Archive for Ben Smith
Thanks to all today’s donors - we’ve just hit £900… still some way to go to our £1500 target though so please head over here and donate to these two worthy causes!
…and if you needed any more incentive than the ton of prizes we already have and that warm feeling of doing something nice, the [...]
UPDATE: So far we’ve raised £890. We need another £610 by the 10th to reach our target!
Many thanks to last week’s donors, including David Salgado, Darren King, Aaron Homer Vergara, Chris Walters, ‘Lulucachoo’ and Sam Elkin for their generous donations. Also to the Vodafone ‘Live Guy’ team who added another fantastic prize to the pot: [...]
LATEST UPDATE: £800 donated so far - that’s enough for 16 children, traumatised by abuse, to spend one hour with a social worker rebuilding their trust in adults. Please help us reach our target of £1500 by 10th December!
The awsome people from Vodafone’s ‘Find Live Guy‘ campaign have added another prize to the excellent pot [...]
Continue ReadingIf you’re in London (All Bar One, New Oxford St) for Mobile Geeks of London tonight be warned that I will be there collecting donations for our MIR Christmas Presents campaign supporting Childline and the UN Foundation. As a special treat I also have a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of champagne which we’ll [...]
Continue ReadingLATEST UPDATE: £600 donated so far - that’s enough for 60 one-to-one online counseling sessions for children distressed by abuse to ask for help for the first time. Please help us reach our target of £1500 by 10th December!
So far the ‘Christmas Presents’ campaign to raise money for Childline and the UN Foundation has been [...]
Continue ReadingThanks to all who’ve donated to the Mobile Industry Review ‘Christmas Presents’ campaign to-date. Particularly recent donors Mike Butler, Jamie Klinger, Kara Hoisington and Jo Jensen.
I’ve just come back to my desk to find £100 has been donated so-far today… That’s enough funding for an NSPCC ChildLine worker to answer calls for 5 hours, so [...]
After a short break earlier in the week the prize draw is back and now provides direct dual US and UK currency donations to the 2 good causes. Donate £5 / $10 (or more!) to get chances to win a great selection of prizes.
Please make a donation, help these excellent causes and enjoy some [...]
Virgin Mobile have just announced a fixed-price per day of 30p for pay-as-you-go (albeit post-paid) data and unlimited use.
For fun, let’s remind ourselves of the definition of ‘unlimited’:
un-lim-it-ed [adjective]
1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.
Wow… Infinite, unrestricted data… no conditions? For 30p a [...]
Here’s a quick preview of some of the disucssions and people at the Future of Mobile conference.
Future of Mobile - Preview from Ben Smith on Vimeo.
It’s been a hectic morning at Future of Mobile which kicked off today. You can follow much of the action on Twitter, but we’ve been grabbing interviews with everyone we can which we’ll put up over the next few days.
There’s an excellent range of speakers - Rich Miner is currently on stage presenting on Android [...]
Have you bought a ticket for the Mobile Industry Review Christmas Presents charity prize draw yet?
In the words of Dan Lane, “If not, why not?”
How about we add another excellent prize to the pot?
A netbook computer? Interested now?
Buy a ticket for £5 (Google checkout will handle other currencies too) for a chance to win [...]
Launched today Mobile Industry Review are among the lucky few to receive this new handset for a first hands-on. We have a first look.
Continue ReadingThanks to the people at Nokia Womworld, the best surprise of the day has just arrived - a pre-production E63 (the model we caught a glance of unofficially the other week) not even in final packing! I’ll be trying it out and reporting back.
Looking much like an E71, it has a 3G chip-set, an all-plastic [...]
Continue ReadingWe’ve stashed away some of our best prizes and will be giving them away in charity prize draw on the 10th December so it reaches you in time for Christmas!
Continue ReadingAs reported in the Sydney Morning Herald Kogan Technologies, a small Australian discount electronics manufacturer, has announced it will launch a $199 handset by December 15th. Details are a little thin on the ground, but owner Rusian Kogan told the Herald:
…[the] phone would look similar to the iPhone in that it would be a touch-screen [...]
Only applicable to UK-based readers: Not our normal type of post, but too good to miss in these credit crunching times. Online cash-back website TopCashback is offering 30% back on purchases from Nokia’s own online store until the 1st December, repeating an offer Nokia made earlier this year through a competing site. It may [...]
Continue ReadingPlay.com are already showing the ‘HTC G1′ (that’s the T-Mobile G1 to the rest of us) available SIM-free, available from mid-November. The details and pictures look right, with a prominent HTC logo on the side in lieu of the T-Mobile one, but this seems a bit soon after the launch to be officially sanctioned…
At £599.99 [...]
This is by no means exhaustive - the information had to be extracted from reluctant shop staff over the phone today, but for those looking for cheaper or shorter tariffs with the G1 than the £40 per month option advertised here’s the best bits of what you need to know as promised:
Combi 25 (150 mins [...]
If you look at T-Mobile’s website or their marketing material you’d think the G1 was only available as a free phone on a choice of two £40 per month (over 18 months) contracts.
However, it’s not… and if you ask in-store there’s a range of tariffs available including a number of 12 month ones. For instance, [...]
Continue ReadingUpdated: With thanks to commenter ‘BigJohn’ for his note about the use of a Jersey Telecom number range.
One of the services I have been most remiss in not writing about after my time in China was SIM4Travel. Now owned by the chaps over at Truphone we’ve been waiting for ‘a bit’ to see what exciting [...]
I parted company with £69.99 today to purchase Three’s 3G / WiFi router, the Huawei D100. I wish I hadn’t.
I’ve used it for an hour and decided it’s going back to the shop. I may just throw it through the door and hurl abuse, but I hope to have calmed down enough to go in [...]
Continue ReadingAnother event tonight - they’ve been coming thick and fast of late. To re-cap the usual points:
Dark room - check.
Loud music - check.
Zero access to product or service - check.
Underground / no signal - irrelevant… no product to test.
Yes… it must be a handset launch. And it’s a shame, because the excellent people at 3mobilebuzz [...]
Time to tap the big brains of the readership this morning…
I’m experiencing a major problem with dropped calls at home. Yesterday calls throughout the day dropped within a few minutes. I suspect it may be a Three issue (the odd ‘network busy’ message), but it’s coincided with me starting to use new handset and I’ve [...]
One of items I was sent for review in China that excited me most was the SPOT messenger - a unique device that receives a GPS signal to identify your position and then allows that to be re-broadcast via the SPOT satellite service with an ‘OK’, ‘non-emergency help’ or ‘emergency help’ message. It’s intended for [...]
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Constantine on 