As of Friday this week (30th July), the Apple iPhone 4 will be available on 3UK, both in stores and online at the 3Store. 3UK have already announced all their tariffs details (which we covered here).  It’s good to see 3UK finally being able to release this phone, and it will be interesting to see how successful it is (the iPhone 3GS is already proving a best seller since launch on the network).

Of course, another option is to buy the phone outright from Apple, and then put a 3UK microSIM on an iPhone tariff into the phone, and their One Plan option (£25 per month, 12 month contract, 2000 cross network minutes, 5000 texts, 5000 3UK-3UK minutes and 1GB Internet) looks a nice compromise between a lengthy contract and not getting enough to stretch the phone…

One of the more popular SIM Only packages that 3UK offer, SIM 15, is back available on special offer in the 3Store again.  This offers 300 cross network minutes, 3000 texts, 2000 3UK-3UK minutes, 1GB Internet data, free voicemail, Skype and Windows Live Messenger, and all for £15 per month with a 1 month rolling contract.

Of course, the One Plan is still available as another option; at £25 per month it offers 2000 cross network minutes, 5000 texts, 5000 3UK-3UK minutes, 1GB Internet data, and the free voicemail, Skype and WLM, and although at first glance it’s offering much more value, it’s also a 12 month contract, which shows how good value the SIM 15 option is if you don’t want to commit to a contract.

As we commented a couple of weeks back, it’s nice to see 3UK formally drop the use of the word “unlimited”, and also nice to see the SIM 15 offering the 1GB Internet data which is common to their higher tariffs, and well worthy of promotion compared to the other networks who are mainly aiming at 500MB as the data limit.

Although play.com announced that they were accepting pre-orders for the Nokia C6 Black variant (at £269.99), they have now also listed the Nokia C6 White as available to order.  Although the White variant is listed as “Temporarily out of stock”, it’s possible to purchase it now, and they will deliver it once it comes into stock (for completeness the Black variant seems to not be available for order at the moment).

Even better, they are selling the Nokia C6 White at only £249.99, a saving of £50 over the retail price of £299.99.  This buys you a SIM free phone with a great range of features, and if you compare that to the Nokia N97 Mini, which launched at a much higher price, this appears to be a bit of a bargain… If you are worried about the size of the device, especially as it has a QWERTY keyboard built in, it’s only 1.3mm thicker than the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic…

If fact, a quick search shows that Mobile Fun have the Nokia C6 Black at the same £249.99 (and available for pre-order as stock is expected later this week / early next week), so you should be able to get either colour for around £250…

If you are interested in the Nokia C6 White, then head off to the play.com website to place your order, or head to Mobile Fun for the Nokia C6 Black instead.

Although we’ve already covered a First Looks of the updated 3UK MiFi when it launched (see here), 3UK (and 3MobileBuzz) have kindly sent me a unit for review.  Although things like the dot matrix screen are very useful to see more detail (especially the signal strength and whether you are getting HSDPA), I have to say the single biggest benefit of the new unit is actually the fact that it only needs one button to turn it on and set it up; such a minor thing, but this one thing has made trialling the device so much easier.

I’ve yet to (need to) use the web administration interface, but just the knowledge it’s there and available (unlike the old unit) again makes it a better device. I’ll continue to trial the device, especially to look at battery life and how well it performs in a marginal signal area, but first impressions of using the device are that it’s well worthy of purchasing.

After a good few weeks of using an Android phone for the majority of tasks I perform (except receiving calls), how have I found the phone? Thanks to 3MobileBuzz, I’ve had an HTC Hero on loan, and although not the newest of phones, it’s still interesting to see whether it can handle all my needs.  In fact, just before the phone I wrote down the 30 most important tasks I currently use my Symbian for just to remind me the sorts of applications and tasks I needed the phone to perform.

So, a small caveat; as the phone came preconfigured with a SIM, Google Account and Spotify Premium account, I haven’t used the phone with my Google Acount (ie Mail, Calendar etc.) and I haven’t used it for receiving calls (as none of my friends know this phone’s number). Finally, as a loan phone, I have limited myself to *free* Android apps.

The Good – In nearly every task I’ve thrown at it (including a few extra ones), it’s excelled, and the phone has worked well.  Applications have been available to help with the task at hand.  Spotify (in both online and offline mode) proved to be a useful application (although quite why, when you have a track in the local cache, it continues to consume online data I don’t know).  In the majority of tasks I wanted to perform, there was a free app to help out (something that’s not true of Symbian, although it’s close), and in many cases, the best app appeared to be the free app too.  Apps were available to integrate into the phone; although it’s against the T&Cs to export phone numbers from the Facebook site, the Facebook widget was at least able to offer to dial numbers direct for you.  The phone was not too heavy, and easy to use one-handed as well as with two (and not suffering from the way I held the phone   Many options were configurable, or 3rd party tools are available to help achieve a little tweak here or there.

The Bad – Not every app though performed well; a few have crashed regularly, making it feel a little like when you beta test software; some of the apps that crashed had 1 or 2 updates during the time, yet still continued to crash.  Whether or not this is a result of the phone still being on Android v1.5 I don’t know, but this is at least being fixed (hopefully) this month.  Another thing missing (not that Symbian is any better, but the iPhone is) was that there was little consistency in the UI between the different programs from different authors, and little consistency between the widgets available too.  Also, although everyone berates Symbian for constantly asking you which connection you want to use, there were a few times when I actively wanted to use 3G over Wi-Fi (accessing 3UK’s Planet 3 website or knowing that I was too far from the Wi-Fi for it to work reliably), and this level of control is not available.

So, overall, I enjoyed the phone, and the Capacitive screen made me realise what an impact this has on the whole UI, and whether even the newest phones from Nokia which continue with Resistive screens can be as much as a success (of course, the new Nokia N8 is Capacitive).  Having said I enjoyed it, the third party apps crashing regularly did put me off a little.

The ugly? It may have been this particular phone, but it struggled to hold a connection to my Wi-Fi.  Whenever it lost it (even when in the same room), it brought home that the 3G radio signal was equally awful (The HTC Hero seems to have a reputation for having a poor 3G antenna design especially in poor signal areas), meaning I was often left without net access at home (although in many other areas where the 3G was stronger it performed well).

Would I buy an Android phone? Yes, but more likely the HTC Desire (also available from 3UK), which offers a later OS version and is more powerful, but I would like to see some improvements in the overall experience.

Thanks again to 3MobileBuzz for the loan of the phone.

3UK have announced this week that they now have two new Android smartphones that you can purchase on 3UK, and not just that, but you can get them on the new One Plan we covered here which offers fantastic value for money if you are a heavy mobile user.

Firstly, they are now offering the HTC Wildfire, which is a cut down version of the HTC Desire.  Although cut down might imply “cheap”, and it’s fair to say it doesn’t have the spec (or the price) of the HTC Desire, but it’s actually still a very capable Android device; in fact the only compliant I’ve heard about it is that moving forward over the next year or two, the screen maybe too small to allow major OS upgrades, as Google has now specified a minimum spec (including display resolution) for the future, and the HTC Wildfire falls a little short.

Having said that, it still rivals many other phones, and is still a better display than many other phones of last year! The 3.2″ screen is still a good size, and the 5 megapixel camera is still better than many, and it offers Android v2.1 with HTC’s Sense UI too.  All the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. are there too.  Also interestingly, although it’s available now in “Metal Mocha” colour, it will also be available on 3UK in Red from August, and the Red colour will be exclusive to 3UK.

If you aren’t an HTC fan, then there’s always the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro, which again, is a smaller smartphone (the “X10 Mini” part), but features quite a key differentiator; the “Pro” means it also features a QWERTY keyboard!  This is a slide out keyboard (in the same way as the Nokia E75, Nokia C6 or Nokia N900), and although it blatantly doesn’t feature the HTC Sense UI, it does feature some key Sony Ericsson UI customisations instead.  These include the ability to specify 4 corner navigation and 3 homescreens, and it also features Sony Ericsson’s Timescape, which brings together your Facebook, Twitter, email, text messages and calls into one place.  This sounds an interesting feature, although with many of these manufacturer applications, it may be a little limiting to the “serious” social networker, especially if it can’t be expanded to support other social networks.

The Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is available in Black from 3UK, and also in White, which will (like the Red HTC Wildfire) be a colour exclusive to 3UK.

If you want either of these phones on the new One Plan, they are available for £30 per month (24-month contract), and remember that comes with 2000 cross network minutes, 5000 3UK-3UK minutes, 5000 texts and 1GB data; if you want to buy them on PAYG, the HTC Wildfire is £199 and the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is £249, both very competitive prices in their own right!

I like the way that whilst historically 3UK were not able to arrange model exclusivity agreements, they are now sufficiently recognised by the manufacturers to at least able to negotiate colour exclusives, and you never know, maybe this time next year, we’ll see a worthy smartphone launch exclusively on 3UK…

Last week (on 1st July), new maximum roaming data rates were set by the EU.  Although you can still negotiate with your operator for a high limit, the default limit now is that the operator must cut off your data whilst roaming when you reach €50 (excluding VAT) to prevent the “Bill Shock” of going well beyond this limit.  In fact, your operator must also alert you when you reach 80% of the limit.

Alongside this, roaming rates have fallen, now with a maximum of 68p per MB (For EURO 1 zone), and calls must cost less than 33 pence per minute (excluding VAT, for the same zone), and receiving a call 13 pence per minute (excluding VAT, for the same zone). Interestingly, receiving a voicemail message must now be free (although listening to the message will still be charge); the interesting point being that some networks used to class this as your handset receiving a call, and you then making a call back to the UK, granting them the ability to charge a massive amount for the call despite the fact the call actually never left the UK.

This is a good thing, although it is still not enough; the EU has stated it expects the difference between roaming and home-country call cost to approach zero by 2015, although of course whether the networks achieve this by increasing their home-country call costs (easily done by increasing the out of bundle call costs which wouldn’t actually impact many people).

Last week Nokia released 3 key new firmwares.  Firstly, the Nokia E71 (and I suspect the Nokia E66 and Nokia E63, as they seem to share a common base and seem to get updates at the same time) was updated to v500, although at the time of writing, this was not yet available for either the generic EURO1 codes nor the operator branded versions in the UK, but hopefully it will become available over the coming weeks.

v500 contains the following updates:

• Maps v3.03 Lite which has Free Navigation support
• Music Player upgrade
• Quick Office v6.2 which has Office 2007 support
• Ovi Store upgraded to 1.6.0.18 and Download! Removed
• Ovi Suite included in Memory card
• Functionality improvements in E-mail configuration
• Qwerty keypad improvements
• Emergency call termination with RSK key corrected
• Corrected Bluetooth link drop when an outgoing call is made in a carkit
• Corrected localization issues in world clock
• Fix provided for selecting desired mailbox when multiple mailboxes are configured

Probably more important is the Nokia N97 firmware update to v22, and the Nokia N97 Mini firmware update to v12.  Given the Nokia N97 is always accused of not having enough memory and space on the internal C: drive, then having to install Ovi Maps (over 10MB) to that area is always a burden. Well, this new firmware at least includes v3.03 Ovi Maps within the firmware, removing the need to have that additional 10MB application install (although we note that v3.04 is now out with the added cell ID and Wi-Fi based positioning, so without using a third party app such as Maps Booster, there is still, ironically, a need to install Ovi Maps in addition to the version in firmware for some of us).

The other new features include:

• Ovi Maps v3.03 with free Navigation built-in
• Nokia Messaging stub built-in
• Default screen brightness raised to 75%
• Default theme now the jet black ‘Nseries 2′, giving longer battery life than the previous ‘Nseries 3′
• RAM optimisations
• Miscellaneous bug fixes, including “Default Nokia tune is played as ringing tone for incoming calls instead of the one user has defined in Profile settings. Also sometimes device has stopped alerting for incoming calls. Both issues are now fixed” which has plagued a good few users.

As with all firmwares, you will need to decide between the impact of applying a new firmware (and the need to wipe the phone and start again with all your contacts, bookmarks, application and settings) against the fixes provided by the new firmware.  As always, expect to wait longer (and potentially forever) for operator branded versions to arrive; for example a 3UK Nokia E71 is still on v300, having never released v400 (or v410) for their devices, so the chance of v500 being released is quite small (it’s not all 3UK; an Orange N97 will still be stuck on v10, as they have never released v11, v20 or v21, let alone the new v22).

Nokia E71 firmware information courtesy of Symbian World, Nokia N97 Firmware information courtesy of All About Symbian.

Although not exactly going to break the bank at £3, Maps Booster is a very useful program to provide your Symbian phone with a fast cell ID / Wi-Fi based positioning information, and unlike the latest Ovi Maps (which offers a similar solution), it’s available to all apps on the phone through the OS’ positioning features.

However, right now (in the UK at least), Maps Booster is on sale in the Ovi Store, and is only £1; well worth it in our opinion.

Whilst you are there in the Ovi Store, why not download the UK Gadgeteer app as well, which provides access to the news stories directly on your phone; just search for “UK Gadgeteer” within the store and you should find versions for both S60 3rd Edition as well as S60 5th Edition.

We first covered the Nokia Bots here, and now Nokia has added another Bot to the collection, with an impressive learning capability.  The Nokia Contacts Bot not just learns your most dialled contacts to present them on the homescreen, but it also learns your “work” and “home” locations, and it will take this intthe learning process for the contact, so this Nokia Bot will not just learn what you do, but it will learn where you do it, and use that location knowledge to good use.

This is a clever trick, and if it works well, provides a useful feature for the phones that support the homescreen widgets (currently the Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini only, although new phones are due with homescreen widget support soon).

This, and the other Nokia Bots, can be downloaded from the Nokia Beta Labs website.