It’s all about secure mobile ticketing. That’s Masabi’s bag.

Do please take a few minutes to watch the future of ticketing on your mobile. It’s excellent, it’s brilliant, it *works* and it’s available in the UK today.

MIR Developers: Masabi Part 2 –> Stop everything and watch from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Note: In my haste to get this video up, I forgot to change the labels — so it says it’s James Pycock on the video. It’s not. It’s Ben Whitaker from Masabi talking. I’ll change this in a minute. I wanted to get this up and out.

An Orange non-spokesperson let loose his thoughts to us on the America mobile phone tariffs, which made a great deal of sense and a lot more than the actual tariffs do themselves.

This all came about on a chance meeting during a meander around Orange’s exhibition hall. The very same room in fact, where we sighted the Nokia N97, 5800 and BlackBerry Bold we brought you news on earlier this week.

A learn’d colleague and good friend on Symbian Guru, the very Guru himself was also talking to this chap when the subject of tariffs came up.

If you weren’t already aware, call charges on mobiles in the US of A are charged very much like roaming fees – even if you are from that very same country, have a contract in that country and are calling from that country too.

Meaning that you also get charged for all incoming calls and in most cases, the messages you receive too. Just as you would do if you had a phone on a contract in the UK, travelled aboard and were using the phone over there.

If you had a mobile phone contract in the States with 700 minutes per month – not only would that number go down every time you made a call, but also when a call came in.

The same works with text and multimedia messages too, although we were told on some packages or networks this might not always be the case. As it could be possible to see just a preview of a message, without actually seeing its entire contents and have that not impact on your monthly allowance.

Why and where this all originated from and possibly the entire cause of this absurdity was outlaid to us.

The theory the Orange chappie had was all to do with geographical locations, curiously enough.

In American you can’t really tell if you’re calling a mobile phone or a landline. As there is no prefix before the number dialled, where there is in the UK with the ’07′ dialling code.

Instead it’s all done by region, much like a normal landline number operates – with the likes of 020 7555 5555, for an example. That very same phone number could also be a mobile phone number in the USA, whilst in the UK it would be 07955 555 555.

The networks and carriers may have thought this would be a good model and simple to implement at the time, but might have not really considered the cost and implications of the charging structure attached.

Where the ’07′ clearly signifies and denotes a mobile number in good old Blighty, with the identified surcharge recognised in calling as compared to a landline. From that a premium fee is attached and that’s really where the money is made in carrying calls across that network.

In America there’s no such luxury. There is nothing attached to a phone number showing it’s a mobile phone number or even what network it’s on either. With the UK, the numbers after ‘07′ even shows what network, such as Orange, Vodafone, 3, the phone is on too.

To make up for these lacking costs, as the non-spokes person from Orange put it, other charges need to be levied somewhere else.

Hence the fee charged for inbound calls and messages too. Seeing as this began at year dot on the conception of a cellular network in the States – there really is no way now to change this.

They’re stuck in a monumental rut, digging themselves in deeper and deeper each and every year where a major fundamental radical change needs to take place.

Although to quote Family Guy, no one has the ‘testicular fortitude’ to put this in play.

The Guru added something in the closing to us regarding text messaging. American’s all just take the hit now with inbound charges for SMSs, as they’re just used to it as a nation with the voice call charges.

A report is coming out in January from a publication called ‘Consumer Reports’, much like our ‘Which?’ series of magazines over here. They have it that there’s been an increase from 15cents per message recently to 20cents, for the very same process.

With, as they also have it, five hundred text messages contain less than 1-minute of voice transmission. Madness, eh?

Next time anyone you know in the UK moans about their tariffs, call charges or minutes they have per month – remind them there are worse places in the world.

DeviceAnywhere offer the coolest thing we’ve seen in ages, the ability to test your mobile apps on actually phones from anywhere in the world remotely.

The image at the top is their test suite software, where you can upload your software to real, live, working handsets and run your software throughly to workout any kinks.

It’s an ideal way to perfect the final version, without having all the mobiles on the Earth laying around your office. Marvelous!

In a rack somewhere on the planet there’s a handset wired in, just like the image below. This is the way you access the handset of your choice .

Check them out, it’s the coolest thing ever.

Then again, we don’t get out much.

It’s not an event geared to announce major amounts of news, it’s really for developers and partners of Orange just to get together.

We’re just here to sit in on the briefings and really get an insight to the inside of what goes on between Orange and the people they interact with. These are the people that are responsible for the applications, their delivery to and with Orange all for the handsets.

Kicking things off, and was really the only one announcement from the event was Yves Tyrode, the executive vice president of their new venue Technocentr.

Who made the bold claim that Orange ‘aims to delivering 15% of their turnover from innovation in 2010′. This is from a new process where their R&D and marketing work hand in hand on new ventures, with the delivery people too. All to solidify the complete process and make everything much easier for all involved in terms of getting new technology to market.

They’ve set up centres for this all around the world, from Beijing to London. With the latter being the news of the day. This new Technocentre now represents a big investment by Orange, and will expand on the work on products and services for over 170 million France Telecom customers on 115 Orange brands. Here, all those key departments are in the same place, at the same time, helping and aiding each other for the best possible concept.

Stéphane Gruber, the head of applications & services delivery for Orange speech ran with the concept of ‘mobile multimedia delivering a personal customer experience’.

Where the phrase ‘mobile multimedia’ kept cropping up in various briefings we attended that morning, and subsequently too – just stamping a theme on the event for us.

His main focus was just to highlight to developers that they’re aware mobiles are moving more and more towards delivering a complete multimedia experience, and that they really need address this.

He went on to produce some interesting stats that we hadn’t seen before; over 3.5 billion people have a mobile phone and only around 11% of customers are consuming 71% of data.

Where they’re going next to is to grab the remaining 89%, with new services and get better at offering up ‘smart’ relevant content to engage their customers. Which all seems fine and is what this event is all about.

They’re aiming all this at what Orange called the ‘signature portfolio’, which in our terms is their flagship range of devices that really standout.

These began with a single HTC device they offered back in 2002 running Windows Mobile, to more than 50 devices in 2006 from all major handsets manufactures and with all known platforms onboard.

This reach a ceiling in their books just a year later, where they were turfing out a new mobile launch every 5 days in those key 10 countries, out of the 28 they are currently in. Whoa!

Controversially, they showed Android as one of the partners in the keynote presentation. When the PowerPoint presentation came back to us, the logo was missing.

The question mark in the image below was where it was in the speech, just for your amusement and bemusement too.

** UPDATE: We’ve been subsequently told, the image was taken out to move the focus on the people at the event. Hmmmm … :UPDATE **

Patrice Slupowski, the director web 2.0 product marketing had some interesting things to say.

There was another frequently used topic we picked up upon at the Orange event, the idea of ‘3 screens’.

Orange have in their mind they work across trios screens, mobile, TV and the web.

On the internet they have 55 million unique visitors monthly worldwide, they said they hold the number 3 spot in France the 5th in Spain and are number 2 in Poland.

In terms of mobile phone customers, they said they have 117 million mobile customers worldwide, 23 million with mobile broadband. Most of which we were aware of the size of, but seeing it all laid out like that just emphased Orange’s position.

What we didn’t know was just how successful their IP TV taking up was, they’re in 1.7 million households in European. This is a feat in itself with all the completion around. Also, needed is around 4mbit/s to deliver this service, which isn’t really everywhere.

They do offer however, in areas of France and Poland satellite IP TV where they cannot receive decent DSL coverage. This is where the request for data is made of a normal dial-up connection, and the Orange IP TV data is pulled down via the satellite dish. Ingenious!

We’ve fired off some emails to their competitors, just to get a more rounded and fair picture – we’ll report back on our findings.

We’ll bring you more from the event when more relevant topics arise .

This time around, 8 years in, they’re notably absent. Whereas before they’ve always been here, in some form or another.

Are we to read on to this latest development, with every other mobile OS provider here?

Yes, and why not.

Posted via email from MIR Live

It appears the rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Orange has some great great troubles with the Bold, leading to the RIM phone being pulled from its network. This was despite them being the very first UK network to carry the mobile.

After some updates to cure the woes behind the 2G and 3G switching, which it didn’t handel to well, its proudly back on the network. Hurrah!

Posted via email from MIR Live

Does this mean this musically inclined mobile will soon be on Orange?

Yes, we believe so.

Otherwise why would it be here, come on now Orange!

2+2=4 after all.

Posted via email from MIR Live

Are we to assume it’s coming to orange?

Yes.

Why wouldn’t it be??

It’s here, we can see it, it’s at an Orange event … it elementary dear Watson.

Posted via email from MIR Live

Looks interesting, will bring you more

Posted via email from MIR Live

Over the next 72 hours, 83 sessions with over 50 partners of theirs. Whoa!

Expect more from those key sessions over the week.

Posted via email from MIR Live

Designer, exclusive mobile phones seem to be the toys of the rich and famous, whilst doubling up as a status symbol all at the same time. Or so we’re all led to believe. Is there room for a phone of this nature in your arsenal? We went along to the launch of the Motorola AURA just to find out.

We waited for well over a week for answers to our quandaries from Motorola, all but to no avail. Here are our thoughts on the AURA and we apologise for the wait.

The event itself wasn’t a normal press briefing per se, some might have called it an art unveiling.

There are now some of you who think we’re being pretentious by saying such things. With the phone supposedly being a piece of art in itself, with its sapphire crystal display and etchings that take two weeks to carve into the designer case.

We’re not, it actually was an art unveiling. Motorola had commissioned a piece of work to back this launch of this most expensive of expensive handsets.

The world renowned architectural practice UNStudio unveiled a bespoke design installation to launch this phone, at the exclusive of exclusive St Martins Lane Hotel, in London.

UNStudio co-founder Ben van Berkel aired the ‘Time out of scale’ which creates an immersive environment inspired by AURA, although we’re not entirely sure what all of that means if any of it.

As for the handset, we weren’t overly impressed with a phone that’ll be on sale for $2000 – just in case the following you are about to read isn’t subtle enough.

We can appreciate the engineering that has gone into the phone, aspects of which we covered here. We can also appreciate the materials used and how exemplary they are, with the 62 carrot sapphire crystal screen and a case with over 700 parts. We also get how all of this factors into why it does cost so much and whom they are aiming it at. Still, we can’t really appreciate the handset for what it is. We tried, we really really did, sorry.

We looked over it again and again, but still came away not entirely getting it. Even if the phone wasn’t at the cost it is, we still don’t think we could go for it. Or even use it as a replacement for any other handset we currently have at our disposal.

The round screen is fairly ok to behold. Being the second most scratch resistant material on this Earth you expect it to be something out of this world. It wasn’t. It was very ordinary, dull and not really the most outstanding feature we’ve ever seen on a phone.

As this is supposed to be one of the redeeming features of the mobile it fell short, was very deficient, came under par, didn’t meet expectations, made no effort to excel – you get where we’re going with this.

There really was nothing in its appearance that really shone to us, in any way shape or form. Yes, it’s the world’s first circular display. Yes, it can display 16 million colours. Yes, it’s durable. As a designer screen to a phone it matches up to the casing and the overall feel. But it could have had something else just to add that little extra.

We even felt short changed in viewing any images or using it to browse the net. Even the novelty factor of seeing and using a well rounded display lost its appeal almost instantaneously.

The second most redeeming feature of the phone is apparently the way the handset opens, with everything hinging on its performance – no pun intended.

Its opening mechanism has been designed by a Swiss manufacturer; we weren’t informed which one despite our feverous questioning. Although they may have let slip to us it could be linked to a well know watch maker. They weren’t allowed to disclose which one, but we’re sure it will come out within time.

One of the product spokespeople from the Motorola design team drew a comparison over its look to a well made watch; Omega was the name he mentioned in passing.

The same person told us though the phone’s opening has the same feel as opening a luxury Mercedes Benz car door. So perhaps he was just waxing lyrical rather than hinting after all.

The phone’s menu features are very very basic, with nothing there stands out at all. We desperately tried here for find something worthwhile to talk about here. Once again, there really isn’t anything outstanding at all.

It’s almost as if the phone’s operation has a very retro feel, which goes against the futuristic look. As the menu options come across like an old old set of functions from say a Nokia 6010 from almost half a decade ago.

We didn’t get to use the camera, but seeing as its only 2megapixels we expect we’re not missing out on anything.

Really all you have here is a GSM phone, with no 3G, no HSDPA, no WIFI or really anything of use to anyone what so ever.

The Motorola AURA is being sold exclusively at Selfridges SIM free for 1400 of your Earth pounds. We were told at the briefing it will also be on sale in the Americas at an equally exclusive store.

Expect to see it soon for free on a 180 month contract.

Once again we thought we’d bring you the delights and treats of the unboxing ceremony, in an effort to share with you our pleasure or not as the case may be.

Think of it as another Christmas come early; the tree is lit, the cracking of the fireplace, The Queen’s message playing in the background ..

Now the mood is set, we’ll begin …

The INQ 1 about to be unboxed, drum roll please ….

The INQ 1 unboxed, tadarrrr!

The INQ 1 unboxed, a little bit closer

The INQ 1 unboxed, everything inside

The INQ 1, powered up and all works well!

The INQ 1, da main menu.

That’s it for now folks.

After we’ve spend some time with it, well share our findings and thoughts

All in an effort to wet your appetite on what’s around the corner, also it’s unfair to keep you waiting around to.

Motorola AURA, in a glass case .. seeing as it is worth £1400 (!!!)

Motorola AURA, showing its watch like cogs screen saver … on a phone worth £1400 (!!!!)

Motorola AURA, closed showing its HAL like 62 carrot crystal screen … did we mention the phone is worth £1400 (!!!!!)

Motorola AURA, showing its circular HAL like 62 carrot crystal screen … by the way, did you know the phone is worth £1400 (!!!!!!)

Motorola AURA, side on view … on a phone costing £1400 (!!!!!!!)

A cross section of the Moto AURA, a phone worth £1400 (!!!!!!) or $2000

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