Mobile Phone Insurance News

O2, the UK Telefonica owned UK netowrk operator, has launched Think Big which is a £5 miilion social action scheme.

The programme is intended to help youngsters improve their local community. The scheme is being run in conjunction with the National Youth Agency and UK Youth. The charities will get £300 towards each approved scheme to help with funding.

The Carphone Warehouse has announced new T-Mobile tariffs for the HTC Desire, with unlimited web tariffs starting at £25 per month for 18 months with a handset price of £179.99, naturally enough mobile phone isnurance on this handset can be purchased from www.insurance2go.co.uk for a cracking price, we think the best value in the UK marketplace especially for high end mobile phones.

Inmarsat - the satellite phone company - reported an 18% rise in fourth quarter earnings saying that demand for its services remains strong.

Vodafone are to cut 375 jobs from back office functions beginning this month, however they have said they will increase the customer facing employees by 170.

They will also be employing 50 to join its graduate scheme from the 3,000 who have applied to the company.

The loss will come from various locations but it is a fair bet that a number of these will come from the head office in Newbury, Berkshire.

Until the site opened just to the north of the town Vodafone had numerous offices dotted around Newbury and London. The offices are state of the art and enjoy fantastic links by road being next to the M4 going towards London in the east and Bristol and Wales to the west and the A34 that goes towards Oxford and Birmingham to the north and Portsmouth and Southampton in the south.

BT, the UK telecoms group, have demanded that Virgin Media open up their network of underground pipes to their rivals. BT is planning to upgrade its network and using Virgins cables and space wouldmake this far easier. BT of course have been forced to share its infrastructure with new Telecoms companies in the past, so now it’s interesting to see them put pressure on Ofcom to allow them to use Virgin’s space.

Vigin Media bought up the media cable companies who put cables into vast areas around the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this enables them to offer higher speeds and they claim, better reliability, than its rivals including BT, Tak Talk and numerous other smaller players.

Today our blog is a light hearted one created and inspired by the facts from today’s Sunday Indie magazine.

Here are some facts about telephones that you don’t need to know but it might make you smile.

In the UK there are over 33 million land lines in current use.

999 was interoduced as the emergency serivces number as far back as 1937. At the time the Times of London wrote: Being one third as big again as the number of the beast, it has sinister significance’.

The easiest dialling tone in the UK is 01234 - it is the code for Bedford.

There are over 77 miilion mobile phones in sue in the uk, more than the people living there. However, this figure probably includes laptop dongles.

….some other news. Insurance2go are only a few weeks away from launching a new service which we believe will shake things up in the mobile phone insurace market. With more and more people opting to insure their handsets due to the increase in costs of handsets and the lengthening of contracts that customers are signing this will be a pleasant surprise to many looking to insure their handset.

Currently in the UK about 25% of users have a SmartPhone such as the iPhone, the Nexus One or Nokia E73, this figures looks set to increase dramtically over the next 24 months. also the introduction of HD Voice from Orange and 3 will increase the turnover of handsets and make taking insurance more attractive.

The Apple iPad will go on sale in the UK in late April. The launch will undoubtedly cause a bit of a stir in the marketplace as seems to be the case with all of Apple’s new products.

The launch will come with both Wi-Fi only and Wi-fi and 3G connectivity. It is thought that Orange are the front runner to be the first network operator allowed to offer the device with 3G connections.

Insurance2go are launching their new Laptop Insurance product that will allow customers to protect their iPad from Theft and Damage.

Best Buy - the US electricals retail giant - have announced that their fourth store will be in Aintree, Liverpool. The new store will creat 100 new jobs. The other three locations announced so far are: Hedge end, just off the M27 in Hampshire near the Roase Bowl Cricket Ground, Merry Hill in the West Midlands, and Thurrock in Essex.

All applicants who are successful in getting a job go on a nine week training course call ‘the blue shirt academy’.

Strand Consult director, John Strand has said that the merger between Orange and T-Mobile will change the nature of the UK Telecoms market massively and it will increase the importance of MVNOs.  As the traditional incumbant networks fight out for more market share he feels that the most successful will be those who take an adventurous and aggressive stance on MVNOs that use small to medium sized groups of consumers and offer them a mobile offering to suit their needs.

The telecoms market is proving to be going through a fascinating period of change. with the increase in Smart phones, High Def calling and the convergence of technologies between phones, laptops and note books.

Vivendi, Europe’s largest entertainment group, are looking for opportunities in the Brazilian mobile phone market.

Psion, the makers of handheld computer devices, have reported that their losses were halved during 2009.

Tata, the Indian Telecoms giant, have said that growth from corporate telecoms is expected to be up 3.5 per cent.

The AIM listed low cost mobile phone, e-mail and data system has reported that it has an order from an operator in the Middel East for 50,000 licences worth £44,000.

Gartner, the US Information Technology group have said that they expect the PC maket worldwide to grow by 20%. it also expects 360 million touch screen devices to be sold this year.

Paypoint - the FTSE 250 listed payment tech group has aquired Verrus for £33 million. Verrus are an Anglo / Canadian company that speciliase in enables drivers to pay for parking using their mobile phone.

The proposed merger between Orange and T-Mobile, that was given the green light earlier this week, could cost up to 4,000 jobs analysts have said.

The group will look to make significant savings of up to £3.5 billion when the merger takes place which could result in significant job losses at a very difficult time in the employment market.

The merger will result in a mobile phone operator with a massive 37% share of the UK market. The companies had to concede some bandwidth capacity to the other operators to get the merger through, despite this there are concerns that the size of the network will not be good for the consumer and competition in the UK market.

Watch this space for further details.

Apple are suing HTC, the Taiwanese mobile phone manufacturer, for stealing some if its technology. The action concentrates on the infringement of 20 of Apple’s patents.

New rules come into play this week that will hopefully to put an end to ‘bill shock’ for customers who have been caught out whilst roaming. From now on the mobile phone operators must offer a cut-off faciliaty at around the £45 mark, this will hopefully help put an end to customers unwittingly running up a massive bill when abroad. Customers are particularly susceptible when using 3G ‘dongle’ to use in conjunction with a laptop.

The move comes a little too late for one Orange customer who ran up an £8,000 bill on a laptop dongle thinking that data downloads were unlimited. Orange have agreed to halve the bill. Still a nasty shock.

At present customers will have to request the cut-off but from July 1st the cut off will be automatic. Operators will be forced to warn customers when they hit 80% of their cut off amount. Customers will be able to set their own limit.

Count down has begun in earnest to the launch of two new products from our parent company. Insurance2go will soon be offering laptop insurance (which will cover the iPad for when it launches) and a new brand will be offering mobile phone insurance with a slightly different tweak - it promises to be hugely competitive. Exciting stuff - watch this space.

Operators must warn users when their bill hits 80% of the limit.

The Google Nexus One looks as if it will be officially launched in the UK in April of this year. The launch is likely to be in conjunction with Vodafone. The handset will be available on the web direct from Google, however, it is not yet clear if Vodafone will be stocking the handset in its stores.

Insurance2go are all ready and waiting to offer insurance on the Nexus mobile phone:

www.insurance2go.co.uk/google-nexus-one-insurance

Samsung have launched the new Corby flip handset aimed at the mid- to low-end market. It includes a 2.6in screen at QVGA resolution along with an external LED display and HSDPA for fast data transfers. Bluetooth is accompanied by a 3-megapixel camera and microSD support. Available in black, pink and lime green

Vodafone have said that they will support the HTC Legend mobile phone that uses Android 2.1.

Apple have admitted that some of the factories that make iPods, iPhones and its PCs have used child labour in the past but this is now no longer the case. However, they revealed that 55 of its 102 factories worldwide have ignore Apple’s rule that emploees cannot work more than 60 hours a week.

The Independent Newspaper in London is to be sold this week to a Russian bilionaire, Alexander Lebedev. The fee is thought to be a nominal £1, this looks like it will secure the papers future. Good news for all those who praise diversity in the media and good news for those who enjoy the thoughtful and intellectual paper the Independent has always been.

Cable and wireless look set to win a contract to lay an internet cable from Jamaica to Cuba, this will put them in a strong position to win a stake in Etecsa the state controlled mobile operator that Telecom Italia looks like selling.

EMI the troubled music group has off loaded another asset - Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes West London for circa £3.5 million. However, this will only reduce their debts by a fraction given that these now stand at a staggering £1.75 billion, last year the company lost £1.74 billion.