3 are heavily promoting the new SkypePhone S2. As such, today, Thursday and Friday this week (10th, 11th, and 12th September) 3UK will be in Soho, Leicester and Golden squares respectively (ie Soho Square today, Leicester Square tomorrow, Golden Square Friday) to allow people to get hands on with the phone.  They will be around 10am to 4pm each day.

There will be bean bags to relax in, drinks, and inflatable musical chairs. If you are in the area, head along and see the phone for yourself.

In other 3 news, 3 UK are slowly running out of stock of some of their USB Modems and SkypePhones (actually the Black twin pack). It appears that as most people are now buying the Stick version of their USB Modem and the new SkypePhone S2 these shouldn’t be big losses. Even better, 3 UK have stated they will be offering a twin pack offer on the new SkypePhone S2 at some point soon.

Thanks to Sam at 3mobilebuzz for the advance notice of these London events.

If you are a semi-regular visitor to London, and you’ve ever been fined for forgetting to pay the London Congestion Charge, then the KenBuster may be for you!  It’s a GPS based device, and whenever you go inside the congestion charging zone, it notifies back to the KenBuster HQ, who arrange to make the payment for you automatically; no more forgetting to pay!

This looks a very interesting device, and it knows the charging times throughout the day, so won’t automatically charge you unless the rules require payment.  Obviously, you have to provide the company with your car and credit card details to allow them to pay on your behalf.  Whenever a payment is made for you, you receive an SMS and an email confirming the payment has been made, and they provide a “secure website” for you to see the payments they have made for you.  It also sends a daily SMS, which will help alert you if for some reason the device has failed to register you entering the zone (or of course, you simply left it at home).

The device costs £200 with no monthly ongoing costs (alternatively, you can buy it for £50, and pay £8 per month with a minimum 12 month contract).  Finally, for those who forget, but don’t want the automatic payment system, you can simply pay them £8 per month, and they will send you a daily SMS reminder, and if you have been in the zone, you can reply to the SMS, and they will then make a payment for you.

A nice device, integrating technology (GPS, and “communication provided by Orange”) with a real problem, it only takes a few fines for this device to pay for itself, and the additional lack of having to deal with the payment daily may make it worthwhile to others too.  With the fine currently at £120, and 5,000 people being fined daily, there appears to be a big market for this device!  The only question remains: will they remain the device to be the BorisBuster…? [The answer is no; "The Congestion Charge was Ken's idea and will be his legacy."]

Thanks to Pocket GPS World who alerted us to the device in the first place.

Vodafone are rolling out HSDPA to more cities. After covering London last year, they are in the process of extending this to also cover Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Reading. In these areas, the theoretical maximum speeds are 7.2mbps download and 1.8mbps upload. Although, of course, 3 recently challenged mobile network operators to concentrate of actual performance, and not headline rates.

Londonist has added a map which shows the free wifi spots in London. Ewan at SMS Text News thinks it’s not complete, and missing some hotspots, but if you are visiting London, you may want to check to see if there is any free wireless in the area you are going to be in.

Story courtesy of SMS Text News.

Ofcom have announced that we should have at least 4 HD (Hi-Def) channels broadcasting on Freeview in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Some of these channels could come online as early as 2009, in the areas where analogue TV has been turned off. The BBC will get one of the channels, and the other three will be auctioned off.

Story courtesy of Reuters.

Dopplr, the traveller’s social networking site, has reported that Heathrow has changed it’s baggage restrictions. They have lifted the one bag carry on restriction, which means you can now take a bag and a laptop bag onboard as hand luggage. Also, you no longer need to remove the computer from the bag as a matter of course, as they have rolled out improved scanners. Given all the bad press around the opening of Terminal 5, it’s nice to see some good news for Heathrow.

For those in or near London, the Oyster scheme is being expanded further. As well as using the contactless smartcard to pay for your travel, the scheme has already been adopted by a number of newsagents, allowing you to buy low value items on the same card. Now, Nokia, O2, and Transport for London are planning to release a mobile phone with a built in Oyster smartcard chip, allowing the device itself to act similar to an actual Oyster card. The difference will be that the purchase amount will then be added to the user’s mobile phone bill.

Although this is a new development for the UK, The Guardian report that 50% of phones in Japan are already equipped with this sort of technology.

The trials of this device (a Nokia 6131) were announced this morning, with the trials starting today for the 500 lucky travellers.  These travellers are getting the new phone with credit on their mobile phone account, credit on their new Oyster chip in the mobile phone, and some credit from Barclaycard, who are also partners in the trial.  The trials run for 6 months, so will finish at the end of May 2008.

Thanks to The Guardian (and others), and especially Ken at UK Mobile Report, who attended the launch event this morning.  Also, thanks to Nokia.