Mobile phones: 15 years and a world apart

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Fifteen years ago – almost to the day – I got my first mobile phone, a Motorola mr20. It was a chunky thing, with a two-line black-on-green LCD display and a battery that lasted for up to 12 hours (so long as you didn’t use it to make calls or try out any of its three different ringtones). It could receive text messages, but not send them: for that you needed the upmarket mr30 model.

Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device. (more…)

Why you won’t get the mobile broadband speeds Ofcom claims

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

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How I got Android 2.2 by de-branding my phone

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

I’ve lost patience with O2. I’ve been waiting like a good boy for two and a half months for it to pass on the Android 2.2 update to O2-branded HTC Desire handsets (such as mine). Now I’ve had enough of waiting, and I’ve taken matters into my own hands.

What’s frustrated me isn’t the wait as such – obviously I’d rather get the upgrade sooner rather than later, but I’m old and jaded enough to take these things philosophically. And yes, I understand that O2 needs to test the update fully before it can roll it out to customers and take responsibility for supporting it.

But it does seem to be taking an unaccountably long time, especially when you note that (as reader Alan Robertson pointed out in a recent email) Android 2.2 has been running on unbranded handsets without issue since the day of release.

And in the meantime, those of us with branded phones are barred from trying it out independently: though the software is freely available, my phone is restricted to installing only O2-approved firmware, as and when the company sees fit to make it available. Hmm, why did I ditch the iPhone again?

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How much will an Apple iPhone 4 cost?

Friday, June 18th, 2010

While the iPhone 4 arrives in the UK next week, it’s not yet clear how much it will actually cost to get your hands on the shiny new Apple handset — and that’s not just because T-Mobile and 3 haven’t gotten around to releasing their prices yet.

The price plans that have been released — from O2, Orange and Vodafone — are rather convoluted, with mind-melting, eye-bleeding charts. O2’s announcement even lead to an email exchange between a bewildered Barry Collins and a losing-the-will-to-live myself, as we tried to understand whether they were or weren’t selling the iPhone at the same upfront cost regardless of contract length (they are, but it depends on how you look at it. We think. Maybe.) (more…)

O2 data charges: punishing the many to pay for the few?

Friday, June 11th, 2010

O2 has delivered some astonishing statistics to justify its controversial decision to scrap unlimited data plans. In a blog post published by chief executive Ronan Dunne, the company claims that only 0.1% of its customers consume almost a third of the data of the network, while the average O2 user consumes only 200MB of data.

“We don’t think it’s fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsibility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance,” Dunne stated.

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Sky Mobile TV app brings live sport to the iPhone

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Spotify generated huge excitement when it launched with its offer of unlimited music for £10 a month, but this simply blows it out of the water. Sky has today launched a new Mobile TV app which offers live streaming of a selection of its most popular premium channels for a monthly fee, and you don’t even have to be a Sky TV subscriber at home.

The core Sky Mobile TV News and Sports app is available for free, and offers full listings for the core sports and news channels. But for the paltry sum of £6 a month, you can stream live coverage from those channels over a Wi-Fi connection. (more…)

Will you hit the Orange iPhone “unlimited” cap?

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise. (more…)

Why you’re better off on LLU than BT broadband

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Ofcom’s latest research into broadband speeds might have been spectacularly indecisive on the surface, but when you start digging through the 113 pages of the full report, some interesting nuggets of information begin to emerge.

One of the most noteworthy of these is that broadband customers on local loop unbundled (LLU) lines – where the ISP has put its own equipment in the telephone exchange – are generally on much faster connections than those with connections delivered by BT Wholesale.

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iPhone and Palm Pre owners locked to Britain’s patchiest 3G network

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Ofcom has published detailed maps of Britain’s 3G mobile data coverage – and they make grim viewing for owners of the iPhone and the forthcoming Palm Pre.

Both Apple and Palm have decided to lock their devices exclusively to the O2 network. But as Ofcom’s network-by-network maps show, O2 has by far the patchiest 3G coverage of any of the UK’s five mobile networks.

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A broadband cap I actually like

Monday, October 20th, 2008

When it comes to mobile broadband, it’s easy to get bogged down in specs such as download speeds and data caps. But sometimes it’s the things that are never mentioned on the spec sheets that make the difference.

Here, for example, are two mobile broadband dongles from O2 (left) and BT (click here to read about BT’s new mobile broadband service). One causes me endless hassle on the train journey into work of a morning, while the other is painless. The difference? That little white piece of string that keeps the BT dongle’s cap connected to its body. 

Something as innocuous as a cap retainer might sound utterly trivial, but I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, picking my way through the half-eaten bag of Doritos and discarded newspapers under the train table, trying to find the AWOL O2 cap. It doesn’t even fit on the other end of the stick!

The BT cap, meanwhile, remains firmly anchored to the stick, no matter how many hard-disk threatening bumps the train encounters.  How much does that little piece of string add to the cost of the device? A tiny fraction of sod all. How much difference does it my mobile broadband “experience”? A pretty sizeable one.