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In a pleasant web deisgn/cool company cultural exchange, we sent our ’roundy’ Omio business cards and some inflatable toast (don’t ask) to WallSwaps, and now we are up on their amazing digital cork board!
Have a look! We are amongst such luminaries as Clearleft, TCD Design and Relentless Clothing!
Better yet, we got our Erskine birdie badge through the post today, which we will all be wearing around the office with pride (via some sort of badge-time share arrangement, the details are still being thrashed out)!
Thanks to the guys for their lovely gift, and thanks to our super design lady San for having such a cool idea in the first place!
Afternoon chaps and chapesses! We thought it was high time that Omio had a little recap to bring everyone up to speed with what exactly has been going on!
First and foremost, we are proud to present MMC‘s Paul Mather as a guest blogger, here to chuck his opinion-shaped hat into the ring and give the blog a new take on the mobile biz! Please make him welcome in the way Omio’s faithful readers know how…by reading his stuff!
Secondly, our interview with T-Mobile’s Head of Corporate Affairs Robin O’Kelly was picked up by the Carnival of the Mobilists, a round-up of the best phone-related writings on the interweb! This week Mippin Blog did the honours, and a fine job too!
Also, a gentle reminder that Omio is now in the phone recycling business! Bring out your mobile phone relics, make some nice money comparing their worth on a variety of sites, all whilst doing your bit to heal the world! Check out our mobile phone recycle service today!
Speaking of healing the world, the HTC Touch HD‘s release has been nothing less than earth shattering, and our planet might need some time in traction to recover! With that huge touchscreen, TouchFLO weaving its magic on Windows Mobile and all manner of mod cons, our extensive HTC Touch HD video review is sure to help you make up your mind about it!
Plenty to enjoy, take your pick!
The price of 3G handsets have fallen by almost a quarter in the past year, according to Mobile Today.
The average price of a 3G handset was £120 last summer, by July 2008 the price had crashed to only £92.
Prices were at their lowest during March, where handsets cost an average of £74, whilst they rose again during summer.
Just goes to show that holding out a little longer for your favourite phone could save you a great deal of money! This is the reason why we have set up the newest function on Omio, ‘Price Watch‘.
Price Watch allows you to plot prices of both Pay As You Go and Pay Monthly handsets, tracking fluctuations over the last six months.
For example, you can see on the Samung U900 Soul Price Watch page that the handset has fallen from an average PAYG price of £310 in May ’08 down to under £200 today. So in only five months, you could save over £100 on the price of a phone!
So pop on over to the page of the handset that you currently have your eye on, and stick a Price Watch alert on there! It can inform you when the phone reaches a specific price, or becomes available on your fave network.
Omio, always bringing you new ways to save money!
If the Olympics wasn’t thrilling enough for you… If the Democratic Convention doesn’t ring your bell… Or if you just love phones… Today is the omio.com live webcast with the HTC Touch Pro.
It’ll be happening here at 4.30pm UK (that’s 11.30am in New York, 8.30am in Los Angeles and 5.30pm in Paris). Check the time in your timezone
If you got questions that you’d like us to answer, let us know in the Touch Pro forum thread
Click on the link below to view the cast!
Our lovely new HTC Touch Pro has been put through its paces all afternoon, and one of the most exciting things about it is the nice 5-row QWERTY keyboard! It’s nice, but is it better for texting than the current undisputed champ of the Apple iPhone?
All mobile lovers want to know who will win the battle of the touchscreen and tactile titans… And if you can’t see our stock text clearly enough in the vid, it went as follows:-
“Here is some text, set by omio.com to test the keyboard of the HTC Touch Pro against the keyboard of the Apple iPhone 3G. To make it more fun, here are a few numbers 2 4 6 8 and an @ sign and a smiley 
”
The results of our highly scientific tests may shock you, but probably not.
14 seconds…I admit to being the official text athlete for the iPhone, and I apologise for the shocking performance! If I didn’t fluff the first line, I would have bested the Touch Pro with ease! Truth is still that the Touch Pro’s keyboard is a far more enjoyable experience when it comes to typing than the iPhone’s monolithic display.
More serious vids of the interface, texting and the keyboard, and a review to follow once we’ve calmed down a bit…
P.S. Yes…we know that it wasn’t quite an iPhone 3G in the battle, just forgot to amend it as the owner had disappeared when it was time to text!
Imagine if you released a piece of software, let’s call it ‘MobileMe.’ This software was supposed to allow consumers to sync their data across devices, but instead it made all their precious information go away, or not transfer, or simply not work instead. Yet you still deemed this service good enough to charge people a monthly fee. That would make people upset with your company and various practices.
Now you want to apologise profusely to these loyal consumers, but at the same time save face. Wouldn’t it be clever to ‘leak’ an internal e-mail voicing your culpability and disappointment in the shortcomings of the service, and as such show remorse yet maintain the impenetrable exterior of your company’s facade?
Yeah, you get it… Apple is sorry for MobileMe not working at all, and random (but really rather good) website Ars Technica claims a leaked memo from Jobs himself has addressed the eagerness to get the service out in tandem with iPhone 3G may have compromised the high standards usually reserved for Apple products.
“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs states in a strangely press release-y tone. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”
Being Apple means never having to say you’re sorry. Officially.
Source: Ars Technica
Heard of HTC? Unless you’re really into your tech hardware, possibly not. Maybe they aren’t a Samsung or a Motorola just yet, but they are the largest manufacturer of Windows Media-based handsets, and they want you to know about it. Okay, not you, but the US…then you.
With the launch of the Touch Diamond in the UK and the States, as well as the forthcoming Touch Pro, HTC seems determined to penetrate the public conscious with a multi million dollar marketing push across all media featuring the tagline, “Set Your Fingers Free”. Don’t mean to be a stickler, but whilst HTC were busy fiddling with styluses (stylii?), Apple beat them to the finger pie buffet with the iPhone. The Touch Diamond still has one…
The imaginative ad on their site highlights their new focus on being a maker of fun, intuitive touch-driven handsets, rather than remaining an austere PDA maker for the gadget-savvy. They have been known for courting a fair few networks in their time with many exclusive handsets including o2′s XDA series, but it seems they wish to get their solo project off the ground finally.
Combine this with their more prominent branding on handsets, the community aspect they are attempting to develop with the HTCWiki, and the Touch Diamond soon to be available on all networks in the UK, HTC may be a force to be recognised as much as reckoned with in the smartphone sector.
In light of the unofficial release of the o2 Pay As You Go pricing for the iPhone 3G, we thought it would be a good time to see if the young pretender has what it takes to wrestle the crown from the current champ.
o2 was kind enough to briefly display prospective numbers for the iPhone 3G on their site, which was at the expected price point of £300 for the 8GB and fifty quid more to double up on memory. These were promptly yoinked unceremoniously off the page, perhaps they were testing the waters to see industry reaction?
Using our patented Omio ‘Compare Phone’ feature, we stand the iPhone 3G next to its predecessor to see what magic the Apple camp has weaved in the past year.
See the iPhone Comparison in Depth.
More detailed analysis follows…
Thanks to the lovely folks at Motorola we’ve had a chance to rock out with the ROKR E8 before it’s network wide release on July 1st, and it’s not a bad l’il phone! Despite being a tad basic and lacking in some much needed 3G whizzyness, Motorola’s combination of music player and mobile seems to tick the boxes for people who want to leave their iPod in the drawer. It’s already out on Orange, with the other networks to follow soon. Be sure to have a look at our review on the site, see what we really thought of it!
In the meantime, here are a few images taken from the E8′s stay in Omio Towers to whet your appetite…
Any questions about the ROKR, or anything mobile-related as a matter of fact, don’t hesitate to ask us in the ‘Q & A’ section of the mobile phone forum!
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