The much awaited smartphone Dell Streak is out today with its launch exclusively on O2. The Streak Tablet-cum-Smartphone which goes on sale from this morning is the first device that is being sold on a data only package in the UK.
The mini-tablet is available on the Telefonica-owned O2 on a PAYG package which starts from £399 only. The customers can also go with its O2 Pay & Go Text & Web tariff at just £10 a month to get unlimited texts and internet every month.
You can also get the handset for free on a 2-year contract at £35 per month. With this deal, you will get unlimited texts, data and ten hours of voice calls. For those who wish to use it as a tablet instead of a phone, O2 is offering a deal of just £25 per month on a 2-year contract.
The Streak functions well with a Giff Gaff SIM as well as a Tesco SIM. Another exciting deal from O2 is an in-contract upgrade option where in by keeping your phone you can receive cash back of up to £150 towards payment of future bills. It is also said that the network provider O2 is offering the Streak for just £299.
The other specs of the Streak Tablet-cum-Smartphone are a 5MP camera, a 5-inch 800×480 pixel screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, Wi-Fi and 3G. It also comes with 2GB of data storage and is powered by the Android 1.6 OS.
WebOS based new mobile handsets Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi plus are about to hit UK consumer pockets on 28th of May through O2 as carrier.
One would need to wait and watch the impact of this on Apple’s party as both these handsets are a bit improvised transformations of their older versions.
The Pixi Plus is packed with all basic and advanced features, which can be input through a full QWERTY keyboard. Most of the features of Palm Pre Plus are also same as Pixi with a few enhancements like QWERTY keyboard silently slides under the 3.1 display with HVGA capability and camera is also upgraded to 3 MP when compared to 2.0 mega pixel camera of Pixi.
Also, now the Pre Plus allows double the amount of online storage whereas the Pixi plus is provided with Wi-Fi connectivity. Touchstone compatibility is also available for the Pre Plus.
Another good thing is that both these handsets are bundled with unlimited data & texts, BT Openzone and Wi-Fi at the Cloud. The tariff for a contract of two years starts at £25 a month with 100 minutes. The rate for the Pre Plus is £99 and that for the Pixi Plus is £49.
One can even go with an 18-month contract for £35 band for both the mobiles and get 600 minutes. However, going up either of these two deals might leave the subscribers with a bigger hole in their pocket than that in the case of T-Mobile’s charges for the HTC Desire.
Here comes a great news for all the Smartphone lovers in the UK. The miniature Streak Smartphone is all set to be launched by Dell in Europe via Telefonica in the later part of this year as per Dell’s CEO. The device was demonstrated at Citrix Synergy conference.
It was unveiled by Michael Dell to the audience at an event in Moscone Center West of San Francisco. It was also stated that the Streak Tablet-cum-Smartphone would be released exclusively through O2/Telefonica in Europe.
Initially, the Streak would be released at CES 2010. Later its sales would start in the US through AT&T, Dell’s partner, which is also a distributor for the iPhone and iPad.
The Streak Smartphone is bundled with a 5-megapixel camera, a 5-inch 800×480 pixel screen, 3G, access to Wi-Fi, multitouch functions and is also powered by Moorestown processor of Intel. Other interesting features of Streak are a 30-pin docking connector, camera with a front face and its availability in different colours.
Streak will see competition from an array of Smartphones including the likes of Evo 4G which have 4-inch and bigger screens apart from the iPad.
The much awaited HTC phones, the Desire and the Smart are being publicized by O2. You can place an order to own any handset as both these HTC phones are now available in O2 stores.
The latest Smartphone, the HTC Desire which is similar to that of Google’s Nexus One is available now on O2 network. The Desire is bundled with an AMOLED touchscreen of 3.7 inch, a processor of 1GHz on Android 2.1 and a camera of 5 megapixel.
You can even avail the handset for free by entering into an 18 month contract where you need to shell out £40 a month. This monthly payment can be cut down by either paying £50 or £100 for the device after which you will have to pay £35 or £30 respectively every month.
There are various tariff plans; however, all the plans offer unlimited Internet and texts. The tariff plan of £40 per month provides you 600 minutes of talktime, £35 a month offers 300 minutes whereas the tariff of £30 per month will provide you just 100 minutes.
Coming to the HTC Smart which is a user friendly Smartphone is available at very reasonable price. It is bundled with go easy controls, connectivity and browsing options.
The Smart features a touchscreen of 2.8 inch, 256MB storage, a camera of 3 megapixel, Bluetooth with no Wi-Fi and an FM radio. One can get the device by paying just £15 per month in an 18 month tariff plan which provides 50 minutes and unlimited texts.
JD power conducted an independent survey and came up with O2 as the best mobile broadband service provider from the voting. O2 beat competition from Orange and T-Mobile to be voted as the best with a customer satisfaction index which read 653 out of 1000.
Orange trailed very close at 650, and T-Mobile got 644 on a scale which measured reliability, performance, cost, promotions, offers and last but not the least, customer service.
Customers also voted it as amongst the best in the industry along with Orange. T-Mobile was the next one followed by Vodafone and 3.1
O2 topped the list in fixed broadband segment also with a customer satisfaction score of 766 out of 1,000, while Plusnet got the 2nd place with 703 points and Sky got the 3rd place with 676.
The sample used for the fixed broadband ISP customer satisfaction survey was 2048 residential customers with fixed line broadband and it was 1274 mobile broadband customers for the other survey.
As the Apple iPad received a thundering welcome from gadget fans across the US, its launch in other countries has been delayed. All the three major operators, Vodafone,O2 and Orange have confirmed the sale of the tablet PC in the UK from May.
Apple confirmed the news that higher demand in the US hit the launch dates of the iPad in other countries. Apple is to open pre-orders and announce the prices on 10th May.
The iPad is available with just Wi-Fi connectivity or with WiFi connectivity and 3G. The iPad uses MicroSIMs, though. None of the three operators in the UK announced the mobile broadband charges for iPad.
T-Mobile have not yet made any announcements about the iPad being made available, though it has also been running from pillar to post to get into a deal with Apple along with the other major UK telecom players.
O2, Vodafone, and Orange are expected to offer pre-paid plans as well as contract based plans for the iPad. For US customers, Apple’s network partner, AT&T is offering 250 MB data for just $14.99 and unlimited data for $29.99 with no long-term contracts from the customers
3 Mobile
3 is all set to add the business phone Nokia E72 to its array of offerings, as per confirmed reports from 3 mobile. The repeated requests from a lot of customers has now got materialised as 3 finally agreed to get the Nokia E72.
As per 3, they received a lot of comments on their blogs about the much anticipated Nokia E72, which is not a big surprise considering the astounding success that the Nokia E71 enjoyed.
Nokia E72 has got a lot of business use cases satisfying the business users including GPS, Wi-Fi and 3G. To top it all, Ovi maps will be accessible for free and that can lure a lot of customers.
Come May 2010, 3 customers can pick the E72 for monthly tariffs and that would surely provide options to the business-centric customers away from the Blackberry business handsets.
O2 has joined the bandwagon of service providers who sell Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 but just in black for the moment. Online business partners viz., mobiles.co.uk and dial-a-phone are providing deals from O2 for the first Android phone from Sony Ericsson.
O2 is offering the phone for £30 per month as the lowest rental including 600 minutes and unlimited texts but no free internet access. The total cost of ownership thus works out to be £720 over the two year contract period which is by all means high compared to T-Mobile’s tariffs for HTC Desire.
If you are looking for a cheap monthly tariff, Vodafone offers the X10 Black for £320 upfront payment and a £10 monthly contract for two years. The TCO works out to be £560 though you get insufficient 75 minutes and 250 texts per month.
O2 has meanwhile delayed its home phone service launch which promised to cut down the combined cost of connectivity in all forms including broadband, fixed telephony, and mobile telephony. It is expected for May 2010 launch, now.
Online mobile phones retailer obil.co.uk expects stocks to arrive early April and is already taking in pre-orders on the Xperia X10. The pre-order however does not include O2.
Click here to pre-order your Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 from OBIL.co.uk
WebOS based new mobile handsets Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi plus are about to hit UK consumer pockets in April through O2 as carrier. These are expected hit markets somewhere in April of 2010. These handsets were released a while back in U.S. and after a while waiting it is finally hitting U.K. market.
The Pixi Plus is packed with all basic and advanced features, which can be input through a full QWERTY keyboard. It also has other powerful features like 2.0 Mega pixel camera, a display with sub-HVGA multi touch capability, 3.5 mm stereo and GPS navigation facility.
Most of the features of Palm Pre Plus are also same as Pixi with a few enhancements like QWERY keyboard silently slides under the 3.1 display with HVGA capability and camera is also upgraded to 3 MP camera when compared to 2.0 mega pixel camera of Pixi.
ACS, a UK law firm along with its client DigiProtect formed an outfit representing content owners to protest against anti – piracy. This outfit is sending legal letters to all suspected illegal file sharers, in which they notify their illegal file sharing activities and provide them option to settle out issues out of court at a price of £500 per issue.
O2 joined the array of mobile network operators and mobile service providers protest against these measures of the law outfit. O2 has gone a step head to classify these measures as “Bullish” activities and slammed the legal outfit at the practice of threatening mails.
Stand of mobile operators is to arrive at a “win – win” conclusion along with encouraging environment for new business models around content providing to mobile users. As market is getting very competitive, all content providers are pressing against their profit margins and are looking forward for a friendly environment to grow in.
O2 has done good work to get hold of the Jet Ultra Smartphone from Samsung for a price as low as £15 per month along with a collection of DVDs.
Jet Ultra, also known as the GT-S8000 is very much the same as the older Samsung Jet phone. It comes with the same 800MHz ARM-based processor and has a 3.1-inch AMOLED display. A 5-megapixel camera and a 2 GB storage which is expandable by using the microSD card reading technology make it look good.
And then there are features like the Touchwiz UI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, AGPS, and the like. O2 is offering a gift box called the Ultimate Gangster collection which contains American Gangster, Casino and Scarface on DVD for the first 10,000 early bird users.
And the price is one of the lowest from O2 so far at £15 a month on a two year contract which provides 100 minutes, unlimited text and data.
There is no clarity as to when the exclusivity with O2 will end for the Samsung Jet Ultra though we can believe it to be no sooner than the first 10,000 customers arrive. The £15 per month segment is attracting all the competition and the customer is going to be the clear winner.
Click here for Samsung Jet deals from OBIL.co.uk
Five months back, O2 had started a new service to recycle old mobile phones in co-ordination with electronics and handset recycler Redeem. This enables its customers to redeem any brand mobile of any carrier or network and receive cash in return. Not only mobile handsets, O2 Customers can return even non mobile and any electronic devices like MP3 players, video cameras, still cameras or network navigation systems and still can receive cash in return.
O2 estimated that more than 90 million unused mobile handsets are lying around in UK and planning to donate £1 for every recycled piece. Thus, as per this estimation O2 yet has to shell out a lot then what it has incurred till now. UK has undertaken this initiate under a social program called “Think Big”, which enables it to stick to its social and environmental commitments.
O2 is committed to provide environmentally friendly products and services to its customers as its core value of its business.
Reaching of £1m in just five months is evidence of its popularity and O2’s commitment for being environment friendly and making the planet toxic free.
Customers can save up to £45, thanks to a 3 months free mobile broadband offer from O2. This offer applies to its 1GB and 3GB mobile broadband packages both of which can be bought on an 18 month contract.
With O2’s 1GB tariff, the customer gets mobile broadband speeds up to 3.6Mbps with a limit of 1GB on monthly data usage. After the first 3 free months, the price is just £10 a month. O2’s 3GB data tariff on the other hand provides higher download usage cap as 3 GB and it costs £15 a month after 3 months of free usage.
Inclusive in either package is a free O2 USB modem E169. The modem is compatible with both MAC and PC and it automatically connects to the fastest available network. Unlimited access to more than 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK with The Cloud and BT Openzone is a plus.
Interested ? If yes, O2 can deliver it to you the next day and in the event of customer dissatisfaction, you can use the 14 day return guarantee.
Siroda, an independent network specialists firm top-rated O2’s mobile broadband speed. More information can be obtained at o2.co.uk
Now that T-Mobile and Orange have got married (read merged), Is 3 going to be the next one on the block? I don’t say that and it’s rather the industry experts who believe that O2 and Vodafone could be looking out to pick Hutchison Whampoa’s 3.
Keeping in view the fact that 3 has got a market share of 8 % in the UK, Vodafone and O2 both could be eyeing 3. This is fuelled by the fact that O2 has moved to second position and Vodafone humiliated to third place after the T-Mobile and Orange merger.
In all likelihood, Vodafone as well as O2 might have entered bids for T-mobile; however, the fact that their UK businesses are worth more than T-mobile’s was probably the reason for them to have opted out from 50:50 merger with T-mobile.
The merger will be great news for the industry if we are to believe some observers. Given the massive gap in the market share, O2 and Vodafone would surely target 3 so as to narrow down the gap. And for Hutchison Whampoa who owns 3, it is a ringing bell for a strategic exit from the UK.
As O2 and Vodafone declined to comment, and Hutchison Whampoa was unavailable.
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.
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.
With Apple’s announcement of the UK release of its recently launched multi-media gadget, the iPad, the bidding war between UK mobile operators for the UK rights of the device seems to be getting fiercer. A lot of speculation is floating around as to who is negotiating with Apple to provide internet services via 3G for the iPad.
The usual suspects are O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-mobile with the exception of 3 which seems to be staying out of the race.
On the retail side, there are rumours that the mobile phone giant Carphonewarehouse is interested is selling the iPad in its stores. However, it is unclear what Apple’s strategy will be, an exclusive provider or unrestricted mobile rights.
In an announcement on its UK website, Apple said it will be shipping Wi-Fi models of the iPad in late March and 3G models in April. However, the UK price of the device is still unknown and so is the service provider. In the US, Apple has once again chosen AT&T as the 3G provider, continuing the association since the iPhone.
UK mobile service providers are trying to establish their foothold on the European iPad market as well where T-mobile is said to have leaked its price at EUR 499.
Until official announcements are made its speculation galore!
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.
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.
