Apple is facing a Brit backlash against the iPhone, with accusations that the handset has sold less than expected since its launch this month, and a report suggesting the price tag is what’s putting people off in the UK.
Check this article on The Register, which quotes “reliable channel sources” as saying that O2 has activated just 26,500 iPhones since its launch on 9th November - which puts the early estimates of 100,000 sales in the first weekend into perspective. The article does point out that more may have been bought as Christmas presents, and so not activated yet.
Meanwhile, research firm Gfk NOP has conducted a poll of 500 Brits, and found that 72% said they won’t be buying an iPhone due to its high price, with just 2% considering adding it to their Christmas lists. Analyst Richard Jameson reckons that people simply aren’t used to paying more than £200 for phones here in the UK.
We think it’s too early to label the iPhone a flop - and don’t forget, if that 26,500 figure is correct, at £269 a pop that’s still over £7 million worth of sales, and a minimum of £927,500 a month in contract payments…
The Beeb has been quick to experiment with the iPhone’s capability for web applications, with the first fruits being its BBC Podcasts site. It lets you browse the broadcaster’s radio podcasts by station, genre or title (an A-Z list). I wrote about it earlier this month, but have been having a play with it to see how it shapes up.
It’s well designed, with a clean and easily navigable interface mirroring the way the iPod feature works on the iPhone. Clicking through (that should be thumbing through, really) to the podcast gives you a paragraph of textual description of the overall podcast, as well as a description of each individual podcast, along with their duration.
But what’s good is the Play button, which lets you stream these podcasts directly to your iPhone over Wi-Fi using Quicktime streaming - which again, means the controls for pausing and controlling the volume work in exactly the same way as the iPod feature.
Continue reading ‘iPhone Web Apps No. 2: BBC Podcasts’
If you live in London you’ll have struggled to avoid the billboards for Barclaycard’s OnePulse cards that combine a credit card with the Oyster travel card.
The upshot is users can make sub-£10 purchases just by waving their card in front of a scanner, like they do with the Oyster. Well, now Barclaycard has said that from early next year, trials will begin of OnePulse using specially-equipped Nokia phones, so users wave their phone, not their credit card.
OnePulse can already be used in around 1,000 places in London, and for the trial several hundred Barclaycard customers will get Nokia phones embedded with the special radio chips - most probably the 6131 NFC (pictured) announced earlier this year.
Nokia reckons mobiles will be safer than contactless credit cards because they can be locked. Some have claimed that contactless cards will be open to fraudsters using portably radio receivers to get people’s card details.
Mind you, there is also another problem. Most people using their Oyster card will wipe it across the reader. If they did that with their phone it’ll soon get covered in scratches - imagine doing it with an iPhone! Hopefully Nokia’s thinking of ways round this!
[Via The Observer]
Want YouTube on your phone but fed up with only have the (very) limited selection currently available for mobiles? With hours of video being uploaded every minute on YouTube you know it’s going to take them a lifetime to configure all of them for mobile phones.
Luckily some enterprising developers have managed create a streaming media player plug-in that’ll let you browse ALL YouTube videos and watch them on your smartphone.
The plug-in works by converting YouTube videos to play on Windows Media Player installed on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based smartphones.
To set it up you simply need to go to the YouTube Pocket website, download the YouTube player to your smartphone and you’re away.
The people behind YouTube Pocket have also developed other mobile services including a Gmail viewer and MySpace music player for mobile phones.
[Via Coolsmartphone.com]
T-Mobile and Vodafone will go head to head in a Hamburg court this week in their fight over marketing rights for Apple’s iPhone in Germany. A date for the hearing has been set for November 29.
Vodafone last week filed an injunction with German courts requesting a hearing over T-Mobile’s exclusive rights to sell iPhones in Germany. It questioned the legality of T-Mobile locking iPhones to its network and its binding contracts for users.
German laws are different to those in the UK, and the exclusive T-Mobile-Apple deal could be illegal. If the court finds in favour of Vodafone, iPhones will have to be available unlocked in Germany.
Since the injunction last week T-Mobile has already changed its iPhone offer and is now selling Sim-free iPhones for over £700.
German iPhone fans will be waiting with baited breath for the court’s decision this week, as will we.
The K850i already has a hugely popular heritage coming as it does from the K800i, and even though it’s literally just arrived in stores the K850i is going to be a huge hit.
If there’s one (slight) complaint about the five-megapixel Cybershot phone, it’s that it’s a little on the bulky side compared to some other devices out there.
Luckily, black is a slimming colour and Sony Ericsson’s going to add a lick of paint to the K850i to make it even more appealing. The standard grey device is already out there and a velvet blue one is also on the cards.
Now new pics of the device show a jet-black K850i with some silver keys as a finishing touch. It looks great and makes us want one even more. You can see more here.
The latest installment of the Pocket Picks iPhone review concerns the two most high-profile Web 2.0 apps on the handset: YouTube and Google Maps. They’re both the result of Apple palling up with Google, despite the latter having its own mobile ambitions with the Android platform.
YouTube first, then. It lets you browse the popular video-sharing site by Featured vids, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent, and using a Search function. In the case of Most Viewed, you can narrow it down to today, this week, or all-time depending on your preference. On the iPhone, you can see how YouTube is a good dip-in dip-out experience, in that you fire up the app, watch a few videos to kill time, then duck out again.
Choosing a video switches iPhone into widescreen mode, and the quality is pretty good (obviously, you’ll want to be using the iPhone’s wi-fi connection rather than EDGE). Once watched, you can bookmark them, share (this sends an email with the link in), and click straight through to a bunch of related vids. The only disappointment is there’s no way to read or post comments, or even ratings.
Continue reading ‘UK iPhone Review Part 5: YouTube and Google Maps’
Nokia’s Sports Tracker software has been available from its Beta Labs for some time but has now been officially launched, together with a shiny new web app to let you share and publish your boasts training progress reports.
Sports Tracker requires a Nokia S60 3rd Edition phone with either an external or internal GPS receiver which it uses to automatically keep a log of your speed, distance run, and location when out training. This data can be uploaded to the site and presented in a variety of ways including a map view, progress graph and workout summary.
Another nice feature is the ability to upload geo-tagged photos that you take while out and about. The software will pop them up onto the appropriate point on your route map or let you manually place them.
Nokia Sports Tracker is completely free and Nokia say they are working on an API that will let you access your data from other websites and apps, which should let you publish your progress on your blog or (potentially) into social networking sites like Facebook.
LG has been shouting about its success with its Viewty handset, of which has sold out in Europe in less than a month.
LG claims that 200,000 handsets delivered to 14 European countries have sold out after only three weeks.
The five-megapixel cameraphone with three-inch screen is one of the best around, and the latest in a long series of hits for LG, which has come from nowhere in Europe to the first tier of manufacturers in only three years.
The Shine and Prada handsets got a lot of attention, but the Chocolate is its biggest yet, with over 11 million handsets sold so far (globally, not just in the UK!).
LG’s especially encouraged by the fact that the Viewty is pretty expensive compared to a lot of other handsets. Market research firm Strategy Analytics puts LG at number five globally in terms of sales, but second only to Sony Ericsson in terms of average phone price ($125 compared to Sony Ericsson’s $171).
[Via Korea Times]
GeoSentric, the new incarnation of the old GPS phone manufacturer Benefon, has claimed that Nokia’s adopted its social networking application.
Benefon was one renowned for making GPS-enabled handsets long before GPS started taking off. Unfortunately it was too early to market and eventually dropped handsets to move into mobile applications.
GeoSentric’s GyPSii platform lets users upload pictures, videos and sound clips, each encoded with the location of where the picture or recording was made. Friends can then see where the user is or was, and search each other’s saved places.
GyPSii is already available on Windows Mobile and now also Symbian handsets making it available on most smartphones.
Nokia’s support should boost its user base, now the manufacturer will carry GyPSii on its GPS-enabled handsets including the Nokia N95 and 6110.
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