The Orange UK handset range is just terrible, isn’t it? Have you taken a look recently. I only just formally recognised this today after talking with reader Amy. She emailed earlier to say she’s due an upgrade on Orange and is thinking about the Nokia 6500. What did I reckon, she asked.

I had a browse through the available selection. Paltry. There’s a Nokia N95 — the first version, not the 8GB one. Great handset but it’s YEARS old. They’re even trying to flog a Nokia N73. Again, still a good phone — but it was top of the range back in two-thousand-and-SIX!

Hugely disappointing. No E-Series. Boring choice of N-Series. Any suggestions for Amy? I was reduced to confirming her 6500 choice. And I reckoned she should negotiate-like-hell with Orange on her price plan.

I popped into the Orange shop on Oxford Street today.  I thought it was about time I had an Orange connection.  I’ve got handsets and price plans on all other UK networks and, well, it’s all about putting your money where your mouth is.

I walked in and had a browse at the rather small selection of pay-monthly mobiles.  The pay-as-you-go section was double the size!

My attention was drawn to the latest HTC Touch that comes complete with a keyboard.  I wouldn’t have minded that.  But let’s talk data.  A sales person came over to me after giving me about a minute’s worth of browsing time.  Good strategy.  He gave me enough time to have a poke about, then asked if I needed help.

I thought I’d get stuck in.

“Talk to me about your data charges?” I asked. The chap looked a bit put out.

“Do you mean browsing?”

“Ah, no,” I said, “I mean pure data.  The last time I was in an Orange shop it was 4 quid a meg… what’s it now?”

“Oh, er, a pound (a quid) per meg,”  he replied, quickly.  Good.  Good knowledge.

“Aye but do you have an unlimited style 1g service plan?”

“On our data cards it’s 3GB per month,” he replied.

“But on your handsets, on a standard service plan?”

“A pound a meg.”

Hmm.

“Are you sure? You don’t do some sort of 7 pounds a month, 100 meg or 1,000 meg offer?”

Insert look of panic on the salesman’s face.

“Errrrr,” he said, “You’ll er… no,”  [He was about to get a brochure], “No, it’s not in the brochure. You’ll need to phone.”

“Phone?”  I prompted.

“Yeah, er, phone up.  Phone up and ask.  They’ll know.”

Right.

Can’t be bothered.   Next.

Check out this story from Mike Smith — he’s added it as a comment to this post from last April: SMS Text News » Archives » Unlimited data on Orange UK for £8 a month. No, I’m not kidding!

Unbelievable!!! I was on a £4.00 per month unlimited GPRS wap package with Orange for 4 years. When I say unlimited, it was subject to a fair usage policy of 10mbs per month. So much for unlimited!!! I was actually using 400-500mbs per month, on a regular basis, and no one said a word.
I then upgraded to a Nokia N95, not one of my better decisions, but I needed access to Orange internet, not wap. I was offered a £5.00 per month unlimited off peak bundle, or an anytime 30mb bundle for £8.00 per month. 30mbs, I would have got through that in an hour!!! I reluctantly opted for the off peak package, at least I wouldn’t need to re-mortgage the house at the end of the month!

Just by chance I rang customer services (now there’s a breach of the trades description act) to see if any new data plans had become available that would be more suitable. To my surprise, and great delight, I was offered anytime unlimited usage for £8.00 per month. Now that’s a bargain in anyones book, so I grabbed it straight away.

Knowing Orange of old, they may suddenly realise just how generous that is and withdraw it, just like they did with my £4.00 wap package. The bottom line is, they can withdraw the offer, but if you are already on the plan, they can’t take you off of it. My advice would be to grab it while it’s available, and if you change your service plan, don’t be talked out of giving it up. Make it plain you keep want to keep the data bundle no matter what. £8.00 per month unlimited internet usage is a very good deal indeed, now if only it was possible to get a connection………………………………:-))

Are you on Orange? What’s your story with mobile data? I always thought Orange was the black sheep of the UK operators with a ridiculous set of data rates.

More news on the convergence front - Cable and Wireless has signed a deal with Orange to provide national roaming services to its fixed mobile convergence (FMC) customers. The five year deal will let customers use Orange’s mobile network when they’re outside the office and then switch back to using IP over a Cable and Wireless network once they’re inside their workplace.

Orange has its own FMC service, called Unik, but the pair shouldn’t clash as C&W will be targeting multinationals rather than consumers with its offering. I’ll be watching this one closely - this will pit C&W against BT in FMC services. BT’s own service, Fusion, is in for a bit of a refit at the moment, and should be due out in a more data-centric incarnation some time soon.

Orange has decided to get on the “ultramobile PC” bandwagon, and is set to carry the HTC Shift from next month. The Shift is a cross between a normal mobile and a Lilliputian PC, with a flip top, 7 inch screen, full slideout QWERTY keyboard and a stripped down version of Windows Vista running alongside Microsoft Windows Mobile.

The device, which Orange has created execrable category of “mob top” for, also sports HSDPA and wi-fi connectivity. For the paranoid, there’s also a fingerprint reader to protect those precious contacts.

While it’s a little on the chunky side compared to most smartphones - the Shift is a bit too big slip into your pocket - HTC still makes a nod towards phone-dom with SMS functionality. The Shift is a gorgeous looking gadget, and the reviews have been stellar so far, but I can’t help thinking it would have been nice to see some voice action as well, so users don’t need to carry a normal voice centric mobile around too.

While there’s always VoIP, the Shift’s pricing starts at £999 on top of the data tariff. For that sort of price, I’d want the Shift to bring me tea in the morning too.

Bebo, the other MySpace/Facebook, is now accessible for a fixed fee of £3 per month. Meh. Whatever. Next.

It’s a little uninspiring for the mobile industry, I feel, if you spend a ton of effort educating people that they can pay £3 to access Bebo on their mobile… then you nail them for a few pounds a meg on every other mobile site they visit. Bill shock will just put more and more people off. Before you know it, you’ve got an MMS on your hands. (That is, you kill the introduction of a service particularly as a result of stupid pricing).

Mobile Choice has the details….

Link: Mobile Choice Blog: Orange offers Bebo Mobile for £3 a month

For £3 a month, Orange customers can sign up to Bebo Extra, which gives them unlimited access to Bebo’s mobile internet site without paying any data charges. They’ll be able to send comments via SMS, receive notifications back in return, and also send Bebo Mails by text.

Check out Orange’s Bebo profile.

In a unique collaboration between Orange World and the 5th Estate mobile portal, Nigel Slater fans will now be able to interact with his new book Eating for England whilst on the move.

The site is being promoted across Orange’s Orange World portal throughout October and is designed to specifically target mobile users that fit Nigel Slater’s target audience. It will also be tagged on the forthcoming Underground poster campaign for Eating for England.

By texting NIGEL to 80880, mobile users will be able to access extracts from the book, recipes, wallpapers, mobcasts and an exclusive interview with Nigel. They will be given the opportunity to click through to amazon.co.uk and buy the book directly from their mobile as well as entering a competition to win a free copy.

“Everyone talks about innovation the whole time, but few people actually get on with it and dip their toe in the water. Nigel’s brilliant new book provides us with the perfect opportunity to launch this exciting new collaboration” John Bond, MD Press Books, HarperCollins Publishers

Written in Nigel Slater’s trademark style, Eating for England is an entertaining, detailed and somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation of the British and their food, their cooking, their eating, how they behave in restaurants and their idiosyncratic attitude towards the fine art of dining. It is a celebration of the glory, humour, eccentricities and embarrassments that are The British at Table.

This new innovation is a first for HarperCollins Publishers and we are very excited to have this recognised brand working in conjunction with one of our major authors.

Hot on the heels of their recent deal with Orange for the provision of it’s targeting and advertising solution to power the operator’s My Personal Offers System, Irish company Xiam Technologies have just announced a deal with Vodafone Ireland.

Vodafone Ireland is using MPOS technology to serve interactive third party advertisements on their newly revamped Mobile Internet portal. “We see mobile advertising as a significant opportunity to augment revenues whilst improving the portal offering” says Chris Handley, Head of Mobile Internet and Content at Vodafone Ireland. “Xiam’s proven commercial and technical know-how will bring the best to the channel for both
advertisers and subscribers.”

The two deals come as a ringing endorsement of Xiam’s leadership position in the market. As Colm Healy CEO at Xiam explains, “The mobile phone is a uniquely personal device and mobile marketing must be personalized. As a high reach, low noise channel the mobile experience must deliver individual relevance if it’s to succeed. Xiam’s solutions focus on treating each customer as an individual, dramatically improving both the users experience and the uptake of operator services”.

Link: Deutsche Telekom buys Orange Netherlands for €1.3 billion - International Herald Tribune

As reported here a couple of weeks ago, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom have concluded a deal to buy the Dutch operations and network of Orange for €1.3 billion (about $1.8 billion, or £900m).

According to reports, Deutsche Telekom expects the takeover to result in savings of about €1 billion over the next few years - mainly down to network integration and reduced marketing expenses. The European Commission say that the merger will make T-Mobile the second larged operator in terms of subscribers and third largest in terms of revenue in the Dutch market.

Orange has signed an agreement with Xiam Technologies, for the provision of its My Personal Offers System (MPOS) which will give customers real-time recommendations across the Orange World Portal.  MPOS will help Orange World customers to discover personalised content that is relevant to their own specific interests.MPOS will ensure Orange customers discover and consume a broad range of content and services that are both relevant and meaningful based on their unique profiles. For example a football fan could expect to be offered ‘FIFA 2007’ game and a ‘Chelsea’ wallpaper based on the club they follow, then be presented more subtle, unexpected recommendations based on usage patterns identified by MPOS and filtered according to individual user profiles. MPOS can recommend content across different categories and suggest content that the customer may not otherwise find.

Jim Small, Portal Relevance Manager at Orange UK said, “It is the first time our customers will be able to access a diverse range of content services through a tailored recommendations page on Orange World that is based on the intelligence we have gathered from each user’s previous visits. For us it is about enhancing and personalising the customer experience, whilst increasing customer loyalty and content revenues.  We believe that Xiam’s MPOS technology will help us do this”.

Colm Healy, CEO of Xiam explains, “Xiam’s MPOS will help Orange Customers to find the content that interests them. It has been developed to address the need to treat each individual subscriber on a one-to–one basis and this is central to the recommendations solution which will present individually customised content suggestions for each customer coming to the Orange portal. Based on the premise that in the fast moving world of mobile content, with a small densely loaded interface, helping the customer to get to the right content in an easy and efficient way is vital in providing a meaningful portal experience.”

Xiam’s system will provide a number of different recommendation mechanics on the Orange Portal enabling customers to access content across all content silos, in their own personal recommendations page, irrespective of their location on the portal. This aids content discovery and navigation by linking together different but related content formats. For example a user could access ringtones, games and wall papers from the same location.

Link: Apple turns to Orange in France | The Register

In another of those ‘oh what a surprise’ announcements, it’s been revealed that Orange will be marketing the iPhone in France.

The announcement was made by France Telecom (Orange’s parent company) Chief Exec Didier Lombard during a conference in Hanoi.

No details on pricing as yet, and the Orange France website is surprisingly lacking in information - a quick search revealed “0 réponse pour iphone”. It won’t be a surprise if the price is the same as the T-Mobile/Germany deal of €399.

What’s curious is all the announcements so far have involved the current or former wireless divisions of incumbent operators - France Telecom (Orange), Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BT (O2) and AT&T (er, AT&T). Working on this theory, should we expect Vodafone (ex Telecom Eireann) for Ireland, O2 (Telefonica) for Spain and KPN in the Netherlands? Or is it just coincidental?

Link: EU Clears T-Mobile Netherlands To Buy Orange Netherlands

.. in Holland at least. Deep breaths now, especially if you read the headline on an RSS reader

 The European Commission Monday cleared Dutch mobile phone operator T-Mobile Netherlands Holding to aquire Orange Netherlands.

The commission found that the proposed merger would “not threaten competition on the mobile retail market,” as other operators such as KPN and Vodafone Group, as well as mobile virtual network operators, would continue to compete with the new company.

Following the merger, T-Mobile will become the second-largest operator in terms of subscribers and the third-largest operator in terms of revenue. KPN remains the market leader in both revenues and subscribers, whereas the new entity will be of a similar strength to Vodafone, the commission said.

Link: Lampard takes aim and shoots - for his own TV channel | Broadcast | MediaGuardian.co.uk

To the adoring Chelsea faithful he is super Frank. To rival fans he is fat Frank or worse. From yesterday, he was TV Frank, the first footballer to launch his own dedicated mobile television channel.England international and Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard said the channel, featuring fly on the wall material shot by him on his mobile phone, would give viewers a glimpse of his life behind the headlines.

“One of the reasons I do this kind of thing, and I am embarrassed to put a camera in my own face, I won’t lie about that, is to show we’re average people at home with our families doing ordinary things.

I read about this last night in the London Paper.

I really, really hope it’s not a piece of crap.

You could do a brilliant job of delivering a mobile TV style service geared around a professional player such as Frank. However I suspect (and I’ll keep an open mind ’til I find out) that it’ll be one of those services where they’ve filmed 4 videos and, well, that’s yer lot. No more. They’ll then fan it out as much as possible to make it look longer than it is, you know, lots of repeat shots and so on. That’s not a TV channel. At least, not by my understanding. You want new content, new updates every day, or at least 3 times a week. You want immediate after-match commentary from him and weekly interviews.

Ah well. I really hope they do it properly. Looks like it’s for Orange subscribers to enjoy.

News in from interactive mobile specialists Dialogue. They’ve just appointed ex-Orange UK Head of Support Operations Steve Lovell to the team as Head of Technical Servies.

Steve, 35, from Leeds, was responsible for multimedia technical operations and services. More recently, at BT his role as Service Operations Centre Manager, involved overseeing technical support teams responsible for all live NHS
services provided by BT.

“I am really looking forward to working with a team of people that already have an excellent reputation in the mobile arena,” said Steve. “One of my main objectives is to further develop Dialogue’s technical infrastructure and procedures, in order to continue to improve platform and service reliability. My other main focus is to provide the best possible customer service to new and existing customers as well as meeting and forming good relationships with Dialogue customers.”

Hugh Spear, Dialogue’s Managing Director is excited to have Steve on board: “We are all very excited about Steve joining our management team and he will be an integral part of helping drive the business forward. Steve’s technical knowledge and expertise will help continue to improve Dialogue’s reliable platform, and ensure we continue to provide a great service to our customers.”

Of course you shouldn’t confuse this Steve Lovell with the Aberdeen football striker, who’s career has included stints at Bournemouth, Exeter City, Sheffield United, QPR, Portsmouth and Dundee. Although the Steve Lovell from our industry achieved 100% uptime of his remit during his time at Orange, it’s unknown whether he also scored 34 goals in 84 appearances like the footie Steve did at Dundee.

UK mobile operators T-Mobile, 3 and Vodafone have confirmed plans to begin rolling out the High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) standard in the UK by the end of the year.

The technology - which uses packet scheduling - takes the performance enhancements found in the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) standard and brings them to the upload side of a data connection. The net effect is a balancing of the theoretical maximum upload and download speeds.

Vodafone have already launched the technology in Germany, and will begin rolling out their UK service later this year. Rivals T-Mobile and 3 will also be aiming to start upgrading their network by the end of the year, with Orange planning to introduce the HSUPA service in 2008.

The only UK operator not figuring in these plans is O2 - who have at present not announced plans for HSPA enhancements to their network.

(Thanks to SMS Text News reader Mike for providing additional information to correct this article)

Mobile music social networking service phling! is getting it’s European debut thanks to a deal with Edipresse Switzerland.

The deal will enable Swiss customers of Orange, Sunrise and Swisscom Mobile to use their mobile phones to browse, listen and share music and to discover new music from Edipresse’s Internet-based radio stations, independent artists and labels, and from other users in the phling! community.

The phling! service will be promoted through Edipresse’s print and web sites properties in the run up to and during the 41st Montreux Jazz Festival taking place 6th-21st July in Switzerland and will be available to all Orange, Sunrise and Swisscom Mobile customers. Consumers in Switzerland who wish to subscribe to the service simply need to text “EDI Music” to 979.

Adrian Bisaz, European VP of Sales and Business Development for Oxy Systems said: “This is a significant milestone for mobile music lovers who can now interact with other community members by viewing their music libraries, seeing what others are listening to, exchanging music opinions and ratings, discover new artists and even share music with a group of friends. This partnership with Edipresse media along with the tie-ins with the three leading mobile operators and coinciding with what is arguably the most respected European music festival underscores our determination to bring phling! to the masses of music lovers across Europe.”

Link: Tech.co.uk | News | Hacked iPhone reveals T-Mobile, Vodafone info

Just when you thought it was all making sense..

As we reported yesterday, hackers have cracked the Apple iPhone activation process. Its firmware was also leaked over the weekend, revealing the Apple iPhone wide open, laid bare.

Four very interesting files were found within in the Apple iPhone system, says Hackintosh . They are:

Default_CARRIER_ATT.png
Default_CARRIER_CINGULAR.png
Default_CARRIER_TMOBILE.png
Default_CARRIER_VODAFONE.png

Rumours are that Apple are chosing carrier partners based on their market share in a particular country. So O2 get the UK, T-Mobile have Germany, which just leaves Vodafone. Ireland anyone? Also there’s another rumour doing the rounds that France Telecom/Orange are going to get the gig in France.

Link: Mobile ticketing on the buses - vnunet.com

Bus company Go North East have announced plans to introduce a mobile ticketing service this Autumn.

The service, supplied by IT company Atos Origin, will be a prepaid service - with funds being added via a website. Before getting on the bus, the end user texts a supplied code and gets a barcode ticket in return. When they get on the bus, they just have to show the barcode - or scan it on a special modified ticket machine.

Honest opinion on this? As a long time user of London’s Oyster contactless ticketing system, it’s a lot less hassle than what’s been proposed here. I can top-up my Oyster account in quite a few stores locally, online, or at a tube station. No fiddling around texting and waiting for a barcode to come back just to go 5 minutes down the road. Besides, with Nokia, O2 and Orange already in talks with Transport for London over combining the technology with mobile handsets, I wonder how much mileage is in this?

Link: News | Orange to offer targeted SMS ads - NMA

New Media Age report that Orange is to bring SMS marketing to their directory enquiry service. According to the article, after a consumer calls the service on 118 000, they will receive a text message with the information requested, along with a relevent advert.

Orange have teamed up with service provider PhoneSpots, who’ll be offering click-to-call, pay-per-click, impression-based and subscriptions to potential advertisers.

Link: Orange and Littlewoods breach Data Protection Act, says ICO | OUT-LAW.COM (Via The Register)

The UK Information Commisioner’s Office have today ruled that Orange breached the Data Protection Act’s security rules.

The case followed a complaint about the way Orange processed personal information - in particular they were allowing new staff to share usernames and passwords for the company’s IT systems. Following an investigation, the ICO found that Orange was not keeping it’s customers personal information secure.

In addition to a general promise to comply, Orange’s undertaking states: “The sharing of user names and passwords by Customer Service Representatives, to access computer systems, shall not be allowed under any circumstances.”

Failure to meet the conditions of the undertaking is likely to lead to further enforcement action by the ICO and could result in prosecution by the Office.

I used to get phone calls from companies claiming to be Orange themselves, or a ‘partner’, trying to get me to extend my contract, change tariff, come back to Orange after porting, etc etc. Most of the time their info was so out of date it was hilarious. However, how did they get that information in the first place?

Link: Orange simplifies data by capping at 30MB | The Register

Orange has launched its unmetered-mobile-data tariff for the UK - but unexpectedly capped it at 30MB a month. The tariff is available to pre-paid as well as contract customers, and costs a fiver for evening and weekend use, or £8 for anytime unmetered data access. Only it’s not as unmetered as one might hope.

When will the madness stop? The redefining of the word ‘unlimited’ started with broadband providers, and seems to have now spread to the world of mobile. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s watchdog that supposedly stops false claims in ads, is quite happy to sit back and let this happen.

Watch this space, as rumours are abound the industry is about to change the definition of the word ‘free’ to mean something that costs money. It’s nothing that an asterisk and a bit of small print can’t handle..

Link: Ding Dong! Avon Calling

The cosmetics company, Avon is reported to be considering launching an MVNO in Poland within the next few weeks. PMR Business newspaper said that the network, under the myAvon name, will use the infrastructure of PTK Centertel, the operator of the Orange mobile network. It will address its offer chiefly to clients and consultants who sell Avon products.

Expand the concept a little further and you’ve got the possibility of a mobile network selling door to door. MVNOs have traditionally relied on their market brand and awareness to sell a service, but it’s usually limited to their retail outlets (eg Virgin, Tesco, Marks & Spencers). A door to door service with local agents would remove the barrier of the consumer having to visit the retailer, and could find a niche in the market.

Courtesy of this week’s edition of celeb gossip email Popbitch ..

Orange are preparing a novel Glastonbury competition. They have a bull fitted with GPS in a field in Cornwall, which is divided into squares. Guess which square the bull is in at mid-day each day for two weeks before the festival and you could win tickets. Except, we hear from Cornish friends, that the location of the bull has got out, and there are plans afoot to “interfere” with the beast…

Heh dear me. Bet you thought from the headline this’d be about something else eh?

Link: The Sun Online - News: The only signal in the village

We’ve probably all done silly things in our time to improve reception during a mobile call - sticking my head out the window springs to mind for me. However, I think this one takes the biscuit ever so slightly!

LOCALS have been queuing to use a bench on their village green . . . because it is the only place they can make a mobile phone call.

Residents discovered that by standing on the seat they can get a signal. Now the parish council in East Prawle, Devon, is building a 2ft podium for them to use.

The nearest Orange cell is apparently two miles away, so why not just put in a microcell? According to Parish Councillor Julian Brazil: ‘You don’t get a mobile telephone signal in East Prawle and people don’t want a phone mast. People have been complaining the bench is getting broken so it has been decided to get a mounting block.’

So there you go. Another wonderful example of good old English eccentricity

Link: Truphone Blog - Internet telephony on Nokia mobile phones

James Tagg, Truphone’s founder today appeared on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours consumer affairs programme to discuss the controversy caused by some operators disabling internet telephony on the Nokia N95

Wicked. You can have a listen to the interview here.