The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Archive for June, 2007
AT&T unveils iPhone tariffs
Jun 26th
Link: iTariff for iPhone to iCost an iFortune
AT&T have today unveiled tariff details for the iPhone. According to reports, as well as the $499-$599 you’ll be splashing on the handset, it’ll also cost you between $59.99 and $99.99 per month on a two year contract. Oh, and a $36 activation fee too.
$59.99 will give you 450 minutes of talk time and 200 texts, and $99.99 includes 1,350 minutes. Apparently the plans include unlimited data – although whether that’s ‘unlimited’ (subject to fair use policy and a monthly cap) or really unlimited is not known at the moment.
Teachers say mobiles are ‘offensive weapons’
Jun 26th
Link: BBC NEWS | Education | Mobile phones ‘offensive weapons’
Expect this to turn up in the Daily Mail tomorrow..
A teaching union is calling for mobile phones to be classed as potentially offensive weapons. NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said the way pupils misused them to bully their teachers meant they should be banned from school premises.
Hmm ok. There was me thinking from the headline we were talking about throwing mobiles at the teacher, or attacking them with the power of a Razr flip. Anyway, the article goes on:
Ms Keates is raising the issue of mobiles with ministers at a task force meeting on Tuesday. She is particularly concerned about websites such as Ratemyteacher and Bebo which, she says, provide a vehicle for false allegations and abuse by pupils which can damage teachers’ self esteem and careers.
She said: “These sites are fed by pupils’ misuse of mobile phones. The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon and action taken to prevent their use by pupils while on school premises. Regrettably, our evidence shows that some schools are still not taking these issues seriously.”
Right. Firstly, what’s stopping pupils using Ratemyteacher and Bebo from their PCs at home? In fact, they’re probably more likely to do that as the data charges on prepay are pretty crippling.
And second – ‘offensive weapon’? What’s that about? I’m surprised they haven’t banned pencils yet, following my complaint sometime in the 80′s that the boy that used to sit next to me in Infants school used to constantly stab me in the leg with a blunt HB.
Of course if you’re a Daily Mail reader, this is yet another serious issue that needs a knee-jerk reaction. Standby for the feedback from ‘Angry from Tunbridge Wells’.. 
Property site RightMove partners with Vodafone
Jun 26th
UK property website RightMove has launched it’s new mobile-enabled website, allowing home hunters and property professionals to search for property on the move.
Although the new mobile site is accessible to users on all networks, Vodafone subscribers have access to a ‘find me’ facility, which allows them to see all available property in the area and locate their nearest Rightmove agent. The service makes use of Location-based Services (LBS), although the press release quite excitingly claims “the user can ask the Vodafone mobile network to find their current location using satellite technology” – which I’m sure sounds more exciting than cell triangulation and the like.
The new mobile RightMove site is available at http://mobile.rightmove.co.uk – just be careful of low flying satellites if you’re a Vodafone user.
3 Hong Kong goes with Miyowa for IM
Jun 26th
Mobile operator 3 Hong Kong, sister company to 3 (or is it Three?) UK, have launched Windows Live Messenger using a turnkey solution from Miyowa.
The MoveMessenger solution provides a tiny (60k) Java J2ME instant messenger client, which is compatible with more than 300 handsets and complies with existing standards including Jabber and Wireless Village. It also includes a feature called EcoLife, which aims to save the handset battery during usage.
Amy Lung, Chief Operating Officer – Mobile of Hutchinson Telecom Hong Kong, said: “Miyowa has proven track record in delivering superb universal mobile instant messaging solution in Asia. Leveraging the strong and reliable local support of Miyowa, we have achieved a fast and robust roll-out of Windows Live Messenger service for our i-mode customers.”
Only 5% of Americans play music on phones
Jun 26th
Link: Nearly 30 Million Amercians to Have Music Phones By End of Year
JupiterResearch has found that although US consumers are continuing to acquire music-capable mobile phones, only few take advantage of those capabilities. According to a new report only about five percent of consumers report sideloading songs onto their phone (i.e., transferring digital songs from a PC to a phone), and only two percent report downloading songs over the air.
Thus, although some 27.9 million US consumers are expected to have music phones by the end of this year, the music functionality of the phone will remain significantly underutilized.
Teen admits texting before fatal crash
Jun 26th
Link: BBC NEWS | England | Death crash driver admits texting
The BBC are reporting that a 19-year-old driver has admitted sending a text message whilst driving shortly before causing a fatal crash. The incident, which happened in November 2006 near Newcastle Airport, resulted in the death of a 74-year-old County Durham grandmother.
Rachel Begg pleaded guilty to causing the death of County Durham grandmother Maureen Waites by dangerous driving. At Newcastle Crown Court, the judge warned Begg, of Whinbank in Ponteland, that a prison term was inevitable.
Ms Waites, a self-employed hairdresser, from Wellfield Road North in Wingate, was on her way to pick up a relative from the airport when she died. Judge John Milford QC adjourned the case for a pre-sentence report and said: “This will determine the length of the custodial sentence you will receive in due course.”
iPhone overload – and it’s not even launched yet
Jun 26th
If I was looking to hire a PR team, there’d only be one place to look right now in my opinion. You’ve got to take your hats off to the PR bods at Apple – it seems at the moment not a day goes past without a plethora of Apple and iPhone-related stories hitting both the online and offline press.
Here at SMS Text News, we like news stories about mobile. We find them, blog them, analyse them, and occasionally do a bit of complaining. In the early days of the iPhone hype, we’d jump on anything about the elusive device and blog it. However, if we did that in the past few weeks, not only would you think you were reading an Apple PR site, we’d probably have to hire a whole team of bloggers just to cover every story.
Take this example. A quick scoot around Google News produces 7,997 articles on the iPhone from the last 24 hours – and it’s not all the same story. Reg Hardware is reporting a US Analyst alleges it’s already hitting Palm device sales. The Inquirer says four different networks are tipped for the European exclusive rights. The Boston Globe says Apple investors may have set their hopes too high, after the companys market value passed $100billion in May on the back of iPhone fever. iTWire are quoting a Gartner analyst, who reckons the handset will be a ‘game changer’. And finally, from my random selection, Scientific American are running a story that German manufacturer Balda are quite chuffed that Apple are busy ordering a huge amount more touch screens from the company.
There’s coverage good and bad in there. Whatever your thoughts on the old saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’, I think it’s easy to agree that Apple are getting a huge chunk of coverage out there at the moment.
Has the iPhone’s moment been and gone, even before it’s launched? Whether the press frenzy will die down after this Friday’s US launch remains to be seen.
Music festival saves trees with mobile ticketing
Jun 26th
Ethical music festival Two Thousand Trees has become one of the first festivals in the UK to introduce mobile ticketing, thanks to a tie-up with tixmob.
The festival, to be held near Cheltenham on 13th & 14th July, is giving fans the ability to receive the tickets direct to their mobile phone – or for those buying multiple tickets, to have them delivered direct to their friends mobiles.
James Scarlett, organisers, Two Thousand Tress Festival said, ‘The ethos of the festival is very much one of sustainability and laid back consideration. That stretches to the ticket too. Using tixmob we are happy that we are helping reduce our environmental impact by reducing the need for paper based tickets as well as giving festival goers a convenient, hassle free way to buy tickets.”
To book tickets, visit www.tixmob.com – or to find out more about the Two Thousand Trees festival and view the line-up, head over to www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk
eAuctionAlerts offer free eBay mobile alerts
Jun 26th
Link: Free eBay Mobile Alerts By Text Message (SMS) at eAuctionAlerts.com
Just had word in from Nate at TxtDrop.com about the launch of his new eBay mobile alerts service. Called eAuctionAlerts, it offers a free service to remind people when their specified eBay auctions are about to end.
Although eBay offer a similar service, they charge $0.25 per alert – whereas eAuctionAlerts is completely free at present. It will work with most of the international eBay sites (including the UK), unfortunately they only support US and Canadian carriers right now. Nate says there are plans to add international carriers in the near future – so watch this space!
A trip to the O2 store
Jun 25th
I was in London earlier meeting a business colleague, who’s just arrived in the country for a couple of weeks. Rather than pay his horrendously expensive roaming charges, he got hold of an O2 prepay SIM and a top-up card. So far so good.
I spoke to him last night and explained how to top-up, and he duly went down to the local corner shop, swipped the card, paid his £20 and left a happy man. However, when he came to switch on the phone this morning for the first time, it came up as ‘SIM unregistered’.
When I met up with him today, I did the usual SIM and handset swapping to make sure it wasn’t anything simple. Alas, it didn’t work. So we took a trip to one of the numerous O2 stores in Oxford Street. Hoping they could just tap a few keys and make it work, I explained his trouble, and handed over the info. ‘Sorry sir, you’ll have to speak to O2 Prepay customer services’, said the assistant, waving a cordless phone in his hands and already dialling the number. He then went off to talk to a bunch of tourists who were eyeing up an N95. About £450 without a contract, incidently, and definitely not available on prepay!
Anyway, I spoke to a very helpful customer service rep at O2. ‘Sorry sir, it appears that SIM card has expired. It’s so old we have no record of it on the system, and, well.. you know if you don’t use a prepay SIM for six months it disconnects? We could put in a reconnection order but that’ll take 24 hours at least’.
At this point, I was a little confused. I’m sure that prepay SIMs didn’t used to expire. Why could they not just reactivate it? And where had his £20 gone?
In the end we fixed it by purchasing a new SIM card (a bargain at £4.99), then typing in a rather horrendously long network code on the handset, which assigned the old top up swipe card to the new SIM card and transferred the top-up he made. Apparently if your top-up card isn’t actually assigned to a SIM card, it acts like a gift card – so the balance remains on that card. Confused? I was. But it sort of makes sense.
So, 20 minutes later, £4.99 expenditure, and the loan of an O2 in-store cordless and their sofa, and it was all sorted. However, what would have happened if someone with local knowledge of the mobile market (plus knew where the nearest O2 store was) wasn’t there? How many business people visiting the UK do the same thing, only to find they can’t get it working, or even worse have splashed a load of cash on a SIM on Ebay or made a top-up only to find their money has disappeared down a black hole?
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