The camel’s nose under Google’s tent

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

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(Source The Register)

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

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(Source BBC Technology)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(Source The Guardian)

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

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

Signs Voda UK for heavy lifting

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

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(Source The Register)

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

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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

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

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

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

Compare all iPhone 4 32GB deals

Shaves tariffs

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

Free On-Demand Webcast – Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

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(Source The Register)

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

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(Source The Guardian)

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

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

LONDON (Reuters) – Internet and phone provider TalkTalk has signed a deal with Vodafone to launch a mobile phone service under its own brand, the Times reported on Friday.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Up to 4 million downloads

An Android wallpaper application that collected data from users’ phones and uploaded it to a site in China was downloaded “millions of times”, according to mobile security firm Lookout.…

Free On-Demand Webcast – Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

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(Source The Register)

O2 UK recorded positive growth last quarter, again, with good contract additions, strong iPhone and BlackBerry sales, and market-beating churn

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

HSC to offer SIM-free BlackBerry Pearl 3G to dealers, supported by marketing package and exchange programme HSC has said it will be the first distributor to launch a SIM-free version of the BlackBerry Pearl 3G into the dealer community. The phone will be accompanied by exclusive marketing packs for dealers including point-of-sale and merchandise packs [...]

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

A crisp, bright screen makes this smartphone appealing – but Samsung’s new in-house operating system doesn’t

What is it? Samsung Wave GT-S8500 – the first device to run Samsung operating system Bada

Category: Hardware and software, given the newsworthy nature of operating systems these days..

You’d use it for… On the move, personal or business. It’s not going to intrude on BlackBerry’s ground as leading high-performance business mobile device, but the Wave sits happily as a phone suited to staying up to speed while on the move.

First impressions: what is it like to look at, to hold, to use? Perfectly good look and feel to the phone, a sturdy but slender shell encasing a fairly high-spec bit of mobile kit. It’s when you activate the screen things start to go downhill.

The home screen – quite separate from the screen of apps – has six iterations as you swipe your finger right-to-left, inching across a background of some picturesque eastern European town square.

Each of these five modules is for housing a quick access single widget – but the access isn’t so quick after four or five swipes of the finger. Navigating from the home screen to your downloaded apps directory takes another click. Granted, the software is snappy and quickly responsive, but these things all pile up in the “pointless” file.

And you can’t swipe up to the URL bar in the browser, forcing you instead to press an on-screen button. Seems needless.

What does it really do well? Mobile internet has a well-suited clean font, made all the more appealing by the crisp super AMOLED screen. Put the Wave side-by-side with an iPhone 4 and a 3G – you’ll see the difference. FYI: guardian.co.uk looks better on a Wave than a 3G.

Keyboard keys appear far too close together, but typing seems to work fine if not more usable than on the iPhone. When browsing the web, pinching zooms are clunky and not instantaneously responsive.

Video playback is impressive, on the eyes and the ears. Creating media is a good experience too, the 5MP camera shooting strong video and stills taking allowing nifty features like user-directed focus.

What’s the cost? Around £300 sim-free; a 24-month contract, free handset, will set you back between £25-£45 per month.

What’s it up against? A smartphone market with less wiggle room than the App Store. It’s a relatively ruthless market out there for high-end devices, software increasing in consumer importance at a rate of knots.

With Bada, Samsung is late to the party and forgot to invite its marketing muscle. For this reason alone, Wave falls short of the majority of recently-released Android devices – Samsung have plenty of work to do before the release of Bada-powered Wave 2.

Blind us with the tech specs, then: Quite a few headline tech specs come with the Wave: the 5MP video/still camera will draw the punters – 5x zoom for stills and 720p video recording make the feature more than adequate; the Super AMOLED screen is a turn on, but likely only to the techies.

As light as any iPhone, the Wave is slimmer but only at a stitch. At 3.3 inch, the Wave screen limits its viability as a comfortable-to-use mobile internet device. With 2GB internal memory as standard, most users will require a MicroSD card (up to 32GB capacity).

What’s it good for? Taking and sharing decent-quality stills. It would be good for accomplishing tasks quickly if there weren’t so many naggingly bad points of user experience making pretty much any task an exertion.

What are its failings? One word: Bada. A few more words: the cramped feeling while using SMS, the uneconomic use of the 3.3 inch screen made worse by the majority of the screen having a black (or very dark) background even when running apps.

Will I have to read the manual? Does anyone still read manuals? If new to Samsung, you may need to Google “Help! I’ve accidentally locked my Samsung Wave – what now?”

How long is the battery life? With its 3G signal sensor turned off, the battery will last you over 24 hours from full – more than can be said for any iPhone before 4.

What’s its USP? The Wave’s USP would have to be the Super AMOLED screen which, on this score alone, puts it near top of the class for smartphones. That said, I don’t know one single person who’s been sold a phone on screen specifications – and it’s not great marketing fodder either.

Rating out of 10: 6.5

Finally, is it worth it – yes or no? Not at the current price. There are countless devices (and countless yet to be released) doing a better job and with a better operating system. Don’t hold out for the Wave 2.

Rating: 3/5

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(Source The Guardian)

HSC to offer SIM-free BlackBerry Pearl 3G to dealers, supported by exclusive marketing package HSC has said it will be the first distributor to launch a SIM-free version of the BlackBerry Pearl 3G into the dealer community. The phone will be accompanied by exclusive marketing packs for dealers including point-of-sale and merchandise packs designed to [...]

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

Get your GSM snooping tools here

Black Hat  Independent researchers have made good on a promise to release a comprehensive set of tools needed to eavesdrop on cell phone calls that use the world’s most widely deployed mobile technology.…

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(Source The Register)