iPhone users are still reeling over the decision by National Rail to be sticklers over the licensing rules for a (now no longer available) free iPhone app for accessing live train timetables, and then releasing their own paid-for app.  However, Symbian users are more used to simply accessing the free National Rail WAP site for the same information.

However, one Symbian user has created a S60 5th Edition WRT (Web RunTime) widget (and has plans for a S60 3rd Edition version too) to access the rail timetable.  Now, this doesn’t yet include live data, but at least does allow you to see what trains should be running, and how long journeys will take.  Best of all, it’s free!

Of course, there are other options; beyond the National Rail WAP site already mentioned, there is also traintimes.org.uk, which is mobile-friendly, and can provide similar information to this WRT widget.

This story and picture are courtesy of Daily Mobile, from where you can also get access to the widget.

ALK Technology’s CoPilot SatNav solution is now available for Android devices, costing £25.99 for just UK coverage, or £59.99 for pan-European licensing.  ALK have stated this is compatible with the T-Mobile G1, Vodafone’s HTC Magic, and even the new HTC Hero.

It features a whole range of functions that you would expect from a product like this, including:

• Visual lane assistance – To help drivers at busy junctions and intersections
• Speed limit warnings – Customisable to provide an audio and visual reminder when driving
• Flickable scrolling menus for easy access to all CoPilot settings

New live services for Android users of CoPilot include:

• CoPilot® LiveLink™ – a free to use location sharing service that allows you to view the current whereabouts of CoPilot friends on your device and share your location with friends and family online
• Live Weather –  Displays a five day forecast based on your current location, on route or any chosen destination

In common with other CoPilot Live versions, the Android software contains a choice of 2D/3D and Driver Safety mode mapping as well as full, voice guided, turn by turn instructions. A safety camera database with free upgrades is also available.

The only information missing is what the £25.99 buys you; is that indefinite use of those maps, but with the need to pay again to upgrade the maps each time, does it include software updates, but generally, this seems a good deal for those who want or need to add SatNav to their Android device.

More details direct from ALK here, and thanks to Pocket GPS World for highlighting the news to us.

We first covered the Huawei D100 Router as sold by 3UK earlier this year, but we now see it’s been removed from the 3Store (most likely due to 3UK concentrating on the ZTE USB Modem right now, which is not compatible with the Huawei).  Well, courtesy of Hot UK Deals, we’ve been informed that Carphone Warehouse are currently selling their stock of the 3 branded device at half price, which is £34.25.  That’s a very good price for the device, although it is limited to only working with 3UK, and, as already stated, needs a Huawei 3UK USB Modem to work.  However, once you have that, it will offer you the ability to share your 3UK Mobile Broadband connection with upto 4 other devices via Wi-Fi as long as you have access to a power socket.

Given that this does have these limitations, what are the options for others?  Well, the Solwise 3G Router may help out; although it’s designed as an ADSL router, it has a 3G failback capability (ie when the ADSL line is down, it will use a 3G USB Modem instead).  Now, because this isn’t being sold by any particular network, it’s not limited to one mobile network, and also supports a whole range of USB Modems, including a number of ZTE models as well.  It can even support some mobile phones being connected via USB if you have one lying around spare.

As the Solwise has both an ethernet port and Wi-Fi capability, it can act as a nice portable connection sharing device too. The Solwise is a little more expensive at £60 though (although for another few pounds you can get a Euro plug adaptor for the same device given you the ability to use it across Europe; although use a local SIM or be prepared for some horrendous data roaming charges!).

Both these devices still have one problem; the USB Mobile Broadband Dongle has to be physically located close to the main unit (and hence a power socket); if this location does not have the best 3G signal, then you should head over to Mobile Fun, who sell external aerials and signal boosters for the majority of USB Modems on the market (and have some generic ones for those without external antenna sockets).  Finally, it’s not clear if Carphone Warehouse are selilng the Black or White variant (or if you get a choice when ordering online), so it may be prudent to go to your local store if you are looking for a particular colour.

We should say that T-Mobile have a similar unit, but it’s only available with a new Mobile Broadband contract, so if you already have a device, there’s no wasy way of purchasing one…

Last week Garmin announced two new touchscreen devices; the Garmin Dakota 10 and Garmin Dakota 20.  Mapomatic has the full details here, but to summarise some of their information:

They are smaller than the iconic Garmin eTrex units, and feature a 2.6″ touchscreen (compared to the 3″ screen on the Oregon models).  They will not come with built in mapping in the UK, but maps can be added (including the free Mapomatic UK OSM Map for Garmin).  The Dakota has 850 MB of internal memory, which can store up to 1,000 waypoints, 50 routes, 2,000 geocaches and an active tracklog of up to 10,000 points and 200 saved tracks.

The Garmin Dakota 20 adds even more features, including a 3-axis compass, barometric altimeter, a microSD card slot for increased mapping and memory storage, and wireless unit-to-unit connectivity for sharing your waypoints, tracks, routes and geocaches wirelessly with compatible Dakota, Oregon, Colorado and Foretrex devices. Dakota 20’s 3-axis, tilt-compensated electronic compass shows your heading even when you’re standing still, without needing to hold it level.

Head over to Mapomatic to read the whole article, and also their recent article on new firmwares for Garmin Colorado and Garmin Oregon models here.

If you have a Garmin Nuvi 7×5, 800, 8×5, Zumo 660, GPSMAP 620 or GPSMAP 640 then before you do anything (including powering on your device), head to Garmin’s WebUpdater and apply the mandatory GPS firmware update (it’s already available for the 7×5 range, and the others should follow with some speed).  These devices may try to repeatedly update the GPS firmware, causing the unit to shut down, fail to start up, or fail to acquire GPS signals (the most common occurence).

If your device is failing to startup, things are a bit more complicated, and you’ll need to talk to Garmin about the possibility of needing to return your unit to them for fixing.

Truphone have announced their low cost international calling solution is now available on 12 new handsets, which includes the Symbian S60 5th Edition models (both the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the Nokia N97), as well as a range of additional S60 3rd Edition handsets.

Not just that, but Truphone have now got their application into the Ovi Store for many of the supported phones too.

Some of the new phones aren’t yet able to work over Wi-Fi (but will work over 3G).  Adding these new phones to their existing iPhone, iPod Touch and Android support shows Truphone to be a valid option to consider irrespective of your choice of platform.

This little device is a femtocell.  Femtocells connect to power and your broadband connection, and provide you with access to the 3G phone network of one of the networks, in this case, Vodafone.

Whilst T-Mobile (who although have admitted they are working on a similar device, have stated they are not ready to announce any products yet) plan to use femtocells to help provide fill in coverage for their network, and hence want the devices to be used and usable by everyone, the Vodafone Access Gateway is a very private device; you’ll need to register which Vodafone phone numbers can use the device to help protect your personal investment in the device.

Yes, investment, for the device will not come free… £160 to buy one outright, or £5 per month as an addition to an existing contract (it is possible large spenders of £60 or more per month may be able to get one thrown into a new contract for free, but this is unconfirmed).  It can support up to 4 voice calls at the same time (although it will give “access to all of Vodafone’s sevices” there’s not a lot of technical data on whether data is supported, or how much broadband bandwidth is required to support those 4 concurrent calls).

Vodafone have announced a website for more information on the Vodafone Access Gateway, but at the time of writing, the webpage simply says “Coming Soon”.

We, can, however, tell you that it is due very soon; we should see the devices on sale next week (1st July), with the website providing more information going live between Monday and Wednesday next week.

3UK have reduced some of their PAYG prices to make them even more competitive…

• A PAYG Mobile Broadband Dongle is now £19.99 (although you may find you can get a cheaper one at the 3Dongle4Free website if there offer of a free dongle with just p&p to pay is still running)
• Taking the 1 month at a time contract, the dongle now just costs £9.99 upfront
• The Mobile Broadband Starter Kit loaded with 3GB of data is now £39.99

These are all offers worth considering if you are in the market for occasional use Mobile Broadband.  Also, don’t forget the 3 SIM Zero contract deal for your voice calls, or head to the 3Store and 3 will even send you a PAYG SIM for free if you want to benefit from their Skype Free Calls Forever campaign.

This is the new HTC Hero, similar to the HTC Magic already available on Vodafone, but enhanced by a number of HTC customisations on top of the base Android OS, in a similar way to the TouchFlo interface that HTC add to their Windows Mobile devices.

The spec includes a 3.2″ 320×480 display, 5 megapixel camera, 512MB ROM, 288MB RAM, HSPA, WiFi, GPS, compass and microSD slot.  It features a fairly powerful 1350mAh battery, weighs 135 grams and is 112×56.2×14.4mm, and features a Teflon coating to help keep it clean.

In a similar way to Nokia E-Series devices which feature two theme profiles, the HTC Hero will have a Scenes profile feature to allow you to swap between business and personal modes (although we don’t believe it’s limited to 2 profiles like the Nokia solution).  It looks like it will have the ability to integrate some social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into the Contacts, and the phone features a dedicated search button that provides “you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero”.

Best of all, HTC are talking about a July availability date in Europe, and to back that up, Orange UK have already announced they will be selling the HTC Hero, and T-Mobile have stated this is the phone dubbed the G1Touch.

The G1Touch will be available from mid-July and will be free on T-Mobile on a £40 per month contract (no contract term stated by T-Mobile, so that might be 24 months) on a Flext tariff offering £225 of credit to spend each month, and that tariff will also include “unlimited” internet browsing (likely to be 3GB per month).

Orange have stated the HTC Hero will be free for customers to take out the £39.15 per month (24 month contract), which will offer 1200 cross-network / landline minutes, “unlimited” texts, and “inclusive anytime” internet browsing (which means 500MB); which looks to us to be the Dolphin 40 tariff.  It will also be exclusively available in ‘Graphite’ (dark grey) from early July.

It’s nice to see Orange finally starting to offer half-decent internet access deals, and we note that the Dolphin 40 tariff has no “out of bundle” charge for texts, so maybe they actually mean unlimited texts… <later> Oh no, it actually means 3,000 texts, just like the other networks….

Well, it looks like we were right and wrong with our information on 3UK’s Nokia N97 pricing…

For the main Mix’n'Match tariffs, 3UK have stuck with their current method of pricing, which is to bundle the cost of the phone into the monthly fee, so, for example, the lowest tariff (Mix’n'Match 300) is £35 per month for an 18 month contract for the Nokia N97, but you pay no upfront costs for the phone at all.  Now, although this tariff offers all the normal 3UK benefits (Skype, Windows Live Messenger, some 3UK-3UK calls, and free voicemail), the total of 300 cross-network / landline minutes does not necessarily look good value compared to Vodafone’s £35 per month option, which offers 900 cross-network minutes, “unlimited” 3,000 minutes of landline calls, and “unlimited” 3,000 texts and Internet access, although there’s an upfront £150 cost attached to this deal.

However, we talked about 3UK offering similar deals with an upfront payment, and for the Texter plans, 3UK seem to have done just that…

So, for £25 per month (18 month contract), you can get 500 cross-network / landline minutes, “unlimited” 3,000 texts, and Internet access.  Now, this deal has a one-off payment of £146.80 upfront, which does start to look comparable with Vodafone’s offering.  It’s also interesting to note that the same £146.80 charge would apply to getting a Nokia N95 8GB or a Nokia N96 on that same tariff.

So, the information we gained last week was generally correct; you can get the Nokia N97 for £100 on a £35 per month contract, or pay £200 for a £15 per month contract, but these are all Texter plans, not the more common Mix’n'Match tariffs.

As the week progresses, and more networks reveal their pricing, we’ll try to summarize them all and bring you details of the best deals out there…

We mentioned last week that Devicescape had taken the decision to withdraw their app from the iPhone App Store due to a couple of issues.  Well, it appears that there are cases when their app can still be very useful; they haven’t yet got round the issues that the iPhone v3 OS introduces, but it appears that when connected to various Wi-Fi hotspots you can sometimes be logged out (timed-out) and in these scenarios, Devicescape can be easier to handle the reconnection than using the iPhone directly.  As such, their client is back in the App Store, although it’s still not as useful as it was until they can resolve the issues.

This is the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, recently announced in the US.  It’s based on the HTC Magic, so it’s basically the same device as already available on Vodafone here in the UK.   That is also the reason, we understand, that it won’t be available in the UK; as Pocket Lint have reported that T-Mobile have stated that Vodafone have an exclusive arrangement with HTC for the Magic in the UK.

However, T-Mobile are still planning to release a number of other Android devices this year (including some non-HTC hardware), so we should still be seeing some updates from T-Mobile over the next few months.

We’ve seen manufacturer app stores, we’ve seen OS app stores, but now WeFi, the community providing information on free Wi-Fi hotspots has launched its own equivalent of an app store over at WeFiApps.  The applications available are generally data-intensive ones, and are grouped into various categories (which they have called palettes).  There are palettes for Road Warrior, Stay in Touch, Going on Vacation, GPS at its best, Messengers Showdown, Listen! and Watch!, Stay Updated and The World of Video (amongst others).

When you download these apps, they include the WeFi application, and a special WeFi application launchpad, allowing you to ensure you configure these applications to only use the free WeFi hotspots around the world, ensuring you minimise data costs.  It should be said that although all apps are free to download, some apps do require registering to use with payment, but once registered, can then be used without further costs by selecting the correct Wi-Fi access points.  As we’ve mentioned before, the WeFi solution comprises the community generated database of free Wi-Fi hotspots, a smart connection manager, and the hotspot directory such that it can locate the nearest free Wi-Fi based on your current location.

Although the app store itself may never be a runaway success, bundling applications with their tools will make this website useful to allow people to be safe in the knowledge that they are not running up horrendous data costs.  Interesting, we hear that WeFi are looking to start offering a premium version will will be able to connect to chargeable Wi-Fi hotspots, putting them in direct competition with the likes of devicescape (who concentrate on the smart connection manager side of things) and Boingo (who concentrate on the provision of chargeable Wi-Fi).

We’ve covered the lastminute.com fonefood widget briefly here and here, but their webruntime widget is now available directly from the Ovi Store.  This is designed for Symbian S60 5th Edition devices, and allows the user to find local places to eat via lastminute.com’s fonefood service; as with many other apps nowadays, it uses the GPS location to filter the results.

However, as with many other problems that we’ve seen with Ovi Store, we were able to search for it, but when we tried to select it, we were told it was no longer available from the Ovi Store.  If you get this, you can still download it directly from m.lastminute.com.

Over the weekend, Pocket GPS World announced that they have entered into a partnership with Inforad, such that Inforad now use the Pocket GPS World safety camera database on their hardware units.  Pocket GPS World have had their database available for many years as a download for use with software devices and many hardware SatNav units, but it’s now available for these dedicated camera alert devices.

Inforad seem to have a couple of different devices available for sale, with their simplest (and cheapest) device even having a built in battery to save the need to connect to the cigarette lighter all the time, and their devices come with lifetime camera alert database subscriptions, so for £40 or £50 you can buy a device with lifetime access to their chosen database (which is now Pocket GPS World’s, and based on our experience of that database, it will stay with them for many years to come).

Update: We’ve had it confirmed that this deal is initially only for 1 year, and that Inforad will use the Pocket GPS World database alongside their own.

Although only available for Nokia phones (others, such as Samsung should be available soon), fring have updated their client for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th Edition devices, with a minor update, which brings some stability improvements, and a smoother installation process.  This new version is 3.40.19, and is available now direct from fring.

Recently, 3UK have used innovative pricing to make their phones and tariffs appealing; instead of charging upfront for the phone, they have offered the phone for free, but increased the monthly price plan as required, so a phone that costs £20 per month for Mix & Match 300 was made up of £15 per month for the tariff and £5 per month for the phone (resulting in a charge of £90 over the 18 months).  Of course, one downside of this was that if you didn’t change phones at 18 months, then 3UK would continue to get an additional charge per month…

Well, according to Gerry at nokiAAddict, it looks like 3UK may be returning to a more traditional model for the Nokia N97, partly, we suspect, to appear competitive with the other networks.

You see, on their old scheme, they would probably charge something like £35 per month for the phone on Mix & Match 300, which gives 300 cross network minutes; but with Vodafone offering 900-odd cross network minutes for only a few pounds per month more, it doesn’t look good value.

As such, 3UK will be charging a one-off payment for the phone (like, to be fair, Vodafone do on the tariff mentioned above).  So, it looks like the Nokia N97 will cost £100 on a £35 per month 18 month contract, and as much as £200 on a £15 per month 18 month contract.  Of course, you can get the phone for free from Vodafone, but then you’ll be committed to even more (£40 per month) or a 24 month contract.

3UK haven’t officially released the full range of prices yet, but we will let you know when they do, and once the other networks all confirm their pricing, we’ll compare them all to see which ones actually offer good value…

Although we have little more information, it appears IBM has announced a very interesting program for Wimbledon this year.  It’s called Seer Android Beta, and it’s an Augmented Reality app.  The app acts as a real-time guide and interactive map of the 2009 tournament allowing selected users to see what others can’t, as well as providing up to the second scores.  The IBM Press release says:

The Seer Android Beta is an innovative application being trialled at Wimbledon 2009, that takes a live video feed from the handset’s camera, and superimposes content and data associated with various points of interest into that video stream.

From tennis to food courts, points of interest throughout the Wimbledon grounds have been plotted using GPS. By making use of the T-Mobile G1’s digital compass and precise GPS coordinates, the application offers a ‘heads up display’ to show the user what they are looking at. It augments this with other live data from the scoring systems and IBM scouts reporting from around the grounds, to give the user a comprehensive and dynamic insight into their surroundings. For instance, pointing the camera lens towards a court will not only identify the court number, but also display details about the current and subsequent matches.

Seer Android Beta users can also use the phones’ Map view, which pinpoints their location on a detailed map of the grounds, and can be used as a way finder. The Timeline view is an aggregation of news feeds and updates from IBM scouts, and allows users to see in real-time what is happening around the site. And a handy ‘Radar’ function indicates the user’s current position and nearby points of interest within range.

Although IBM have stated: “A limited number of T-Mobile G1 handsets running the Seer Android application will be supplied by T-Mobile and will be made available to key media and VIP guests of IBM at Wimbledon 2009.”, we can also confirm that it looks like you will be able to download the app from the Android Market from Monday (Search for IBMSeer).  The use of the compass and GPS to augment the camera view by overlaying additional data (including data from twitter it would appear) is fascinating, and in essence shows us where other solutions such as Google StreetView could head in years to come.

We’ve promoted devicescape a few times before as a nice solution to providing automated login for smartphones and PDAs, as it supports both connecting to free Wi-Fi providers as well as those requiring subscription payments.  Well, they’ve had to announce that for the short term they have had no choice but to drop iPhone (and iPod Touch) support…

Apparently, the new iPhone OS brings with it two key features:

• Automated login to any carrier provided Wi-Fi networks (e.g. all of AT&T’s Wi-Fi locations here in the US);
• An integrated mechanism for logging in to other public Wi-Fi networks via a web form.

However, devicescape have stated that (for them at least), the integrated mechanism doesn’t remember details, so you have to enter them each time, and when you cancel it, it disconnects from the network, meaning that applications like devicescape fail.  All is not lost though; devicescape have stated they are continuing to work on the problem, and hope to be able to return to the App Store in the near future with full v3 support.

One complaint levelled at Nokia’s Share Online service is that it’s limited to 3 services (Flickr, Ovi and Vox).  Well, that’s not quite true.  Although no other services are available for configuration from Nokia (and you can’t add your own manually), it seems some companies have fathomed out what’s involved, and will allow you to connect Share Online to their services…

Firstly, one of the popular twitter image sites, mobypicture have provided simple instructions for using Nokia Share Online (and Nokia Lifeblog for elder phones).  These instructions are here.

Secondly, pixelpipe, an up and coming competitor to ShoZu, have also setup the ability to use their services via Share Online, therefore saving the need for the installation of an additional app just to upload photos.  Pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options; email, MMS (strangely very popular right now for iPhone users!), and they also have support for iPhones directly, Nokia phones (using Share Online) and finally an Android app for Android phones.  More information on all these options can be found here.

Actually, pixelpipe support a whole range of upload options, ranging from Windows app, Firefox, Linux and Mac utilities, and they even have facilities for uploading via instant messaging! pixelpipe currently support 75 services to post that content (text, photos, video, even audio files) to, with a full range of social networking sites, photo & video services, and blogging and micro-blogging platforms.

The only downside with using Share Online instead of ShoZu is that ShoZu does have the facility for offering an automatic upload option (and also can ask you to confirm before sending), whereas with Share Online it’s more of a manual process (also, ShoZu is much better at queuing multiple requests), but for some, ShoZu either doesn’t work, or isn’t worth the memory used to keep it running in the background to provide these services.

Finally, although we’ve not compared the list to work out whether it’s absolutely true; pixelpipe claim to support at least 25 more sites than ShoZu…

We’re impressed companies have worked out how to link into the limited Share Online functionality, and it’s nice to see a greater range of choice of how to upload your photos and videos, and with two of these services supporting a single upload and making the file available on multiple sites, these are worthy of further investigation for many as a method of keeping data usage down.