Blyk, the yoof-oriented MVNO, provides free voice minutes and texts to its 16-24 year old demographic in return for watching targeted adverts via their handsets. Once the free balance is used up, or if the user want to browse the web, the phone can be topped up like a regular pay-as-you-go SIM.
The UK Mobile blog SMS Text News has spotted a questionnaire on the Blyk website that suggests the company are considering extending their free service to include data.
Blyk want to know how important free data is to their customers, while making the point that other services might have to be sacrificed to fit the current advert/pricing model. They also want to know want kind of services are likely to be used the most - web access, social networking, chat etc.
Although Blyk are unlikely to be able to provide a huge amount of free data via advertising, this could still make a big difference to the amount their customers try to use and might even encourage some digital holdouts to give the mobile ‘net a try.
Here at Pocket Picks we are all far, far too old to be on the Blyk network and no amount of vitamins and moisturiser is going to change that. If you have given the service a whirl, why not take a break from drinking cheap cider and performing urban street dance and let us know what you think in the comments? Would the prospect of free data make putting up with adverts worthwhile?
Opera have released version 4.51 4.1 of their slimline Opera Mini web browser.
Among a few new features and bug fixes, the big news on the new version is a promised speed increase of up to 50%.
Yes, we know, ‘Up to’. Still, it does *seem* a bit faster. The code itself feels like it has been tightened up a bit and is more responsive and the autocompleting URLs are a definite improvement on slowly tapping out addresses.
Most importantly, Opera have increased the speed of the proxy servers that cache webpages to improve access times. This make a huge difference compared to the native browser on most phones.
Other new features include the ability to upload and download files from within Opera Mini itself (previous versions have had to launch the native browser to achieve this), inline searching of web pages and the ability to save pages for offline reading.
The latter is a great addition to the app and makes it possible to take reading material with you to mobile deadspots (e.g. on a plane) without having to faff about with ebook formats and the like.
Opera Mini is a free Java app, available here.
Good news, people of Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Reading. The six cities are due to get Vodafone’s high-speed mobile broadband network by this Autumn, as the operator continues to roll out HSDPA across the UK. They join London and the major British airports, which were the first to get it last year. Vodafone is also making a step up in the way it sells mobile broadband contracts to customers, offering more easily understandable information at the point of purchase - for example, explaining how many emails and web pages your tariff allows you to download, and how long it’ll take you to download files, films and music over the network. Films? They’re encouraging people to download films over a mobile broadband connection? There better be generous data limits on those tariffs!
If you’re a heavy user of the Google Reader RSS site on your computer, you’ll probably know there’s an iPhone version already available. However, Google has just revamped it to make it easier to use, bringing the look and feel into line with its existing (and excellent) Gmail iPhone site.The star feature to highlight stories for later reading has been made more prominent (i.e. easier to jab with your thumb), and the new site also supports the new ‘Notes’ feature for Google Reader. It’s also much, much faster to use according to VentureBeat.Want to have a go? You’ll need to follow this link to go directly to the site. As ever with these things, it’s in beta…
I’ll be honest: if you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re not entirely clueless about the mobile internet. Yet maybe your friends and family could do with a bit of help. If so, point them in the direction of Mobile Internet For Dummies, the latest in the series of idiots’ guides books. Apparently, it’ll cover topics like choosing the best handset for your needs, downloading new applications, and using mobile sites for search, entertainment, messaging, shopping and finance. Oh, and even developing your own mobile site for yourself or your business. Whether mobile pr0n is covered is, as yet, unclear. The book has an RRP of £14.99, but Amazon is already flogging it for less than a tenner.
Now this is what I call proper Web 2.0 on mobile. Nokia’s Serena Glover has been talking to MocoNews about the company’s plans for its Ovi services, and this nugget leapt out at me:
“With Ajax on the Web, there’s so much functionality - you can drag and drop and do more all the time. The same thing will happen on the device.”
This is part of a discussion about the way multimedia stuff happens through applications downloaded to your phone right now, rather than directly in the mobile web browser, as they do for PC based users.Glover says Nokia is working to change this, for example by hooking up your handset’s camera directly to the browser “so you don’t have dual experiences”. It’s intriguing stuff, although it also ties into the debate I just posted about, where including Ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies swells the size of websites, which isn’t always good for mobile browsing.
Jeremy Liew has written a really interesting post on the Lightspeed Venture Partners blog (they’re a VC firm), pointing out that full web browsing on phones is on the rise, thanks partly to the iPhone.
But at the same time, the size of these full web pages is increasing - the average web page has tripled in size since 2003 apparently, thanks to more use of Web 2.0 techs like Ajax and JavaScript. Jeremy wants to know what people think will happen as these two trends collide. Frustration, basically. Even if you’re on a flat-rate data tariff and a decent 3G or HSDPA connection, trying to access pages that are sluggish to load is plain frustrating, no matter how swizzy your touchscreen-based browser is. Using the iPhone can feel like going back to the days of dial-up on some sites. The obvious answer is to make sure there are mobile-friendly versions of each website, serving up the same content without the unnecessary (for phones) gobbledegook. But then many techies think this would be an equally bad idea, creating two separate internets. Decisions, decisions. Perhaps everybody could go back to plain text and images, and make their websites look like GeoCities homepages again ;o)
If you use the Internet from your phone but are unlucky enough to pay for your 3G usage you probably like the idea of using a wifi-enabled mobile like the Nokia N95. This works great, but it can be a hassle having to reconnect every time you want to go online in a different place and it is easy to forget and use your 3G instead. If you are in a foreign country this can be a VERY expensive mistake.
Psiloc Connect offers a simple solution with the kind of conection management that you would think your phone would do by default. Certainly, if I were a Nokia developer I would be kicking myself for not thinking of this first.
The app does all the hard work for you - just give it a list of wifi access points (or tell it to discover some) and it will try each in order of strength, only falling back on your 3G connection if the wifi fails. If you are really worried about your phone bill, it can be set to ignore the 3G option and just use wifi.
Psiloc Connect is available here for around 10 euros, with a free 10 day trial.
Whisher is a wifi sharing service that asks its members to share their home wireless connection in return for free access to its network - by sharing you effectively become part of that network, allowing Whisher members in your area to use your link.
The service has a substantial number of hotspots worldwide. including hundreds in the UK but the network only supported connections from a Windows or Mac machine running Whisher’s software.
Until now, anyway. Whisher has just launched a client app that will give access to any wifi-enabled Symbian S60 3rd edition Nokia phone.
The app is free to download for Whisher members and installs as a plugin to the Nokia wifi app. Selecting “1Click Whisher” from the connections menu will bring up a list of local connections with icons indicating if they are Free, Commercial or part of the Wisher network.
If any of you have any experience of using Whisher, please let us know in the comments. Is it any good? Just how common are their hotspots in your area?
Don’t pretend, WinMo users. You know you want some iPhone-style touch browsing in your life. And now you can have it without crossing to the dark side, courtesy of Makayama.
It’s developed something called TouchBrowser, a scrollable web browser for WinMo Pocket PCs (as long as they have VGA or QVGA screens, and aren’t a Treo or Windows Mobile Classic device). It automatically hides menus and scrollbars, letting you use the whole screen to scroll.
It also switches between mobile and normal views, to enable no-frills viewing of sites designed for mobile devices. Oh, and there’s a pretty nifty on-screen keyboard too. Check the promo video out above, then check it out via the link.
(via Engadget)
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