Orange and Vodafone preparing Social software
August 20th, 2009 
Tags: 3, E71, E72, Facebook, Google, INQ, Nokia, Orange, Social Networking, Twitter, Vodafone
Both Orange and Vodafone are preparing some Social Networking software to improve their customer experience…
Orange are planning their “Social Life”, which will be available from their Orange World portal, bringing your Facebook, MySpace and Bebo information together in one place, and they should be offering text message services too.
Vodafone are starting work on Vodafone People, which appears to be based on Zyb, a company they bought last year. It will apparently bring together Twitter, Facebook and Google Talk (Which for us, makes it a more useful service), offering status updates and the syncing of the contact lists onto the mobile phone. Interestingly, Vodafone are claiming this will be available on 400 mobile phone devices, which makes it pretty device OS-independent.
3UK obviously already have the INQ1 (aka Facebook phone), and with the new INQ Chat (aka Twitter phone) coming, it seems these three networks are going to be going head to head to claim superiority in the Social Networking space.
On a side note, we heard yesterday that it’s unlikely 3UK will be launching the Nokia E72, and we suspect they’ll be promoting the INQ Chat instead. So, if you are after a replacement for your current Nokia E71, you’ll either need to move to the INQ products, or head off to another network…
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August 20th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Will they offer higher ‘unlimited’ data vodafone is unlimited to 500 MB compared to 3 at 2GB. Real shame if 3 dont offer the E72 and push the chat instead, i’m sure it will be a good device and its going to be cheap but the E72 will offer so much more especially to those of us using E71 at the moment. I can’t imagine moving from mine to a chat so i’ll stick with what i have or move if I can get more data from someone else. Hope they change their mind.