Mobile pizza

3 Skypephone

3 and Skype have announced the launch of a 3G handset with Skype built in.

Pre-pay customers will need to spend at least £10 per month, so you can see how 3 may be justifying the move - loose out on potential call revenue beyond any inclusive minutes, but retain and attract plenty of customers. The only other risk would be overstretching their bandwidth, but they seem to have plenty of unused capacity.

Interestingly, the phone was developed with Qualcomm and is therefore Brew-based. It does however seem to also support Java.

Mobile tickets

Only spotted it now, but a couple of weeks ago IATA, the air transport association, announced the agreement amongst airlines of a standard for 2D barcodes on mobile phones. This means that  it will soon be possible to issue mobile e-tickets.

Martin Varsavsky

Mr. Varsavsky is a very succesful Argentinian born entrapreneur I only heard of recently. He is the founder of FON, a community-powered Wi-fi network that is rapidly spreading around the world. In the UK they have partnered with BT, although I cannot say I had noticed BTFON before today.

3 sconfusion

...and the result of the tests is that there is definitely a difference between the 'Max' bundle and the 'X-Series Silver' bundle. The latter suppors socket connections, while Max does not.

3 confusion

With the X-Series, seeMeTV and their focus on content, Three have earnt a place in the good book. Their wall-garden policy may have been/be debatable, but at least it did have the user experience at heart.

That's certainly not true with their internet bundles. They seem to have three data bundles - Internet Max, X-Series and  X-Series Silver - all at the same £5/month price point. If you try and read the info on the Three site, it is hard to work out the difference between the three of them, other than access to a bunch of applications. There is however the possibility that the bundles may have other differences that are not clearly communicated.

We are running a few tests to find out...

The importance of a little buzz

Last weekend I got a reminder of how important usability is in mobile.

A friend was talking about their Blackberry Perl and how much they like it. He however has a serious problem with it. His Perl doesn't buzz  if there is a call waiting while he's on another call.  As a business user, that's a pain.