced a sharp drop in profits. And Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 made $1bn in its first couple of months, which is a result comparable to the unprecedented success of the 3D blockbuster film Avatar.

What seems to be happening, despite the huge success of some titles, is a switch from expensive video-based games to cheaper-to-produce ones residing on mobile phones, online, or on social networks – which is where all the eyeballs are anyway. It is reckoned that more than half of iPhone users are playing games. Morgan Securities says demand for online gaming will double annually for a few years, to $800m this year and $1.6bn next.

It has been presumed that the centre of gravity for gaming will switch to Apple’s app store (which this month added a version of Grand Theft Auto to its growing games portfolio) but now the outlook is not so sure.

The success of Facebook has raised the prospect that social networks could be the place people go to for games. The iPhone, for all its undoubted success is still a minority sport. The mobile guru Tomi Ahonen reminds us that “only 0.7% – yes less than 1% – of all who have a mobile phone on the planet, have an iPhone”, and in any case apps only work on smartphones which so far only account for about 14% of the installed base of mobile phones (but, of course, are growing fast).

Developers are finding it increasingly difficult to make any noise among the avalanche of apps in the iPhone store, let alone any money. Apple’s disclosure that total downloads have exceeded 3bn is an amazing success story, though not as big as it looks once you have allowed for the fact that most downloads are free and the figures also include downloads of updates.

Games embracing Google’s Android operating system – based, unlike iPhone apps, on open source – could offer serious competition to Apple; as could Nokia, which is still the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world by a distance.

Companies faced with investing millions in new video games or much smaller sums in the mobile market – towards which everything, including social networks, are migrating – may well take the cheaper option. Either way, a lot of companies are likely to go under before the wheat is separated from the chaff. In this market, the consumer is still king.

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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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The hype machine went into overdrive about the forthcoming Gphone/Google phone, but the prices leaked to Gizmodo suggest it will be more like business as usual

Google is holding an Android-related press conference at its headquarters in California on Tuesday 5 January, presumably to announce details of the Nexus One phone that Googlers have been (as related here on 14 December) “dogfooding”.

But if Gizmodo’s tipster is to be believed, the Nexus One will not be the revolution that some seem to have been expecting. Yes, Google could supply unsubsidised mobile phones directly to consumers at close to or less than cost price and try to subvert the mobile phone industry’s business model. (The less-than-cost price would reflect the value of plumbing users into Google’s numerous online properties, such as Gmail and YouTube, and feeding them adverts.)

Alas, Gizmodo’s headline blows that idea out of the water: Leaked Nexus One Documents: $530 Unlocked, $180 With T-Mobile.

If so, the HTC Nexus One looks like just another Android handset at a competitive but not particularly different price. If you sign up for a two-year contract with T-Mobile, it’s still not a cheap deal: Gizmodo says “There’s only one rate plan: $39.99 Even More + Text + Web for $79.99 total”.

The total cost is pennies short of $2,100 (£1,300).

If you cancel the plan in the first 120 days, you must pay $350 to keep the phone or send it back to Google. Since the Nexus One doesn’t support CDMA — popular in the US — or AT&T’s 3G network, you may well be sending it back.

Another possibility, of course, is that the story is wrong, and Google will after all use cheap hardware with Google Voice to try to redefine at least the geekier part of the phone industry. We will soon see.

However, while accepting that Google’s Nexus One price is competitive with other smartphones on the market from Apple, Nokia and RIM etc, it’s still not clear to me why smartphones are so expensive. Smartphone fans argue that ARM chips are much cheaper than Intel chips and that Microsoft Windows is far more expensive than (free) alternatives such as Android.

In that case, why does a smartphone cost $530 or $600 or so when you can get decent netbook with a 10 inch screen, Windows XP, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Skype and a 160GB hard drive for about $300?

Shouldn’t a smartphone be half the price of a Wintel netbook, not almost twice the price?

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, android, apple, blog, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, drive, free, google, HTC, line, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, nokia, phone, phones, prices, sol, t-mobile, uk

• Basic iPhone 3G offered at £35 a month on a two-year contract
• Vodafone hoping to attract consumers with network reliability

Vodafone will start selling the iPhone in Britain next month, offering customers a free handset for £35 a month on a two-year contract, disappointing consumers hoping for a high-street price war over the device.

The pricing plan comes as a surprise because it does not give Britain’s biggest mobile phone company a competitive advantage, especially on an 18-month deal, where it is more expensive than its rivals.

“I don’t think this is about a price war – I think this is a network quality war,” said Vodafone UK’s chief executive, Guy Laurence. “At the end of the day, customers will seek out the best deal and I believe we are competitive, but it is about the quality of the network it runs on. We have spent a year optimising the network for the iPhone.

“It’s very simple: now you can get the iPhone on a network you can rely on.”

The arrival of the iPhone on Vodafone brings the number of mobile phone companies supplying the device in Britain to four. Vodafone customers who register interest before it goes on sale on 14 January will get a small thank you for not defecting to rivals that already have the handset, in the form of free calls to other Vodafone users for the life of their initial contract.

Orange started selling the iPhone last month, ending O2’s two-year exclusive grip on the handset, then Tesco arrived this month, complicating matters by opting for 12-month contracts and demanding consumers shell out several hundred pounds for the device itself.

Vodafone’s “entry-level” prices for the iPhone over 18 months are almost £100 more expensive than Orange and O2, while Tesco does not offer an 18-month contract. Vodafone’s entry-level prices over two years are about £40 cheaper than O2 but almost £75 more expensive than Orange.

Different handsets, however, have been pitched by different networks at different price points and with different bundles of texts and minutes.

The basic iPhone 3G is cheapest with Orange over 18 months, at £624.98, and with Tesco over two years – provided consumers renew their 12-month contract – at £702.

But most consumers are likely to want the 16GB version of the faster iPhone 3GS. That is cheapest with Tesco, where it costs £800 over two years for consumers who renew their 12-month contract. The 16GB iPhone works out at £829.64 for Orange customers, £869 on Vodafone and £909.35 on O2.

Variety of packages

But the packages on offer are very different. For that price, Tesco offers £60 of calls and texts a month – which works out at about 600 minutes or 1,200 texts – while Vodafone offers 300 minutes and unlimited texts per month and O2 gives customers 600 minutes and 500 texts. In stark contrast, Orange offers just 150 minutes and 250 texts.

On the face of it, Tesco and Vodafone offer better “value” than Orange or O2 on the iPhone 3GS 16GB over two years. Some people have been put off Tesco Mobile, however, by the fact that it uses O2’s network to run its service and the company has been suffering network capacity issues in recent months, especially in London.

With Britain’s newest network, 3, unlikely to get it for several months and with T-Mobile having counted itself out of the race for the foreseeable future, the arrival of Vodafone completes the range of choices for UK consumers.

Vodafone is offering all three versions of the iPhone on 18-month and 24-month contracts, the same as Orange and O2. The 18-month tariff starts at £40, for which customers will get the basic iPhone 3G – which has 8GB of memory and a 2 megapixel camera – free, but have to pay £89 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS – which has a 3 megapixel camera and a faster processor – and £179 for the top-of-the-range 32GB iPhone 3GS, which has more memory capacity. Over the length of that 18-month contract, therefore, Vodafone consumers will pay £720 for the iPhone 3G, £809 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS and £899 for the iPhone 3GS 32GB.

The equivalent 18-month entry-level prices on O2 are £625.73, £713.82 and £803.07. For Orange the equivalent prices are £624.98, £712.98 and £802.48.

Vodafone is also offering all three devices on 24-month contracts. At the basic £30-a-month contract the iPhone 3G will cost consumers £59, the iPhone 3GS 16GB £149 and the iPhone 3GS 32GB £239. Over the two-year period, therefore, consumers will pay a total of £779 for the iPhone 3G, £869 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS and £959 for the iPhone 3GS 32GB.

The equivalent prices for O2 are £822.24, £909.35 and £997.43 and for Orange they are £704.64, £829.64 and £929.64.

Tesco started selling the device last week and while it grabbed headlines by being the first operator to make the phone available on a contract at £20 a month and lasting just a year, consumers have to pay £222 to buy the basic 3G handset or £320 for the 16GB version of the faster 3GS handset and £407 for the 32GB version of the device.

Over the life of an annual contract, therefore, the 3G phone on Tesco costs £462, the 16GB 3GS £560 and the 32GB version 3GS £647.

Expanding the price over 18 months in order to compare the Tesco deals with O2 and Orange, the iPhone 3G on Tesco costs at total of £582 over a year and a half, the 16GB 3GS costs £680 and the 32GB 3GS costs £767. All these prices are lower than the equivalent prices from O2 and Orange, but only by £35 to £40 over 18 months. Compared with Vodafone’s 18 month prices, Tesco is about £130 cheaper.

It is not possible, however, to get an 18-month contract with Tesco so either customers would have to renew their 12-month contract or opt for Tesco’s more expensive 24-month contract from the outset.

Doubling-up the 12-month contract leaves the 3G costing £702, the 16GB 3GS £800 and the 32GB £887 over two years.

Anyone signing up to Tesco’s 24-month contract, at £60 a month, in contrast, will get the iPhone 3G and the 16GB 3GS for free – rather begging the question why anyone would want the basic 3G phone – while the 32GB version costs £50. Over 24 months, therefore the cost to a consumer of the 3G and 3GS 16GB devices would be £1440 and the 32GB £1490.

O2 sells the basic iPhone 3G for £96.89 on an 18-month contract at £29.38. The 16GB version of the iPhone 3GS is £184.98 on the same contract and the largest 32GB version £274.23. Over the year-and-a-half of the contract, therefore, the devices cost £625.73, £713.82 and £803.07.

O2 gives the iPhone 3G away for free on a 24-month contract at £34.26 a month while the 16GB iPhone costs £87.11 and the 32GB version £175.19. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for O2 are £822.24, £909.35 and £997.43.

Orange sells the basic 3G iPhone for £96.50 on an 18-month contract costing £29.36 a month; the 16GB 3GS costs £184.50 and the 32GB version £274. Over the lifetime of the contract, therefore, the three versions on Orange cost £624.98, £712.98 and £802.48. Or a mere 75p, 84p and 59p cheaper than O2.

Orange gives the iPhone 3G away free on a 24-month contract at £29.36, while the 16GB version of the 3GS costs £125 and the 32GB costs £225. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for Orange are £704.64, £829.64 and £929.64.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, 3gs, all, apple, best, cheaper, cheapest, compare, compared, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, Deals, free, iphone, iphone 3gs, largest, line, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, prices, sam, service, sim, sol, t-mobile, tariff, three, uk, vodafone

• Basic iPhone 3G offered at £35 a month on a two-year contract
• Vodafone hoping to attract consumers with network reliability

Vodafone will start selling the iPhone in Britain next month, offering customers a free handset for £35 a month on a two-year contract, disappointing consumers hoping for a high-street price war over the device.

The pricing plan comes as a surprise because it does not give Britain’s biggest mobile phone company a competitive advantage, especially on an 18-month deal, where it is more expensive than its rivals.

“I don’t think this is about a price war – I think this is a network quality war,” said Vodafone UK’s chief executive, Guy Laurence. “At the end of the day, customers will seek out the best deal and I believe we are competitive, but it is about the quality of the network it runs on. We have spent a year optimising the network for the iPhone.

“It’s very simple: now you can get the iPhone on a network you can rely on.”

The arrival of the iPhone on Vodafone brings the number of mobile phone companies supplying the device in Britain to four. Vodafone customers who register interest before it goes on sale on 14 January will get a small thank you for not defecting to rivals that already have the handset, in the form of free calls to other Vodafone users for the life of their initial contract.

Orange started selling the iPhone last month, ending O2’s two-year exclusive grip on the handset, then Tesco arrived this month, complicating matters by opting for 12-month contracts and demanding consumers shell out several hundred pounds for the device itself.

Vodafone’s “entry-level” prices for the iPhone over 18 months are almost £100 more expensive than Orange and O2, while Tesco does not offer an 18-month contract. Vodafone’s entry-level prices over two years are about £40 cheaper than O2 but almost £75 more expensive than Orange.

Different handsets, however, have been pitched by different networks at different price points and with different bundles of texts and minutes.

The basic iPhone 3G is cheapest with Orange over 18 months, at £624.98, and with Tesco over two years – provided consumers renew their 12-month contract – at £702.

But most consumers are likely to want the 16GB version of the faster iPhone 3GS. That is cheapest with Tesco, where it costs £800 over two years for consumers who renew their 12-month contract. The 16GB iPhone works out at £829.64 for Orange customers, £869 on Vodafone and £909.35 on O2.

Variety of packages

But the packages on offer are very different. For that price, Tesco offers £60 of calls and texts a month – which works out at about 600 minutes or 1,200 texts – while Vodafone offers 300 minutes and unlimited texts per month and O2 gives customers 600 minutes and 500 texts. In stark contrast, Orange offers just 150 minutes and 250 texts.

On the face of it, Tesco and Vodafone offer better “value” than Orange or O2 on the iPhone 3GS 16GB over two years. Some people have been put off Tesco Mobile, however, by the fact that it uses O2’s network to run its service and the company has been suffering network capacity issues in recent months, especially in London.

With Britain’s newest network, 3, unlikely to get it for several months and with T-Mobile having counted itself out of the race for the foreseeable future, the arrival of Vodafone completes the range of choices for UK consumers.

Vodafone is offering all three versions of the iPhone on 18-month and 24-month contracts, the same as Orange and O2. The 18-month tariff starts at £40, for which customers will get the basic iPhone 3G – which has 8GB of memory and a 2 megapixel camera – free, but have to pay £89 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS – which has a 3 megapixel camera and a faster processor – and £179 for the top-of-the-range 32GB iPhone 3GS, which has more memory capacity. Over the length of that 18-month contract, therefore, Vodafone consumers will pay £720 for the iPhone 3G, £809 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS and £899 for the iPhone 3GS 32GB.

The equivalent 18-month entry-level prices on O2 are £625.73, £713.82 and £803.07. For Orange the equivalent prices are £624.98, £712.98 and £802.48.

Vodafone is also offering all three devices on 24-month contracts. At the basic £30-a-month contract the iPhone 3G will cost consumers £59, the iPhone 3GS 16GB £149 and the iPhone 3GS 32GB £239. Over the two-year period, therefore, consumers will pay a total of £779 for the iPhone 3G, £869 for the 16GB iPhone 3GS and £959 for the iPhone 3GS 32GB.

The equivalent prices for O2 are £822.24, £909.35 and £997.43 and for Orange they are £704.64, £829.64 and £929.64.

Tesco started selling the device last week and while it grabbed headlines by being the first operator to make the phone available on a contract at £20 a month and lasting just a year, consumers have to pay £222 to buy the basic 3G handset or £320 for the 16GB version of the faster 3GS handset and £407 for the 32GB version of the device.

Over the life of an annual contract, therefore, the 3G phone on Tesco costs £462, the 16GB 3GS £560 and the 32GB version 3GS £647.

Expanding the price over 18 months in order to compare the Tesco deals with O2 and Orange, the iPhone 3G on Tesco costs at total of £582 over a year and a half, the 16GB 3GS costs £680 and the 32GB 3GS costs £767. All these prices are lower than the equivalent prices from O2 and Orange, but only by £35 to £40 over 18 months. Compared with Vodafone’s 18 month prices, Tesco is about £130 cheaper.

It is not possible, however, to get an 18-month contract with Tesco so either customers would have to renew their 12-month contract or opt for Tesco’s more expensive 24-month contract from the outset.

Doubling-up the 12-month contract leaves the 3G costing £702, the 16GB 3GS £800 and the 32GB £887 over two years.

Anyone signing up to Tesco’s 24-month contract, at £60 a month, in contrast, will get the iPhone 3G and the 16GB 3GS for free – rather begging the question why anyone would want the basic 3G phone – while the 32GB version costs £50. Over 24 months, therefore the cost to a consumer of the 3G and 3GS 16GB devices would be £1440 and the 32GB £1490.

O2 sells the basic iPhone 3G for £96.89 on an 18-month contract at £29.38. The 16GB version of the iPhone 3GS is £184.98 on the same contract and the largest 32GB version £274.23. Over the year-and-a-half of the contract, therefore, the devices cost £625.73, £713.82 and £803.07.

O2 gives the iPhone 3G away for free on a 24-month contract at £34.26 a month while the 16GB iPhone costs £87.11 and the 32GB version £175.19. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for O2 are £822.24, £909.35 and £997.43.

Orange sells the basic 3G iPhone for £96.50 on an 18-month contract costing £29.36 a month; the 16GB 3GS costs £184.50 and the 32GB version £274. Over the lifetime of the contract, therefore, the three versions on Orange cost £624.98, £712.98 and £802.48. Or a mere 75p, 84p and 59p cheaper than O2.

Orange gives the iPhone 3G away free on a 24-month contract at £29.36, while the 16GB version of the 3GS costs £125 and the 32GB costs £225. Over the two years, therefore, the prices for Orange are £704.64, £829.64 and £929.64.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, 3gs, all, apple, best, cheaper, cheapest, compare, compared, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, Deals, free, iphone, iphone 3gs, largest, line, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, prices, sam, service, sim, sol, t-mobile, tariff, three, uk, vodafone

For a company, picking the wrong trends to follow can make life difficult or lead to disaster. If, at the start of this decade, you invested in strategies based on using fax machines or standalone videophones, DAT, WAP or DAB, “push technologies” or paperless offices, then you might not have done as well as if you’d chosen blogging, social networking, or a user-generated content strategy. You’ve been invited to a meeting to decide what will be the most important technology for your company in the next five-10 years. What do you pick, and why?

• Mobile and location-based services are the only one I’d put money on.

dvdhldn

• Looks like a game of BS bingo to me. Current buzzwords du jour in my place are “SaaS”, “virtualisation” and anything that’s in the “cloud”. If you can virtualise a service by placing it on the internet (and thus, in the cloud), you get a triple-word score.

BarryMcC

• I’m putting my money on the Sinclair C5 making a comeback.

tigerdraught

• I feel there is a massive future in the games industry, with the next step being real-time 3D rendering with the current-gen console (probably not now, but definitely in the next set of consoles in about three-four years)

YoungPayters

• The one I’d really put my money behind would be cloud computing. There’s a lot of small IT companies out there running their own servers and wasting a lot of money doing so. I’d be surprised if, 10 years from now, any of these companies still own their own server hardware. I suspect e-book readers will eventually take off, but they need to seriously come down in price – under $100 would probably be the breakthrough point.

Barry841

• Domestic solar power has to be in there. Only have to bring the installation and capital costs down and have more contractors around that know how to install it. Ground source heat pumps too, for those with the space.

CWill68

• Data storage and hosted applications “in the cloud” are a very easy win. I suspect they will lead to the rise of lightweight “dumb” terminals, which will be simpler, cheaper (almost disposable) and have almost no recognisable operating system or storage within.

Generally, everything is going to get much more energy efficient. Power over Ethernet is also coming – low-voltage power supplies for computers, which could be driven by solar power. Convergence is another easy one: in five to 10 years’ time having a laptop or netbook will look like having a desktop PC does now. Ditto having a games console. 3D is (largely) a red herring, as is HD video and audio (DAB+ and successors) except in specialist media production.

In five years, going into the office will be a weekly rather than daily chore; in 10 years it will look very quaint – if you go into an office either you are very, very senior or you are a cleaner. WiMax is going to make for pervasive high-speed connectivity. Being offline will be a thing of the past.

nordelius

• I think the smartphone market; it’s going to be the real booming piece of technology. The iPhone has only really started to make a massive impact on mainstream society.

djhworld

• Parallelism is the big thing as far as computing is concerned: not only are we seeing more cores in individual computers, but we’re increasingly offloading tasks not just to remote servers, but clusters (or even whole clouds) of them.

It’s not new in and of itself, but it becoming mainstream in a big way is. Everything’s scaling “horizontally”.

nevali

• Having worked and played continually with computers since 1991, and with networks and programming languages since 97, in my humble opinion the technology of the future is plumbing.

rlancefield

Read the full thread. Got a tech dilemma? Email it to tech@guardian.co.uk

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(Source The Guardian)

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68 100 service charges a flat rate 35p for connecting to required number or text messaging the user

A mobile-only directory enquiries number that claims to be 70% cheaper than its rivals has been launched this week.

68 100 is available on all mobile phones and costs 35p to use, the pay off being that anyone wanting a number will first have to listen to a 20 second advert.

The 35p is a flat charge and does not increase if the caller is then connected to the number, or for a text message containing the required number to be sent.

The cost compares well with other services such as 118 118, which charges an average £1.13 when called from a mobile. Other services including Maureen (118 212) and YELL (118 247) cost £1.08, while BT (118 500) costs £1.38. However, those numbers do not require users to listen to adverts.

Calls from a landline to directory services companies are cheaper, and even free if you use 0800 118 3733. This service is the free number from the company behind 118 118, but again users have to listen to an advert before they can be connected. The 0800 service is also automated, meaning users have to talk to a machine to get their required number, which does not always give the correct results.

The directory services market was deregulated in 2003 and was supposed to deliver cheaper replacements. At the time dozens of companies vied for the 118 numbers but now only a handful remain and costs have shot up.

In its last market survey Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, found that the average cost of calling directory enquiries had risen 8% in a year to 54p. Earlier in the year, research by consumer group Which? found the true cost of getting the right number via a directory enquiries service is three times higher than most Britons believe.

A survey of its members came back with a guesstimate that calling a 118 service costs 33p from a landline and 64p from a mobile. But the consumer group said the true cost of a typical call from a landline to the two most-used services – 118 118 and 118 500 – is around £1 from a landline and £2 from a mobile.

In October, BT put up its directory enquiries costs for the second time in a year, alongside other call cost increases. Customers ringing 118 500 are now charged 99p a minute up from 77p.

Earlier this month The Number, the company behind 118 118, reported a £58.6m pre-tax profit for last year, despite a decline in call volumes. It said it had offset the decrease by cutting costs and pushing up prices.

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(Source The Guardian)

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The future’s bright, the future’s 11p cheaper

Orange will launch its iPhone offering on 10 November, at a price almost indistinguishable from O2’s existing one.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

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(Source The Register)

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Orange appears to have decided not to get involved in an iPhone price war with O2

Orange has announced prices for the iPhone on its network – but shown little appetite for a price war with O2, which presently has the monopoly on iPhone sales in the UK.

The phone will go on sale from 10 November across Orange’s retail network, as well as Apple retail stores, Phones4U, Orange concessions in HMV stores and – as predicted in the Guardian last month – in Carphone Warehouse shops.

But the tariffs announced today offer little temptation for any O2 users to change, or for non-iPhone users to switch. Orange contract buyers can get a 16GB iPhone 3GS for £184.50 plus £29.36 per month on an 18-month contract; at O2, the same phone costs £184.98 plus £29.38 per month on an 18-month contract.

Both networks say that they offer “unlimited” data downloads over the phone network – though Orange adds a warning that its “fair usage” policy in fact limits it to 750MB per month. (The iPhone also has Wi-Fi, which can be used without limit.)

When Orange announced that it would sell the iPhone it put up a web page where people could register their interest. It says that more than 200,000 did so – though how many will maintain that interest now that they have seen the tariffs on offer is hard to determine.

The launch does threaten O2’s position as the UK’s largest mobile network. Reports of inconsistent data connections troubling iPhone users on its network may have put some people off switching; Orange, by contrast, has claimed to have the largest 3G network in the UK.

But it will come under sustained pressure once it launches the iPhone, which is famous among network operators for using comparatively large amounts of bandwidth for emails and web browsing, compared to most smartphones – and especially standard mobile phones – which use little data, and where users are given strict data rations. Apple’s ability to negotiate O2 and other mobile networks around the world into giving iPhone users “unlimited” data downloads over the phone networks has made the device enormously attractive to a new generation of mobile workers, but squeezed operators’ margins to the limits.

Orange will offer Apple’s hot-selling internet device on a business plan, where a 16GB iPhone 3GS costs £87 on a 24-month £30 per month contract – significantly cheaper than the personal contract.

In addition, Orange will offer the iPhone on pay-as-you-go contracts – £440 for a 16GB iPhone 3GS.

The announcement of the prices intensifies the competition for customers between the networks, though with Vodafone ready to start selling the iPhone early next year, there may be the chance of some price pressure.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Finnish company Nokia admits that it has underperformed

The many touchscreen mobile phones that have hit the shops this year, from the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre to the HTC Hero, have continued to eat into the commanding lead once enjoyed by Nokia, with the world’s largest handset manufacturer reporting its first loss for over a decade.

The Finnish company admitted that it underperformed the overall mobile phone market in the three months to 30 September. The decision to slash the value of its networks joint venture with Germany’s Siemens, due to the continuing economic gloom, plunged the company into an overall quarterly loss of €913m (£836m) compared with a profit last year of €1bn. It is the first loss for the company since it started reporting on a quarter-by-quarter basis in 1996.

Nokia, which once made more than four out of every 10 mobile phones sold worldwide, has suffered as new entrants including Samsung, LG, Palm, HTC and Apple have barged their way into the lucrative market for so-called smartphones, devices that can access the web, send email and play music. Consumers are increasingly being offered a range of touchscreen devices, most recently the Palm Pre, Motorola Dext and BlackBerry Storm 2, which will hit Britain later this month. Nokia has been slow to react; as a result its average selling price has slipped as it has sold more so-called mid-range phones and its smartphone pricing has come under intense pressure.

The market as a whole, meanwhile, has been suffering as consumers have been holding off getting a new phone, instead switching to cheaper Sim-only deals because of worries about their own finances in the economic downturn. Nokia signalled in its third quarter results that this trend may be coming to an end, helped in part by the slew of attractive new touchscreen devices which operators are using to lure consumers on to long-term contracts. This year, Nokia expects industry mobile device volumes to be approximately 1.12bn units, down 7% from 1.21 bn units in 2008. That is a better performance than Nokia’s previous forecast of a 10% decline this year.

But Nokia itself does not appear to be capitalising on the pick-up, with its sales lagging the overall market in the third quarter.

Nokia said it reckons the entire mobile phone industry shipped 288m units in the quarter, down 7% on the same period a year ago, but up 7% on the second quarter. Nokia, however, shipped 108.5m units in the third quarter, which is down 8% on the same period last year and only up 5% on the previous quarter.

Nokia blamed a shortage of components for its poor third quarter performance compared with the wider market. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, its chief executive, said “We would have sold more devices and smartphones in the third quarter without the capacity constraints. The constraints did in fact hit the smartphone part of the business more than the rest of the devices.”

Nokia’s average selling price in the quarter was €62, at the same level as in the second quarter, but well down on last year’s €72.

Analysts believe Nokia has yet to come up with a real competitor to the iPhone. In a note issued after the results, Standard & Poor’s equity research team said Nokia’s overall market share actually fell in the third quarter, to 37.7% from 38.5% in the previous quarter and its share of the high-end smartphone market was also down. Nokia had originally forecast that it would grow its market share this year but was forced to ditch that forecast in July.

“While commentary that the demand environment for handsets improved during Q3 is encouraging, as is the improved industry outlooks for both handsets and infrastructure, we believe competitive pressures are intensifying and we see nothing from our preliminary read of results to change our view that Q4 will be challenging from both a market share and profitability standpoint,” the S&P team added.

Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at industry specialist Gartner, said sales of Nokia’s flagship N97 smartphone do not appear to have been exactly stellar. “Despite their positive comments on the N97 I am reluctant to say that sales of 1.8m for a flagship product are good enough. Moreover, as Nokia stated at the beginning of September that N97 shipped 1.5m devices since the launch we can see that sales are actually not accelerating.”

Nokia plans to launch four new touchscreen phones in the fourth quarter including the 5230 and 5530. Milanesi said she expects them to do well but “they will help drive volume, not necessarily value” because they are likely to be relatively cheaply priced.

Nokia stripped out smartphone sales for the third quarter, saying 47m “converged mobile devices” were shipped in the three months, compared with an estimated 44.2m units in the third quarter 2008 and 41m units in the second quarter 2009. Of that total figure, Nokia sold 16.4m units in the third quarter 2009, compared with 15.5m units in the third quarter 2008 and 16.9m units in the second quarter 2009.

Nokia’s share of the converged mobile device market was an estimated 35% in the third quarter 2009 down from 41% in the second quarter 2009, suggesting that consumers who were on Sim-only deals in the summer and have recently decided to take a phone on a long-term contract have not been rushing to grab a Nokia device, but instead plumped for rivals such as the iPhone.

In a note on Apple, American investment house Northeast Securities said it has run supply chain checks which indicate that shipments of the iPhone in September “exceeded [Wall] Street estimates of 7m by 25%-30%. Wider distribution and share gains were contributing factors”.

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(Source The Guardian)

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With 91,000 downloads in two weeks and thousands of conversions, users have done well from the app that find geographic numbers for 08x-prefixed ones

The 0870 iPhone application – which finally made its way onto Apple’s iPhone App Store at the end of September – has saved its 92,000 users a total of more than £250,000 in just a fortnight, according to the program’s writer. (If you’re behind the game on this one, see our previous post.)

Simon Maddox, who wrote the application – which lets people look up cheaper geographical alternatives to “national rate” numbers with the 08 prefix – has tracked the number of downloads and the amount of advertising revenue from his application, and found the results far more encouraging than he could have expected.

If you’re just here for a summary, here goes: 91,722 downloads; £267,987.54 saved! $680.82 made in ad revenue

Yes, you read that right. In the two weeks the app has been released, it’s saved UK consumers over a quarter of a million pounds! Pretty awesome! How do I calculate that?

Easy: Take the number of successful conversions, multiply it by the average saving per minute (35p), and then multiply it by an average call length – I used 5 minutes.

Impressive, eh? He also provided a graph of the pattern of downloads. We’ve taken the liberty of adding in the advertising revenue. (He gets that. It totals $680.73 – about £425 – for the period.)

That’s got to be a big win for everyone. Except, perhaps, the companies using 08x numbers (apart of course from 0800) – and the telecoms networks that have shared from the extra revenue those numbers take off you, the caller.

If you haven’t got an iPhone or Android phone (for which the app is also available), there’s always the saynoto0870.com page.

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(Source The Guardian)

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A phone with a variable keypad, a pen that records audio on to objects – welcome to the world of assistive technology

EyesFree, a new interface for Google’s Android mobile phone operating system, provides a perfect illustration of what today’s “assistive technology” researchers are looking for. It provides a way for blind people to use a phone with a touch-sensitive screen, but the corollary is that it also provides sighted people with an easier way to use the phone. In fact, they can make calls without even looking at it.

The idea behind EyesFree is that wherever you put your finger on the touchscreen represents the number 5. If you want 1, you move your finger up and to the left, and if you want 8 then you move it straight down, and so on. In alpha mode, your finger is surrounded by letters instead. You get spoken feedback for each selection, and if you pick the wrong number or letter, you can delete it by shaking the phone.

I tried it at the Techshare 2009 exhibition and conference held in London last week, where Julian Harty, accessibility evangelist at Google UK, was giving a talk. EyesFree is not, initially, as easy as it looks on YouTube demos. However, Harty says a tip is to put a simple grid pattern on the back of the phone and use your “pinch instinct” to improve your aim.

Harty also reckons EyesFree will be better for people with physical problems that make it hard for them to use phones with very small keys. There is no number pad on a touchscreen phone, and with EyesFree, your aim doesn’t have to be very good.

EyesFree was developed by TV Raman, a blind research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and his colleague Charles Chen. Harty says it will be included in the next version (1.6) of the Android development kit, which also includes a text-to-speech engine and accessibility APIs (applications program interfaces). “It’s up to the carriers to ship it,” says Harty, “but users can download it from the Android marketplace, and developers can get the source code from code.google.com.”

Focus on extremes

I described EyesFree to Dr John Gill, an accessibility expert who set up his own consultancy after leaving the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). He’s in favour of “inclusive design, where you try to design for as wide a range of people as possible. Everybody talks about it, but few people do it,” he says. “The problem with ‘assistive technology’ is that it tends to be focused on the extremes – the totally blind, the totally deaf – but there are many more people who are partially blind, or partially deaf,” says Gill. “And the numbers are going to grow because the number of older people is going to grow.”

Gill also thinks people don’t want devices that “look as though they were designed for the disabled”, and much more could be done to make mainstream products more accessible. For example, he says you should be able to lay a mobile phone flat on a desk and operate it with one hand without it sliding around.

Of course, the Techshare 2009 exhibition, which highlights the importance of digital technology for people with disabilities, featured lots of gadgets, including Geemarc’s new BDP400 big-button desktop “talking phone”, the Plextalk Pocket mobile book player/reader, and the RNIB’s PenFriend voice-labelling device.

Plextalk Pocket is an MP3 player roughly the size of a mobile phone, and it also has a numeric keypad and a text-to-speech engine. The built-in microphone and loudspeaker mean it can be used for keeping voice notes, but the key feature for blind users is that it supports the Daisy (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) standard used by the RNIB for its digital Talking Books. A Daisy book file usually includes one or more MP3 files of the book being read aloud, which are synchronised with a text or HTML file of the content. This means users can search and move backwards and forwards through the book without having to guess where something might be in the audio file. (This is even more of a problem with books on tape.)

Daisy, Daisy

There are other portable Daisy-compatible products including the small Milestone 312 MP3 player, which the RNIB sells for £299. Though the format dates from 1994, and is an international ANSI standard, I can’t find any ebook readers that support Daisy – or a ebook supplier who has even heard of it.

The RNIB’s PenFriend, launched at the show, looks like a handheld microphone, and lets people use their voices to label things: books or CDs, food packages, medicine bottles, bills that have arrived in the post, or whatever. You start by sticking a small round label to the object, register that using the optical scanner at the PenFriend’s tip, then record your comment. Pointing to the label will then play back the associated comment. Again, there’s a YouTube video.

The RNIB’s Mark Prouse, who explained PenFriend to me, pays someone to read his post to tags. He says: “It’ll be a household must, I think.”

PenFriend was developed by the RNIB and a London company, Mantra Lingua, and uses optical identification technology (OID) for the re-usable labels. OID is cheaper than RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), and the PenFriend only costs £63.24. It also works as an MP3 player and can store about 70 hours of notes. The audio for a tag could therefore be the type of medicine and the dosage, the name of a food product plus the use-by date, the full text of a letter, or the track-listing for a CD, and so on. Packs of 380 extra labels will cost £11.49, so the system is cheap enough to use for address books and diaries.

While it was good to see the enthusiastic reception that PenFriend got at Techshare, it’s disappointing that it takes the RNIB’s involvement to get something like this to market. John Lamb, editor and publisher of Ability magazine, says: “Technology for disabled people still remains a minority sport, and that’s surprising given the cutting-edge nature of assistive technologies such as optical character recognition, eye gaze control and haptic feedback.

“Things are beginning to change thanks to tighter legislation, more awareness of disabled people’s rights, and belated interest from major technology companies. However, it’s an uphill struggle to undo years of indifference,” says Lamb. “Assistive technology is one way for the IT industry to pay society back for the billions it has made from us all.”

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(Source The Guardian)

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US firm that created first mobile phone unveils handset using Google’s Android software that will be known as Dext in Europe

The struggling American technology firm Motorola, which made the world’s first mobile phone, has taken an important step in its attempt to regain its lost grandeur by unveiling its first handset that uses Google’s Android software.

The Cliq – which will be called the Dext when it is launched in the UK next month – will compete with Apple’s iPhone and the Pre, upon which rival American group Palm has pinned its own hopes of revival, in the key Christmas market.

The touchscreen Cliq has a slide-out keyboard, like the Pre; a better camera than both the Palm device and the iPhone, at 5 megapixels; and supports fast mobile broadband and wi-fi. But it is the way the phone integrates a host of social networking services – from Facebook and Twitter to the music-sharing service Last.fm – that shows how Motorola hopes to differentiate itself from the host of touchscreen phones available.

Motorola has taken Google’s Android operating system – designed to compete with Palm’s WebOS, Apple’s iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian platform – and built a new system it calls MotoBlur out of it. It allows users to synchronise their contacts, posts, feeds, messages, e-mails and photos from sources as diverse as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail, corporate e-mail and even Last.fm and have them appear on the device’s screen. As a result, the phone gives users an instant snapshot of all their communication services – unlike the iPhone, which relies on users downloading and flicking between a host of applications.

The Palm Pre has similar functionality for email and Facebook to the Cliq, while the low-cost INQ1 handset, from the Hutchison Whampoa-owned INQ, also allowed easy integration with the social networking site, email, internet telephone service Skype and numerous instant messaging services. But the Cliq is more integrated than any of its rivals.

The phone’s home screen acts almost like a window on to the user’s different applications. All conversation threads, friend updates, stories, links, photos and more are automatically delivered to live widgets on the home screen. Messages are relayed through a single message hub giving an instant snapshot of emails, texts and instant messages. Even news items can be amalgamated into one feed alongside friend’s postings on Facebook.

The Cliq is the first of what will be many handsets from the American firm to include MotoBlur, which will become Motorola’s smartphone platform of choice, though it will continue to make handsets using Windows Mobile aimed primarily at business users.

“Is this phone the make-or-break phone?” Motorola’s chief executive Sanjay Jha asked the GigaOM conference in San Francisco. “No, but it is a very important starting point, it points the direction … it is the first step in a long journey.”

The Cliq is also an important step for Google’s Android platform. There are already touchscreen phones in the market using Android, produced by Taiwan’s HTC, but the Cliq is the first from a “big name” manufacturer. Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are all expected to produce Android phones in the coming months, leaving Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, as the only one of the top five handset makers not experimenting with the Google platform.

Two Drunks

Jha said coming together with the Android platform, which is run by Google’s head of mobile Andy Rubin, was like “two drunks finding each other in a bar”, which rather highlights the perilous state in which the company has found itself in recent years.

Motorola’s fall from grace has been long and hard. Having made the DynaTAC 8000x in 1983, the first commercially available mobile phone (an unwieldy beige handset), it went on to dominate the market with Ericsson but the switch to digital phones in the 1990s found Motorola unprepared and its share started to slip as Nokia came to dominate the global market.

Motorola then started this decade as the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world – accounting for one in four of all handsets sold – but still the market leader in the US. But it failed to follow-up the success of the ultra-slim Razr phone, initially launched six years ago, with another headline-grabbing product, preferring instead to try the same handset in a variety of different colours or with slight technical improvements.

By the time the iPhone appeared two years ago, Motorola was in freefall. In the three months to end June, Motorola sold just under 16m phones, giving it just 5.6% of the market, compared with 10% the previous year, and putting it firmly in fourth place behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.

Orange has grabbed the Cliq/Dext under an exclusive deal with Motorola for the UK. Pricing will be announced in the UK next week but the phone is expected to be free to anyone signing up to a long-term contract of between £25 and £30 a month, making it cheaper than the iPhone.

Ralf Gerbershagen, vice-president and general manager of Motorola Western Europe, told the Guardian: “This is a day we have been waiting for for quite a while.

“You have to have a great piece of hardware in the market and we believe that we have this with Dext, and you have to have a good brand and we believe Motorola is a very strong brand in the marketplace,” he said. “Motorola is a global player and it is geared up to remain a global player”.

MotoBlur is designed to cope with the bewildering array of web-based communication tools available, he added. “There are more social networking accounts around the world than email accounts and the reason is many people have a couple of them.”

The Dext, he argued, would help consumers take charge. “In the end, technology is there to make your life simpler.”

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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