2011 March | Mobile Industry Review

Archive | March, 2011

London tube phone signal plans shelved = too difficult

By Ewan on March 31, 2011 in Operators

Alas it all proved far too difficult… Plans to build a mobile phone network on London Underground in time for the Olympic Games have been abandoned.The UK’s four mobile operators on Thursday said they had concluded it would not be possible to build the network in time for the Olympics starting next July. via FT.com [...]

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HP’s WebOS: 100m+ devices this year? Time to look at their platform…

By Ewan on March 31, 2011 in Devices

First, the background. I remember being really excited by the introduction of Palm’s all new WebOS and the Palm Pre. At the time, I remember rating WebOS slightly higher than the bog-standard first edition of iOS. I remember Palm being a forced to be reckoned with. I remember when the ultra-geeks I knew were seriously [...]

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Premium Rate Fraud Costs UK Mobile Industry a Whopping £140m per year

By Ewan on March 31, 2011 in Operators

At least that’s the claim from BillingScore. Now BillingScore does sell software that can identify patterns and unusual behaviour that might indicate fraudulent behaviour, so I suppose they would say that, but from my dealings with operators it doesn’t surprise me that their processes are just not good enough to stop this happening. But £140 [...]

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Nokia’s Sleeping Screen – really, really nice

By Ewan on March 31, 2011 in Devices

Steve Litchfield over at All About Symbian posted a note this morning about Nokia’s all new (‘experimental’) Sleeping Screen system. It’s gorgeous. One of the best features of the Nokia N8 is the clock that is shown on the screen, even when it’s asleep. I simply love it. Right now on my desk there’s an [...]

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BlueVia: “Helping developers run at internet speed”

By Ewan on March 31, 2011 in Opinion

Continuing our BlueVia Introduction series, their top man, Jose Valles, is back — but this time in English! (I hope you enjoyed Jose’s brief Spanish video from Monday). I asked Jose if he could give me an example of how BlueVia works with developers. He jumped straight into an answer so I’ve edited the video [...]

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Lady Geek TV: Series 3: Episode 5

By Krystal on March 30, 2011 in Applications

The ladies are back again, and this week it’s gaming apps. “Is your high-pressure job getting to you? You need to take it easy – to “chillax” even… and what better way to kick-back than with some of the finest games on your smart phone. This week the Lady Geeks and their lovely assistant Keith [...]

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I don’t oppose the London Underground’s WiFi plans

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Opinion, Services

I’m not a Londoner anymore. I live in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. However I’m in London most days so I feel I have some right to stand up and be counted here. Have a read of this: Some 55 per cent of 950 people questioned said they did not want Transport for London to go ahead with [...]

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Impressed by SoftBank’s reaction to the Japanese Quake

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Operators

Serkan at MobileCrunch has the full story: Son said that as SoftBank’s leader, it makes him feel uncomfortable to hear that disaster victims and their friends and relatives have trouble in connecting and obtaining information. And while he was at it, he also promised that the orphans won’t be charged any communication fees until they [...]

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If an operator suffers a critical outage, should they refund customers?

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Operators

On the 28th of March, T-Mobile Netherlands suffered a catastrophic network outage that resulted in millions of users having their phones transformed from communications devices into paperweights. From what I’ve been told, connectivity was offline for most of the business day. T-Mobile is refusing to offer any compensation citing ‘Force Majeure’. Now then — should [...]

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Try the Viewsonic View Pad 7 free: Nice idea!

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Devices

Now then I think this is a pretty cool idea. On Monday morning, the team at Viewsonic went live with their new marketing message. I suspect it’s designed to attract the attention of those consumers currently wedded to the concept of anything starting with an ‘i’. The offer? Try the Viewsonic View Pad 7 absolutely [...]

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FaceTime is still absolutely astonishing for the lay person

By Ewan on March 30, 2011 in Opinion

I was at Kings Cross St Pancras last night about to head out to Paris. I decided to use the WiFi there to make a quick FaceTime call to my little boy. Baby Archie is almost 10 months old. (I think we need to see him walk before we can start referring to him as [...]

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An introduction to TaxiStop by their CEO Gideon Clifton

By Ewan on March 28, 2011 in Applications, Devices, Operators, Services

I was very interested to meet with Gideon Clifton, CEO at upcoming taxi-bookings service, TaxiStop. Gideon was at the BlueVia-Microsoft event to talk about the how TaxiStop is leveraging a plethora of Microsoft and BlueVia technologies to deliver its new service. I’m rather excited at the prospect of using TaxiStop to book my taxi journeys [...]

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