Beardy rich bloke Richard Branson has picked up a baguette and waved it angrily at French telecom suppliers, accusing them of “ripping off” consumers as he launched his new Virgin Mobile service in France.
” In examining the French market we saw the bulk of people in France have been ripped off big-time,” table-thumped Branson at the media launch, before unveiling ambitious plans to recruit one million customers to Virgin Mobile in the first three years of operation.
Branson has teamed up with Europe’s grand fromage mobile retailer, Carphone Warehouse for the Virgin-branded venture, which will offer services through mobile phone operator Orange’s network.
The French market – long seen as one of Europe’s least competitive mobile markets – could prove highly profitable for Branson who said that pressure from regulators had gifted Virgin the opportunity to set up a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in the country.
Branson’s Virgin Group were one of the early adopters of the MVNO concept in the UK, building the network into the UK’s fifth-largest mobile brand by customers, before exporting operations into the US, Canada and Australia.
France is currently dominated by its three network operators: Orange, Bouygues Telecom and SFR, all of whom have remained tight-lipped on the news of Virgin elbowing onto their turf.
They should be worried though, with Virgin’s rates set to undercut the competition with pre-paid services offered at a basic 0.42 euros a minute compared to the usual €0.48-0.55 rate.
To further tempt Frenchies, Virgin will be offering free SMS text to subscription customers signing up for 12 month deals (although Orange can review this later if its network subsequently becomes overloaded.)
Marketed and distributed through Carphone’s 200+ Phone House Stores and Virgin’s Megastores music stores, Branson is hoping to create a buzz in the younger market that will filter up to the crumblies.
“The marketing is aimed at young people because older people will buy what young people are buying, but young people won’t necessarily buy what older people are buying,” he commented.
NTL Deal set to finally go ahead
Elsewhere, NTL’s bid for Virgin Mobile – which has dragged on for an eternity – looks set to be sealed this week.
NTL are expected to announce that the Virgin Mobile board has accepted a revised offer – first rumoured in December last year – that will see Virgin’s mobile phone services added to to NTL’s ‘triple-play’ packages of voice, broadband Internet access and television.
We didn’t think we needed a poll to find this one out, but a new poll in the States has found that just about everyone – including fellow mobile users – get annoyed by people talking loudly on their phones in public.
Multimedia is for da kidZ
The highly rated Palm Treo 650 smart phone has won the support of another major mobile phone operator in the UK.
With Orange the sole Treo supporter up until now, rivals Vodafone, T-Mobile and O2 have preferred to offer a selection of Windows Mobile-based devices made by HTC – including the 
Palm – who are currently celebrating the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Palm Pilot – is reported to have shifted 564,000 Treos in the last quarter (and we’re soon to join the throng after giving up on the fiddly complexities of our Windows Mobile handset).
UK Mobile company, Orange, is to abandon their numbered Talk plans to replace them with ‘types’ – Dolphins, Canaries, Racoons and Panthers.
Orange has always been a pioneer in dealing with customers. This started with their name, which back in 1994, was extremely adventurous – as was tying it in with a colour and trying to associate it with emotion.
On a personal note – I’ve been with Orange since they started and was highly impressed in the early days. Over the years I found that the quality has gone south a little – people you speak to there are a little less helpful; the flexibility that made you glad to be with Orange and started to atrophy shortly after Wanadoo (France Telecom) took over in 2001.
Instead we will be categorised as Dolphins, Canaries, Racoons or Panthers. Here’s the explanation …
Britain remains in the grip of a texting mania as new figures reveal around 99 million text messages were faithfully banged out on little keypads every day during February.
The SMS stats revealed that while love may be – quite literally – in the air, most people preferred to profess it from the comfort of their keypad, with only ten million romantics going to the trouble of sending a proper Valentine’s card through the post.
The MDA has forecast that text messaging figures will reach an annual total of 36.5 billion text messages by the end of 2006, compared to 2005’s 32 billion total.
LG have announced a unique new phone, the LG-SD910, featuring what the Korean manufacturing giants are describing as a ‘Duo Slide Design.’
Looking a bit of a moody number in its all-black skin and glowing red buttons, the LG-SD910 sports a large 260k colour QVGA* TFT LCD screen (*that’s 320 x 240 pixels in English).
Despite its unusual construction and feature set, when all the slidey bits are tucked in the LG-SD910’s a surprisingly compact gizmo, measuring a pocketable 87 x 44 x 23 mm and weighing in at 90g.
A new service, Barablu, launches today claiming to offer free voice calls and text messages between mobile phones.
It’s as clear as the screen on your PSP that mobile phone operators aren’t very keen on ideas like this. Many commentators have claimed that the operators have gone a long way to trying to block the development and sale of WiFi-capable mobile phones – as the operators are terrified that it will erode the price of calls from ‘quite a lot’ per minute, to zero.
Barablu does appear to have something unique here – at least currently. The difficulty they’re going to hit is the same for anyone trying to build a community of users and provide this type of service -it’s all about the number of people you can attract on to it. If people find their friends aren’t on it, or their said friends already have a similar service – the software will get unloaded and they’ll stop using it.
Slimmer than a stick insect with the runs, the new world’s thinnest phone comes in the shape of the EV-K100 handset, an ultra-thin gizmo made by Korean cell phone makers KTF Technologies.
“We substantially cut down the thickness of the antenna incorporated into the EV-K100 and instead extended its length to secure all the necessary functions,” said a KTF spokesman.
The company intend to market the bar-type EV-K100, codenamed “No. 7,” from next week via its parent firm KTF for around 400,000 won ($412).
The US mobile companies are finally, really getting hold of delivering content of all sorts to mobile phones.
As with all things to mobile phones, we’d love to see the figures as to who actually pays for access to this. A barrier which has yet to be consistently cracked.
With a veritable orgy of announcements, BenQ Mobile rolled out six new mobile phones at the CeBIT trade show in Germany.
VoIP calls are made possible through the built in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity and pre-loaded Skype software.
Also announced was the flagship EL71, a tri-band, 16.5mm thin slider phone with a metal casing in brushed aluminium finish. Designed for the “young professional,” the phone sports a 2-inch, 260,000-color QVGA display.
The CL71 slide phone is another slim number (17.8mm) with built-in 1.3-megapixel camera, MP3 player and radio with a 2-inch TFT 262k display offering 176 x 220 picture resolution.
Finally, the wedge shaped E61 comes in orange, yellow, or silver, with a built-in VGA camera with 2x/4x digital zoom.