The coolest things for the coolest phones
Bad news, UK denim fans. You’ll have to hop on a Eurostar if you want to get hold of the new Levi Strauss slider phone. It’s due on sale this month, but only in France, where Orange has signed an exclusive for it.
It’s a 3G handset with Bluetooth, MP3-playing capabilities, a microSD card slot and a two-megapixel camera. The Levi branding is strong too, with the logo engraved on the back.
(via MobileBurn)
Cor. Watch the video above, and tell me you’re not impressed. It’s a concept device being trialled by Orange France called ‘Read&Go’. It’s got a touchscreen, supports Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, has 1GB of storage space, and comes with 30 preloaded e-books.
Orange is working with five French newspapers in its trial – Le Monde, Le Parisien, Les Echos, L’Equipe and Telerama – with the device updating content every hour between 6am and midnight. 150 lucky users have been given a Read&Go for the next two months.
With Amazon yet to launch its Kindle e-book reader on this side of the Atlantic, Read&Go could get in early and steal its potential market share. Orange apparently has plans to embed adverts based on the user’s location too. Quick, Orange UK, trial it here too!
A company called 3DVU which specializes in 3D image navigation and location services has announced that it is teaming up with Orange to launch a new service called Navi2Go on Windows Mobile phones.
As you have probably already guessed, Navi2Go is a navigation application but the main selling point here is that all of the data is served up in an impressively flashy interface where the area you are navigating is recreated in luscious 3D on your handset. Apparently you will be able to travel over the UK in its entirety with high resolution aerial imagery and high-precision terrain elevation in a 3D bird-eye-view.
So basically what we are talking about here is an application that does what Google Earth does, but on a mobile and with the the added benefit of GPS showing you exactly where you are. Very clever and for directionless people like me (they call me the anti-compass) a very helpful too. It had better be however as the service is subscription based though it is available now for a four month introductory price of £15 at the Orange Shop under the travel section.
Just a quick note for any of you on contracts with Orange to let you know that business customers on mobile broadband tariffs will soon be able to bag themselves an unlimited usage allowance so that using your mobile in conjunction with your PC for broadband internet access, no longer needs to be a financial black hole.
The refresh of the Business Everywhere Unlimited tariff will offer unlimited data access for £17 a month on a 24 month contract. The slightly scaled down Business Everywhere Daily tariff will allow occasional mobile workers to bolt on a day’s worth of unlimited access to their existing Orange contract for £7 a throw with no minimum contract requirements.
It’s being touted as a means of testing whether or not you need/want a permanent unlimited data tariff meaning you’d better make your mind up within two tries as otherwise you’d be as well just signing up for the Business Everywhere Unlimited tariff.
Unlimited mobile broadband anywhere you want in the country for £17 a month? Almost makes us wish we got out more.
Just in time to miss Christmas, Orange has released a dirt-cheap Alcatel OT-E227 handset on prepay, costing a mere £9.99 (Plus £10 top-up).
As fits the price, the clamshell handset is pretty functional with a 1.5-inch 65k colour screen, and pretty much no bells and whistles. What it does have is a whopping 325 hours’ standby time and 10 hours’ talktime, and it weighs only 70g.
To attract custom, the handset is nattily decked out with Fuschia (Apparently THE colour this season), glossy black and metallic rose.
Alcatel describes the phone as a “great basic handset for first time mobile users”. They’re not wrong!
Orange has had HTC’s iPhone-lite Touch Plus for a while now – probably something to do with it having an exclusive deal? Anyway, T-Mobile’s jumping on the Touch bandwagon and has posted an HTC Touch Plus on its British site as ‘Coming Soon’.
While O2 has the iPhone market sewn up thanks to its deal with Apple, other operators have had to scramble around for alternatives and HTC’s nifty little device certainly fits the bill for people hankering after a touch-screen smartphone. Oh, and the HTC Touch Plus certainly won’t cost £270 AND a hefty 18-month contract!
Other ‘Coming Soon’ devices posted on T-Mobile’s site are the Nokia 1650 (Due February) and 8800 (January) and Sony Ericsson’s HSDPA-enabled Walkman phone, the W890i (Also due in February).
Orange has rolled out its new on-device games portal making games available directly from your handset. Portal Booster, powered by Mobile Scope, will make Orange’s games catalogue available within a few button presses on certain handsets, avoiding users getting lost in menu hell as is usual when browsing operators’ mobile internet portals.
The first handsets to be released with this built-in are the brand new Sony Ericsson W910i and the K850i.
Hopefully this will drive consumers to search for and download games from Orange, further improving take-up and hence increasing its mobile data revenues at the same time. It’ll also help mobile games firm In-Fusio, which is behind Mobile Scope, who will be delighted more users will be encouraged to pay for its games from their handsets.
[Via Mobile Entertainment]
Nokia Music Store customers can get free access to it over wi-fi after it signed a deal with The Cloud. The deal gives free access through The Cloud’s 7,500 wi-fi hotspots.
The deal means that Music Store customers with wi-fi handsets and laptops can connect to The Cloud and browse the millions of tracks on Music Store without having to pay their operators’ browsing rates.
Aside from the obvious financial benefits, customers will also get faster, more reliable connections than on operators’ 3G networks, meaning quick and easy downloads.
The Cloud’s wi-fi hotspots are in all sorts of places such as McDonalds, Coffee Republic, airports and the Square Mile in London. It’s already done deals to offer free wi-fi access to iPhone users and O2 and Orange customers. If it keeps growing at this rate, soon no-one will ever need pay for wireless broadband internet again…
Vodafone’s certainly been stirring controversy, speculation and rumour about 3G iPhones this week.
First, on Monday, Vodafone got an injunction against T-Mobile in Germany, demanding that German iPhones be sold unlocked without two-year contracts. This is going to be reviewed in two weeks.
The German court decision came after Vodafone Germany filed a motion for the courts to review T-Mobile’s exclusive rights to sell the iPhone, which are apparently in breach of German commercial laws.
This was the same argument that saw Bouygues Telecom and Virgin Mobile sell iPhones in France, alongside Orange, which was stopped from selling it exclusively.
Now, Vodafone is playing down rumours it’s going to sell 3G iPhones next year.
A spokesman has told Tech.co.uk that although Vodafone has said before it was interested in selling 3G iPhones, this is ‘rubbish’.
However, he did say: “We have said in the past we’re interested in selling a 3G iPhone and that may have been misinterpreted.”
Hmm. Telefonica’s already been linked with 3G iPhones as early as May next year. Having seen O2 sell thousands of iPhones already, what’s the betting Vodafone’s lining itself up to get at the forefront of negotiations for the 3G iPhone contract from Apple?
Orange has just signed a deal with wi-fi provider, The Cloud to make the companies 7,500 UK hotspots available to Orange users. The deal is aimed at satisfying the needs of business customers who will be able to access the points via their existing Orange Business Everywhere data cards.
Orange has already snuggled up to BT OpenZone, France Telecom and WeRoam to provide broader wi-fi access to its customers so this move is pretty much in keeping with its existing strategy. Combined, Orange customers now have access to more than 10,000 wi-fi hotspots.
The Cloud is no stranger to mobile network providers either having already brokered a deal with O2 to offer wi-fi access to iPhone users. Let’s hope those hotspots don’t get too crowded.
(Via Orange)
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