Facebook, the social networking website has won the top-spot among internet sites accessed via mobile phones with Google taking the second spot.

This information along with other statistics was announced by GSMA’s Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) during its launch on 4 Feb 2010.
Facebook, sitting at the top had 5 million unique visitors while Google sites had 4.7 million and BBC sites 1.8 million.

Facebook’s triumph continues in other categories such as pages viewed, where it had 2.6 billion pages viewed, far greater than the 900 million for Google sites.
In terms of time spent in minutes, Facebook viewers spent 2.15 billion minutes and Google viewers spent 400 million minutes.

Internet usage on mobile phones is growing rapidly, GSMA reported that in the UK, in December 2009 only, 16 million users accessed the internet from their mobile phones, 6.7 billion pages were viewed and a total of 4.8 billion minutes were spent online.

Facebook has clearly established itself as a leader in the mobile media market.

GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) was successfully launched in the UK on 4 Feb 2010 by the GSM association and comScore, a leading internet market research company, in collaboration with UK mobile service providers O2, Orange, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3.

GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) is a powerful tool for measuring and reporting mobile internet data for understanding consumer behaviour to track the effectiveness and potential of mobile as a platform for marketing and media.

Reported data is anonymised and includes information such as unique visitors to websites, pages viewed, time spent and distribution of users between smart and non-smart phones.

Getting exact end user behaviour data in the mobile space has never been taken up on such a large scale. Having exact figures would help potential advertisers understand the new market and use mobile advertising as a serious marketing avenue.

Internet usage on mobile phones is growing rapidly, GSMA reported that in the UK, in December 2009 only, 16 million users accessed the internet from their mobile phones, 6.7 billion pages were viewed and a total of 4.8 billion minutes were spent online.

Mobile advertising has been picking up since 2008 when the iPhone was introduced, but 2010 seems to be the year it will take off.

Review:

“Mobile Hub mobile phone of the month – December 2009″

LG KS360 lets you communicate with your friends in a quick and easy way. The Qwerty keyboard helps type out your messages a lot quicker than most mobile phones. The phone has been designed with messaging and email access in mind. The ability to access Facebook and Twitter at the touch of a button ensures that you never miss your laptop to meet your social networking needs.

LG phones are always very well designed and are guaranteed to look great. The phone inspite of its Qwerty keypad slips into your pocket or handbag very easily. The 2.4″ display is a great touch screen. You dont have to necessarily use the keypad to enter your number, the touch screen has it own on screen keypad. The auto rotate feature, a big pain with most big screened phones, works like a wonder on this phone.

The camera is a disappointing 2 mega pixel one. LG has let us down on this front, considering that they generally squeeze in high end cameras into most of their phones.

The FM radio is a handy feature providing music on the go.

The USB interface ensures you can transfer data (generally music) from your computer onto the phone. As far as connectivity is concerned the phone supports Bluetooth, EDGE, GPRS, GSM, USB and WAP.

The best bit about the phone is not its stunning looks, but the pricing. Priced at an affordable £60 pounds on pay as you go, one would not go wrong with this model.

Full Manufacturer Specification & Features:

Key Features

• Smart Touch Screen dialing
• 2.4-inch display-screen
• Full QWERTY keyboard
• 2.0-Megapixel camera with Flash
• MicroSD card slot
• MMS

Camera Features

• Autofocus
• Flash
• 2.0-megapixel camera

Music Features

• MP3 Player
• MP3 Ringtones
• Polyphonic Ringtones

Standard Features

• Built-in handsfree
• Calculator
• Clock
• Games
• Organiser
• Vibrate
• Voice memo

Connectivity

• Bluetooth
• EDGE
• GPRS
• GSM
• USB
• WAP

Display & User Interface

• Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
• Colour Screen
• Full QWERTY Keyboard
• Touch-screen
• Wallpapers

Applications

• Internet Browsing
• Java™

Memory

• Expandable
• MicroSD Card
• Internal Memory
• 15MB

Messages

• Email
• Instant Messaging
• MMS
• Predictive Text
• SMS

Technical

• Dimensions
• 101 x 51 x 17mm
• Display Size
• 240 x 320 pixel
• Standby Time
• Up to 430 hours
• Talk Time
• Up to 5 hours
• Weight
• 108g

Summary: Great phone. Low priced. Mobile Hub rates this as the phone of month – December 2009.

Click here for LG KS360 Blue deals from OBIL.co.uk

EU competition watchdog has been approached by consumer groups to look into the planned merger of T-Mobile and Orange.

The fear is based around the size of the two companies and also the fact that both of them have enormous operations outside of the UK. The merger would push the new entity right to the top of the UK pecking order. The merged company would hold nearly 40% of the UK market, which could stiffle competition.

We at Mobile Hub however think that the merger is a good thing for the market and the two companies concerned. T-Mobile and Orange are both players at the fringe of the market. Combining the strengths of both companies would push them into being a major player.

Vodafone is all set to launch the Nokia N900 in January. This follows the announcement by Vodafone to launch the iPhone in January. So that makes two interesting launches next month.

The Linux based N900’s launch had been delayed by a few months due to last minute issues with the operating system.

Interested vodafone customers can register their interest for N900 on their site – vodafone.co.uk

Mobile Hub will host a detailed review of the N900 in a few weeks. Watch this space.

Finally Vodafone is set to offer the best selling smartphone, the Apple iPhone 3GS to its customers.

With O2’s monopoly (since 2007) on the iPhone broken a few months ago by Orange (and then by Tesco Mobile), Vodafone is the next to do the same. Though a pre christmas launch would have been widely appreciated by the existing customers of Vodafone, they preferred to wait on till the new year. This was most probably done as their Christmas sales strategy revolved around the Vodafone 360 and other products. There was no space for the iPhone.

Vodafone’s pricing will be slightly higher than that being offered by O2 and Orange. A free iPhone would cost around £45 a month on a two year contract. An 18 month contract will cost considerably higher per month. Most mobile phone analysts had expected Vodafone to be the one to crash the pricing on the iPhone. However this is not expected to happen now.

Orange is still the cheapest to offer the phone. However the difference in pricing is minimal.

16GB               16GB                 32GB          32GB

£87.00       £87.00         £175.00         £175.00

£87.11       £87.11         £175.19         £175.19

£89.00 £89.00       £179.00         £179.00

Source: OBIL.co.uk & vodafone.co.uk

Our suggestion to anyone looking for the iPhone is to wait for a few more months. March/April 2010 would be a good time to get the phone and hopefully a price war would have kicked off by then.

The much awaited Xperia X2 launch has been delayed again in the UK. Vodafone which has exclusivity over this model announced that the model would not be available in the UK till early next year. This is the third time that Vodafone has had to postpone the launch.

Either ways, it is already too late for Vodafone to wring any Christmas sales out of it, even if it were to be launched in this week. The X2 would have definitely been a big hit if it had managed to sneek into the market in November or even early December.

This does indicate that Vodafone do have some serious issues with setting up of the phone. If it were a minor issue, they would have probably still gone ahead with it.

The Mobile-Hub team had been anxiously waiting for the launch of this phone and to have a thorough review of the X2 on the site before Christmas. However looks like its a job for the new year.

Twitter Logo

Twitter has just introduced a ‘retweet’ option. A ‘retweet’ or ‘RT’ as its called in Twitter allows users to ‘forward’ an interesting message from their own timeline to the timeline of all of ones followers.

Twitter had been sceptical in allowing such a feature at the click of a button, due to the fear of being inundated with spam ‘forwards’ choking up its social networking site. However as users tended to ‘retweet’ a message anyways, they finally gave in and have incorporated the feature into Twitter sometime last week (that too in a phased manner, not all users of twitter had retweets enabled on the same day).

Vodafone, always a front runner in social media related technology (see earlier post on Vodafone 360, a social networking coup by Vodafone), has been quick to allow the same from their mobiles. Sending a message of : “RT twitter username” to 86444 causes the last message received to be retweeted to all the followers. Vodafone users have long used the SMS method to tweet their statuses/interests. The ‘retweet’ option only enhances the experience.

In what is a shocking new development in the mobile services sector, Vodafone has enabled users, to pay for a dedicated priority access, to the bandwidth on the network. Ofcourse this is only available to the business users of the Vodafone network (and only in Spain at the moment), but might be extended to all users in the future.

What this means is that, if you pay extra, you will have a high share of the 3G bandwidth on a priority and the ones that don’t will have a slower connection. This will eventually mean degraded user experience to the normal users, who could be denied bandwith even if there was enough free, for them to use.

Vodafone ofcourse does insist that ‘ordinary users’ will not suffer any sort of poorer performance. Oh well yeah, but we at Mobile Hub, do not understand how this could be the case. If that is the case, then why throttle the bandwidth in the first place.

After a few great initiatives the last month, like the Vodafone 360 and Twitter retweets using the phone, this is one stupid step from Vodafone.

Review:

The Samsung H1 is the first handset that comes preloaded with the Vodafone 360 feature in the UK. The 360 from Vodafone is basically a one stop place for all your social networking needs. Click here for more details on the Vodfaone 360.

The Samsung H1 has quite an iPhonish feel to it. It looks and works like the iPhone. The main apps page looks a lot like the iPhone apps interface page. But no complains there.

Pic: The Apps and Calendar pages on the Samsung H1

The interface works a lot like the iPhone. Coincidence, don’t think so !!

Of the two phones on the 360 at the moment, the Samsung H1 is the higher end phone, while the Samsung M1 is on the lower end.

The massive 3.5″ touchscreen is very impressive. The screen is big enough to view a webpage or to list enough applications in a single page. The touchscreen has a feedback output to touch, so when you touch the phone’s screen small vibrations are emitted, giving that natural rough texture to touch on an otherwise soft screen. This feature makes ‘touch’ very realistic.

The 5MP pixel camera on the phone is typical of Samsung. They always tend to put in the high end cameras on their phones.

It has the WiFi built into it. So using the 360 feature on a home router would be a lot quicker. This is especially useful if you have large files to be synced up with the main server (the main feature/advantage of 360).

The integrated GPS is a handy feature. It comes pre-loaded with maps and voice directions. No other high end phone at the moment comes with pre-loaded voice directions.

The 32GB memory implies that you will never run out of space. This is enough space to store 3200 MP3 songs. (Note: The initial marketing material from Vodafone indicated a 16GB upper limit on memory, but Mobile Hub can confirm that it is actually 32GB)

The Samsung H1 is available in two colours at the moment. Black and Silver. The Black looks more impressive than the rather dull looking silver model.

Pic: Samsung H1 side view.

The phone is quite bulky. With a thickness of 58mm and weighs a good 134 gms. But with the features it packs in, that would be expected.

Specifications & Features:

• 3.5″ OLED touchscreen
• 32GB internal memory
• Wi-Fi
• HSDPA
• Bluetooth 2.0
• 5Megapixel autofocus camera with flash
• Dimentions 58×115.9×12.9mm
• Weight 134g

Summary: Playing around with the H1 was a treat. The Vodafone 360 on this phone is just a bonus.