Mobile Digest

Motorola Purple MOTORAZR V3i

Looks like purple is the new black, or is it the new pink? Whichever way, Motorola has put out a MOTORAZR V3i in striking mauve livery just in time Mother's Day in the US (May 13 in case you were wondering). And what mother doesn't want a bright purple phone?

The handset will be available exclusively through Motorola's online store without contract for a tidy $239.99 - although bag two at the same time (one phone is never enough) and you'll get a 20 percent discount. There's no word on UK availability just yet.

The MOTORAZR V3i is quad band with Bluetooth for wireless transfers. It has a large internal colour display and integrated 1.23 megapixel camera. More from Motorola's store.

3 offers Pay As You Go from 5p per minute

Following on from Orange's new pre-pay tariff yesterday, 3 has announced a new pricing structure for its Pay As You Go customers, with calls now from 5p per minute - the cheapest any network any time call rate available from any UK mobile network, according to the company.

3’s Pay As You Go Top-ups are also now available in a wider range of
denominations - £10, £15, £20, £25, £30,£40 and £50 - and with no expiry dates. And customers can convert Top-ups to an Add-on. Voice Add-ons reduce the cost of calls per minute to any network from 30p to 5p and text Add-ons can reduce the cost of texts from 10p to 5p each. You can also surf the net for £1 per day and access seven TV channels for £2.

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Orange offers pre-pay overdraft facility

Orange has a new solution to running out of credit for pre-pay customers - an overdraft.

Customers signing up to the company's Speakeasy pre-pay tariff can get £2.50 worth of 'overdraft' (known as the Reserve Tank) to stay connected when credit runs out. But it costs £1 to take advantage of it.

Other benefits include three 'Magic Numbers' that are charged at 15p per hour and a flat rate of 15p per minute for other numbers.

Orange website

Orange Pay-Off: 15 seconds to be a sexy, weird, dancer

Orange has launched its Pay-Off contest and is inviting its customers to submit 10-15 second video clips of themselves either trying to prove that they're the sexiest person alive (Face-off), are the best/craziest dancer (Dance-off), or are just plain weird but couldn't muster a longer clip on YouTube (Weird-off).

The best videos are entered into a series of play-off rounds, where users vote for their favourite and the winner then has to face a new challenge - though what that is isn't clear yet.

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Will the iPhone do for mobile music what iTunes did for online music?

Media analyst Screen Digest has completed some interesting research into the global market for over-the-air (OTA) mobile music downloads, as well as speculating on what impact the iPhone may have on this market.

By the end of 2006, the global market for OTA mobile music was worth around £113m, most of which was generated by single track downloads in the US. The global online music download market was worth around £636m.

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First iPhone camera images spotted online

Pictures claiming to have been taken on Apple's forthcoming iPhone have tipped up on the internet.

The image, showing a man tucking into some jam on toast, was spotted by Mobile Guerilla, after constantly typing "taken with an apple iphone" into Google for over a month.

The pics were found on a Flickr account, and the EXIF data showed that device used was: "Camera: Apple iPhone". The images have since been removed.

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Orange launches Play-Off - first video gameshow for mobile phones

Orange is jumping on the talent show bandwagon, but on mobiles phones with Play-Off, which claims to offer the nation’s never-ending queue of wanabees a platform to pit their "talents" against one another.

You need to submit 10-15 second videos in response to a particular challenge. The best videos go into a "play-off", then users vote for their favourite. Win and you take on your next challenger. Lose - and you're gone.

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Vodafone offers free YouTube videos to your handset

We told you some time back that Vodafone had done an exclusive deal with YouTube. Well, now you can try it for yourself - as it's just launched.

Before you feverishly reach for your mobile handset to check out all those Shiny Media video reviews, there is a drawback to this - it isn't the full YouTube service. It's actually described as "the Best of YouTube", with a range of 15-20 videos being offered and refreshed each day. Better than nothing, but not quite what you might hope.

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Championship Manager 2007 heads to mobiles

I'm guessing that the various Championship Manager games have had a serious negative impact on relationships over the years - and that looks set to continue with the launch of Championship Manager 2007 for mobile phones.

As you would expect, Championship Manager 2007 has all of the up to the minute data, and now features more English and European teams and players, improved tactics, player-specific training regimes, pre and post match press conferences and an enhanced interface.

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Review: Sony Ericsson W200i - Walkman phone for everyone

The propaganda

Not everyone wants - or indeed needs - a super phone in their pocket, loaded with features and raring to satisfy any and every multimedia whim at a moment's notice.

Some just want a decent enough camera, a bit of music and the ability to talk and text their friends. Nothing more complex or overblown than that. For that sort of person, the Sony Ericsson W200i will more than suffice.

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Shiny Video Review: Nokia 6300

Susi examines the Nokia 6300 and reports back for Tech Digest on this simple, straightforward but fairly limited phone.

Nokia

Orange and Vodafone block Skype and other VoIP services

Red Herring has reported that Vodafone and Orange has blocked customers from using Internet telephony services such as Skype over their networks.

Phones are being shipped that have specifically had their VoIP capabilities disabled.

One such phone is the Nokia N95, an expensive mobile multimedia computer that's received great reviews, but which is now having features stripped out by frightened mobile operators.

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Vodafone encouraging family tariff, and business mobile recycling

Vodafone aims to encourage customers to sign up to its family tariff by selling two Samsung C300s, or two Nokia 1600s, in a single bundle.

The Samsung deal costs £75, and the Nokia deal costs £50. They'll be sold in Vodafone and Woolworths stores.

In other news, Vodafone has partnered with leading recycling company Fonebak to create awareness amongst UK employers about the importance of mobile phone recycling.

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Shock: Text messages blamed for declining standards in written language

Ireland's State Examination Commission has come to the conclusion that we all knew already: the rise in text messaging is a contributing factor in the decline of writing standards.

"The emergence of the mobile phone and the rise of text messaging as a popular means of communication would appear to have impacted on standards of writing as evidenced in the responses of candidates," their report stated.

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Nokia N76 - now with added Travis

When Nokia says it has teamed up with "one of the UK's most influential bands", I'm guessing not many of you out there would think of Travis. Well amazingly, that's who they mean.

Nokia has done a deal with Sony BMG to throw in five Travis tracks for anyone buying the N76. But it's typically not that simple - it's in the form of a voucher, you don't get to choose the tracks and you have to download from the MSN music shop. Surely pre-installing isn't that hard? At least you will get the band's new single, plus four other tracks from the band's back catalogue.

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Samsung's SGH-i400 heads to Europe

Samsung has unveiled another smartphone - the SGH-i400 - which should debut in Europe sometime in late summer.

It's a slider handset, using the Symbian S60 operating system. Details confirmed so far include a two megapixel camera, dedicated MP3 keys, stereo speakers, A2DP Bluetooth, MicroSD slot and full web browsing courtesy of the 2.3-inch screen.

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Mobile phones cause forgetfulness

Here's a quick challenge for you - try and remember five numbers that are stored in your mobile phone. Tricky isn't it? If you're finding it a challenge, you're not alone.

Over two thirds of the UK mobile phone users - 69 percent - were unable to recall five numbers from their phone memory in a recent survey.

With thefts of mobile phones accounting for 40 percent of robberies and only four out of ten people backing up their contacts it's a bit of a recipe for disaster.

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Motorola V3i phone packed with gold and diamonds

If those high-priced Vertu handsets don't offer enough glitz, you could go for something just a little more obvious - the Peter Aloisson-designed Motorola V3i phone, made from gold-covered stainless steel and encrusted with 855 small diamonds.

Ideal for the average footballer's wife, it has a typical V3i specification (which is approaching two years old) of a 1.3 megapixel camera, media player and not much else.

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Review: Nokia N95 - feature packed multimedia mobile

The propaganda

Nokia is touting the N95 as a multimedia computer, rather than just a simple old phone. While that might be pushing it slightly, it's certainly a feature packed handset.

It supports 3G, HSDPA, GPRS, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and infrared - basically every wireless connection you can think of and there's built in GPS, so you'll always know where you are.

It's got strong multimedia credentials too, with a 5 megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss lens and, according to Nokia, DVD-like quality video clips.

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Philips SHB6102/05 Bluetooth stereo headset

Let's be honest, we can probably do without the wires connecting headphones to player - and with some you can, as indeed you can with the right mobile phone. Well, if yours isn't one of them, you can make it so with the Philips SHB6102/05 Bluetooth stereo headset.

There's no need to worry about you player having Bluetooth support, because these headphones come complete with a Bluetooth transmitter that plugs into your 3.5mm headphone socket, creating A2DP compatibility.

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LG KS10 - Google-packed slider phone

LG recently announced a tie-in with Google, offering pre-loaded Google Maps, Gmail, and Blogger mobile applications with selected new handsets. And it looks like the first of these is the LG KS10.

It's a slim slider phone with HSDPA connectivity and a Symbian operating system. Other features include a 2.4-inch LCD screen, two megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth, multimedia playback and a microSD slot.

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T-Mobile launches web'n'walk USB modem

T-Mobile has just launched the web'n'walk USB modem, which is compatible with both PC and Mac, offering broadband speeds of up to 1.8Mbps.

And according to T-Mobile, it's significantly cheaper than the similar device from Vodafone. On comparable 12-month price plans with unlimited usage on a HSDPA connection, T-Mobile's USB modem costs £29.99 to purchase the device plus a monthly fee of £29 on the web'n'walk Plus price plan, where as Vodafone's USB modem costs £49 to buy, plus a monthly fee of £52.86 on the Data Unlimited price plan.

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When is a BlackBerry not a BlackBerry?

Will Head writes...

RIM is soon going to be rolling out a version of its much prized instant email software that will run on Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform.

The company has offered similar functionality in the past through BlackBerry Connect, but the new version looks like it will replace the Windows Mobile interface while it's running so it looks distinctly more BlackBerry like.

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BlackBerry software coming to Windows Mobile 6 devices

Research in Motion (RIM) has said that it plans to port software to devices running the latest Windows Mobile 6.0 operating system, allowing more devices to run like BlackBerries.

The software would allow people who don't want to lose their existing handset functionality to subscribe to the BlackBerry service and get the BlackBerry interface on their mobile.

A user would be able to switch easily between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile functionality, according to RIM.

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O2 offers incentives not to upgrade

All those shiny new mobile phones - whatever handset we go for, we want another one a few weeks later. And certainly as soon as our contract allows us to. That's not good news for the phone networks or indeed the environment. Well, O2 are taking steps to encourage you to keep the one you have.

The company is to pay customers not to upgrade, offering £95 in phone credit and a £10 donation to the Energy Saving Trust if you agree to keep your handset on for another year. Or if you're feeling less charitable, £100 in credit and no money for the EST.

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Review: ZyXEL v660 - mobile and VoIP hybrid phone

The propaganda

VoIP may be great for keeping calling costs down - but it does mean you're shackled to your PC by a headset, which doesn't lend itself to long conversations.

ZyXEL is hoping to change all that with the V660 phone which combines a normal mobile with Wi-Fi and VoIP functionality. The idea is simple - when you're in range of a hotspot you can make calls cheaply over the internet and when you're out of coverage you can still be contactable via the standard GSM network.

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Video: Jabra limited edition JX10 Cara headset

When you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a flashy phone the last thing you want is a naff Star Trek headset making you look like a crack dealer. This is probably why Jabra have come up with Cara, a limited edition of the JX10 headset. Charlotte from Jabra talks us through the concept behind the headsets. See after the jump for pictures.

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iPhone? Nope, never heard of it

Nearly half of Americans adults have heard of the iPhone, despite the fact it's not even out yet, according to a survey. What's more, 17 percent said they already wanted to buy one - something that will not doubt delight the accountants at Apple.

However, not everyone is jumping at the chance to get their mitts on Apple's new baby - with only nine percent saying they'd be queuing up to buy one at launch. About 17 percent, however, were willing to wait until their current contract expires and a quarter would only buy it when their mobile company offers it.

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Stuck in a boring meeting? Read your email instead

If you've been holding a meeting and found you've had to compete with the allure of mobile email for your colleagues' attention, you're not alone.

A survey of senior executives found that 86 percent said it was common for people to check their mail during a meeting using a BlackBerry or Treo. A third of them weren't very happy about the practice and were somewhat irked by their fellow worker's behaviour.

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Video review: Nokia N95

Ashley and Shiny Shiny's Susi put the Nokia N95 through its paces.

Nokia