At a briefing last night on the new 3 Mobile Wi-Fi device (the 3UK MiFi), 3UK announced that they will be launching an Android phone on their network in early October, which will be available for Christmas (and will appear in their Christmas Buying Guide).  As this was not the official announcement, 3UK declined to state which phone they were launching, but we have reason to believe it may be an HTC device running their Sense UI.  Coupled with an indication that this was a top end handset, here at UK Gadgeteer we suspect it may well be the HTC Hero [Editor's note: of course, it may be the HTC Tattoo], although we’ll all have to wait 2 weeks to get confirmation of that.

One key point 3UK did state though; they agreed with us over Android liking and in essence “needing” a permanent internet connection, and stated that they will sell Android phones with Internet included in the tariff.  We’ve said “phones” as 3UK stated they expect more Android devices in the future, and if nothing else, would expect to carry the INQ Android devices when released in 2010.  For PAYG Users, the latest 3UK PAYG includes 150Mb of data every time you topup already (see here).

Supporting Android and automatically including an internet connection show 3UK are continuing to key up with the other operators; with their range of Nokia devices, the new INQ Chat and now an Android device, 3UK are returning to a position of having a strong product range.

We did ask 3UK if they were planning to include the new Nokia N900 in their range, and just got the stock answer of “no current plans”, which is a common statement all networks use when they aren’t ready to announce either way, so this doesn’t necessarily rule it out over time.

On a side note, the 3 MiFi device is performing well, and we hope to bring a HandsOn review to you later today or tomorrow (this article was written using the 3 MiFi for connectivity).  This will be available on Friday in Stores (and available to order online on Thursday).  As we stated last week, there will be two pricing options; the “Broadband 5GB 1 month” service will cost £69.99 upfront and then £15 per month for 5GB of data (with a rolling 1 month contract), or you can select the PAYG “Ready To Go” option at £99.99, which will include 3GB of data to be used over a 3 month period, and then it will move onto standard Mobile Broadband PAYG pricing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:08 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.