Coming hot on the heels of their 3G Mobile TV launch, Orange France has announced that their high-speed EDGE mobile service for consumers will go live next week.
Although EDGE technology is slower than 3G services it has the distinctive advantage of being cheaper and – unlike the “walled garden” approach of 3G – the technology gives customers direct access to email, the Internet and television.
Orange, the mobile phone arm of France Telecom, has shuffled its expectations of EDGE take-up in a downward direction from its initial forecast of 500,000 subscribers by the end of December.
“We expect to have more than a million high-speed clients (EDGE and 3G) by the end of May 2006,” Orange Chief Executive Didier Quillot told a news conference.
Quillot added that he expected the total to stand at between 500,000 and 1 million by Christmas 2006, with the number of EDGE subscribers reaching 2 million by the end of 2006.
Monsieur Quillot revealed that Orange had 110,000 3G subscribers by the end of May – nudging higher than their rivals, SFR, with 100,000 subscribers.
SFR expects to have scooped up around 500,000 3G subscribers by the end of the year.
Currently, Orange’s EDGE service offer coverage of some 85 percent of France’s population, against the 45 percent coverage offered by its 3G network.
3G coverage is expected to rise to over 50 percent by the end of 2005 and continues upward to around 60 percent by end of 2006.
Orange has stated that it will invest over 200 million euros in 2005 and 2006 to make its network compatible with EDGE.
EDGE stands for Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution and is a radio based high-speed mobile data standard, which enables television, video and music to be received on an Orange Intense mobile phone at any time.
The mobile Internet handset – developed by Danger and manufactured by Sharp Corporation – will be made available on service contract for £68.70 (~€100, ~US$125). 
The feature-stuffed handset includes a mobile phone, push email, instant messaging, HTML Web browser, text-messaging, calendar, address book, an integrated digital camera and the option to download applications and content. 
Beating at the heart of the T-Mobile Sidekick II is Danger’s “hiptop” software and services infrastructure. 
Also known as the Hiptop 2, the 130 x 66 x 22 mm (5.1″ x 2.6″ x 0.9″) handset features a flip Transflective TFT 240×160 pixel screen and an integrated VGA (640 x 480 pixel) camera. 
T-Mobile are also releasing a “trendy” version of the Sidekick, resplendent in distinctly un-macho pink sparkly bits. 
A survey by Cingular Wireless has revealed that men spend more time yakking on mobiles than women. 
Women aren’t afraid to get snapping either, with 60 percent using their camera feature frequently or occasionally against 40 percent of men using it as often. 
It’s OK to say you don’t understand the ringtones business. 
This lead to three possible reactions – the haters, the lovers and the not-bovered. 
The draw of ringtones is to individualise the phone handset. But with ringtones, there is no scarcity of supply. Everyone can have one, if they pay for it.
We covered the announcement of Orange’s 3G TV content to mobile handsets last week, but today we discovered who’s providing the content-to-mobiles technology powering the services. 
After much careful thinking and planning they’ve ended up with an end-to-end solution, spanning ingestion; digitisation; encoding; and distribution going initially to IP TV, now cellular and wireless. 
Following on from my recent detailed review of the Vodafone 7100v Blackberry, I thought it would be worth passing on a few tips I’d learnt over the process. One attempting to reassure readers through the scary process of upgrading the operating system on the 7100 Blackberry; the other, a solution for syncing your information with an Apple Mac – not something that is natively supported by RIM or Vodafone. 
After updating the software, which by the way you need a Windows computer for, I set about syncing the Blackberry with my Mac. My existing phone, the Sony Ericsson P910i, works correctly out of the box with Mac OS X’s iSync application, syncing wirelessly over Bluetooth within a few seconds. 
About a month ago I had the chance to spend two days with a pre-release version of the Sony K750i handset and as it’s now closer to the release of the handset, I thought an overview of the product might be timely.
You morph it in to a camera by sliding the lens cover at the back of the device. Using the 2mpx camera you can easily captures clear pictures with vivid colours during light days. 
Video recording is OK, given the devices restrictions.
I’d just assumed the K750i would have a ‘normal’ headphone jack, letting me choose the headphones that excited me, but the provided headphones had to be connected via a Sony-interface at the bottom of the phone. This brings obvious advantages, like them having a mic, letting to let you use them as a hands-free set.
Vodafone execs spent the morning cackling wildly to themselves, throwing wads of dollar bills in the air and rolling around silk-covered beds covered in cash as record revenues and profits for its full year results were announced to the world. 
But in-between triumphant licks of triple-thick Cornish clotted cream, Sarin sounded a cautious note, warning that competition was rising. 
Vodafone performed particularly well in strong markets such as the US and Spain, with revenues growing at more than 20% year on year. 
Orange has triumphed in a study rating customer satisfaction among mobile phone contract providers, with Virgin Mobile coming in top in the pre-pay sector, according to the 2005 UK Mobile Telephone Customer Satisfaction Study, run by J.D. Power and Associates. 
The authors of the study claim that the results reflect the positive impact of increasing competition and lower tariffs. 
The contract segment seemed a well-chuffed bunch too, with satisfaction levels rising to 733 index points from 720 index points in 2004. 
Mobile technology and photo messaging is still a hot potato, with 35 percent of all mobile owners snapping on camera phones and 21 percent sending photos from their mobiles.