Articles tagged with: mobile services

Orange may have been the first to launch the BlackBerry Bold here in the UK, but eager RIM fans may have got less than they bargained for when they signed on the dotted line for an 18 month contract. According to The Register, the much vaunted BlackBerry Maps app is missing from the Orange version - despite the first Orange specs stating the software would be there.

One call to Orange customer services is all it takes to find out why as those enquiring to its whereabouts are being offered Orange's own service, for an extra £92. Those who try and download the free BlackBerry Maps software themselves are finding that when they install it no icon appears and they can't run it.

If you’re already in Beijing, have your iPhone to hand and can’t quite figure out if you’re about to watch the kayak slalom or synchronised swimming, here comes Google to the rescue. It’s just launched an iPhone-friendly version of its Translate service and Chinese is one of the many supported languages.

This won’t help much if you can’t actually read Sinitic languages, of course, but until Google launches a text-to-speech service, you’ll have to settle for holding up the iPhone screen and hoping for the best.

Back when PDAs ruled the Earth, offline web browsing was all the rage. These nifty utilities made it easy to capture a web page (or even a whole site) on your desktop computer, then sync it to your handheld for later perusal – and you didn’t need an internet connection to do it.

Of course the spread of the Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled smartphone has all but put paid to offline browsing, but there’s still something to be said for capturing a web page on your desktop computer for looking at later on your smartphone. After all, it may be easy to find most web sites with Google, but the same can’t be said of an interesting post on an obscure forum or a comment on someone’s blog. Which is where Laterloop comes in.

Motorola's been pushing the movie playing experience on mobiles such as the Z10 lately. Now it's taken the next natural step and offered movie downloads via its hellomoto.com website.

The full length films aren't delivered over the air but rather downloaded via PC to be transferred to a phone. It's a simple drag and drop process but the handset is required to go online and download a license key before the file will play.

With web publishing now easier and cheaper than ever, virtually every company in existence has its own web site. Creating a mere website isn’t always sufficient in these days of multi-platform web browsers and any online presence worth its salt really needs a mobile website, too.

Creating a website that’s suitable for a handheld web browser from scratch is no mean feat, but Wirenode makes it possible to create a mobile-friendly web site in a matter of minutes – and it’s completely free,

Vodafone's lagged well behind the likes of T-Mobile and its Web'n'Walk service when it's come to mobile browsing and email data - charging either a £1 a day for up to 15MB or £7.50 a month for a stingy 120MB. Now it's revamped its offering, coming up with a free 'unlimited' service on all its new tariffs.

For 'unlimited' you'll need to see the 500MB 'fair usage' policy but it's still a huge step for Vodafone users who've had to put up with high bills for modest mobile internet use.

Plans start at £25 a month. A £40 plan will also throw-in a choice of unlimited texts, unlimited landline calls or unlimited calls to other Vodafone numbers. As an added bonus it's also offering to set up users email in-store start making advantage of the bundled data straight away.

Still typing search strings into Google? How 2007. This year all the kids are going for visual search - looking up information just by taking a picture on a camera phone. The technology's ripe for a big explosion now that Evolution Robotics has signed a deal to place its "ER Search" visual search engine into the hands of potentially millions of people on Japan's KDDI network.

The technology works by analysing photos to look for recognisable objects - such as a book cover or DVD sleeve - and beaming back relevant information. In theory it could even be extended to landmarks, road signs and, who knows, people. Want to Google someone across the bar? Just take a covert snap of them and you're away.

Thankfully it's mainly restricting itself to inanimate objects for now. See here for a video of how it all works.

[Press release]

After launching in the US in January, Yahoo has now made the beta version of its Go 3.0 mobile portal application available to European users. Intended as an all-in-one application for everything Yahoo related, the portal has had a full cosmetic makeover to make it much more suitable for small handheld screens. Like Yahoo’s desktop application, Go 3.0 also supports widgets – plug-ins that add new features and services.

The BBC has given its mobile news site much-needed makeover. Relaunched today, BBC Mobile has a similar design to the main BBC site and now capitalises on the fact that handheld devices have had large, high resolution screens for some years.

The new site is a portal with news stories, sport and weather forecasts, along with links to microsites for the BBC’s TV and radio entertainment output. At the time of writing, there are also options to watch clips from Torchwood, although this wouldn’t work on the iPhone.

Sadly nothing to do with Sir Jimmy Savile, NowThen is a new photo-sharing cum social-networking service for mobile phones. The site is free to join and lets you send picture messages to groups of friends for the cost of a single message.

Once you’ve signed up (you’ll need to provide your mobile phone number), MMS messages sent to an email address or number provided by NowThen get forwarded to any groups you’ve set-up on the site. There’s also the option to make your uploaded photos visible to other users of the site and even feed them to your Facebook account.

[NowThen]