Apple iPad & Apple TV Media Event

Posted in Announcements about 2 months ago by Nick - Comments (1)

Apple is holding a media event today (March 7th) in San Francisco, California, where it is expected to announce an iPad vNext and an updated Apple TV. The event is scheduled to kick off at 10:00 AM Pacific Time / 1:00 PM Eastern Time.
 
Apple will not be providing video coverage of the event to the public, but a number of news sites will be on hand to provide text and photo updates including Engadget and CNET.

CEO change at Research In Motion

Posted in Announcements about 3 months ago by Robert - Comments (3)

"We will take this to new heights” - This is a Bold statement from the NEW Research In Motion (RIM) CEO Thorsten Heins. Blackberry Smartphone manufacturers RIM have announced a change in CEO. The shake-up at the Canadian company will mean Mike Lazaridis who was founder of RIM and co-CEO Jim Balsillie will both step down. Now steps up Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007. He has risen through the ranks from Chief Operating Officer, Product Engineering, overseeing the Blackberry smartphone portfolio world-wide. Heins previously worked for Siemens as the Chief of Technology in 2007 and holds a master’s degree in Science and Physics. Will his vast experience be enough to spearhead Blackberry into a new era?

The change up is due to recent struggle in Blackberry sales and the embarrassing outage. The outage at the end of 2011 that troubled users all over the world, experiencing problems, sending ,receiving, using BBM and also internet and data problems. This outage left a lot of users feeling that this shouldn’t happen with a Billionaire company and a secure system. This then lead to the outage being the number 1 #trendontwitter, which was embarrassing for the company.

Another blow was the flop in sales of the Blackberry Playbook which didn’t hit the heights hoped with consumers. This leaves a huge mountain of pressure on Heins to deliver in 2012 as many loyal Blackberry users feel as though they are falling behind the other major manufacturers. The new CEO stated that the company doesn’t need drastic change. He also mentioned that he won’t split up the company. "I will not in any way split this up or separate this into different businesses," Mr. Heins said. "If there [are] requests coming towards Research In Motion to talk about licensing that platform to other companies, I will entertain those discussions. I will listen." I would agree with Heins to some degree as I think they do need some things tweaked to make Blackberry a front runner. I do believe though that they need to step it up fast or risk falling behind further. Let’s look at the positives and negatives of the Blackberry smartphones:

Negatives

Positives

What will 2012 bring for RIM and Blackberry?

In a recent interview with Thorsten Heins he discussed a new Playbook 2.0 OS update. He mentioned that they need to use powerful marketing to help get back on track.

Blackberry 10 platform is something that is being worked on at the moment. Heins states that it’s unheard of for a company to create a new platform within one and a half years, but he’s very excited to see it. There isn’t anything I’ve seen so far that details what Blackberry 10 will consist of and what features and capabilities it will bring. RIM are expected to release a new Blackberry Bold smartphone running on Blackberry 10. The new handset is expected in December and will have touch-screen and QWERTY keyboard facilities.

2012 will be a huge year for RIM and Blackberry, I hope that Thorsten Heins can pull it off and take Blackberry to new heights.

Technical issue affecting O2 customers in the UK and abroad

Posted in Announcements about 5 months ago by Nick - Comments (2)

Please be aware that O2 are currently experiencing technical issues which is affecting the UK as well as users abroad. Some customers will experience a message stating “sim registration failed” displayed on their handset or low/zero coverage. Other customers may experience dropping calls. O2 Network services are working on this but as yet we have not been advised of an ETA for resolving this issue.

Orange & T-Mobile Network Update: Signal Share

Posted in Announcements about 6 months ago by Nick - Comments (4)

Great news! Everything Everywhere completed their rollout of 2G signal share to ALL remaining Orange OWE and Personal Line customers on 31st October.

To date the company has seen a fantastic 5.5million inter-network handovers since the first phase went live on 12th October and early results show a real improvement to dropped call rates.

The total switch on is going to plan and we expect to cover the whole country within the next 8 weeks. You will not need to do anything to get the benefit from in call handover, this will just happen automatically.

– Area 1 covering the Midlands is completed.
– Area 2 covering London, Home Counties and the North West - completed on 2nd November.
– Area 3 covering East Anglia and the North East – will complete on 9th November.

Using 3G signal from both Orange and T-Mobile

Sharing 3G signal is being rolled out geographically starting 17th October so anyone in the completed areas with a 3G compatible device will be able to benefit from 3G signal from Orange and T-Mobile (where available).

The company successfully switched on much of South West England & South East Wales on 17th October and completed their rollout to most of Scotland on Monday 31st October.

The whole of Northern Ireland, Cumbria, Northumberland and the county of Durham will be enabled for 3G National Roaming from the 7th November. In addition, northern parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire will also be activated. If you effectively draw a line from Southport in Lancashire to York, and then from York to Grimsby, anything north of that line will be enabled.

To get the benefit of fast Internet in more places, you will need to switch their phone off and on. Users travelling around the country will not be able to access 3G signal share everywhere until the whole roll-out is complete.

Once the full roll-out is complete we’ll remind you with a text message to power their phone off and on again to get the benefit of the new services.

Apple releasing budget iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 in September, says Reuters

Posted in Announcements about 9 months ago by Nick - Comments (3)

According to Reuters, Apple is preparing to launch two new models at the end of September.

The news agency reports that Apple plan to release a new, cheaper iPhone 4 which will feature an 8GB drive alongside a the next generation iPhone 5. Reuters contradicts recent reports and rumous that the iPhone 5 will be available early September, reporting instead that Apple are aiming for an "end-September" launch. The articles goes on to re-inteate the feautres that many bloggers have already leaked, including a larger display, new antenna and 8-megapixel camera.

Apple has announced more than 200 new features in iOS 5, the operating system likely to be used on the iPhone 5, including a revamped notification centre, iMessage, Newsstand, reminders, Twitter, a better browsing experience and a completely PC free experience.

Read the full article here