2
At first, when the likes of Three and Vodafone released their “Mobile Broadband” services I was a little skeptical that it’ll be worth the money. 3G data is notoriously rubbish in the UK, either services are capped back to GPRS speeds or are heavily firewalled to make a “walled garden” of approved content. The premise is as follows, Three are starting to reduce their monthly cost in a attempt to get the customers in to back their massive HSDPA expansion in the UK, along with sites like Quidco offering interesting discounts on contracts and special half-price deals, it looks even better…
So I bought in.
On Wednesday I bought Three’s 5GB/month offer package through Quidco, which came to £7.50/per month and £12.50 cashback. For me, the 5GB limit is perfect as I doubt i’ll ever use over that amount in a monthly period. A few people have pointed me to similar packages on T-Mobile, but you can see just from a quick look in that list that the actual price is quite high for what you get, the only bonuses of that package would be the free T-Mobile wifi access (which theres alot of access points for in the UK) and the AUP style limiting, in that if you go over your limit you don’t get charged, you only get kicked up to the higher package if your a constant abuser.
So what’s the catch? Overage. Three charge you £1/per MB in overage, so a extra GB would cost you £1024. In today’s modern telecoms world that is an insane price, which again many people have pointed out to me. If you have no intention of using up to the bandwidth limit, what’s the issue?
Well, I got a useful Royal Mail red slip through the post yesterday, so I have to head down and pickup the equipment. Hopefully by the end of today I can give it a test and write down some more thoughts on it.
filed under: technology | comments (0) | read more...
7
The BBC reports that Symbian dismisses the “gPhone” or Android as it’s now been dubbed, by the looks of it the BBC have snubbed the new “Open Handset Alliance” as theres no 100% dedication to the plaform, which is hard to expect when not even a demo version of the OS and hardware has rolled off production lines.
Looking at the members list, it seems that Symbian have got something to worry about. While Nokia and Sony Erricsson are about 60% of the mobile market and both Symbian customers it seems the rest, Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung have took the jump to join this group in its early stages. Also, alot of the big carriers are behind them, NTT DoCoMo, T-Mobile, and Telefonica.
Google has used their corporate might to pull in a few “big boys” from the industry, once a prototype is out and interest starts brewing i’d expect a few more to join in.
filed under: home, technology | comments (0) | read more...