Apple has declared that it is now “the first and only VoIP application that functions on the iPhone and iPod touch over cellular 3G networks.” Regardless, there is now at least one app on the market that can make 3G VoIP phone calls possible on the iPhone.

We knew this was coming. At the CTIA conference in October, the American telecoms carrier AT&T confirmed that would provide functionality to support cheap VoIP over 3G for the iPhone.

Now that the restriction have been lifted, you can expect Skype and possibly Vonage to soon work over mobile 3G networks.  This is a fantastic revelation could mean cheap mobile phone calls in the future with VoIP functionality over their Apple iPhone and possibly other Smartphones by makers such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson and Samsung.

But another possibity with this application which is available on the iPhone is that it will also be available to the iPad, which could mean cheap VoIP calls on the iPhone, the iPad and other Smartphones in the future such as the Blackberry….what a cool money saving prospect.

 Compare Vonage and Skype tariffs and features for Vonage Vplan UK. Skype Pay As You Go, Vonage VoIP India Calling Plan, Skype Unlimited Europe, Vonage VPlan 5, free calls to 45 countries, Skype Unlimited World free calls to 34 countries, Vonage Vplan 3 free calls to 25 countries, Vonage Vplan 2 free calls to 15 countries, Vonage VoIP India Calling Plan, Vonage VoIP USA Calling Plan. See the Smeology VoIP Comparison Guide for all the best Voice Over IP deals

The University of Salford polled over 2,000 respondents, where the Apple iPhone grabbed 13.5% of the vote to come top of our favourite mobile devices.  The University found that the iPhone was regarded as a design classic, which has transformed the design of mobile phones. 

The University believes that in three years time the majority of mobile devices will have touchscreens like the iPhone.  The iPhone was launched in 2007 – with its large capacitive display – sparked a touchscreen arms race in high-end mobile devices. While touchscreen technology on mobiles predate the iPhone, Apple reinvigorated the concept by incorporating multitouch features into the iPhone.

Touchscreen devices will represent almost a third (27.4 per cent) of all mobile phone sales this year – up 96.8 per cent on 2009 – and will rise to 58 per cent of worldwide mobile sales by 2013, Gartner said.

The touchscreen takeover will be even more pronounced in mature markets such as Western Europe and North America, where the analyst predicts touch-sensitive screen tech will appear on more than 80 per cent of mobile shipped devices.

Both ‘finger-friendly’ capacitive and ’stylus-style’ resistive touchscreen tech will be found on phones in the short term, according to Gartner, however capacitive screens will be the “mainstream” touchscreen tech, with resistive displays filling a lower-cost niche.

Even so, Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, said touchscreen technology is pushing beyond the high end and filtering down into mid-tier devices too.

Cozza added that user interfaces are beginning to be “truly optimised for touch input”, and noted that touch UIs are being more deeply integrated into underlying mobile OS platforms – both key to unlocking the potential of touch tech.

The Omnia is classy to look at thanks to a chrome-effect bezel and a dusky mirrored surround for the screen. The front face features just three buttons: send (to make a call), end and an optical joystick. The brushed black rear face is interrupted only by the very powerful camera.

The user interface is uses Samsung’s Touchwiz user interface. This has an arrowed tab at the left of the screen. A quick touch on the tab brings out a sidebar ribbon featuring various application widgets. You can drag these widgets using a finger onto the main area of the screen (the desktop I suppose we should call it) and drop them wherever you please. A finger tap then launches the application. You can drag the widget back to the ribbon if you no longer need it.

The Samsung Omnia i900 is Free on an 18-month plan with Carphone Warehouse

What this means is that you can customise your home screen far more than many of the other touchscreen phones out there, although there is no way to add new applications to the ribbon. Weather and share price widgets are sadly lacking. The Omnia also comes with a stylus, which you can anchor to a hook on the top left edge of the handset.

The Samsung Omnia i900 is a bit like the iPhone with it’s animated grid of coloured quick launch icons.  The Microsoft Office Mobile applications offering excellent support for email attachments. As you would expect too, the Omnia supports push email using all of the major systems, including Exchange Server.

We believe that the Omnia is an object of desire to compete with the iPhone.

See our Mobile phone section the GooglePhone, Blackberry Storm Smartphone, Orange and Google work together, Palm Pre now available, Smartphone Buyers Guide, Buying a Smartphone, Mobile deals with free gifts, How to select a mobile package, A to Z of Mobile Features

For the first time, a single company will control everything from the software in users’ phones to the services they use to make calls and surf the web.

The Google Nexus One promises to be one of the most advanced smartphones, with a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one powering Apple’s iPhone 3GS. It will probably be the first phone to run a new version of Google’s Android software.

The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Google Nex One to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from a couple of cents (just over a penny) a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging.

Google said the Nexus One represented the next frontier in the company’s $20bn (£12.4bn) core business – selling advertising through search.

If Google can succeed in linking its Google Voice service to Skype and other Voip networks, it can lure users with the offer of free long-distance calling and a “real” phone number.

One of Google’s challenges will be to link the phone to mobile networks so that the company’s services can be offered not just over wi-fi-connected broadband, but also over a 3G link to the internet, resulting in a real call-from-anywhere device.

This could prove a problem, though: few phone networks will appreciate being frozen out of lucrative business such as voice calling and text messaging, and being reduced to a simple data pipeline for Google’s services.

Google could also antagonise the networks by selling its mobile phone directly to customers and inviting them to use their existing Sim cards, whatever network they are on. Google wants the Nexus One not to be tied to particular mobile phone networks. The mobile networks aren’t the only enemies Google risks creating. Other phone makers now using the Android operating system, such as Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, might not take kindly to Google keeping the most up-to-date version of its software for itself. I predict that the Google Nexus One will be as successful as the iPhone, let’s see what happens in 2010.

See our Mobile phone section the GooglePhone, Blackberry Storm Smartphone, Orange and Google work together, Palm Pre now available, Smartphone Buyers Guide, Buying a Smartphone, Mobile deals with free gifts, How to select a mobile package, A to Z of Mobile Features

The iPhone was first introduced in January 2007 at the Macworld conferance by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. 

The first advert for the iPhone, titled “Hello,” aired during the Oscars on February 25, 2007 on and featured clips from several notable films and television shows over the last seventy years, showing iconic characters answering telephones and saying “hello” or a similar greeting. The iPhone is shown at the end with the caption “Hello. Coming in June.”

The iPhone was launched in the United States on June 29, 2007 .  It is made under contract by a Taiwan-based company. The price today for an 8-gigabyte model is US$399. Later on, Apple eventually became available in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France and is now (Dec 2009) becomin available in other areas of the world.

The iPhone has gone on to be the world’s fastest-selling mobile phone, and with the App Store offering over 15,000 applications for downloading, it’s customisable too.

Multi-touch technology means the iPhone 3G is ideal for browsing the web, looking at photos and using the GPS, with the 3G internet speeds ensuring pages load just as fast as your home broadband. Available in 8GB or 16GB storage capacities, users can store thousands of photos taken on the 2.0-megapixel camera, tens of thousands of iPod music and up to 20 hours of video.

The Apple iPhone is a small and light device with multimedia capabilities and a touch screen enables the user to input information through a virtual keyboard and function buttons. It also has great features, such as a camera, a media player (much like the “iPod”), and the other usual functions that allow visual voicemail and text messaging. The Internet services that can be done through the iPhone include web browsing, e-mail and Wi-Fi connectivity.

See our Mobile phone section the GooglePhone, Blackberry Storm Smartphone, Orange and Google work together, Palm Pre now available, Smartphone Buyers Guide, Buying a Smartphone, Mobile deals with free gifts, How to select a mobile package, A to Z of Mobile Features

Below the screen are two soft keys, call and end buttons, plus four dedicated buttons. The home/menu key can’t be reassigned, but the others can, with one function for a short push, and one for a long one. By default, for example, pressing the calendar button briefly shows the calendar, while a long press creates a new entry.

Between these is the Navikey, a standard looking four-way navpad. It’s not entirely standard, as it has an optical sensor so, you can scroll through menus and lists by wiping a finger or thumb over it, which makes for much faster navigation – although some third party apps did seem to be a little confused by it at times. On the whole, it works well, and is a good improvement.

In applications like the web browser – which supports Flash, and had no problems with our various test pages – it makes navigating much simpler; a small mouse pointer appears and you can scoot round quite quickly. On the home screen, missed call, email or text notifications appear at the bottom; hover over the icon, and you see a pop-up with more information, and you can go directly to a specific SMS, for example.

The main keypad itself is quite small, but the keys are domed and feelgood. Call quality is clear, and we had no problems with signal, nor with setting up VoIP – though as with other recent Nokia phones, you need to download the SIP Settings application. Once that’s done, you can select ‘Internet call’ from an address book entry, or just dial a number and press the right soft key. It works well, and it’s good to see it integrated with contacts, though configuring SIP can be a bit tricky for novices.

We have a comprehensive section on mobile phones with practical articles on…..Smartphone buyers guide…Mobile deals with free gifts…Pay As You Go deals...Mobile Phone Manufacturers….Mobile Phone Networks….Defining your mobile phone and tariff requirements….A to Z of Mobile Phone Features……Mobile Phone FAQ’s

The multi-year deal will make Google services available across Europe on a large range of its Orange Signature phones. The new services will include access to Google Search from the homescreen on Signature Android handsets, as well as other services such as Orange TV.  

The Orange and Google partnership taps in to strong demand from consumers for mobile devices that can access the internet, send emails and play music, as well as allow calling and texting.

Google Mobile App will later be made available across a wider range of Orange Signature devices operating on Symbian S60, RIM (BlackBerry) and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Orange said.

Orange claimed its own data showed strong consumer appetite for simple internet search on mobiles. Mobile searches increased by 120% over the last 12 months, it claimed.

The Googlephone promises to be one of the most advanced smartphones, with a large touchscreen display and a processor almost twice as fast as the one  iPhone. It will probably be the first phone to run a new version of Google’s Android software, offering high-speed 3-D gaming.

Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging.

One of Google’s challenges will be to link the phone to mobile networks so that the company’s services can be offered not just over wi-fi-connected broadband, but also over a 3G link to the internet, resulting in a real call-from-anywhere device.

Can Google have its cake and eat it? We may not have too long a wait before finding out, because experts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year.

The arrival of Orange as the second network in the UK able to sell the iPhone has not dented sales of the Apple handset through its original UK partner, O2.

Orange brought O2’s two-year exclusive deal with Apple to an end recently  as it started selling the iPhone to UK customers. Vodafone has also signed a deal with the American technology giant, and will start selling the phone in the first few weeks of next year.

Orange reckons that it had sold 30,000 iPhones by 4pm on that first day, but Key said O2 had not seen a drop-off in sales on its network.

Having the iPhone to itself for so long, however, has helped O2 outperform its rivals in the UK. Its third-quarter results, released today, showed it was the only UK network to increase revenues in the three months to the end of September, up 2%. Vodafone, by contrast, saw UK revenues decline 4.8%, and T-Mobile dropped 14.6%.

O2 has 21 million British customers, having added 292,061 in the most recent quarter. In the same period, Orange added 257,000 new customers, Vodafone added 147,000, with T-Mobile adding just 20,000.

Over the last 12 months, O2 has grabbed a near 70% share of all new customers, the wider availability of the iPhone, and aggressive marketing and discounting by rivals – especially Vodafone, which is trying to ditch its image among consumers as being expensive – will dent its performance in future.

     ]]> http://www.smeology.co.uk/mobile-phones/iphone-mobile-phones/o2-and-orange-strong-iphone-sales/feed/ 0 http://www.smeology.co.uk/tech-blog/blackberrys-new-storm/ http://www.smeology.co.uk/tech-blog/blackberrys-new-storm/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:29:52 +0000 smeology http://www.smeology.co.uk/?p=1631 BlackBerry seems to have addressed many of the problems it had with touch screen smartphone when the Storm 2 goes on sale in the UK on October 26.

The touch-screen QWERTY keyboard is much improved, too, allowing for simultaneous double-touching, unlike the touchscreen on the iPhone, the BlackBerry keyboard mimics the feel of a real keyboard by clicking both audibly and physically under the fingertips. There’s wi-fi too, now an essential for this class of device.  Add to this the push e-mail and unrivalled security features that makes BlackBerry the default choice for industry worldwide, and the result is a very fine phone indeed.

Instant access to content on the move is no longer the exclusive privilege of the businessman on the go. It’s something we all now expect, as previously separate devices — the camera, the phone, the portable music player, the video player — now converge into one device.

Where once BlackBerry led the way in e-mail on the go, there is now a host of other touch-screen products that offer much the same services in a more user-friendly package.