Now that o2’s exclusive rights to Apple iPhone has ended, endless news and announcements have been made that companies like T-Mobile and Vodafone are going to start selling the iPhone. What is really interesting is that Tesco’s is going too be offering the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS very soon, the iPhone will be available in their Phone Shops and through their online website – Tesco Direct. The grocery giant is well known for marketing products at a competitive price from food to household goods, but it also markets technology at competitive prices as well.
According to the BBC, Tesco has announced that they should be releasing the iPhone before Christmas, although no tariffs have been released by Tesco, Tesco has said there prices are going to be competitive.
Google statistics shows Octobers online mobile Internet activity was dominated by Apple iPhone, making Apple iPhone the biggest player.
Google analysed the requests on all major mobile phone operating systems, and found that Apple iPhone came on top of the market.
Apple iPhone holds 50% of the Global Smartphone Traffic and in the United States of America the figure rises to 55%, with HTC coming second at 22%. In the United Kingdom Apple iPhone dominates the market at 74% of all Smartphone traffic.
The next biggest player in the United Kingdom is Nokia, holding 10% of the market, HTC also holding 10%.
T-mobile has been offering the contraband iPhone 3G to customers in the U.K. But this service is only available to T-Mobile’s most valued customers, and by that I mean customers that pay the most every month. T-mobile has limited this service to only 150 units per week and to customers that pay more than £75 a month, only the lucky ones that receive this service will only know how much they are paying for the actual handset.
Google has released a new service to the family, Google is offering customers a free live sat-nav for mobiles on Wednesday. Since the news of this, share prices in sat-nav companies have fallen dramatically.
American based company Garmin, saw share prices fall by 18%, since Google released details of their new service. Garmin was not the only company affected by the news, Dutch based firm TomTom have reported a slump of 9.5% when the markets closed on Thursday.
The application provides free real time, turn by turn directions for people to follow on their phones. The first phone to be able to use this service will be Motorola’s Droid.
Google has collaborated with services that include a search engine to find addresses, live traffic data and Google Street View.
The news has affected TomTom badly, wiping out all of its profits since August, the company has made a statement saying that prices will be falling in the coming months.
One of the biggest and well known search engines has entered the online music battle. Google has released a new service that allows buying and finding music online.
Google has called this service OneBox, OneBox is collaborating with music site Lala and MySpace owned iLike. This service is only available in the America, this service will allow users to search using snippets of lyrics, song titles, artist names and one of the coolest things it can do is stream sought – after tracks.
Analysts are saying this can be the alternative to illegal file sharing. Mark Mulligan who works as analyst for research firm called Forrester has said in a blog post:
“Apple can do little about iPod owners downloading from BitTorrent, But Google on the other hand can.”
BitTorrent software is heavily used for illegal online file downloading such as music and movies.
“Just imagine if when a consumer searches for a song, alongside all of those Torrent results is a heavily integrated Google music offering.”
iLike and MySpace play a big role in this service, when users search music with OneBox a pop-up widget will appear and it will allow to play the full song, this feature is powered by iLike. Another box will appear, offering the user to purchase the track and it will also recommend music videos and information about upcoming concerts, and this part of the service is powered by MySpace.
The top ten search terms of all time are “music” and “lyrics”, according to Google.
“At Google, we see millions of music-related queries every day,” said Google’s vice president of search Marissa Mayer at the launch of Google’s OneBox in Los Angeles.
One of Google’s biggest competitor will be Apple, Apple currently hold 70% of worldwide music sales. Other music firms such as Spotify, which is Europe based is gaining massive popularity. Spotify was launched in 2008, it is a free music-streaming service, it now has more than eight million users across Europe.
Google already allows free licensed music download in China and is now seeking partners in other countries to take the new music model worldwide.
T-mobile has been offering the contraband iPhone 3G to customers in the U.K. But this service is only available to T-Mobile’s most valued customers, and by that I mean customers that pay the most every month. T-mobile has limited this service to only 150 units per week and to customers that pay more than £75 a month, only the lucky ones that receive this service will only know how much they are paying for the actual handset.
