Orange has become the first UK provider to offer live television channels to its customers’ handsets.
Available exclusively to UK-based Orange 3G customers, the service will give customers access to nine channels, including ITN News, CNN, Cartoon Network, Extreme Sports, as well as dedicated Big Brother and Celebrity Love Island channels.
Mobile TV is seen as the latest hot potato in the telecoms world, with the service enabled by the DVB-H broadcast transmission standard – a digital TV technology that offers low battery consumption and robust reception.
With their announcement of a UK service, Orange have jumped the gun on rivals o2, who are still experimenting with Mobile TV trials in the Oxford area.
Orange are already broadcasting 23 TV channels over mobile phones in France, along with other European networks selling selected live TV via 3G network streaming.
“This is truly a service where 3G comes into its own. We don’t expect people to watch for hours at a time but to dip in and out,” beamed Julian Diment, head of commercial and brand partnerships at Orange.
Not surprisingly, 3G operators – who collectively shelled out £22.5bn for the networks – are extremely hopeful that mobile TV will prove an alluring attraction for consumers to sign up for their flagging service.
Keen to milk the franchise for every last penny, there are a slew of interminable reality TV show tie-ins lurking around the corner.
For the terminally sad, Channel 4 will provide live 24-hour streaming from the Big Brother house during the next series, which is launched next month.
We can’t imagine any circumstances where we’d consider paying to watch barrel-scraping Celebrity Love Island program on a mobile, but someone clearly thinks that a dire mobile channel based on the show will be a hit.
Orange’s service launches next Monday and will initially only be available on the Nokia 6680 from Orange.
Subscriptions are charged at £10 (~US$18.3 ~€14.5) a month on top of regular bills. Orange
UK video mobile network, 3, has announced the first mobile blogging service, letting their 3 million customers share mugshots, arty scenes and video clips captured on their video mobile via the Web.
Graeme Oxby, Marketing Director of 3 was also big on the idea: “Video mobile technology is all about immediacy, whether it’s downloading the latest music video on the move or being the first to share the breaking news from Big Brother with your friends. With My Gallery, you can share your antics straight away with your friends and family without being tied to a PC.”
The procedure for 3 customers to set up a My Gallery site is straightforward enough: users simply send a picture or video message to “3333” (this will be charged at a standard rate) and they’ll then be sent a password via SMS to manage their blog site.
Poor old granny. All she wants to do is ring up a cab to take her home from the bingo, but her hi-tech, Bluetooth enabled, all-vibrating, MP3-playing, camera-toting, WAP-enabled phone is trying to get her to download the latest Blink 182 ringtone and asking for her GSM details.
With the more advanced phone tariffs making the small print of an insurance company look like the Beano, some telecoms companies have been trying to woo customers wanting just basic services with simpler pricing.
UK’s first video mobile network, 3, has announced the first advert to be broadcast over a 3G service.
The clip will be launched in mid-May and made available via ‘Today on 3’, with the first 100,000 customers able to download the clip for nowt.
Pamir Gelenbe, co-founder and Director of Corporate Development, Flytxt was equally chuffed: “We’re delighted to be working with 3, the UK’s leading 3G network on such an innovative approach to mobile marketing and advertising. The advantage for brand owners is that mobile marketing combines the wide reach of TV with the precision of DM and the tracking potential of the Internet. ”
Just 17 days after releasing its ‘Tiger’ OS X 10.4 operating system, Apple has issued a sizeable bug fix update after growing gripes from customers.
Russians were also most annoyedski to find the iDVD player bombing when the operating system was set to their home language (something that affected a host of other languages too).
“A lot of things [at Apple] are pretty secretive; there aren’t necessarily as many eyes looking over the products as there could be,” said Wilcox, commenting on the company’s decision to use a limited group of beta testers looking at the code.
Despite the corporate wires buzzing with office gossips, chatting clerks, bored employees and downloading demons, a survey warns that IM remains unregulated in the workplace.
Some 25% of particularly bored office workers have also used IM to download music and film trailers at work.
For example, anti-virus firm Symantec reported a 400 percent increase in IM and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking viruses, worms and trojans over the last 12 months.
After the high profile launches of 
A few facts did emerge: the Revolution will come with 512MB of internal RAM, an IBM CPU, ATi GPU, an SD slot, built-in WiFi, wireless controllers and a selection of USB2 ports.
Nintendo’s new machine will be their first console capable of playing standard storage DVDs, but they haven’t forgotten their old-school fans, with the Revolution able to accept Ye Olde Gamecube discs.
Rumours persist that Nintendo may have a surprise up their sleeve for the end of the expo, but so far reaction to their presentation seems a little muted.
Wooargh! The lights! The shapes…the colours….all that swirling…and moving…have I gone back in time to a chemically assisted squat rave?
The mind-melding visual feasts are driven by beat detection or joypad control, letting users take interactive control of the camera, patterns and effect generators, to create their own psychedelic wig-outs.
We’ve liked Jeff Minter’s stuff ever since the days when an Amiga 1200 (RIP) with 4meg of RAM was considered positively ostentatious. Even then his Llamatron was streets ahead of the competition, so it’s great it see the spliff-consuming, loveable hippy still producing such great work.
And he’s still got his principles too, writing on his bulletin board: “And we haven’t sold our souls, or our IP, to Microsoft either. We’ve created for them an interactive visualiser for the Xbox360, and we’ll not do a visualiser for the rival consoles for this coming generation. But if someone were to ring me up tomorrow and say “Blimey Yak mate, that Neon’s a bit tasty, any chance of a bit of that for the next “not_a_console_visualiser_app” I could quite legitimately say “abso-smegging-lutely!” and we could be delivering working code in a few weeks. We can use it in games on *any* platform. The engine is small, efficient and portable.”
Although Nintendo’s 
“We’re making the gorgeous Game Boy Micro for image-conscious folks who love video games, the ones who want the look of their system to be as cool as the games they play on it,” waffled George Harrison, who has one of the longest job descriptions we’ve seen for a while: Nintendo Of America’s Senior Vice President Of Marketing And Corporate Communications.
Wrapping up the feature list, the Game Boy Micro comes with a built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, supports standard headphones and comes with a removable face plate for that all-important customisation thang.
Pausing briefly for breath after announcing the new PlayStation today, the busy bees in the Sony hive have announced the world’s smallest and lightest high definition consumer camcorder with full HD resolution based on HDV 1080i.
The new camera also uses a smaller and more compact Carl Zeiss lens, with a diameter of 60mm compared to 92 mm on the previous model.
A Memory Stick PRO Duo media slot is provided for transferring images captured on the camcorder’s 2.8-megapixel still camera.