Carphone Warehouse have jumped into the big boy broadband rankings with its acquisition of the UK’s third-largest Internet provider, AOL UK.
Shelling out a cool £370m for the operation, Carphone Warehouse will inherit AOL’s 2.1 million UK customers, of which 600,000 are on dial-up, with the remaining 1.5 million using broadband connections. It’s four years ago that AOL announced their broadband pricing.
Under the deal, AOL will be keeping its (somewhat inappropriate) name – short for ‘America On Line’ – with the new owners retaining the US firm’s pricing policies.
(When AOL first hit the shores of Blighty, we did wonder if they’d change their name for the UK market, but we figured that UK On Line (UOL) sounds like someone being sick, and Britain On Line (BOL) would just invite the addition of ‘LOCKS.’)
Retaining AOL UK’s management and infrastructure, Carphone Warehouse said that it’s funding the acquisition of its shiny new toy through an extension of its existing debt facilities.
Although AOL UK is being sold by its American parent company Time Warner, the deal will see AOL continuing to provide co-branded portal, content and other audience services, as well as taking care of online advertising sales through a revenue-sharing agreement.
Carphone Warehouse head honcho Charles Dunstone announced that the deal was “transformational for our broadband business,” adding that they had “accelerated their customer service recruitment plans and incurred additional wholesale broadband costs.”
“The joint development of AOL’s already successful audience platform will bring us new advertising and content revenues in a proven and low risk manner,” he added.
Ol’Charlie boy’s been getting in the neck recently, after Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk service was the subject of a damning expose on the BBC’s Watchdog programme.
The show had been inundated with complaints after the company failed to deliver on its promise on ‘free’ broadband, and Dunstone has claimed that the strong demand has cost the company £20m more than originally expected.
The AOL deal sees the Carphone Warehouse crew slip into third place in the UK league table of residential Internet providers, with NTL the current leaders with 2.9 million home customers, followed by BT on 2.2 million.
With Windows Vista steaming over the horizon at a rate of knots, users are being encouraged to see if their steam-powered Windows machines will be capable of running the new bells’n’whistle bonanza of the new OS.
Unchuffedly (or perhaps that would read better as, “in a less than chuffed manner”), we dutifully shuffled back to the Microsoft site and downloaded the user-unfriendly sounding “
But it wasn’t all good news as we caught sight of some yellow warning triangles further down the page.
Drivers
Looking down to the final warning tab entitled ‘programs,’ we were presented with a refreshingly short list considering that our machine is stuffed to the brim with programs old and new.
Although PDAs may be a dying breed, they clearly ain’t dead yet, with the lesser known Spanish electrics company releasing no less than two spanking new GPS-enabled PDAs.
A SD/MMC card slot takes care of expansion options, with connectivity coming in the form of a MiniUSB socket , Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (T620 only)
As we\\’d 
Primed and ready for take off, O2’s own-brand Jet supersonic mobile boasts that it can deliver 67% more talk time than its nearest comparable rival.
The phone’s business-like styling reflects its targeted demographic, with an austere black casing and ne’er a whiff of any fun stuff to be found – this grumpy old handset hasn’t even got a camera or an MP3 player.
The O2 Jet will be ready for slipping into pin striped suit pockets from 19th October, with prices varying according to monthly tariffs. There will also be a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) version available for sixty quid.
Google will soon be offering free music videos on its Google video Web site after striking a deal with industry bigwigs, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.
“Our partnership with Google is rooted in the pioneering approach we’ve used to offer fans more music, while benefiting artists and protecting copyrights,” gushed Warner Music in a press release.
Google has said that it will be offering further access to Sony and Warner’s hefty audio-visual catalogues in the coming months through partner Web sites in its AdSense network.
In true online video blog style, the announcement was made by Mr Diddy (not one of 
Details of the deal between Mr Diddy and Burger King haven’t been disclosed, but we’d imagine that it’s going to be worth more that a couple of orders at their stores, even if his entourage are ordering large.
We attribute much of Mr Diddy’s knowledge and acceptance of YouTube down to 
It’s been a long, long wait, but it looks like the release of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, is finally set to happen soon.
Vista has a scheduled roll out date for business customers next month, with consumers getting to play with the new desktop in January 2007.
Sherlund also noted that he expects Microsoft to start dishing out Vista discount coupons to customers who buy new PCs capable of running the OS in the run-up to the release.
Looking like lovechild of a bedtime romp between an iPod and a mobile phone, Samsung’s X838 phone has real “gimme!” appeal.
Because of the narrow, slimline construction, the number keys are unusually arranged in rows of two, with the usual ‘call’ and ‘end call’ buttons at the top.
There’s also an easily accessible ‘hold’ button so you don’t end up ringing your Mum when you’re rocking out to Pantera, as well as a volume up/down control on the side of the unit.
We spent some time trying to translate the text from the 
BT has released detailed plans for the rollout of its next generation 21CN network.
“Planning the rollout programme has been a complex task with industry consulted at every stage. Work is now well underway to create the new backbone for 21CN – this has to be in place across large parts of the UK before the first customer lines are switched across,” she added.