3UK have announced this week that they now have two new Android smartphones that you can purchase on 3UK, and not just that, but you can get them on the new One Plan we covered here which offers fantastic value for money if you are a heavy mobile user.

Firstly, they are now offering the HTC Wildfire, which is a cut down version of the HTC Desire.  Although cut down might imply “cheap”, and it’s fair to say it doesn’t have the spec (or the price) of the HTC Desire, but it’s actually still a very capable Android device; in fact the only compliant I’ve heard about it is that moving forward over the next year or two, the screen maybe too small to allow major OS upgrades, as Google has now specified a minimum spec (including display resolution) for the future, and the HTC Wildfire falls a little short.

Having said that, it still rivals many other phones, and is still a better display than many other phones of last year! The 3.2″ screen is still a good size, and the 5 megapixel camera is still better than many, and it offers Android v2.1 with HTC’s Sense UI too.  All the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. are there too.  Also interestingly, although it’s available now in “Metal Mocha” colour, it will also be available on 3UK in Red from August, and the Red colour will be exclusive to 3UK.

If you aren’t an HTC fan, then there’s always the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro, which again, is a smaller smartphone (the “X10 Mini” part), but features quite a key differentiator; the “Pro” means it also features a QWERTY keyboard!  This is a slide out keyboard (in the same way as the Nokia E75, Nokia C6 or Nokia N900), and although it blatantly doesn’t feature the HTC Sense UI, it does feature some key Sony Ericsson UI customisations instead.  These include the ability to specify 4 corner navigation and 3 homescreens, and it also features Sony Ericsson’s Timescape, which brings together your Facebook, Twitter, email, text messages and calls into one place.  This sounds an interesting feature, although with many of these manufacturer applications, it may be a little limiting to the “serious” social networker, especially if it can’t be expanded to support other social networks.

The Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is available in Black from 3UK, and also in White, which will (like the Red HTC Wildfire) be a colour exclusive to 3UK.

If you want either of these phones on the new One Plan, they are available for £30 per month (24-month contract), and remember that comes with 2000 cross network minutes, 5000 3UK-3UK minutes, 5000 texts and 1GB data; if you want to buy them on PAYG, the HTC Wildfire is £199 and the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro is £249, both very competitive prices in their own right!

I like the way that whilst historically 3UK were not able to arrange model exclusivity agreements, they are now sufficiently recognised by the manufacturers to at least able to negotiate colour exclusives, and you never know, maybe this time next year, we’ll see a worthy smartphone launch exclusively on 3UK…

I’ve covered Hermes before (see here), but the latest update seems worthy of another mention.  Hermes will now take your Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter and Gravatar friends information, and use it to populate additional information into your local addressbook. This new version adds support for when the matching process doesn’t quite work, and you need to manually help it along the way. When you need to provide the manual link between the local addressbook and the online details (for example when the names don’t quite match, or you have two “Adrian”s and it can’t tell which is which), then you simply start typing the name to match and it provides a list of options.

This level of integration between my online communities and my local addressbook is key to me; it’s similar to the Socially App for Symbian which although doesn’t this level of detail local does at least integrate things like online avatars from online services into the phone experience, but I have to say the potential richness of the data that Hermes supplies is very impressive.

This Find-as-you-type comes as part of v0.8.2, and it’s available in the Maemo Application Manager.  For more details on the new version, and a few screenshots showing the new features, head over to The Nokia Blog who have more information.

Sergejs Cuhrajs, writing at My Nokia Blog has posted an article listing a selection of apps available for installation on the Nokia N900, and there should be something of interest to everyone.  Sergejs also goes into the detail of how to setup the Nokia N900 to allow these apps to be installed, including showing screenshots where possible.

If you have a Nokia N900, and you haven’t looked into the range of applications available for your device, then head over to the article here.

A day or two ago, I got a nice SMS from 3UK:

From 3: On Apr 22 some prices change. You still get free texts, internet & 3-to-3 calls. New: free Twitter & 0.facebook.com

It finishes with a 3UK web page for more details.

Wow, I thought; 3UK are just making the existing free twitter browsing permanent, and adding support for the new 0.facebook.com website (which provides a mobile text only interface to Facebook; ie access to news and information, but no photos, keeping the data usage down); what a nice bunch of people, providing these extra services for all their customers.

However, curiosity got the better of me, so off I went to the website to see the finer details of the changes, and boy did I get a shock…

So, here are the full details of the PAYG changes coming next month:

• Voicemail is no longer free; it is now 15p/minute.
• Calls to landlines and Mobiles goes up from 20p/minute to 25p/minute.
• Sending a picture message goes up from 25p each to 30p each.
• Making International calls from the UK goes up roughly 5p/minute for the majority of countries.
• Making roaming calls whilst in some countries goes up 4p/minute (Band 0 countries).
• Receiving calls whilst roaming in some countries goes up 9p/minute (Band 1) or 25p/minute (Band 2).
• Calls to 084x and 087x numbers increase by 5p/minute, 5p/call, or both.
• Calls to 090x numbers increase too.

“Some prices change” really doesn’t seem to cover it, and I think 3UK should be making more of these changes before people wonder where all their credit has gone.

I do note that 3UK are promoting both Twitter and 0.facebook.com being free and don’t need a TopUp, which implies (maybe incorrectly), that these, like Skype and Windows Live Messenger, continue to work even if your credit runs out, which is one small positive to come out of all these changes.

In other news, Sylvia Chind has confirmed the following handset information (see here for full details):

• The Nokia E72 will be available in May, and is likely to be as much of a hit as the Nokia E71 has been.
• The Nokia N900 is not coming to 3UK, and nor is the HTC HD2.
• The Samsung Galaxy, Sony Ericsson X10 and HTC Desire are coming to 3UK (although we had already announced all those devices here at UK Gadgeteer)
• They are still hoping to bring the iPhone to 3UK, but it’s not here yet.

This is generally good news for 3UK in terms of their handsets, and it’s unfortunate it’s come at the same time as all these PAYG price increases, but for many 3UK customers, now might be the right time for a new phone, and a move to a contract to soften the impact of these PAYG price changes.

As with all things Nokia, people want to customise their phone, and as with all things Nokia, the operators try to stop you.  However, with the Maemo based Nokia N900, it appears that changing the operator logo is easier than, say, recent Symbian phones (where it’s quite difficult, although not impossible).  As such, Jay over at My Nokia Blog has written up how to perform the operator logo change, with screenshots and a video…

It’s well worth a look, so head over to here to read how to perform the change.

Just like buses, you wait for ages and then two come along together…

It’s been a bit of a week for firmware updates, and many recent devices have seen updates this week.  The Nokia E72 has now got the v22 firmware, The Nokia N86 gets v21, and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic gets v40.  Each of these offers improvements for the device, and are worthy of investigation if you own these devices.  Of course, the operator-specific branded firmwares will take a little longer to be released.

For example, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic changelog includes:

• Additional Kinetic Scrolling
• Changed UI in the homescreen similar to the 5530XM
• Updated Nokia Messaging
• OVI Contacts pre-installed
• New screen alarm when locked
• Keyboard updated: when in vertical mode it’s alpha-numeric, if you turn your phone to landscape mode, it automatically changes to full qwerty
• Keyboard updated: when you press a “key” the key that appears on top is now bigger
• Software updater is now updated and has some more options
• When phone key lock is on and you receive a call you see a slide to unlock and a slide to answer bar

However, the Maemo based Nokia N900 has had an even better week…

Earlier in the week, a small minor firmware update was released, which allowed the Ovi Store to become available for the Maemo platform, and then over the next day or so, the PR1.1 first major firmware release will start appearing on devices for applying.  This brings many little minor fixes to the platform, many of which were reported via the Maemo bug tracker direct to the developers, but probably the single biggest bugfix that is directly relevant to the UK is that 3UK SIMs are now supported by this firmware update.  So, if you have a 3UK SIM you want to use with a Nokia N900, then apply this update (2.2009.51-1) and then you should no longer suffer from “SIM card rejected” messages.

If you are yet to buy a Nokia N900, and have been put off by the high SIM-free price of the device, then Vodafone have announced they will be selling the phone soon.  There are rumours that stocks are already in store, but sales are being held to prevent it impacting on the launch of the iPhone on Vodafone, but I doubt whether anyone will be swayed from one to the other, as they seem to attract a very different customer.  Either way, this new firmware will be well worth applying to your Nokia N900 as soon as it’s available for you.

If you want to access this major update as an OTA (Over The Air) upgrade, you’ll need to apply the more minor upgrade from earlier in the week first, and then shortly afterwards this new firmware should become visible, however, if you use Nokia’s PC based Software Updater, you are able to jump straight to the latest firmware without the intermediate step.

The only issue with this firmware update is that is does not bring the portrait-mode support that was expected, so it’s likely we’ll see another firmware update for the Nokia N900 in the coming months to address that oft-requested feature; also, MMS is still missing, although there is a third party app providing MMS support if you really need it (see here for more details, and here for another program by the same author which allows a secondary APN to be defined on the device, which is often needed to be able to send MMS).  However, we should point out that Nokia and Maemo are aware that the OTA firmware update will not work if certain other software is installed (especially applications from the extras-devel repository, which is not enabled by default on the Nokia N900).  If you are directed to perform the firmware update via your PC, one option is to turn off this repository, and uninstall any applications installed from it, and see if that fixed the “under-the-covers” software problems.

If you really want to see a fairly complete list of fixes, then head to the Maemo PR1.1 release information, although be warned, it’s quite technical, and quite long too!

Finally, if you want to get the latest version of Vagalume (the Maemo Last.fm / Libre.fm client) streaming Last.fm on your Nokia N900, then nokiAAddict has also written up the information on how to achieve this here.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Changelog courtesy of nokiAAddict.

Two little stories have caught my attention this week regarding the Nokia N900, Nokia’s new Maemo based Internet Tablet Phone.  Firstly, from Liam Green-Hughes (who has written up his First Looks review of the Nokia N900 here), and in that article he mentions a little third party utility called FM RDS Notify.  As the Nokia N900 ships, you have support for an FM transmitter, which when you connect to an RDS-compatible stereo (such as in the car), you will see “Nokia” displayed when music is playing.  However, FM RDS Notify takes that capability a stage further, and puts more useful information into the RDS data information of the FM signal, allowing details of the current music track playing to appear on the stereo instead.

However, it doesn’t stop there; it can also display the details of the current caller (should be be on the phone), or even display SMS messages.  Although the application is currently only in the Extras-devel repository, and not the more mainstream Extras respository, I’m sure it will move over in time, as the application develops.  It already has some impressive functionality for what is v0.3, and the first version was only released back in late December!

The other interesting app for the Nokia N900 is Barriosquare, which is a FourSquare client for the Nokia N900.  Now, FourSquare is only starting to become popular in the UK, but has been running for some while in the US.  FourSquare combines the Social Networking aspects of sites like Twitter and merges in the location, and there is even an element of competition on who can “login” to an individual location the most and claim the “Mayor” badge for that location.  Using the public API to the website, a single developer has managed to create the application.

And that’s the power of the Nokia N900; individual developers can create a free app for the device and release it via the repositories and then everyone can access that new utility, that new feature which enhances the whole device just a little more.  The same sort of idea is available for most platforms through their App Store, but Maemo developers have embraced the idea of the Linux repositories offering free applications, and many of the enhancement applications are going to remain free, even when Nokia release a paid App Store for Maemo.

Although in my mind it will never be an iPhone killer, the Nokia N900 is certainly a phone that any serious techie should at least consider seriously; even with all the work that’s gone into Maemo 5, it’s still a little bit specialised to recommend the Nokia N900 to someone not used to smartphones and tinkering with their phone, but for the target market, apps like these will continue to make the Nokia N900 shine.

Some content around Barriosquare courtesy of thenokiablog.

The Maemo Last.fm client, Vagalume (which also works on a variety of Linux OSes), has been updated to v.0.8.1.  This new version (which has been released for the existing OSes as well as the new Maemo 5 OS), offers a range of new features…

• Implemented the Last.fm Web Services API v2.0
• Support for Libre.fm and other Last.fm-compatible services
• Support for Maemo 5 (Nokia N900)
• New icon that replaces the classic Vagalume logo
• New CD case image to place the album cover artwork
• New feature to stop playback after a given time (“sleep timer”)
• New menu option to play any user’s tag radio
• New “Add bookmark” and “Bookmark this radio” menu entries
• New configuration setting to download free tracks automatically
• Add {station} keyword to the IM status template
• Use system-wide Gnome audio settings
• Mixer support to change the volume in non-Maemo targets
• Added Polish translation
• Autocompletion support for combo box entries
• Make url and email clickable on the about dialog
• vagalumectl: new commands to show and hide the player window
• Fix some timeout problems in HTTP requests

What’s nice to see is support for Libre.fm, which is a similar setup to Last.fm, but designed around Free music, and hence as no subscription to pay.  It uses a very similar API to access the music as Last.fm, so it will be interesting to see whether we start to see other clients, such as the Symbian mobbler client also supporting this site.

Since the initial v0.8 release, a minor update has already been released which fixes a minor install issue with the Nokia N900, and also falls back to the old Last.fm API should the new one not work.

For me, it’s nice to see this client not abandoning the elder Nokia Maemo devices, and I hope many other Maemo applications offer continued support for these devices (eg Nokia N800, Nokia N810), which still function perfectly well, even if they can’t run the latest OS.

If you aren’t seeing Vagalume in the Application Manager on the Nokia N900, then follow Gerry’s advice here to activate the “Maemo Extras” application repository to get access to more applications.

Although not the first UK mobile network to provide a statement on the Nokia N900, Vodafone are the first to announce that they will be selling the phone as from January (according to their website).  This is good news for this popular Maemo device, and the word on the street is that the amount of firmware customisation by Vodafone will not be too heavy.

As the phone is still at the “pre-register for updates” stage, Vodafone have not yet released pricing, but it’s likely to be inline with the Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini pricing and tariffs.  It’s also interesting to see the iPhone 3GS is still marked as “Coming Soon”, whereas the Nokia N900 already has a date attached to it.

If you are interested, head over to the Vodafone website and register for updates.

Oh, and the other network? 3UK have already indicated they are unlikely to carry the Nokia N900 as it’s a little bit of a niche device for them…

Over at mynokiablog.com Hiren has written a very comprehensive review of the new Nokia N900, covering a lot of aspects of the device, including a large number of screenshots.  If you are interested in this particular Maemo device, then head over to the mynokiablog.com website here.