We first covered the LG Secret after it’s launch, and have been using one ever since. However, if you want your own Secret, it’s now available;

• on Vodafone, and if you spend more than £35 per month (for 18 months; or £40 per month for a 12 month contract), you should find the phone is free too.
• on O2, spending £35 per month for 18 months, £30 for 24 months, or £40 for 12 months will get the phone for free.
• on Orange, although you won’t get the phone for free on any tariff.

We’ve been generally impressed with the phone, although it’s not in the same league as an N95 or an iPhone. We understand it should be available on 3 and T-Mobile soon, although neither are listing the phone on their websites today.

Vodafone are actually doing the right thing; instead of limiting the new 500Mb of inclusive data to “new customers”, Vodafone are removing the hard and fast limits of the past. Ewan at SMS Text News has more details, based on his discussions with Vodafone after overspending last month. The interesting point in Ewan’s article is; whereas before Vodafone included 120Mb of data, and charged for any single Kb over that limit, the new 500Mb is a “Fair Use Policy”, and apparently don’t intend to charge for customers who go over this limit (although if you constantly go well over the limit, you’ll get a polite letter from Vodafone, and ultimately may be moved onto a different tariff).

This is good news - it’s nice to see a network operator setting a fair use policy with just a “please stop it” method of dealing with overuse, instead of the more usual draconian charging.

It appears Vodafone have taken 3’s concerns (and complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency) seriously, and are revising their claims for the Mobile Broadband service. Having claimed users could get 7.2mbps, 3 have pointed out that the real maximum is more like 6.69mbps, and even that figure is not always obtainable. Vodafone will now, instead, concentrate on tasks like “Downloading music videos” as they shift the advertising more towards a consumer bias.  To compare, 3 state you are likely to get 2.8mbps on their network, although they plan to increase this in June.

It appears a recent Vista security update is causing problems with USB Mobile Broadband devices, including the 3 Modem Stick.  It appears that the update causes Vista PCs to power down the dongle, even though it’s connected and data is flowing.  Shane from SOS has come up with an interesting solution, which he has released on his blog.  Basically it’s a batch file which runs a directory listing of the disk section of the USB device every 5 minutes to ensure it’s kept active.  Hopefully, a proper fix will be released by Microsoft soon; given O2, Vodafone and 3 are all in talks with Vodafone, it hopefully won’t be too long.

Story courtesy of 3mobilebuzz.

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.

Although nothing is firm, 3 mentioned today at a briefing, that they are looking at providing a home router with a 3G modem built in, to allow people to connect their whole network via 3G, instead of just a single laptop or desktop via a USB dongle. 3 also said they will expect sales of dongles to drop as more laptops come with HSDPA built in over the next few months. Of course, they’ll still make their money from the contract, and won’t need to provide hardware, so it will be interesting to see whether they offer a SIM-only data deal, and what pricing they offer.

Finally, they also talked about speed of 3G connections, and whether companies are over-selling their services. Mainly aimed at Vodafone, 3 are claiming customers should be more worried about signal strength and the impact of other traffic, and not just the headline connection rate. To help counter this, 3 are planning to increase the number of mast sites from 7,500 to 9,000 by 2009 as part of their mast sharing deal with T-Mobile. This will also help increase population coverage from 90% to 98%, which will also help.

T-Mobile now offers it’s USB Modem on PAYG for £99.99 with a £4 per day offering. It’s advertised as unlimited, but it’s Web’n'Walk Plus, which doesn’t offer all services (VOIP is not allowed on this tariff, for example), and compared to 3’s £10 for the whole month doesn’t sound such good value if you would use it more than twice a month. Also, we could not find out whether T-Mobile actually meant unlimited, or had a fair usage policy on this service.

So, O2, T-Mobile, 3, and Vodafone all openly promote good data deals (although some of them could do with keeping their web sites up to dates with their latest deals and T&Cs), Orange stand out as only promoting their pay monthly service, and not a PAYG service.

Vodafone have announced a new range of tariffs from today. Starting from £25, they all include some data allowance. From the Vodafone press release; “The move means that pay monthly customers will no longer need to buy an additional internet bundle for £7.50 but instead every plan will automatically include internet access.” and goes on to say “Price plans start at £25 and customers who select a £40 or higher price plan will also for the first time have the choice of unlimited texts, unlimited landline calls or unlimited Vodafone to Vodafone calls.”

It should be pointed out Vodafone’s “unlimited” data bundle has a fair usage policy of 500MB per month. Unfortunately we can’t give you many more details, as Vodafone had not updated their website at the time of writing this.

Story courtesy of SMS Text News.

On Friday O2 finally launched their competition to Vodafone and 3’s Mobile Broadband. For £20 a month you get a 3Gb allowance (with a handy text message at 2Gb warning you the allowance is running out). Over that, it’s 20p per MB. However, you do also get unlimited WiFi via The Cloud. One limitation - you must be an existing O2 customer, and it’s an 18 month contract. There’s a month-by-month option (a bit like PAYG) which is still £20 per month, but you’ll need to buy the USB modem at £120 first.

Unlike 3, the max speed on offer today is 1.8mbps, with O2’s 3.6mbps rolling out in June.

Certainly the unlimited WiFi deal is a bit of a differentiator, but compared to 3’s offer of half price broadband to existing customers; and with the trick of getting a 3 Skypephone on a 6 month contract just to become a customer, it’s not necessarily the cheapest way of getting online for everyone.

Some content courtesy of SMS Text News.

In order to improve the reliability of phone services whilst travelling with Virgin Trains, Virgin have worked together with Vodafone, who have installed repeaters into all 52 Pendolino trains which should help to boost 2G and 3G coverage, and is plans to improve the dropped call rate by 60%.

Story courtesy of SMS Text News.

There are rumours flying around the Internet that there is a new N95 8Gb firmware coming soon. The new v20 firmware will add Automatic Screen Rotation (a feature seen on newer devices), and a range of bug fixes.

Of more interest to our readers is whether this firmware is released for the branded versions - both 3 and Vodafone seem to take their time before they release these new firmwares (if ever), and of course due to the way 3 build their network and have their own custom apps, without the 3 branding and the additional security certificates they include, users often find themselves missing out on some of those free software addons 3 advertise if they move to an unbranded phone. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the new firmware, and also reporting back as and when the main UK operators actually make that firmware available (and also the impact of unbranding your phone)…

As well as the TomTom ONE HD, TomTom have produced a replacement power supply for the TomTom GO x20 and x30 ranges which includes a SIM and GPRS service to connect and download reliable and accurate traffic data, including data collected from Vodafone mobile phones up and down the country. This will cost €100 to buy and €60 for 6 months service, and TomTom plan to increase the range of devices supported later in the year. TomTom claim the HD traffic service provides 5 times as many traffic updates as their standard service and covers up to 10 times more roads. This should help when there is an accident, and traditionally you would have been simply diverted onto other equally busy roads.

Interestingly, the HD traffic receiver actually contains a Li-Ion battery, so does not appear to need an external power supply to function, although when connected, it will power both the traffic receiver and the main SatNav unit.

Although available separately, it will be provided as standard on the TomTom GO 730 HD Traffic and the TomTom GO 930 HD.

The only downside (in the short term) is that it appears it is not compatible with third party mounts, such as the CarComm mount we featured here, although we expect Brodit and CarComm to update their solutions fairly soon after the devices are widely available.

Hopefully this service will be available soon in the UK (it should be before the end of the year).

If you are looking for a cheap SatNav solution, then Vodafone have announced their own Vodafone SatNav software, which is available for £5 per month. It will be available on their branded Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8Gb, Nokia 6110 Navigator and BlackBerry 8110 Pearl devices. The software will be free for the first month on Nokia, and free for 12 months on the BlackBerry, although data charges will apply to all. This software isn’t as advanced as some others, so although it maybe cheaper, there may be better solutions out there, especially if you consider the full cost of that £5 per month, plus data charges over the (likely) 18 month contract you have the phone.

We covered the release of the Vodafone USB Modem Stick here, however, Automated Home have got an in depth review of the modem available here.

Vodafone are dropping the monthly price of their 3G USB Modems. The price for their 3Gb data allowance, will drop to £15 per month (if you take an 18 or 24 month contract). At these contract lengths, you will also get the USB Modem for free too. As Vodafone are yet to update their website to reflect this, we can’t confirm whether the £15 includes VAT or not. This price drop should be taking effect from today.

Thanks to SMSTextNews.

Whether you are a PC or Mac user, TomTom has been busy updating it’s desktop software. TomTom Home 2.2 is now released, and offers some new functionality, notably more user community sharing options, with the ability to upload and share POIs, Voices, Routes, Colour Schemes, Sounds (arrival sound, alert sounds, ringtones). In terms of Mac support, the new version offers new functions, and a much more stable interface.

In other news, TomTom has now signed up Vodafone to provide the data for their HD service in Germany. Although only live in The Netherlands, TomTom had already signed up Vodafone to provide the data there and in the UK. TomTom are hoping to have HD traffic for 50% of their European customers by the end of 2008.

Vodafone are now offering a new USB Modem in their range of devices. It’s a USB stick, which plugs directly into the USB port - no trailing device on the end of a cable, like the more common USB Modem used. It’s available now from free (on 24 month contracts), up to £149 (no PAYG) direct from Vodafone.

Update: It’s a Huawei device (model E172), and supports speeds upto 7.2mbps (although Vodafone’s fastest network access is only available in selected areas of London and a few airports.

As we first mentioned here, 3 have now released their USB Modem as a Pay As You Go (PAYG) offering. Simply head over to their website, buy the modem for £99.99 (in Black, White and Pink as mentioned here or the Black ZTE version), and then topup with 1Gb, 3Gb, or 7Gb data packs for £10, £15 or £25 respectively, which are valid for 30 days (charges of £1 per Mb apply once the allowance is used up, although you should be able to topup again).

In comparison, Vodafone charge £9.99 for 24 hours access, with a 500Mb limit, so if you plan to use the USB modem a little more frequently (but not enough to buy one), or want a little more headroom in the bandwidth limit, then this deal may well be for you. You also get the modem for the same price directly, without needing to quote special discount codes.

Have you got yourself a 3 USB Modem, or a Vodafone USB Modem, and fancy making it look a bit different?  If you look at the 3 Accessories section, you’ll see that they have a link to 3Skins,  which is a 3 branded version of the Skin4Things website. This company sell skins, basically stickers, to apply to your mobile phone, but they also include a few other devices, including the USB Modem (they also have skins for games consoles and laptops).

Picture courtesy of SMSTextNews.

Although 3 may well launch their USB Modem soon, Vodafone already offer their USB Modems with a PAYG option.

More details and pricing (including an offer) in the rest of the article.

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