You can’t make this up; T-Mobile is, according to an article in The Register, doubling the cost of 08xx calls because OfCom told them to! OfCom told the operator to ensure that they were charging 0870, 0871, 0844 and 0845 calls as “normal” national calls. As T-Mobile mainly bundles lots of minutes with each contract, it appears to have set the “normal” national rate to be their out of bundle rate for a landline call. However, they are not going to include these calls in their bundled minutes, so as a result, the actual cost of calling these numbers will now increase. T-Mobile have said “To make things clearer for our customers, we have aligned our 08 number charges with local and national calls to follow the latest Ofcom guidelines. These calls aren’t included as part of your allowance in any of our price plans.”

Flext customers will go from 10ppm to 20ppm, Just SIM or Solo customers will go from 10ppm to 30ppm, and Freetime customers will now pay 40pp (peak). These changes will take effect on 28th July.

With those sorts of rates, we suspect even more mobile users will be heading to saynoto0870.com (which actually covers most of the 08x ranges) to find alternative national landline numbers, instead of calling 08xx numbers, and then the call will come out of your allowance.

We’ll have to see how the other operators react, but here’s a thought to them: why not include them in the minutes, just like you used to 5 years ago, and whilst you’re there, how about making freephone calls (0800, 0808) calls actually free as well…?

The PSP v4.00 firmware is due to become available “soon”. Despite the impression of a major update based on the version number, but actually, it appears the main new feature is the ability to perform Google searches direct from the menu system, with a search history recall of the last 20 searches. You will also be able to speed up or slow down the playback speed of videos from the memory card. This is achieved by pressing the up or down directional buttons whilst playing a video.

We’ll give you more news when it’s actually available.

Nokia released the PC Phone Beta back in December, but have now withdrawn the product from the Beta website. They’ve said that they will not continue development as a standalone product, and have removed the software. They did also mention that although a standalone product would not be following, they would “incorporate the best parts to other Nokia offerings”.

In other news, the Nokia Support Discussion forums are now accessible from WidSets, via the Nokia Discussions WidSet widget. Although read only access right now, we’re hoping Nokia develop this further to allow full two way access to the site from WidSets.

Finally, the Nokia 5800 phone, ie the touchscreen S60 phone, has been spotted on a German advert (above, courtesy of Symbian World), so can’t be far away from launch. As the first of the new generation of Nokia touchscreen phones, it’ll be interesting to see how well it functions.

We’ve mentioned NavNGo’s iGO MyWay 8 software before, and now you can read a lot of information about it. PocketGPSWorld have published their review of the software, covering nearly every possible aspect of the software.

Head over to Pocket GPS World to read the review.

According to a short article over at SMS Text News, it appears the EC Commissioner, Viviane Reding, has given all European mobile phone network operators two weeks in which to reduce their roaming SMS and data charges, or face regulation. Of course, if history repeats itself, the operators will huff and puff, reduce their rates a little and regulation will still be introduced to ensure the rates fall further. As a consumer, the price drops can only be a good thing; as an occasional traveller, I normally leave my phone switched off whilst abroad to minimise the cost; if the operators get these price reductions down far enough, many people will be more inclined to use their phones abroad, which of course will increase revenue even further. 3 are already pioneers in this field by offering “3 like home” on their own foreign networks, but they don’t have networks everywhere people travel to.

Of course, whether or not the operators reduce their rates in time for this Summer is also up for debate, but at least we should see rates start to drop at some point.

If you are heading to Glastonbury and don’t have a solar charger (or of course, it rains), and you need to recharge your mobile, you may want to head to the Orange Recharge Pod. Inside are mini-lockers where you are able to lock your phone into whilst it recharges, so you don’t have to stand there. The tent has 500watt solar panels and a 500watt wind turbine, which Orange are hoping will allow them to recharge upto 100 devices an hour. No mention as to whether or not Orange will recharge your phone for free, but we applaud the idea, and hope that such recharge tents can become regular fixtures at a whole range of events.

Picture and some content courtesy of smartplanet.

berble.com have confirmed that there will be no laptop tethering for the iPhone, inline with our opinion last week. An O2 contact told them that connecting a laptop to the iPhone would be against the T&Cs for the unlimited data usage. They go on to mention that the contact also suggested the capability might not even be available within the iPhone to achieve this, even if it wasn’t against the T&Cs.

Read berble.com’s article here.

Anssi Vonjoki, Nokia’s VP of Mobile Markets, has stated that Nokia will launch a whole range of touchscreen phones in 2009, not just high end smartphones, but “from the very low segment to the highest one featuring this type of functionality.” We’re not sure that Nokia would want to redevelop both S60 and S40 to support touchscreen, so these phones are likely to bring S60 phones down to more consumers.

LG have had some success with their touchscreen phones, from the Viewty to the latest LG Secret, and of course there’s the iPhone.  Whether Nokia can achieve the consumer experience to the same level as Apple waits to be seen.

As predicted a week ago, Nokia have announced the E66 and E71 phones.

The Nokia E71 has a built in GPS, QWERTY keyboard, a 3.2megapixel camera, is 114mm x 57mm x10mm and weighs 126g.  It should be with us in Q2 or Q3, and features a new Calendar application, which we’re certainly interested to learn more about.

The Nokia E66 is the successor to the E65, and is a slider.  It features a 2.4″ screen, but packs HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, and also has a 3.2megapixel camera. Both phones support the latest Ovi sharing tools Nokia is promoting, ie Nokia Maps (both features A-GPS), as well as music and media sharing, features that might more traditionally have been only seen on the Nseries range of handsets.  As part of their Eseries Enterprise capabilities, both can encrypt both their internal memory and memory cards, both can access Microsoft Exchange Servers, and both feature the MobileVPN client.  Some security settings can be managed centrally as well, which will make them even more popular with large corporate customers.

Here’s a roundup of a few additional points and information that have been released since the initial launch earlier this week.

Firstly, there are rumours that O2 are going to allow the iPhone 3G to be tethered to a laptop via Bluetooth, ie you can get access to the internet from the laptop via the iPhone. This is unconfirmed, and some people have indicated that the early iPhone 2.0 firmwares do not contain this functionality, so unless Apple pull something out of the hat at the last minute, this may not happen. Of course, many people argue that the iPhone has enough capability that you won’t want or need to use your laptop at all!

On the more positive, Unlimited WiFi will be available on the iPhone 3G at 9,500 hotspots covering both The Cloud and BT’s OpenZone network, which will be added in on 11th July, the iPhone launch date.

There’s no front facing camera, despite what a few people are claiming, so no 3G video calling.  Whether this was something that was dropped from the development to meet the timescales, or whether it was a purposeful decision (after all, how many of us make regular video calls, compared to voice calls…?) we’ll never know, but for now, there’s no capability.

There’s some questions over navigation apps, with some people claiming that companies like TomTom will not be able to release SatNav software because of a clause which prevents real-time navigation apps.  We believe that this clause relates to the use of the SDK to access the Google Maps data, which, of course, TomTom will not be using.  As such, we doubt this clause will prevent a wide raft of SatNav applications becoming available.

All in all, we suspect there will be a lot more news about the iPhone between now and a month’s time.

Just a quick reminder, the £20 per month Mix & Match 1100 offer finishes this weekend for many phones, so if you’ve been thinking about getting this deal, now could be your last chance.  Head over to the 3 Store now to purchase it.

The offer will continue on a limited number of handsets for a little longer (remaining an online exclusive deal too), although we may see other offers in due course.  We’ve already heard about a likely drop in the additional monthly cost applied to the N95 8Gb, although if you are in the market for one of these phones, it will no longer be offered on the Mix & Match 1100 special offer after Sunday, so you may find buying it now results in a better value deal.

It’s taken the purchase of TeleAtlas by TomTom to start doing something we had all assumed they were doing before; sending them map corrections and updates. It appears that all the Map Share updates (streets missing, errors in the data, new POIs) were collected by TomTom, but never actually passed back to the map provider, TeleAtlas, for them to update the core mappign. This meant that for some changes, that change was lost when a new map was released by TeleAtlas, and would potentially have never been updated by TeleAtlas as they simply didn’t know about it.

However, since the purchase has now been fully agreed, TomTom have announced that all that historic data will now be passed across to TeleAtlas to help improve the map quality.

Although we support the provision of the data, we’re a little annoyed TomTom have kept it to themselves up to now.

Maplin are selling a GPS Tracker, which offers the ability to record your location as you travel around.  It can record at a variety of differing levels, providing either greater accuracy, or a greater time period the logs are recorded for.  Unlike other units, it doesn’t support external media cards, so you are limited by the internal memory, but for most people it will still easily cover a day or two of photography.  It uses the Sirf Star III chipset for greater accuracy, measures 47 x 29 x 12mm and weighs only 21g.  It’s claimed to be compatible with Google Maps and Google Earth, and is water resistant.  For £39.99, it might well be worth a look for many budding photographers…

Thanks to Mark at Automated Home for the heads up.

It looks like we missed this one last week; whilst at Computex, Asus also launched a USB handwriting touchpad, which can recognise Chinese and English characters, numbers, and symbols.  It connects via USB, and is designed for the Asus Eee PCs, matching the more common white colour scheme.

Story courtesy of AVING.net, picture courtesy of linitx.com.

This little device was spotted at Computex, it’s an iPhone / iPod Touch / iPod mini projector that can project a picture that’s 15 to 27″ across, so the size of a typical TV.  It has an embedded stereo speaker system, and support a full 16.7 million colours via a 640*480 resolution projector.  Focus is manual though.  No word on UK availability though at this stage…

After Nokia extended their map coverage into 9 new countries, NavNGo have announced they are about to release maps for Argentina, Brasil and Colombia.  In combination with their 3D mapping, they are trying very hard to compete with the established players, and if they can get their iPhone application we covered before released soon, they could become even more popular.

In contrast, within hours of Apple’s iPhone 3G launch yesterday, TomTom confirmed that they have their SatNav software working on the iPhone 3G, and plan to release it soon (although they have yet to announce an actual date).

Finally, here’s an interesting picture…

This appears to be (if it’s not fake) an iPhone running Navigon’s software, so it looks likely that all the major players are planning on iPhone solutions this year.

Navigon picture courtesy of Navigadget.

Canon have released a new digital SLR, the EOS 1000D. The specification includes:

• 10.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor
• EOS Integrated Cleaning System
• 7-point wide-area AF system with f/5.6 cross-type centre point
• Up to 3 frames per second
• 2.5” LCD with Live View shooting
• DIGIC III image processor
• Compatible with SD and SDHC memory cards
• Compact and lightweight body
• Digital Photo Professional RAW processing software
• Fully compatible with all Canon EF and EF-S lenses and EX-series Speedlites

The camera can shoot upto 3fps (JPEG), but more importantly, it can continue at that rate until the memory card is full; no stopping after the buffer is full for the 1000D. The move to SD cards will be welcomed by many, as they are becoming much more common (and smaller than Canon’s previous choice of CF cards), however, existing Canon digital users may be a little upset by Canon’s continued move away from CF cards.

This camera should be available in July 2008 in the UK.

No, it’s not another update to the software, this time it’s the maps; Nokia have extended their coverage and have now got maps available for Venezuela, Jordan, Phillipines, South Korea, Vietnam, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland. These new maps are only available to the new Nokia Maps 2.0 client, so if you are still using the elder client, you won’t be able to access these maps.

Google have announced that they have now made a customised version of the Picasa Web Albums for Nokia S60 devices. As well as that, Google have translated it into 36 languages as well.

Simply head to picasaweb.google.com to access the new version.

Not wanting Apple to get all the attention yesterday, some leaked pictures of a new Nokia phone were leaked out. The phone, believed to be the N85 (the prototype is labelled N00, as many Nokia prototypes have been in the past), features dual LED flash and a lens cover (a feature missing from some other high spec Nokia phones). As with many other high spec Nokia smartphones, it features GPS, a 5 megapixel camera, and geotagging.

More information over the coming weeks and months as and when the details are released.