Posts Tagged “HD”
New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
Here’s a new voucher code, which can be used when purchasing any 18 or 24 month contract for £30 and over, directly from Vodafone. Enter ‘freecinema’ at the checkout and you’ll receive a cinema booklet containing 12 Cineworld tickets, one for each month of the next year (up to March 2011). The offer will be available until 18th March.
Our most popular phones qualifying for this promotion are the BlackBerry Bold 9700, the new Nokia X6 and the new Sony Ericsson Vivaz, which is available exclusively in ruby red direct from Vodafone.
Sony Ericsson’s curvaceous Vivaz is an all round stunner. So is its 8 megapixel camera, which shoots video in HD – just use the dedicated buttons for photo and video. If you want to see everything in widescreen then flip the Vivaz on its side – or plug it straight into your TV. If music’s more your thing, tap the big 3.2″ touchscreen and fire up the impressive music player. The CD cover is there on your screen. FM radio is a tap away. Record a few seconds of a song, and TrackID tells you the artist and title. There’s also a standard headphone socket – so you can use the pair you love. It’s beautiful and functional. An excellent all-round multimedia phone.
The Nokia X6 16GB has an impressive 3.2 inch touchscreen that covers almost the entire front of the phone. It’s pocket and palm friendly measuring 111 x 51 x 13mm and it’s great for watching movies with the 16:9 aspect ratio screen. With 16GB of internal memory there’s plenty of storage too. The X6 runs on Symbian OS v9.4 and has a 434 MHz processor, which is enough to compete with many other smartphones in its class. The new X Series range from Nokia with replace the XpressMusic range, it will focus on entertainment and social networking.
The Blackberry Bold 9700 has the traditional BlackBerry design with a classic QWERTY keypad and 3G connection, a combination that makes it ideal for emailing as well as quick downloads and browsing on-the-go. It has a sensitive trackpad that helps you glide through menus and a decent camera. It’s a great all-rounder.
Terms and conditions: Free cinema voucher available only to new customers purchasing a pay monthly mobile phone contract of £30 per month or above for a minimum duration of 18 months. Offer only available on orders made online and excludes orders of the iPhone.
Tags: 12, 3, all, Blackberry, compare, comparemobiles.com, contract, deal, Deals, email, free, HD, iphone, latest, latest deal, line, mobile, mobile phone, mobiles, months, new, new mobile, nokia, palm, phone, phones, sol, sony, sony ericsson, test, Touch, vodafone, world, xpressmusic
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
 From its spec, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is a smartphone to rival almost anything on the market, with an 8.1 megapixel camera with image stabilisation and face detection and most notably the ability to capture video in 720p HD (ultra-sharp, minimal to zero flicker). It also offers autofocus in its video mode and a dedicated video capture key. The results can be viewed on the 3.2 inch, 640×360 touchscreen or you can even entertain friends and family by displaying your captured images on your TV with the TV out connection.
At just 12.5mm in depth, the stylish Vivaz is conventionally smartphone sized and weighs only 97g (pretty amazing considering the technology within). All the usual smartphone features are included, including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS and the touch user interface allows you to use the handsets many functions easily and naturally.
The Vivaz is perfect for any business user with a document viewer, email client, organiser and WAP browser but the phones features do not end there; the innovative Media Go function is the perfect for all your entertainment needs and with an FM radio and MP3 player with PlayNow and TrackID it’s a great music phone. The battery gives up to 13 hours of talktime and 430 hours of standby.
Tags: 12, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, email, HD, latest, latest deal, mobile, mobiles, new, new mobile, phone, phones, sol, sony, sony ericsson, test, Touch
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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.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, android, apple, blog, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, free, google, HD, HTC, iphone, latest, launches, line, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, orange, phone, phones, sam, sol, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, test, twitter, uk, update, vodafone, world
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Microsoft made a splash by pre-announcing the Windows Phone 7 Series phone yesterday, but it might all be forgotten by the time phones appear for the (Christmas) holiday sales season
Microsoft’s launch of its Windows Phone 7 Series phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday was a huge success if you judge it by the amount of press and blog coverage. But it also provided very few details, including when phones would go on sale. Microsoft says they’ll be out before Christmas, but so will a lot of other new phones.
Microsoft’s list of Windows Phone 7 partners includes Asus, Dell, HP, HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba, and it expects to have phones on most networks, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. In other words, Windows Phone 7 is still a platform. Microsoft hasn’t followed Apple’s proprietary route, though whether phone makers will still have access to the phone’s source code and the right to change it remains to be seen.
The demos showed the Windows Phone 7’s roots in the attractive user interface developed for Windows Media Center PCs and reworked for the Zune HD and the free Zune 4.0 software for Windows*. They also showed the phone’s extensive integration with Windows Live and Facebook, though at the moment, it looks as though Twitter is supported via Windows Live.
Email support includes Microsoft Exchange synchronisation, Live Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other services.
But it’s not clear where Microsoft stands on supporting Silverlight, Adobe Flash, or the still-emerging HTML5 standard.
Silverlight support would be welcomed by companies who want to put their business applications on the phone, and it would answer the objection that — apart from Microsoft Office — Windows Phone 7 phones are aimed much more at consumers than at businesses.
Adobe Flash would be welcomed by many users and web developers, and would give Microsoft a selling point against Apple, which refuses to support Flash. However, the question is still open. The Seattle Times managed to get a quote from Karen Wong Duncan, a Microsoft product manager: “We do not support Flash. We are partnering closely with Adobe. As Steve Ballmer said earlier, we are not opposed to having Flash on the platform.”
HTML5 support would be welcomed by everybody, especially if Microsoft included an expensive H.264 video codec for playing YouTube and other videos without using Flash. But we don’t know what sort of browser will be included in Windows Phone 7 phones, or what its capabilities might be.
Windows Phone 7 also has an Xbox Live connection, and users will be able to score points in multi-player games, but Microsoft didn’t provide details. Apparently we’ll learn more at the Mix 2010 conference in March.
Finally, there has been no mention of what has sometimes been called Pink: the code-name for putative next generation versions of the old Sidekick device. (Microsoft bought the company.)
The lack of detail makes it look as though Microsoft has announced too early. Presumably it couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a splash at WMC, and there’s only one a year. Next year’s congress would be too late….
* This is worth a download if you want something to manage an MP3 player: it’s much nicer than Windows Media Player. However, you won’t be able to use the Zune Marketplace outside the US.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, blog, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, email, free, HD, HTC, lg, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, orange, phone, phones, pink, sam, samsung, service, sol, sony, sony ericsson, t-mobile, twitter, uk, vodafone, world
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The technology, which provides more natural-sounding audio by using a wideband codec, has already been launched in Moldova
 
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(Source ZDNet UK)
Tags: 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, orange, sol, uk
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But that’s just fine with Mountain View
As Google’s Nexus One smartphone celebrates its one-month birthday, word comes that Mountain View has sold a mere 80,000 of the devices.…
Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing
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(Source The Register)
Tags: 10, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, phone, sol, source the register, uk
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FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s consumer watchdog has asked for a say in the planned merger of the UK arms of France Telecom’s Orange and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile, raising prospects of at least a delay to any deal.
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(Source Yahoo UK News)
Tags: 10, 12, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, deal, HD, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, orange, sol, t-mobile, tmobile, uk
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Which? campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected British consumers
Consumer groups today welcomed confirmation that UK competition authorities have asked Brussels for permission to investigate the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile.
A spokesman for Which? said this morning that it had campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected UK consumers.
“We have been very keen to have this looked at because T-Mobile and Orange have networks here. This merger affects British consumers and we think it should be looked at,” a Which? spokesman said.
If T-Mobile and Orange merge they would have a 37% market share of retail customers in the UK, or 40% including the virtual mobile network operators such as Virgin Mobile that use the two companies’ networks to run their services.
In December Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel wrote a joint letter to Neelie Kroes, the Brussels competition commissioner, urging a UK review of the deal, which is originally under the scope of Europe because two thirds of the turnover of the parent companies – France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom respectively – is generated outside the UK.
The OFT confirmed to the stock market this morning that it had made a request to the European commission to refer the UK aspects of the proposed joint venture between the two companies.
“The OFT’s initial view, following consultation, is that the joint venture threatens significantly to affect competition in mobile telecommunications in the UK,” the OFT said in a brief statement.
“If the request is granted, the OFT intends to examine the proposed joint venture with a view to deciding whether it should be referred to the Competition Commission for an in-depth investigation,” the OFT said.
If the OFT is handed the powers to investigate, it would delay the plans by the two mobile phone companies to consummate their deal, which was originally announced in September and slated for approval by the Brussels competition watchdogs as early as mid February. The OFT would conduct its own analysis of the situation before deciding whether to refer the tie-up to the Competition Commission for a detailed investigation that could last as long as six months.
The OFT said it had petitioned Brussels under Article 9 of the EU merger regulations.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, deal, HD, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, orange, phone, phones, review, service, sol, t-mobile, tmobile, uk, venture, virgin
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• Orange and T-Mobile hoped to escape UK scrutiny
• Merger would create country’s biggest operator
The Office of Fair Trading is calling for the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile to be investigated by the regulatory authorities in Britain rather than merely subjected to scrutiny in Brussels.
The news, expected to be announced on Wednesday, will be warmly welcomed by consumer groups that have campaigned hard for OFT scrutiny of the deal. There are fears the merger, which will create the UK’s largest mobile phone network, could hamper competition and force up prices for consumers.
It is a blow for Orange and T-Mobile, currently the third and fourth placed networks in Britain, as it means a further delay to a deal originally announced in September. They had hoped scrutiny of the merger would be confined to regulators in Brussels, with clearance possibly granted as early as mid-February. Orange and T-Mobile have been lobbying the OFT, the telecoms watchdog, Ofcom, and Brussels regulators in recent weeks to try to assuage competition concerns.
But the OFT will inform the European commission that it remains worried about certain aspects of the merger and wants to subject it to further scrutiny, dragging out the process for weeks, possibly months. The OFT is understood to be particularly concerned about the effect on the UK’s smallest mobile phone network, 3, and the merged group possibly having a stranglehold on the country’s mobile phone spectrum.
The OFT’s decision raises the possibility the deal could be referred to the Competition Commission, whose investigations can run for six months or more. The OFT is not, however, believed to be planning to call for an immediate Competition Commission inquiry. Instead it hopes to use the threat of one to wrest a number of undertakings from Orange and T-Mobile.
The deal would give Orange and T-Mobile more than twice the mobile phone spectrum owned by market leader O2 or second-placed Vodafone, and more than five times the amount held by 3. The government is hoping to auction more wireless spectrum over the next few years, including the slice of the airwaves freed up by the switch to digital TV. But before it can start the sell-off, the regulator needs to deal with the capacity the companies already own. Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile all want to upgrade the spectrum they were given in the 1980s and 1990s to carry so-called 2G voice services, making it capable of running 3G mobile broadband. But they all own different parts of the spectrum and 3 has no legacy network capacity at all.
As part of the government’s Digital Britain process, its independent spectrum broker Kip Meek suggested a wholesale restructuring of the airwaves, capping the amount of spectrum any operator could hold in return for freeing up existing spectrum for 3G.
The Orange and T-Mobile merger was announced towards the end of his negotiations. He was able to take it into account but the whole deal has been thrown into confusion by objections from BT, which is threatening to take the government to court.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills extended the consultation deadline on the plan by a month in an effort to appease BT. But the new deadline, this Friday, might not leave time to enact the necessary secondary legislation before a general election. The OFT is concerned the T-Mobile and Orange deal might go ahead with no workable spectrum plan in place and it wants to ensure the merged group does not rule the airwaves.
The merger with Orange could also jeopardise T-Mobile’s network sharing deal with 3. The operator has helped cut mobile prices in the UK and chief executive Kevin Russell said yesterday its two-year-old network-sharing joint venture with T-Mobile – called MBNL – is an important part of its future. The OFT is concerned the introduction of Orange could unsettle the venture, hampering 3’s ability to compete.
“MBNL for us is a fundamental strategic platform,” Russell said yesterday in a presentation to analysts about his network. “It is a fundamental piece of our strategy, any exposure, however remote, to that not being supported by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile is a risk for us we believe needs to be closed off.”
Delays and trade-offs
The OFT has no power to force companies to change the way mergers or acquisitions are structured, but it can threaten to bring in the Competition Commission to run a full-scale inquiry. Many companies would rather reach a deal than go through that lengthy process. Last year the OFT struck a deal with the Co-op: the supermarket agreed to sell 133 stores across the country in return for having its merger with Somerfield passed without a competition inquiry. The stores were snapped up by rivals such as Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. In the spring, the OFT accepted undertakings from Global Radio that it would sell a clutch of radio station in the Midlands – including Beacon, Mercia and Wyvern – to avoid a Competition Commission inquiry into its £375m acquisition of GCap Media, after raising concerns that the deal could harm the region’s advertising market. More recently, the Co-op proposed selling some of its funeral parlours in the south west to gain clearance for its acquisition of Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society, an independent co-operative which as well as being a food retailer is also a provider of funeral services.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, deal, free, global, government, HD, largest, line, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, prices, service, sol, station, t-mobile, three, tmobile, uk, venture, vodafone, world
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Wait for it, wait for it…
Microsoft has quickly withdrawn a test version of the Windows Mobile 6.5 software development kit (SDK), after it was accidentally posted to the web on Friday.…
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work
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(Source The Register)
Tags: 10, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, source the register, test, uk
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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!
Originally ground up in the rumour mill and spat out as the Kurara, the first product announcement of 2010 by Sony Ericsson was actually a leak from PR agency Burson-Marsteller. No stranger to crisis management (think Bhopal and Tylenol for starters) B-M attempted to put the struggling genie back in its bottle but – too late! The good people at Sony Ericsson have confirmed the news and we now await the official launch.
So what is the Kurara? Ironically, given the genie poppers’ back catalogue it is a municipality in Uttar Pradesh. But no longer: the new handset has a brand new moniker: the Vivaz, after a collection of vintage 1960s cars from Vauxhall…or maybe not.
From its spec, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is a smartphone to rival anything on the market, most notably with an 8.1 megapixel camera with image stabilisation and face detection and the ability to capture video in 720p HD (ultra-sharp, minimal to zero flicker). It is also said to offer autofocus in its video mode and a dedicated video capture key. The results can be viewed on the 3.2 inch, 640×360 pixel resolution (or WVGA, it’s not yet clear) resistive touchscreen.
At 107×52×12.5mm, the Vivaz is conventionally smartphone sized and nice and well weighted at only 97g (pretty amazing considering the technology within). All the usual smartphone gubbins are included, including HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS.
Expected within two to three months, you will be able to sport the Vivaz either in Vivaz Ruby, Moon Silver, Galaxy Blue or – trying a little too hard, perhaps – Cosmic Black.
Sony Ericsson had a hard time financially in 2009, despite the Satio still being arguably the best camera phone in the world. The Vivaz could revive its fortunes and rival the Satio for its camera phone crown.
Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, best, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, HD, latest, latest deal, mobile, mobiles, months, new, new mobile, phone, sol, sony, sony ericsson, test, three, Touch, world
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Censorship row sees Google postpone launch of handset that incorporates its email and web services
Google today postponed the launch in China of a mobile phone incorporating its email and web services, after the row with the government in Beijing over censorship and hacking of its internal network.
“The launch we have been working on with [mobile carrier] China Unicom has been postponed,” said a Google spokesman.
Informed observers said Google had decided it could not launch a handset which relies on the US company’s services – particularly the web search and Gmail applications, which would be “baked” into the operating system – when it could not be sure if those will continue to be available in China.
Google last week accused Chinese hackers of compromising its internal networks to try to access the webmail accounts of human rights activists, who have been repeatedly targeted by the Chinese government. As a result, Google said it would end the self-imposed censorship of its search results there.
Though Google has begun talks with the Chinese government to see if it will be allowed to lift censorship, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said today that the search provider must obey Chinese law. That implies that Google will have to close its google.cn site, which would put most of the 700 employees there out of work.
“Foreign firms in China should respect China’s laws and regulations, and respect China’s public customs and traditions, and assume the corresponding social responsibilities, and of course Google is no exception,” said Ma Zhaoxu.
Asked about Google’s accusation that it had been hacked from within China, Ma said Chinese companies had also been attacked. “China is the biggest victim of hacking,” Ma said.
Although there are mobile phones sold in China which use Google’s free Android operating system, none so far has incorporated the Gmail and web search apps as the proposed one would. Sources familiar with Google’s thinking said the company decided that launching the phone and then withdrawing the email and search service would “seriously compromise the user experience”.
Google has not yet set a date when it will stop censoring search results inside China. The Chinese government insists that internet searches are censored to remove material deemed “subversive or pornographic”, with human rights and dissidents’ work deemed to fall into the former category.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, android, compare, comparemobiles.com, email, free, google, government, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, service, sol, talks, uk, world
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Censorship row sees Google postpone launch of handset that incorporates its email and web services
Google today postponed the launch in China of a mobile phone incorporating its email and web services, following its row with the government there over censorship and hacking of its internal network.
“The launch we have been working on with [mobile carrier] China Unicom has been postponed,” said a Google spokesman.
Informed observers said that Google had decided that it could not launch a handset which relies on Google’s services – particularly its web and email services, which would be “baked” into the handset’s operating system – at a time when it could not be sure whether those will continue to be available in China.
Google last week accused Chinese hackers of compromising its internal networks to try to access the Google-operated webmail accounts of human rights activists, who have been repeatedly targeted by the Chinese government. As a result, Google said it will seek to end its self-imposed censorship of its search results there.
Though Google has begun talks with the Chinese government to see whether it will be allowed to lift its censorship, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said today that the search giant must obey China’s laws and traditions. That implies that Google will have to close its google.cn site, which would mean most of its 700 employees there would be out of work.
“Foreign firms in China should respect China’s laws and regulations, and respect China’s public customs and traditions, and assume the corresponding social responsibilities, and of course Google is no exception,” said Ma Zhaoxu.
When asked about Google’s accusation that it had been hacked from within China, Ma said Chinese companies had also been attacked. “China is the biggest victim of hacking,” Ma said.
Although there are mobile phones sold in China which use Google’s free Android operating system, none so far has incorporated its Gmail and web search apps as the proposed one would. Sources familiar with Google’s thinking said the company decided that launching the phone and then withdrawing the email and search service would “seriously compromise the user experience”.
Google has not yet set a date when it will stop censoring its search results inside China. The Chinese government insists that internet searches are censored to remove material deemed “subversive or pornographic” – with human rights and dissidents’ work deemed to fall into the former category.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, android, compare, comparemobiles.com, delays launch, email, free, google, government, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, service, sol, talks, uk, world
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The broadcaster will be the third this year to start offering a TV channel dedicated to 3D
 
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(Source ZDNet UK)
Tags: 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, uk
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Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage … where was I right and wrong about the year just gone?
Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let’s see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up …
Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business.
They didn’t. Did they? That’s 0/1
Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? “Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11,” he explained. And of course there’s Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn’t. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register.
In fact, companies didn’t withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren’t making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business.
Prediction 2: There will be more “netbooks” – aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC – than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market.
Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2
Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won’t have a near-death experience, but it’s going to keep shrinking.
True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn’t made it grow. 2/3
Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I’m sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying “interest” (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That’s just not sustainable, and debt isn’t going to get cheaper to service, either.
Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4
Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it.
Its latest figures show that it didn’t do well, and the Pre hasn’t actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5
Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive.
Tricky, this. Twitter’s growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their “real-time” search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google “Twitter users”? I don’t see why not – I’ve previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough.
So, 4/6
Prediction 7: Many – as in thousands – of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there’s a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don’t need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?).
(The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7
Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you’re coordinating the project, or you’re doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less.
This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon’s S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We’re still hearing that there’s a skills shortage in IT – but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There’s less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let’s call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.)
5.5/8
And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft.
Prediction 9: Windows 7 will be pushed out of the door in time for the end of the year, and particularly for Christmas sales. It won’t be perfect, but it will get corporates interested in an upgrade from XP, which Vista didn’t.
It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it’s not perfect, it’s considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that’s solid.
6.5/9
Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it.
Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo – well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn’t challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it’s wrong.
6.5/10
Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks.
Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn’t formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it’s been declared dead ages ago) but it’s vanishing.
7.5/11
Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome.
Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping.
8.5/12
Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either.
Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried – er, hoped – no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn’t launched a Zune Phone (it’s doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod’s transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe.
9.5/13
Ubiquity
Prediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it’s a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they’ll become pervasive. Let’s put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year.
Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely.
10.5/14
Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it.
It’s an enduring mystery why this hasn’t been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don’t tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That’s not, though, what I’d imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though “more” DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn’t happened.
10.5/15
Prediction 16: Femtocells – which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection – will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product.
I also said during the year that femtocells weren’t going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can’t be anything but correct.
11.5/16
Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter – rather than last year’s favourite, Facebook – via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.)
Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you’d be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter’s penetration on my part – though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts.
11.5/17
Linux
Prediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be “the year of desktop Linux” while the bugs are ironed out this year.
This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April.
11.5/18
Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it’s best-selling year for desktop Linux ever.
Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn’t going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still:
12.5/19
Apple
Prediction 20: Let’s start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone’s OSX by the end of the year.
Correct. It always is, year after year.
13.5/20
Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 … this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard’s release in October 2007 – which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule.
Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009.
13.5/21
Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don’t think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy – which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers.
Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn’t announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.)
14.5/22
Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade – just as much as it has for previous upgrades.
Yes, it did charge – but not as much as for previous upgrades. That’s a miss.
14.5/23
Prediction 24: ZFS won’t be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it’ll be an optional install, for server honchos.
In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare.
15.5/24
Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn’t.
Hmm – technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs’s illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn’t such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right – no more.
16/25
Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won’t be updated before the autumn.
The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere.
16/26
Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time.
It was, and it did. Finally.
17/27
Environment
Prediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies – even quite big ones – to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
This is the move to cloud computing, and it’s one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud?
18/28
Free Our Data
Prediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey’s data available for free unfettered reuse – and will do it.
I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I’d have traded all the other predictions for this one – but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it.
19/29
Processing
Prediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts’ predictions about how in five years we’d all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn’t. … [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly.
Er, we didn’t. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we’re still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we’re always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.)
19/30
So that’s 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what’s a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we’re seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that’s better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.)
And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google – the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That’s going to be huge this year, I think – so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Contactless credit card allows holders to make purchases by swiping it over a reader
Mobile phone firm Orange has joined forces with Barclaycard to launch a contactless credit card.
Contactless cards allow users to make payments of a few pounds by swiping them over a card reader. More than 20,000 retailers now have contactless pay points in store, according to Orange, and figures from Visa show there are currently 5m such cards in use.
Yesterday’s launch is the next stage in the relationship between Orange and Barclaycard, who announced last year that they will launch a mobile phone with contactless technology that can be swiped like a card.
Orange claims the contactless card gives users “a new level of control over their account” by allowing them to set daily, weekly or even category-based spending limits.
Users who are also Orange mobile phone customers can choose to set a limit of, for example, £50 a week, and would be sent an SMS alert when they come close to this. The card can also be used for ordinary transactions if a contactless pay point isn’t available.
The usual credit checks from Barclaycard will apply before the card is issued, and it comes with an interest rate of 18.9% for purchases or 29.9% for cash withdrawals. Customers buying Orange products or services will get three months interest free on their first purchase if they use the card.
Customers will also earn one Orange credit card reward point for every £1 spent, which can subsequently be spent at high street shops, to get discounts on Orange products, or to get tickets for trips and special events.
The two main contactless cards are Visa’s payWave and Mastercard’s PayPass, with Barclays the main bank signed up to them.
Not all customers have welcomed their introduction, however, with some fearing swiped payments are less secure than those made by traditional credit cards. However, Barclaycard said there was demand from customers.
“We are seeing demand from both retailers and customers for ever more convenient ways to pay and accept payment, and believe that mobile and contactless technologies are key to meeting those needs,” Chris Wood, managing director at Barclaycard, said.
“This announcement shows how, in partnership with Orange, Barclaycard is starting to make mobile contactless payments a step closer for UK consumers.”
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(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, card, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, free, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, new, orange, phone, phones, service, sol, three, uk
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On eve of Las Vegas consumer electronics showcase, expectations grow for internet TVs and the tablet computer
Televisions enhanced with direct internet access and 3D displays will be among the most anticipated products unveiled when the world’s biggest annual technology showcase kicks off in Las Vegas on Thursday.
This year could see a revolution in televisions on high street sale as they converge with the web, allowing viewers to watch services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and YouTube more conveniently.
Manufacturers including Sony, Panasonic and LG are expected to launch sets with a broad range of new capabilities at the Consumer Electronics Show, including High Definition TV (HDTV) screens with the internet telephony service Skype built in, so people can use their TVs for video chats with friends and family anywhere in the world.
The BBC launched a limited trial last month of the iPlayer on some high definition Freesat boxes – the free-to-air satellite service is increasingly integrated into TVs – and is anticipating even more viewers being online when the next generation of sets emerges.
There is a scramble to profit on the hype surrounding 3D after cinema hits Avatar and Up. A number of companies will be debuting their attempts at high-quality 3D screens. The Discovery Channel could even announce plans to launch a 3D TV channel next year.
The Las Vegas show is where the world’s most powerful electronics brands fight for top billing: launches in the past include the DVD, the Xbox games console and the puzzle game Tetris.
Last night’s launch of the Nexus One phone – Google’s rival to Apple’s iPhone – sought to upstage the start of CES and the next big moment will come tomorrow night with a keynote speech from Microsoft’s forceful chief executive, Steve Ballmer.
The company has opened CES in the past by outlining a vision of where Microsoft believes the future is headed. Two years ago billionaire founder Bill Gates demonstrated a table with a built-in touch sensitive computer, the Surface, while last year Ballmer showed off Windows 7.
Announcements likely this year include new mobile phones, concepts for home entertainment – perhaps even a launch date for Project Natal, the motion-sensitive video gaming system unveiled last summer. Whatever Ballmer has up his sleeve, he will have to compete with announcements from rivals such as Sony, Samsung, and Google.
Microsoft is not alone in looking for wow factor. Others include Nokia, the beleaguered mobile phone maker whose chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, will attempt to excite Friday’s crowds with a new slate of gadgets. Alan Mulally, boss of car maker Ford, is expected to show off hi-tech concepts aimed at changing the future of driving.
“We expect them to say something fairly significant,” said Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, which organises the show. “They are positioning themselves as a tech company rather than a car company.”
It is on the show’s extensive floors that most surprises are likely. With more than 2,500 exhibitors and acres of floor space, weird and wonderful ideas have plenty of room to thrive. Exploding on the scene this year are tablet computers – touchscreen devices pitched between a laptop and a mobile phone. With Apple – which is not at CES itself – set to make an announcement later this month, rivals are hoping they can break into the market. Among these is Freescale, a US company which has announceda machine combining tablet and smartbook features. “We believe the tablet will emerge as a popular form factor for the next generation of smartbooks,” said Henri Richard of Freescale.
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(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, bbc, blog, cfree, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, free, gadget, gadgets, google, HD, iphone, launches, lg, line, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, new mobile, nokia, phone, phones, room, sam, samsung, service, sol, sony, Touch, uk, world
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The service will be available on some HDTVs as well as PCs, but it requires broadband uplink speeds that are more that twice the UK average
 
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(Source ZDNet UK)
Tags: 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, HD, launches, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, service, sol, uk
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HD moniker applied to voice, again
Orange UK will be upping the quality of voice calls over the next year, branding the development “HD Voice” in the ongoing search for market differentiation.…
Offloading malware protection to the cloud
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(Source The Register)
Tags: 12, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, HD, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, orange, sol, source the register, uk
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• Mobile phone calls will be clearer, says Orange
• High definition technology cuts out background noise
The mobile telephone industry is joining the HD wave as Orange announces today that it will make high definition calls available in 2010.
The HD voice service, which will require customers to buy new handsets, promises to make callers feel as if they are in the same room. France Télécom-owned Orange is the first mobile phone company to announce a British HD voice service and it hopes the clearer calls will usher in a new standard throughout the industry.
“HD Voice really does inject a level of innovation into mobile phone calls, making it sound as if callers are actually in the same room. Once people have tried it, they won’t want to go back,” said Tom Alexander, Orange UK chief executive .
Orange plans HD voice trials in the new year and a nationwide introduction later in 2010. It is working with handset manufacturers to develop devices that can support the new service.
HD voice provides better audio quality thanks to a wider speech bandwidth. Explaining the service, Orange says: “High definition voice doubles the spectrum devoted to the spoken voice, making it possible to transmit all the nuances of the human voice.” It also fades background noise to provide clearer conversations and even if only one of the two phones in a conversation is HD-enabled, the sound quality will still be significantly better than it is now, the company claims.
The Orange announcement comes just days after rival network O2 apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because its London network was overwhelmed by smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone.
Analyst Ben Wood, at telecoms consultants CCS Insight, said Orange would be looking to use its HD voice service to tap into reports of customer frustration with O2.
“This underlines our belief that quality and performance will be key battlegrounds among the UK network operators in 2010,” he said.
“The iPhone has emerged as the catalyst to a renewed focus on network quality, performance and coverage; HD voice is another tool in that battle. Orange is bound to use this to compete with O2″
Orange launched the world’s first high definition voice service for mobile phones in Moldova in September. It chose the country because its network is state of the art, having only started in 2008.
The British launch follows two years of “considerable investment” in its mobile network, says Orange. It has sought to differentiate itself in Britain’s fiercely competitive mobile phone market by flagging up its wide high speed 3G coverage.
When Orange started selling the iPhone last month, ending O2’s two-year long exclusive grip on the handset, rather than try to secure new customers on price it attempted to lure customers on to its network on the promise that it has better coverage than any of its rivals.
Prices for its HD calls have yet to be set and it is not yet known whether they will cost more than standard calls or if Orange will use the higher quality promise to differentiate itself from rivals. In Moldova the cost of calls did not change when the HD service launched.
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(Source The Guardian)
Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, compare, comparemobiles.com, HD, iphone, launches, line, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, prices, room, sam, service, sol, uk, world
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