Just last week the EU issued a directive telling mobile operators that they must reduce the cost of data for users roaming in Europe. Whether as a direct result of that directive or not Orange have today announced that they will have a new daily browsing bundle for Pay Monthly, Dongle and Small Business customers. The bundle will offer 30MB per day for £3, a significant saving over roaming without a bundle.
For those that need more than 30MB per day other options exist, details can be found below.
Good on ya Orange, expect to see other operators follow suit.
OK, so we expected the MacBook Air to go on sale after this weeks Apple Store outage and at the same time as Lion. Obviously that didn’t happen in the end and we’re still waiting for the release of OS X Lion but we’re pretty sure it’s imminent.
However, we’re still expecting to see new hardware from Apple soon and the clever money is on a MacBook Air and Mac Mini refresh. An inside source that suggests there will be a SSD and CPU boost for both the 11.6″ and 13.3″ Air models.
11.6in MacBook Airs will incorporate 128GB SSDs across the range and arrive with 4GB of memory as standard and there will be 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M, 1.7GHz Core i7-2637M and 1.8GHz Core i7-2677M processors models available.
The 13.3″ version already had a 128GB SSD but will also benefit from a RAM increase and other CPU options.
Both versions are likely to have Sandy Bridge and the new Thunderbolt port. I’d also expect to see similarly spec’ed Mac Mini’s launched on or around the same time.
Don’t expect to see anything until OS X Lion goes live as anything new is likely to ship with Lion pre-installed.
Posted by: Matt
With Gareth away Matt and James are free to ramble on uncontrollably about the ZTE Event from a few days ago where they saw a few lovely things including the ZTE Skate, ZTE Libra and ZTE Tureis. We’re talking about the changes to the Apple Store and price rises as well as the ongoing law suit between Apple and HTC.
There’s quite a bit going on this week, there’s no Gareth, there’s no script, it could all be chaos!
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Earlier today we reported that Apple had increased the standard pricing of apps on the App Store following their brief down time yesterday. If you missed it, many apps have increased in price by an average of about 15%.
However, if you run a business that uses or provides apps for employees then there is some good news. Today Apple announced their new Volume Purchasing for Business programme. Whether you are buying one or thousands of copies of an app there are discounts to be had.
At the moment, if you look at the details released by Apple, it quite specifically says: “Any business in the US can participate in the Volume Purchasing Program” but one would hope this will get extended to other countries in due course.
No exact date as to when the service will go live, simple “Coming Soon” but as always we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Buy apps in volume.
Streamline your purchasing process and put more power and productivity in the hands of your workforce. Every paid app in the App Store is available for businesses to buy in volume through the program website. Simply search for the apps you need, enter the quantity you want to buy, and complete the transaction with your corporate credit card. Apps are available for purchase at the same price listed in the App Store.
Posted by: Matt
Obviously predictive text entry is nothing new, been around for ages and although it has evolved a bit over the years the same frustrations still exist, the default predicted word is all too often the wrong one!
The Swiftkey X app from TouchType is a bit different. The next step of the evolutionary step in predictive text, artificial intelligence and machine learning. It gets to know your habits and how you enter text in order to improve accuracy. TouchType say this increases text entry speed by up to 50%
Check out the full press release below or head over to the website.
Matt posted earlier the details of the three new ZTE phones we got to have a play with at last nights London event. The main purpose of the event though was to announce the partnership ZTE now have with Brightpoint for UK distribution. This will mean that instead of just having carrier branded devices here, like we have seen with last years Orange San Francisco, you will soon be able to buy ZTE branded phones through the normal sim free retailers and high street shops.
ZTE certainly offer value for money and we have seen that with recent devices. Could the company follow in the footsteps of HTC and soon be one of the most common brands in the industry? I don’t see why not. They expect to sell more than 80 million handsets this year!
You can read the full press release below:
Last night James and I attended an event with ZTE where we had a chance to get our hands on several new ZTE phones. The ZTE Skate, ZTE Libra and ZTE Tureis were all on show at the event at the Ice Bar in central London.
At the event ZTE also announced a distribution partnership with Brightpoint UK.
The three phones are set to go on sale, SIM-free, here in the UK sometime next month. Interestingly the ZTE Skate is getting a CPU specification bump for the UK market, rather than the ‘standard’ 800MHz CPU that you’ll find listed in many specification tables the Skate will ship here with a 1GHz CPU which to my mind makes it a much more viable proposition.
Images and a few details of each handset can be found below.
When the Apple store went down yesterday for several hours for ‘maintenance’ many of us thought that this was the time that OS X Lion would be added to the store and when the expected new MacBook Air would go on sale. However, looks like we were wrong as a look through the app store changes reveals no new hardware and Lion is nowhere to be seen.
Instead Apple have been re-jigging and re-pricing all of their apps. It has long been the case that apps on the US store, taking exchange rates in to consideration, were cheaper than here in the UK. But following this down time apple have actually increased the price of all the apps within the store so an app that cost just 59p yesterday will set you back 69p today. As the cost of the app rises so too does the percentage increase, the price increase goes as high as 20 percent in some tiers.
You can see a breakdown of the price increases below. Bizarely though, we’ve just heard that the prices of apps on the Australian store have gone down by a similar margin!
Getting back to OS X Lion though, we’re still expecting to see this arrive on the App Store within a matter of days rather than weeks and we’re pretty sure that there’s a hardware refresh for the MacBook Air and Mac Mini just around the corner.
It was only this morning that we posted about BlackBerry App World downloads reaching the 1 billion mark. Following on from that we now have some further news and figures from RIM which includes the announcement of seven new BlackBerry Smartphones to launch in the coming months. Now the big question here will be are these seven new phones actually seven separate models? We must not forget that most new BlackBerry Smartphones come in two flavors, GSM and CDMA. For example we already know RIM will be launching the Bold 9900 (GSM) and the 9930 (CDMA). So are RIM calling this two new phones when essentially it is really one? We will have to wait and see I suppose.
Anyway, it is jolly exciting stuff and if you want to see further facts and figures such as BBM stats and BlackBerry subscriber figures you can do so below.
As discussed several times in the past, Apple’s little set top box, the Apple TV, is kinda like a iPhone in a box and even runs a version of iOS. The beta version of iOS 5 brings display mirroring over Air Play to the mix, very handy for presentations or if you want to use your iPad 2’s web browser on a large TV screen.
Just like the iPhone, the Apple TV already sports Bluetooth hardware but this currently lies dormant under the existing version of the iOS. According to the chaps over at 9to5mac iOS 5 is going to enable the Bluetooth hardware that lies within and you’ll be able to turn this on or off via settings. We’re not 100% sure what Apple have in mind for Bluetooth on the Apple TV, perhaps to make it easier to connect your iPhone or iPad to it or maybe for keyboard and mouse support?
Personally I’m really hoping for the keyboard and mouse support and for Apple to include Safari in later versions of the Apple TV, I’d love to be able to use the web on my lounge TV!
Off to dig through the latest beta now…
Posted by: Matt
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