A new range of mobile games initiatives are being taken up by Orange UK.
iPhone and its App Store have been leading the market in the last one and half year as most of the mobile operators have been purchasing mobile games from them. However, Orange UK is now trying to beat this competition by launching its own iPhone games with Orange iPhone Games banner, next month.
The games designed by Orange UK will be sold on the App Store from late April. As per the announcement, card games like blackjack and poker, an off-road racing game, and Playtomo, a social gaming service are few games from Orange.
Apart from this, Games Zone, a subscription gaming service will also hit the market soon. Subscribers will be charged £5 a month with 2 free games and 20% off on purchase of any other games.
Playtomo, a social gaming service from Orange will be available on Mobile and Facebook. Even non-Orange customers can avail this service on their mobiles. This gaming service comes with a mixture of games by including action, card and platform titles.
All in all, users can get the best gaming experience and value for what they spend on their mobiles through the gaming services like Playtomo and Games Zone.
Opera confirmed that it has sent its Opera Mini browser for iPhone to Apple and is awaiting Apple’s nod.
Submission is the beginning for the users to browse in a different way on the iPhone as per Opera Software, the maker of Opera range of web browsers.
The Mobile World Congress, last month at Barcelona witnessed the Opera Mini iPhone for the first time. Its thin futuristic interface and fast browsing speeds were lauded by experts at the conference. Given the fact that Apple has historically been avoiding competition in the face and that Apple considers Safari an integral part of the iPhone we need to keep our fingers crossed about the approval.
Safari’s own mobile version of the browser is reportedly slow. Opera claims that the iPhone is 6 times six times faster than Safari as it compresses the web page by around 90 per cent before sending it across to the phone. Thus, Opera Mini speeds up time taken for page load and helps optimal use of users’ data usage limits.
Opera Mini 5 is already available for the Android Operating system promising faster browsing experience. More than 50 million people across geographies use Opera‘s mobile browsers as per the company. Apple might take some weeks to decide about the Opera app on its iTunes Store.
Starting March 25th, Apple’s iPhone will be available in Ireland, Vodafone announced today.
Even as Vodafone promised to offer a range of tariffs for customers, subscribers would in all likelihood be the unhappy lot because of the 18-month contract asked by Vodafone just like its rival O2.
For its Perfect Choice Access 500 and 700 plans which start at €80 per month, free upgrade to the iPhone 3G 8GB device will be available. For those under the Perfect Choice Access 700 plan, the iPhone 3GS 16GB device is free while for new purchases, it will cost up to €199 at the cheapest. The iPhone 3GS 32 GB version will cost anywhere between €49 and €299, depending on the price plan.
It was in September 2009 that Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile operator by revenue, made clear is plans to join Telefonica’s O2 to sell the iPhone in Ireland.
Vodafone are excited to launch the iPhone’s outstanding features on Ireland’s numero uno network. The original 8GB iPhone model from Apple and O2 sold for €399 and the 16 gigabyte model for €499. And within 4 months, the 3G version iPhone got launched at jaw dropping prices ranging from €49 to €229, depending on the model and the tariff plan chosen by customers.
Prices have only nosedived since then, it won’t be wrong if consumers expect a prive war on the cards between Vodafone and O2.
With fierce competition amongst the network providers who offer the iPhone, O2 has launched a set of new tariff plans.
Users who are nearing the end of their existing contracts could be lured to the SIM-only plans launched along with the other plans. The plans start as low as £15 per month for 300 minutes, with no limits on UK texts, data & Wi-Fi on a 12-month SIM only contract. O2 is also offering contracts on a 30-day rolling contract for £20 per month. If you are looking for unlimited calls, texts and data, the tariffs are £45 and above.
O2 believes that the habits customers were accustomed to are changing. Data usage and text usage increase had led them to add newer plans and tarrifs. This has led to the growth of accounts with unlimited access. This mean a fixed price for unlimited data and text.
It will be interesting to see if these new tariffs will help O2 boost its profits after it lost the exclusivity right to sell the iPhone in the UK, late last year. Earlier sometime, O2 boss, Ronan Dunne apologised to customers about poor performance of its network in London, because of handsets which are data heavy viz. the iPhone. And rival, Vodafone has not left any stone unturned to compete on the QoS (Quality of Service) parameter rather than pricing.
O2 has officially apologised to London users of its mobile phone network who have not been receiving a decent service. After the smart phone explosion, even making calls had become a problem in certain areas.
A nagging problem since the summer of 2009, a major uptake in smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry etc) had swamped the network bandwidth with data packets. The smartphones tend to constantly ping the main email and other data servers, thereby reducing the service levels for other users. Excessive data transfer means that even routine calls could be dropped due to insufficient bandwidth.
Throttling bandwidth at a user level would never have been popular, as most smart phone users pay a premium for their connections and expect data transfer to be seemlessly integrated with their phone.
O2 however did stop its users from using the Skype voice over ip software and also prevented users from using high bandwidth sites like YouTube. These steps were highly unpopular at that time and did not help resolve the issue. Emails are the main culprits.
O2 now says that a massive multi million pound investment is rapidly improving the service levels for its customers.
The Nokia-Siemens network that O2 uses is now being upgraded to better handle data and voice traffic.
This could potentially mean providing voice calls a priority over data packets.
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.
£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 official NASA App is out now.
The App connects you directly to all the high resolution pictures that are presently in NASA archives. Also included are the latest video updates, a countdown to the next major NASA launch and ofcourse the NASA official twitter update.
So for geeks around here, this is a one stop shop for all things ‘NASA’.
Hopefully NASA also comes up with an Android & Symbian version of this App for the other handset owners.
Included in the App are:
Enjoy !!
iPhone sales in the UK has been monopolised by O2, since the time the phone first arrived in the UK. This has pushed the prices up on the iPhone. The best contracts on O2 started at £34 a month, which ofcourse included a hefty initial charge for the handset. The prices on Carphonewarehouse (and their sister concern mobiles.co.uk which added the iPhone recently) mirrored the exact same pricing plans as O2 had set it. Generally Carphonewarehouse and its sister stores always offer better deals compared to the service providers (well most of the time).
This is all set to change. With O2 losing its protected right of sale on the iPhone early November, the other major players are already trying their best to get the best-selling iPhone on their inventory as early as possible. Getting it in stock early November would mean a good entry into the Christmas sale market (which is generally the high sales period). Missing the November deadline would mean O2 would have the massive share of the sales.
However looks like Orange might infact be ready to sell iPhone as early as the 2nd week of November. It would be a great coup if they could achieve that. The logistics involved in doing this would be phenomenal. Loads of marketing and sales guys will have to work overtime to ensure that they would be able to smoothly handle this transition. It is also likely that they could get it totally wrong, by hurrying things up and that means end users who pay for their phones, but do not eventually get hold of them in the specified time frame. Hopefully Orange does a good job with the planning.
Other networks, are not even remotely contemplating ending O2’s monopoly till just after Christmas and new years. Vodafone’s targetted release of the iPhone is early Jan 2010. This is most likely because Vodafone have already worked on a Christmas sales strategy and are unwilling (unable) to change it at the last moment.
Orange has been really bold and hope they can pull it off.
Ofcourse one thing is for sure, the iPhone is going to be highly affordable in the future.
(vs)
The best selling smart phone on the market has finally been challenged. Though not by a better phone from Nokia, but by a law suit claiming that the iPhone infringed on various patents that Nokia believes it needs to be compensated for.
The patents in question relates to the way speech is coded, the phone security & protection mechanisms and the wireless transfer technology applied on the iPhone and other Apple products.
Nokia, it must be remembered is not exactly doing well financially. Having recently reported a loss, this step by Nokia seems to be a step towards claiming back the ‘big daddy’ tag in the mobile phone handset industry. Apple however has been doing exceptionally well. While Nokia’s marketing strategy has always been to flood the market with various models of phones, each catering to a different segment of the market, Apple has stuck to the single product model, which means it just bets on a single product (viz. the iPhone). The product is simple and does best what it is supposed to do. Apple seems to have got it totally right.
It is important to note that Nokia is the largest player in the handset sector (with a massive 40% share of the global market). Apple and others have years if not decades to catch up with Nokia in terms of net sales.
Apple’s share price did drop during the last few trading sessions.
However the outcome of this judicial battle will take quite a long time to conclude.
Till then however the whole mobile phone industry will watch this case with the utmost of interest, as this could set a precedent with unimaginable consequences for the industry.
