The battle for Mobile Broadband is heating up in the UK.
At the weekend, Orange launched their latest offer to try and entice UK must-have-data freaks onto their network.
Orange
Orange Mobile Broadband: Asus Eee 900 And Modem Free: £25/month
BIC Phone Launches In France: €49, Mobile & Ready To Go
BIC, famous for disposable pens and lighters, is launching the BIC Phone in France today.As with their other products, the BIC Phone focuses on core functions – making and receiving phone calls & texts.
Available in two playful colours, citrus orange and lime green, the USP of the BIC mobile phone is that it’s ready to go when you buy it.
None of this normal fiddling around with wrestling the battery out of the packaging, finding the charger and leaving it for X hours to get it ready to use – the BIC Phone is charged a ready to go.
24/24 Video By Orange France Gets Paramount Deal
Orange France have picked up a deal with the US studio Paramount Pictures, to distribute their content in France.
It’s not just old content that will be available, but new productions from Paramount including DreamWorks titles, which will be among the latest films available.Orange France customers with a broadband digital television package or a High-Speed Internet package will be able to enjoy a Video-On-Demand programming schedule including the studio’s latest releases, such as Mission Impossible III, Over the Hedge and World Trade Center, among others.
There’s over 2,500 films, in French or original language versions with subtitles, available on the 24/24 Video service currently, which costs from 3 Euros to rent for 24 hours. Usual features such as unlimited viewing, pause functions and fast forward and rewind are available.
BBC TV & Radio Trial On UK 3G
The BBC are going to start of a trial to syndicate a range of its television channels and radio networks via 3G to mobile phones within the month.
Three UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.As well as the TV channels, eight radio stations will also be included – Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 6 Music, BBC 7 and Asian Network.
Appropriately enough the announcement by Richard Halton, BBC Controller of Business Strategy, was made at the Broadcast Mobile TV Congress.
The BBC haven’t done a great deal of content on mobiles, not that they’re not keen on it, as you’ll be able to tell from the comments of Richard Halton, “The BBC believes that mobile content is an important part of the broadcasting landscape and is looking at ways in which mobile devices will shape services of the future for licence fee payers.”
They hope to learn lots from this trial, as Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC said, “The findings, combined with quantitative and qualitative consumer research, will inform the BBC’s future mobile strategy.”
We’ll keep our eyes on this.
SPV M700 Launches on Orange UK: Also In Black
The latest model in the SPV range has arrived on the UK Orange mobile phone network.
There’s been shots of the SPV M700 floating around for a while, but as of today it’s been confirmed that there will be a black version in the UK to partner the White.As well as all of the goodies detailed below, the SPV M700 has Sat Nav built-in – one of the early phone to have this. The handset will be able to take advantage of Sat-Nav from Orange.
The Sat-Nav is powered by Webraska with all maps and live traffic updates are held on a central server and are downloadable from the Internet via WiFi, 3G, GPRS or the Orange EDGE network onto the mobile device. Initially only available to business users, it’s now open to all.
The M700 has a 2.8in, 240 x 320, 65,53-colour display, a 2.1 megapixel camera and secondary, VGA camera for video calls and runs Windows Mobile 5.0, so offers Microsoft Office applications including Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
With all of this on board Orange is billing it as helping “you work faster and more efficiently when you’re away from your desk.”
This 3G handset can offer data rates of up to 1.8Mbps (network allowing) There’s quite a few wireless networks supported including EDGE networks as well as UMTS, GPRS and WiFi.
You can get the SPV M700 from Orange shops and online at orange.co.uk. It’s free on contracts over £35.
BIC, famous for disposable pens and lighters, is launching the BIC Phone in France today.
It’s not just old content that will be available, but new productions from Paramount including DreamWorks titles, which will be among the latest films available.
Three UK operators will be taking part, Orange, Vodafone and 3 giving subscribers to the trial the ability to watch BBC One, BBC News 24 and BBC Three streamed on their mobiles. Beyond some sports programmes and programmes where they don’t have the necessary rights.
There’s been shots of the