Mobile Phones
Britain's cheapest mobile phone contract: Is it worth it?
The cheapest mobile phone contract in Britain right now will lock you in for more time than the minimum sentence for burglary -- but it's only a fiver a month.
Orange's 'Orange 5' plan offers 50 minutes and 50 texts a month for £4.89, and throws in a free Nokia 2330. We haven't reviewed the 2330, but Nokia can be trusted to make decent inexpensive phones, even this cheap. And you won't be stuck with the 2330 forever -- you'll get a free upgrade to a similar low-end phone after 18 months.
Continue reading...
Cmotech Mangrove: Gigantic Windows Mobile phone will make your head look tiny 
Smartbooks -- uber-phones and anorexic netbooks packing the speedy 1GHz, low-power Snapdragon processor -- are finally starting to get as freaky as we hoped they would.
Our favourite is the Cmotech Mangrove giganto-phone. Is the enormous HTC HD2 just too small for your smart phone needs? The Mangrove makes the HD2 look like an HTC Touch. That's an HD2 on the right in the photo above, looking teeny despite its 109mm (4.3-inch) screen.
Continue reading...
Vodafone to offer free texts on Friday
This Friday, Vodafone customers will be able to send international texts for free all day.
Friday 20 November is World Hello Day -- don't laugh, it's a real thing! To celebrate, you'll be able to text people almost anywhere in the world from your pay as you go or contract phone, for free. The texts won't count against your contracted allowance, and you'll be able to send up to 100. Continue reading...
O2 embiggens coverage with 1,500 new network sites
O2 is beefing up its network coverage with 1,500 new network sites. The UK's largest mobile phone company -- for now -- is opening hundreds of new sites after it was embarrassed by its 3G coverage.
The next 12 months will see O2 deliver 200 new sites in London alone. Great news for us skinny-jeaned cockerney four-quid-a-pint southern softies, but what about the more remote corners of the country, where they still wear tweed and watch Emmerdale and pay for things in shillings and guineas? Forty of those London sites will be live and transmitting teledatawaves by Christmas (that's 37 shopping days, consumers!) while there are another 1,300 sites planned for the rest of the country. Continue reading...
Best iPhone games: Sony PSP rivals
Apple's desire to pitch the iPhone and the iPod touch as handheld games consoles that make the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP look old hat might be written off as hot air by fanboys of the traditional gaming giants. But there is substance to the claim.
We've looked at five iPhone games that are posing a headache for Nintendo and its DS, but what about Sony's PlayStation Portable? The emphasis in this battle is on PSP's strengths of rich graphics and long-lasting gameplay, as opposed to the pitting the iPhone against the DS' innovation and creativity. Continue reading...
Firefox Mobile on Nokia N900 hands-on photos: Fire in your trousers
We're still clinging to the name Fennec -- it's a smashing big-eared fox, after all. But even with its new, boring name, Firefox Mobile, we still found much to love in the mobile browser from Mozilla. In our recent test of mobile Web browsers, it was the fastest and most innovative one we used.
But we had to test the alpha Windows Mobile version on a frankly mediocre Toshiba TG01. The boys from Mozilla took pity and lent us a shiny new Nokia N900 Maemo phone to show off the upcoming release version in all its glory. Continue reading...
T-Mobile employee stole and sold customers' personal data
Britain's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), has spilled the beans that an employee of T-Mobile flogged hundreds of thousands of customers' data to other networks, our sister site ZDNet UK reports.
If you have a T-Mobile contract that's about to come up for renewal, and you receive a cold call from another network, they may have gotten your deets from the leak -- but there's no way to know. If you do want to switch, try comparing contracts using an independent retailer such as Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U, or a comparison site such as BillMonitor or our partner Omio.
Continue reading...
Opera Mobile 10 beta on WinMo today
We just wrote our mobile Web browser showdown and browsers are already improving -- not that we want to take all the credit, but Opera is releasing Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows Mobile today.
We got a sneak peak at the latest version of a browser we liked in version 9.7 beta, thanks to its speed and the way it stuck close to Web standards. Tested on our trusty Toshiba TG01, version 10 beta lived up to its predecessor, also scoring 100/100 on the Acid3 test and shaving five seconds off the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, scoring 35,062.0ms.
Version 10 beta improves Opera Mobile's user interface with a sharp, modern look and an early Christmas stocking full of new features.
You can still open multiple pages, but instead of a list, open tabs are smartly presented as tiled thumbnails. It's more like the desktop version of Opera, and includes the SpeedDial feature -- a home screen with thumbnails of your favourite sites -- which is especially useful for a touchscreen phone, since the icons are big and finger-friendly.
You can save passwords and save images offline, and most importantly, sites load quickly and look accurate and clear. Continue reading...
Concept mobile phones unfold in Japan
The winners of the Fujitsu mobile phone design awards are a motley crew of mutants that hope to show what cutting-edge phones will look like in 2011, reports Design Boom.
We're not sure how a concept design for a chameleon phone that mimics the colour and texture of any surface can make it into shops in two years, but that is about ten years in mobile phone time.
Continue reading...
Orange offers first Twitter photo uploads by MMS
Orange has become the first UK network to offer photo upload to Twitter via MMS. The citrus-flavoured phone company has launched a new photo-sharing service called Snapshot, which allows you to share pictures on Twitter -- even without a data signal.
The news was revealed on the Twitter blog, and also by our old friend Conor from Orange. This follows the 'news' that Stephen Fry has switched his iPhone contract to Orange. Continue reading...
