A new custom-made application is providing Vodafone customers with a bunch of widgets, giving them access to the web at a glance. The Vodafone Widget Manager BETA is downloadable free of charge from the Vodafone Live! portal and will provide users with direct access to all their widgets through the applications folder found on the phone. However, the application has been built on Opera run-time for the S60 platform and will initially only be available on the Nokia N96, N95 8GB model, N78 and 6210 handsets, which is those that can use the Opera runtime.
It would have been better to make the app self-running, but then again, they probably couldn’t have released it for free.
Launched today, some of the widgets available include Live Scores, Fresh Games, RSS Reader, Weatherbug, Egg Timer, Train Times, Lottery, Sccope, Currency Converter and FHM Hot Babes. Both BBC News, BBC Sport along with Vue Cinema widgets are expected in the near future.
Both Vodafone Widget Manager BETA and individual widgets are available for free, though data charges may apply in some situation. This is considered a real victory for Vodafone, as its now one of the only carriers to offer free truly useful apps to their users directly.
Samsung has announced its intention to improve its business handset share next year with two appointments to its smartphone team. Their target will be to really push the Samsung line in the UK and related territories.
The manufacturer has brought in Marcus Stone as head of smartphones UK and Ireland, and Nick France as business solutions sales manager, and they’re hoping these hires will move the Samsung up the list of hot companies in the UK, where it’s been erratic in terms of sales for awhile now.
Stone replaces Carl Boraman, who left Samsung in September after just five months in the role. Stone previously held a position at RIM (BlackBerry), where he held several sales and marketing positions during his seven years at the company.
Meanwhile France will be responsible for business-to-business sales within the portfolio, supporting Stone. Both will report to Derek Williamson, Samsung’s general manager.
As they grow more rapidly within the UK smartphone market, they’re already planning to launch even more interesting products in 2009.
According to Samsung, its smartphone market share grew 10.9% in September and October 2008 alone, following the release of the Samsung Omnia. However, the device was hit by reliability and performance problems that have been well documented on various sites.
The European Commission is in discussions about a proposal that could see an import tax of up to 14% imposed on mobile phones with a built-in GPS receiver or TV functionality.
According to sources, the move could increase the price of mobile devices with either one, or both, features by as much as 25%, which could really hurt the mobile industry quite a bit.
It is thought that the tax on GPS-enabled devices is due to increasing pressure from European device manufacturers in Germany and the Netherlands. It sounds like an excuse, not an actual reason.
The import tax is heavily opposed by the European Information and Communications Technology Association, which is backed by companies including Apple, Motorola and LG Electronics, for very obvious reasons. It could devastate an industry that is already struggling, and hopefully this will get voted down quickly.
Customer loyalty apparently isn’t a big priority for Nokia these days.
Nokia is understood to be close to adding its music download service onto its N96 device. However, in a move likely to disappoint loyal customers, the Comes With Music service will not be made available to those who have already bought the N96. Not good for customer loyalty, Nokia.
Sales of handsets featuring the unlimited music download service are quite slow, according to staff at Carphone Warehouse (the only retailer selling the original devices), so this move is even more of a head-scratcher.
New batches of the N96 device pre-loaded with Comes With Music are expected to go on sale after Christmas in a bid to kick-start sales after the holidays (before the holidays might have been a better idea, but…that’s why i’m not a corporate CEO, I suppose).
Staff at Carphone said they fear anger and backlash from customers who have already bought the N96 but will not have the music service made available to them, and I don’t blame them the staff or the customers for feeling that way.
Nokia is understood to be working on plans to pacify existing N96 customers who are set to miss out on the music service. Carphone staff said Nokia should have either launched Comes With Music with an all -new design or ‘something priced at around £70’. I agree.
The service is currently only available on the Nokia 5310 and N95 8GB. The manufacturer is understood to have spent around £10 million in promoting its music download service, which is a lot in this economic climate, so the snub of existing customers (for a phone that already isn’t selling well) is a big mystery.
Nokia hinted that the service would be offered on other devices very shortly. It is understood the manufacturer initially wanted to launch the service on the the Nokia 5800, a new touch-screen device. The handset will go on sale Jan/Feb of next year with the Comes With Music service included standard.
Mid-range handsets may suffer in the run-up to Christmas, according to Ovum. They may end up being too middle of the road to many consumers in the UK (and in other territories as well).
They have predicted that a handful of phones in the high-end will survive the pressure, contradicting LG’s strategy to move away from top-tier phones and concentrate most of their energy on low-mid range type phones. Some other companies are doing the same, and it may not end up being the right move in the short term.
This includes the BlackBerry Storm and the Apple iPhone, which carry considerable brand appeal from customers all over the world. The likes of LG and Samsung are believed to lack the brand value and iconic status of the most popular high-end handsets in the UK, though many of their phones have most of the same features.
This view reflects comments made by O2 CEO Ronan Dunne, who said the market was polarizing between basic phone deal shoppers and very high-end gadget fans. This would be true to some degree even in the US. It’ll be interesting to see how the market gets divided up this holiday season. We have a feeling many companies not named Apple or Blackberry will be pretty disappointed.
O2 customers are being invited to pre-register their interest in the latest BlackBerry device. The BlackBerry Curve 8900, as expected from RIM devices, its strengths are email, messaging, personal info organizing and other business applications. It is also the thinnest BlackBerry to date, measuring at just 13.5mm thick, so RIM is getting the fact that even business people care about the form factor of their devices.
The handset also features onboard Wi-Fi, GPS with BlackBerry Maps, a 3.2-megapixel camera, complete with auto focus, digital zoom and flash, while content will be displayed on a vivid 2.4-inch HVGA+ display.
The real story here: Rumours were spread far and wide that the BlackBerry Curve 8900 was going to only be available exclusively through The Carphone Warehouse. This has proven to be very false with O2 customers able to pre-register their interest in the device from December 10th and pre-order from December 22nd from the O2 website, www.o2.co.uk/blackberry.
The BlackBerry Curve 8900 will be available for from free to £234, and is slated for release on January 5th. It is also known that it will be available on T-Mobile, though the operator hasn’t released pricing details.
Vodafone is seeking to fix software problems on the BlackBerry Storm this week with an update that users can access by going online via their device and updating the software. Software faults on Vodafone’s exclusive handset have given rise to returns and complaints from a sizeable chunk of customers who have been early adopters of devices (which is sometimes a good idea, sometimes not).
Industry sources have reported that the faults affect Storm users that have the auto rotate function. It appears that some users are missing some of the shortcut applications on the device, and there are problems with the Storm’s touch-screen response as well, which has frustrated many customers.
Vodafone has said that the Storm has been one of its fastest selling handsets due to its ultra-slick design. It reflects a move by RIM to introduce BlackBerry to the consumer arena (rather than the business area they occupied and targeted for many years). The operator had anticipated that the device would make up one in six phones sold for Vodafone at one point, which has almost come true so far.
None of this is shocking news: due to Christmas deadlines and the fact that the software is still fairly new, bugs and issues will crop up. It’s part of the process, and its how software works in general. Hopefully, this recent update irons out the major stuff and will help stem the tide of frustration and returns.
Vodafone claimed that its store expansion plans are gathering pace with several leases already signed. The first 18 of 50 shops have already been completed and are set to open before Christmas, and the remainder will open before March 2009. It seems the global economic downturn hasn’t deterred Vodafone.
Vodafone is looking to add more stores to build share in certain cities where stores are not plentiful. The operator will open its third store in Newcastle and its second in Plymouth.
It is also focussing heavily on south-east England with five new stores, as well as pushing into smaller market towns without a store currently, which should help with exposure and bottom line sales.
Orange is another seemingly prosperous operator with store openings in the pipeline, with 100 new stores in the works. The first 20 will open between October and the end of 2008.
Orange’s store count will rise to 400, while Vodafone’s will jump to 365. Vodafone’s new stores are 60 square meters on average and will have up to 5 full-time people on duty on staff. The companies are also looking to retool their stores with new formats and dedicated displays.
Hopefully, the boom lasts and the companies will keep the stores running with a healthy profit margin.
This was one of the fallouts of an open-source OS: more makers could produce phones, even ones we might not have heard from before. This story is a case in point.
The first Google Android phone was the T-Mobile G1. Now we we’re looking to a firm called Kogan for the next official Android phone release. There are a few catches, namely….
Who or what the heck is Kogan? Heard of them before this report? Raise your hand. While we ponder, the pic shown here is the Kogan Agora Pro, the next major Google Android phone. As you can see, this phone grabs its design cues from the Blackjack line, and has a whole different feel and approach than the G1 did. This style may be more suitable for business, while the G1 was more of a gee-whiz, isn’t Android neat type phone.
Specs include: Full Android barrel of good stuff, including Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Talk and Calendar. Other specs: a 2.5-inch QVGA touchscreen display, backlit keyboard QWERTY style, GPS, Blueooth 2.0+EDR, Wi-Fi, a 2MP camera (weak), microSD slot, quad-band GSM and tri-band UMTS/HSDPA.
The phone is slated to appear in Australia at the end of January, and will retail for $399AU. For something a little more budget conscious, you can select the regular Kogan Agora for $299. The design and overall styling is precisely the same, but the regular Agora omits Wi-Fi and GPS support (3G is still there though).
No word on when the Agora will make it away from Australia, but assuming it does well, no reason why it shouldn’t appear on other shores later on.
It’s easy to see that AT&T would have things easier if every phone used a single OS. But the power of being able to choose should outweigh most every other consideration in this case, and it will here too. The power of choice is one of the fundamentals of the industry, and free enterprise in general.
Speaking at the Symbian Partner Event in San Francisco, AT&T’s Roger Smith, head of new ideas and product supervision, stated that he wanted to “standardize on a single operating system for AT&T-branded smartphones as part of a dramatic consolidation of its mobile platforms over the next few years.”
Given the location of the speech, it’s not shocking that Symbian was listed as “a very credible and likely candidate” to be that OS, and for those questioning the iPhone, he stated that that Apple’s device is “simply a third-party device tapping into AT&T’s technologies”. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t appreciate this kind of comment, but Apple isn’t likely to care really.
Is AT&T going to shove away RIM and Microsoft to grab some open-source OS as their primary one for all their lines? It’s probably not going to happen, but the thought is interesting. Would having no choice, just one OS make the cell phone world a better one?
A new custom-made application is providing Vodafone customers with a bunch of widgets, giving them access to the web at a glance. The Vodafone Widget Manager BETA is downloadable free of charge from the Vodafone Live! portal and will provide users with direct access to all their widgets through the applications folder found on the phone. However, the application has been built on Opera run-time for the S60 platform and will initially only be available on the Nokia N96, N95 8GB model, N78 and 6210 handsets, which is those that can use the Opera runtime.
