Mobile Network Comparison

So it’s been a few weeks since the release of the new iPhone 6 and its larger sibling, the iPhone 6 Plus. No matter what you think of Apple’s latest offering, there’s no denying that it’s massively popular and one of the best phones on the market.

Whether you’re delighted that it’s finally got a useful version of NFC or terrified that you’re going to end up with a warped smartphone, one thing all users of the new iPhone are after is the latest and greatest accessories for the most recent model.

With 20 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets out on the market already in less than a month, there’s clearly a huge demand. And especially with the various issues about bending and hair-pulling, it’s clear there are some great oppurtunities. Even if you think it’s perfect as it is, there are some cool toys and additions that make it an even better phone.

So without further ado, here’s our roundup of the coolest, most useful and generally most awesome accessories specially designed for the new iPhones.

Rheme One Easytouch In Car Holder

Only £6.99

First up, something cheap but super useful. With a new phone, you need some way to mount it in your car especially now the iPhone 6 is a great music player and GPS device.

The Rheme One Easytouch In Car Holder may only be £6.99 but it works perfectly with a strong windscreen suction cup. It will also do fully adjustable with 360 degree rotation and quick portrait and landscape views.

Best of all it fits perfectly with both the iPhone 6 Plus and the iPhone 6. This is a simple good product which is easy to use: just push it home against a button on the holder and it grips the phone. Sturdy, sticks brilliantly and convenient. You can rely on this to hold your new phone.

Snugg iPhone 6 Plus Leather Flip Case

Was £39.98 Now only £19.99

Whether you’re worried about scuffing your new iPhone or scared it will bend in your pocket, the Snugg iPhone 6 Plus Leather Flip Case is the perfect solution. It made out of high quality materials to keep your device safe and has a easy flip cover to ensure the screen remains pristine and unscrached.

In addition to this, it also features credit card slots and a secure hidden pocket. We especially like the built-in stand which offers multiple viewing angles and the the fact it has a magnetic strap to keep your iPhone 6 Plus securely seated.

The stitching is high quality and the material inside seems soft. Snugg is a quality brand for a quality handset and with a lifetime guarantee you’ve got nothing to worry about. It also looks great!

PINPO Extendable Waterproof Selfie Monopod

Only £15.47

The PINPO Extendable Waterproof Selfie Monopod might be a bit of a mouthful but it’s also one of the coolest accessories that works with the new iPhones.

This funky handheld monopod makes selfies easier than ever. Its super convenient remote shutter controller is compatible with the latest iPhones and the easily-adjustable design allows you to rotate the viewing angle to capture the perfect shot.

Does exactly what it’s meant to and really makes taking selfies all that more enjoyable. A must-have for photography fanatics.

Anker Astro Mini 3200mAh Ultra-Compact Portable Power Pack

Was £39.99 Now only £13.99

The battery looks great – it’s really tiny, about the size of a lipstick so it fits easily in any pocket or handbag. It’s the perfect solution to add more than a full charge or 9 hours of additional talk time to your iPhone 6.

The external chargers is stylish, comes with a small bag. The charger leverages PowerIQ™ technology to maximize the charge and current for recharging. It’s constructed using Grade A cells and premium microchips to ensure the highest quality.

This little gadget has saved our bacon already on a few occasions. It will do one nearly full charge or two smaller ones and at this price is a no-brainer.

iKross WaterProof Bicycle Mount

Only £21.99

The iKross WaterProof Bicycle Mount comes with with a water proof pouch that will weather seal your iPhone 6 so you don’t need to worry about rain, snow, dust or mud. It features a fully adjustable ball head joint with 360 degree rotation and locking system for customized portrait and landscape view. In our opinion it’s the best way to mount your iPhone whilst on your bike.

Simply put, the protection it offers is excellent. We really can’t think of a more robust way of secure your expensive phone. It’s really clear that that this case has had a lot of thought put into it. The phone fits snugly and the unit mounts nicely on the bicycle handlebars. It looks great and surely could take any drop or hit. Not bad for the price.

Continue Reading

Google have officially revealed that the name for the new version of Android 5.0 will be “lollipop”. Previously codenamed Android “L”, the latest release continues the alphabetical naming scheme and Google have comfirmed that the coding is completely finished unlike previously-seen developer previews.

Android Lollipop replaces the current version of Android which is KitKat 4.4. It’s hard to believe but it’s now a year old having been originally released back in October 2013. There isn’t too much to get excited about with the main new features being a built-in battery saver mode and multiple accounts/profiles for guests. It also will feature Google’s new “material design” as well as the ability to unlock your device securely over Bluetooth.

Here at MNC, we’re looking forward to trying the finished version out. Google have announced that it will be rolled out onto their Nexus devices over coming weeks. We also can’t wait to see what independent developers do with Android 5.0 and hope to see it being featured in some custom ROMs as soon as possible.

Speaking on the Nexus devices, Google also confirmed the details of their new Nexus 9 Android tablet as well as the massive Nexus 6 phablet that had been codenamed “Shamu”. Both will be out for preorder shortly.

The official price for the Nexus 6 in the UK hasn’t been released yet. But it will cost $649 for the 32GB version or $699 for the 64GB version in the US. We predict the initial cost to be around £525 for the smaller version and over £550 for the 64GB model.

Like its predecessor, the Nexus 5, Google’s new flagship phone is made by Motorola. In fact, it looks very similar to their Moto X handset, only bigger and better.

Most of the tech industry’s predictions about the specs have turned out to be correct. But the performance of this is going to be gargantuan. It comes with a Snapdragon 805 SOC offering a quad-core 2.7 GHz Krait 450 processor. Its lightning-fast speed will be supplemented by the Adreno 420 GPU and 3GB of RAM.

One thing you can be sure of is that the Nexus 6 is going be huge with a massive 6″ quad HD display (5.96″ to be precise) dominating the front of the phone. This is running at a resolution of 1440 x 2560 and offers a stunning 493 ppi.

Many people have suggested that the Nexus 6 is far too big for a phone. But we produced the following scale mock-up to compares its size to the new iPhone 6 Plus. You can see that although the 6 Plus only has a 5.5″ display, it’s only negligibly smaller than the Nexus 6 and should feel roughly the same in the hand.

In fact, they are almost identically sized with the iPhone 5 Plus coming in with a height of 158.1mm compared to the Nexus 6’s 159.26mm. The new Google phone is only 10.06mm thick (we’d prefer thicker with a better battery) and weighs about the same as the iPhone at 184g.

The main reason it fits so much more into a similar-size package isn’t because the iPhone has a thicker bezel. In fact, the main reason why the iPhone suffers a much smaller screen is mainly because Apple haven’t moved onto contextual on-screen buttons yet and since the gimmicky Touch ID home key takes up so much space. However, despite being comparable in size, there’s no denying the Nexus 6 is huge by any standard and many will not find this acceptable instead choosing to stick with the older Nexus 5.

We’re super excited about 13 megapixel camera which now comes with a f/2.0 aperture lens. Although you won’t get the sort of creamy paper-thin depth of field you can expect with a larger sensor, it’s going to look great and importantly perform better in low light conditions and at higher video framerates (especially coupled with OIS). Of course the built in panorama and HDR software is getting better all the time and it also has a dual led ring flash. Best of all it can record amazing 4K video at full 30fps but the front-facing camera is only 2 megapixels.

Other features include dual speakers and finally, finally, a half-decent-sized battery and quicker charging. Google claim the 3220mAh cell will last up to 250 hours standby or 10 hours of mobile data/video playback with a talk time of about a day. Sadly there’s still no expandable memory slot – Google, you make us sad 🙁

What do you think about these new announcements? What features are you most looking forward to in Android Lollipop? And is the Nexus 6 too big for you or do you prefer a smaller handset (which)? Let us know in the comments below.

Continue Reading

One 24 September, Giffgaff implemented their long-discussed new range of monthly goodybag bundles. The reactions have been incredibly varied but mainly negative. But if you’re a Giffgaff user, what exactly do the changes mean for you?

We recently discussed the background to this price increase Goodybag change, but let’s go into some details about what actually happened and how you’ll be affected. Here’s what’s new:

• £12 goodybag: reduced from unlimited data to 3GB but minutes have increased from 250 to 500
• £15 goodybag: existing users with a SIM activated before 21 August 2014 can keep the current offering with unlimited data and texts and 500 minutes. New members will only get 5GB of data instead.
• £20 goodybag: discounted to £18 until the end of march next year.
• £12.50 gigabag: discounted to £12 goodybag permanently
• Goodybag renewals: finally users will be able to buy another goodybag before their current one expires in the same month if they’ve used up their allowance.

So will you be affected? The most obvious difference that has concerned the most people has been the removal of unlimited data at the £12 and £15 goodybag options. Of course, if you’re an existing customer, the complaint about the £15 goodybag is irrelevant as you’ll still be able to buy it as long as you activated before 21st August. But you do have to be very careful as it’s only available as long as you purchase it at least once every two months.

However, for people who made the most of the £12 goodybag, they’re going to have less data or have to spend more. To be fair, this was one of the cheapest deals going in the UK and spending just an extra £3 a month isn’t such a big deal as it brings the allowance more in line with other competitors. And if you still want to pay just £12 3GB isn’t a bad deal at all and should last most people fine. It’s also an improvement in some cases as the data is now tetherable.

Giffgaff have actually run some statistical analyses to see how this will affect their users. And they found that, in fact, 79% of members on the £12 goodgybag would be unaffected by the price change as they currently don’t even use more than 3GB a month. As for users currently on the £15 goodybag, only 17% ever actually use more than 5GB of monthly data so an even smaller proportion will be affected. Again, if they do desperately need unlimited data, the price increase is only £3 extra and it comes with plenty of extra minutes too.

They have also emailed each member with a summary of their usages of texts, minutes and data for the last four months so they can easily see what time of user they are. Helpfully, Giffgaff have also calculated which goodybag is the best value for money for you so you don’t have to crunch the figures yourself.

But why change at all? Giffgaff claim that they’ve been witnesses increasing frustration with data speeds in user forums and that this is necessary to safeguard a reasonable user experience expeically before the 4G launch. They were the cheapest offering which attracted lots of users who just wanted to rinse the unlimited data for all its worth which negatively affected other users. It’s a bit of a cop out, but it does at least make sense. At the same time, Giffgaff have also introduced traffic management called Traffic Flow which limits bandwidth use during certain peak times. Where members are using more than their fair share of network resource during the busiest hours, a 300 kbps restriction will be introduced for the remainder of the peak period. A peer to peer speed restriction of 100 kbps during peak hours will also be introduced for these users but all restricts will be removed at the end of the peak period.

So that’s the basic summary of what’s going to change for all Giffgaff’s goodybag users. Are you a Giffgaff user and do you regularly buy a goodybag? Did you take part in this consultation and what was your take on it? How did you think Giffgaff dealt with it? And have you been affected and if so what’s your opinion now it’s in action? Please share your thoughts below.

Continue Reading