The coolest things for the coolest phones
One of the most loved mobile rumourmills of recent months may be coming to an end as Mobile Choice reckons iPhone Nano (Apple’s as-yet-unannounced smaller version of the iPhone) will be out in the summer, and available exclusively through O2, at least in the UK.
It’s thought the new device will be more of a massmarket play than the current 3G iPhone, so as well as being smaller, it will be less well specced and hence cheaper.
Nokia has incurred the wrath of some of the UK’s top mobile operators by bundling a copy of the Skype voice over IP client with its new N97 handset.
Skype allows free or very cheap calls to be made over the Internet by routing voice over IP traffic. This is all well and good if you need a PC to use it but as modern smartphones are highly capable web browsing devices with access to high speed 3G links or even wifi, you can see how people who’ve previously charged you money to talk to your mates might get a tad annoyed.
O2 and Orange in particular have drawn a line in the sand and are demanding that Nokia remove the feature or face having the phone dropped from their line-ups.
So far though, Nokia is sticking to its guns, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether it means that the age of VoIP is finally kicking off in the UK.
You know who had a good New Years Eve? Whoever at O2 is responsible for counting the money they make from text messages.
The mobile carrier (and current Millenium Dome landlord) has announced that on O2 alone, over 166 MILLION texts were sent to celebrate the start of 2009. Actually, some of them may have been sent for other reasons - unless O2 are secretly monitoring the contents of our texts they can’t possibly know if were were celebrating or not and several may have denounced the coming of 2009 entirely. There is just no way for us to be sure - but all the same, that’s a pretty flippin’ huge number of messages flying through the ether.
The messages were counted between 7:30 AM on the 31st and the same time on the 1st of January and averaged out to around 1900 messages per second.
Fancy a non-contract iPhone 3G? It’ll cost you? How much you ask? Well that’ll be £350 for the 8GB version or a full £400 for the 16GB model courtesy of O2. In all honesty, though neither option is cheap, it certainly beats the carrier free pricing fiasco that swept much of Europe shortly after the original iPhone was launched.
Of course, O2 is offering a full raft of Pay As You Go options to entice those unwilling to sign up to a monthly contract. Paying between £10 and £14 a month in call credit will net you 500 free minutes to any landline or O2 cellphone. If you spend between £15 and £29 you’ll get 1,000 minutes, while £30 or more provides unlimited calls (presumably on the same terms i.e. to landline numbers and O2 mobiles).
One of the big sweeteners is that PAYG customers will get unlimited Internet access, including 3G and O2 Wi-Fi, free, for the first year and then for the measly sum of £10 per month thereafter.
The main drawback of the whole package is that text messages don’t get a look in, costing their usual 10p each. Apparently the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail and on-the-fly call merging are also exempt from the PAYG plan, which is worth bearing in mind should you wish to avoid a nasty surprise.
The prepaid phones and plans will be available from both O2 and Apple Stores from September 16th so there is still time to get saving if you have managed to resist the lure of an iPhone on contract so far.
It seems the UK mobile operators are getting excited about mobile music again, launching new ways to buy tunes and related content from your phone. For example, O2 has just teamed up with record label Sony BMG to launch a new service called My Play. It’ll be based around individual artists, and will let you buy songs, videos and ringtones from one place on the O2 Active portal. The companies say it’s the first time an operator and a label have partnered in this way, although it’s unclear whether O2 will let other labels join in the My Play fun. I think it’s an O2 thing rather than a Sony BMG thing, so hopefully it won’t be restricted to the latter’s bands. My Play will be selling full tracks for 99p, videos for £1.50, and ringtones for… £3.50. That’s right, more than three times the price of a full track. The idea of bundling all this stuff together into micro-sites is a good one, but operators’ ringtone pricing continues to make me scratch my head in bafflement.
According to that ever nefarious, ‘word round the campfire’, the iPhone 3G could be making its way to an Orange store near you before very long. The report comes from Electricpig which has heard from an undisclosed apparently very credible source that with O2’s exclusive iPhone contract coming to an end just before Christmas, Orange will be allowed to sell the iPhone on its network from October onward.
Now normally we would dismiss all rumours out of hand this late on a Friday afternoon, purely as a point of principle. But the fact that Orange already carries the iPhone in France, Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Africa does tend to lend weight to the possibility.
There is also the notion that Jailbreaking iPhones has been most common in the UK, with Apple subsequently looking for ways to offer more choice in order to curb the public desire to take iPhones on jaunts to other networks the dirty way. Throw in O2’s less than stellar performance with the launch of the iPhone 3G and you are looking at a very tidy little package of rumours and speculation that could well add up to more than the sum of their parts.
So the only question remaining is, if the iPhone was available on both networks in the UK, which one would you choose?
Still not got your hands on an iPhone 3G, but want to? O2 has released info on which of its stores had stock at opening time this morning, albeit warning that they’ve only got 8GB models in “very limited” quantities. To be honest, if you’re reading this after lunchtime, it’s probably too late to bag one. The operator has also updated customers on the next few weeks, suggesting that the limited supply will continue for “some weeks”, but the supply will at least be steady. “We are working closely with Apple to get additional iPhone 3Gs. These will be coming in on a weekly basis,” it says, promising to update the page (linked above) daily with a list of stores that have the handsets in stock. Sadly, there’s still no iPhones available for online ordering, so you’ll need to get your arse down to a store to bag one. Carphone Warehouse is apparently getting new stock in today too, so it’s worth shopping around if initially unlucky.
You might think those naughty pictures you took of yourself in varying states of undress, wearing a skimpy outfit that can only be described as a ‘top shelf’, were strictly between you and your intended recipient when you idly sent them as an MMS. Oh how wrong you were (mwuhaahaahaa etc).
There has been a serious privacy policy heart attack going on at O2, as significant quantities of MMS messages have been published all over the web. Apparently it’s all the iPhone’s fault, as the problem affects handsets that can’t display picture messages, (which naturally includes a whole heap of other handsets too).
Continue reading ‘O2’s MMS service suspended after images published publicly on the web’
Here’s a story to make you laugh / weep (delete as appropriate).
On Monday, I spent the morning trying and failing to place an upgrade order for a 16GB iPhone on O2’s website. It crashed, hung, and at one point took me through to a ‘thanks for you order’ page, but with no email confirmation since, it was clearly just a punk-ass attempt to fob me off, right?
Er, wrong. About an hour after I got back from the local O2 Store this morning clutching my shiny new 3G iPhone, a courier knocked at the door with my online order. Yes, I have two iPhones! So if you thought your online order hadn’t worked on Monday, you should probably log in to O2’s website and check the ‘My Orders’ section (something I didn’t do, seeing as there was no email confirmation).
I’ve paid for both, so it’s not a ‘w00t! Free iPhone!’ situation. And both are registered to my account, so I can’t pass the spare one on to any one of the 16 friends who’ve just volunteered themselves. The friendly O2 customer service chap I just spoke to on the phone says I can send it back and get a refund, happily, so that’s what I’m doing.
But it’s a strange jumble to have happened, especially given the ‘one person one phone’ rule. Anyway, in a separate note, I’ve got nothing but praise for the staff at the O2 Store, who kept buzzing down the line with updates on stock count, waiting time etc.
I’ve just got back from a jaunt to my local town centre, during which I popped into the O2 Store to check on tomorrow’s 3G iPhone launch - and specifically, whether they’ll upgrade my existing iPhone in-store. The conversation went thus:
Me: “I’ve got a question about the launch tomorrow morning. I’ve got an iPhone, so will you be doing upgrades to the 3G one in-store, or just serving new customers?”
O2 Bloke: “We don’t know I’m afraid, sir.”
Me: “Er..”
O2 Bloke: “We don’t have final details of the process that will be happening in the morning.”
Me: “Oh, so I should… just queue up in the morning anyway and hope for the best?”
O2 Bloke: “That’s your best bet. I’d get here early if I was you.”
So there you have it. Existing iPhone owners may or may not be able to upgrade to the 3G model in O2 Stores tomorrow, but even the staff don’t know (at least in my local - but he did give the impression of giving a prepared response, rather than just being clueless).
Meanwhile, in its guide to getting hold of a 3G iPhone released today, O2 reminds existing iPhone owners that “If you have an existing iPhone you can still enjoy many of the new features by upgrading your software to version 2.0 from 11 July through iTunes.”
As Bollo might say, I gotta bad feeling about this…
