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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

Failing to feel the benefit of O2

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

A letter arrives from O2 this morning, reminding me of the fantastic new 18 month contract I’ve just signed up for.

There’s the 600 free minutes (which, being a man, is 599 minutes more than I’ll actually need. Hi mum, by the way), 500 free texts and unlimited web browsing. And what’s this in paragraph three?

Barely able to contain my excitement, I flip over the page to find:

I can’t tell you how lucky I feel.