Mobile Network Comparison

French technology company has announced that it will soon release its first smartphones. The new devices will all be touchscreen smartphones. They will be called the 35 Carbon, 50 Platinum and 53 Platinum and will be running Google’s Android OS.

Archos has been running since 1988 and is best known as a manufacturer of mp3 players and PMPs (Portable Media Players). It made a name for itself in the early days of mp3 players with the rugged Archos Jukebox series which first came out in 2000. These mp3 players bucked the trend for small flash-memory based devices as it came with a massive 20 GB hard drive inside.

Since then, Archos have been one of the few PMP manufacturers to bother to include a decent amount on on-device storage. While trendy iPod users are content with tiny players, those with decent sized mp3 collections or who prefer lossless formats have had to rely on Archos to produce quality players.

Unlike other competing devices, they also have very good compatibility being able to play Ogg Vorbis files and FLACs as well as mp3s. Best of all, they usually have great recording facilities too. These far superior features have set apart Archos over the years from its mainstream rivals.

In recent years, the company has been pushing DVRs and internet tablets that double as video and music players. In 2009, the first Android-based device was released – the Archos 5. It is now on its eighth generation of internet tablets and is still running on Android.

However, it has to be said that the company’s experiment with Android hasn’t been a 100% success. Although the Archos mp3 players boast far superior features to most other dveices, stability has been a major issue. Archos have also had a very poor developement cycle and often release devices will very out-of-date versions of the OS on them. Either that, or the hardware can’t support more recent releases.

The net result is that the Archos Android devices so far have been slow and buggy and come with Android versions that are several years old. This means they are not only slow but they also are a very poor advertisement for the platform.

It has been rumoured for some time that they would move into smartphones and, with this latest announcement, hopefully we will see a better standard of product being released.

All the Archos phones will be low priced with the cheapest, the Carbon 35, coming in at just £70. It, however, will already be out-of-date when it is released as it will only ship with the last version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. It also boasts very impressive specs for the price – a 1 GHz processor, half a gig of RAM and a nice 3.5 inch screen. It even will have both front and rear cameras.

The next model up is the Platinum 50 which will be £180. This will run the most recent version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.1.2. The RAM is doubled compared to the Carbon 35 and it will have with a faster processor and a 5 inch screen. The Platinum 75 will be exactly the same specifications except that it will have a slightly larger 5.3 inch screen instead. It will set you back £200.

We’re quite excited to see what these phones turn out to be like, especially the cut-price Archos 35 Carbon. We’ll be back with more news nearer the release date which is currently scheduled for the end of May.

What do you make of this? Have you ever owed an Archos device before? Are you excited about their new phones? Is the budget end of the market too saturated already? And which model do you think will be the most successful?

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It’s almost here! After much speculation and rumour, it seems that Samsung’s new flagship mobile phone is going to be released this week. Samsung, the world-leading smartphone-manufacturer, has announced all the specifications for the follow-up to its best-selling Galaxy S3 smartphone, the predictably-named Samsung Galaxy S4.

Among the specs of the Galaxy S4, the screen is probably one of the most impressive. It comes with a huge 5-inch full HD Super AMOLED display with an incredibly-high pixel density of over 440 pixels per inch making for an ultra-sharp appearance. Despite this, the actual form factor of the phone itself fits into a tiny package. It’s incredibly thin and also is very lightweight coming in at only about 130g.

Of course, the Galaxy S4 runs the most advanced mobile operating system in the world right now – Google’s Android. Some of the new features completely blow away Apple’s iOS and this phone comes fully equipped with the very latest version of Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2. There are great new Samsung tweaks too such as the ability to share music through multiple phones so they all play the same song at once fully in sync as a kind of distributed speaker system. There’s also some nice tweaks to the user interface and a feature where sounds are recorded along with photos.

Perhaps the killer app is S Translator which can translate between a dozen languages in real time using voice as well as text. So, for example, if you are travelling in Shanghai, you can speak into your phone in English and it will say what you want in Mandarin Chinese. When you get a verbal reply, the phone will magically translate it into English for you. Check out this cool demo to see how it might work:

Other interesting apps included by Samsung are S Health which lets your phone act as an exercise tracker and some futurist motion sensing features for scrolling with your eyes or flipping through pages without even needing to touch the screen.

Of course, under the hood, the Galaxy S4 is packing extreme performance with a 4-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.9GHz CPU chip backed up with 2GB of RAM. No matter what you throw at it, this handset will easily keep up. The latest games can be run at ridiculously high frame rates and it utterly spanks the competition in benchmarking tests.

As for connectivity, it of course is fully 4G and NFC equipped. AllShare Cast is included as well meaning you can effortlessly stream media from other devices using Sony’s DLNA standard.

The camera is another area where Samsung aims to excel with this phone. The camera sports a massive 13 megapixel sensor which producing stunning results. It has a bright LED flash and performs well in macro and low-light conditions. Plus, of course, there are special modes such as Burst mode, Eraser mode and Cinema mode plus a decent 2 megapixel front-facing camera for video calls or even to merge into your 1080p videos.

Although it was originally announced that the phone would go on sale in the UK on Friday 26 April, the release date has now slipped. Samsung have delayed the release until 10am on Saturday 27th April instead so you’ll have to wait a bit longer to get your hands on this amazing new device.

Where to get it?

All the major mobile networks will be offering the Samsung Galaxy S4 from this Saturday. Click the links below for our picks of the very best deals currently available:

	£35/month for 500 minutes and unlimited data
	£37/month for 600 minutes and 750 MB data
	£36/month for unlimited minutes and 2 GB data
	£31/month for 1000 minutes and unlimited data
	£37/month for unlimited minutes and 1 GB data
	£36/month for unlimited minutes and 500 MB data

So what do you make of the new Samsung Galaxy S4? Is there any better phone out there right now? How does it compared to the iPhone 5, HTC One or Nokia Lumia 920? Which is the best network to get it on? And will you be queueing up to get one later this week? Let us know!

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We’re getting reports that Giffgaff is suffering a partial network outage. It’s not yet clear whether O₂ and Tesco Mobile are also affected. We’ll update from across various sources as the situation progresses.

2G and 3G calls –  Available
2G and 3G texts –  Available
2G and 3G data –  Available
Emergency calls –  Available

Update 22:53

It’s 100% official now:

Service has now been restored on our network. We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. Here is more info: http://t.co/nplmL4oQyU

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

That’s it for us, then. Thanks for reading. We’ll be back soon with an in-depth blog post on exactly what went wrong and how come it took so long to fix as soon as we get confirmation from Giffgaff. We’re not holding out hope but if there’s any form of compensation or goodwill gesture offered, we’ll be sure to have the full lowdown too.

For now: Goodnight and sleep well, safe in the knowledge that your Giffgaff phone is working again 🙂

Update 22:44

Thanks to everyone who came here to read updates and left comments or tweets with their experience. While you’re here, please check out our articles and especially our comprehensive comparison table of all PAYG mobile networks. We’d also be really grateful if you could rate the networks we’ve reviewed (especially this one), subscribe to our newsletter or consider retweeeting some of our articles or linking to some of our pages.

Official Update 22:37

Just wanted to add to Will T’s update. Thank you all for remaining patient with us while we resolved this. I know it was very frustrating to lose your service and I can assure you a full review is now going on into how this can be avoided. I am sure there will be some future updates around this.

Update 22:36

Woohoo! What a relief! After almost four hours we finally managed to make our first call with our Giffgaff SIM. Over on Twitter it seems that service is back up and running. Thanks for coming by to follow our updates.

Official Update 22:35

Good news – we’re back. Calls, texts and data all appear to be working well.

Thanks so much for following along over the last few hours, everyone. We’ll be keeping an eye on the service for a little while to make sure it’s stable – if you’re not receiving service please make sure that you reset your phone and try again.

Official Update 22:25

Good news – after some sterling work by the engineers, we’re back. Calls, texts and data all appear to be working well.

Thanks so much for following along over the last few hours, everyone. We’ll be keeping an eye on the service for a little while to make sure it’s stable – if you’re not receiving service please make sure that you reset your phone and try again.

Update 22:24

At last one other news source has picked up this story. Over at TechEYE.net they have a quickly-written article about the downtime.

Update 22:23

We’re getting some reports that calls are working any. Can any of you confirm?

Official Update 22:22

Thanks so much to everyone who’s reporting their data service status – please keep it coming. Make sure that you’re restarting your handset before trying again as this will force a new connection to the network and give the most up to date result.

Official Update 22:10

We’ve been working hard to bring service back up and we believe we may have restored data service for those of you that were experiencing difficulty. Would those of you that were having trouble please ensure your settings are correct, restart your handset, and confirm whether this is the case?

Update 22:05

So we’ve hit the 3-hour mark now and there’s still no end in sight. However, there is some reason to be cheerful. At least it seems that mobile data is back up and running for most people. And finally it appears that Giffgaff have identified the issue with their network. They just don’t know how long it will take to fix.

Hopefully we’ll have some more positive updates to bring you over the next hour or so…

Official Update 21:53

Just a quick one – the exact issue with the hardware that failed has been identified and the engineers are working in earnest to correct it. Thanks again and we’ll be updating once we have further updates.

Update 21:52

It appears data is back where we are. Anyone else?

Update 21:49

For those still worried about rumours that the network will be down until 30th April, Giffgaff have officially denied this twice now. However, they have yet to give any other ETA for a fix nor any indication whether it’s more likely to be minutes, hours, days or weeks…

Official Update 21:44

Thanks again for your patience. We’re talking with the tech team and it looks like they’re making good progress on this. We’ll update with more as soon as we’re able.

Update 21:41

Still no mention of the outage from any major blog or news source – seems we’re the only ones coving it. Even though Giffgaff has got 100,000s of users now, it’s not yet deemed important enough to write about.

Anyone want to take bets for how long this will last in total?

Update 21:37

If you’re bored with waiting to get your network service back, here’s some things to while away the time:

• How we think all companies should deal with network outages on Twitter.
• The full low-down on what exactly caused the big O₂ outage last year. We we the only tech blog to actually look at this seriously and give you answers about what went wrong.
• Our amusing Timeout Tuesday series of funny YouTube videos.

Got anything funny or interesting you want to share with people while we wait for a more substantial update from Giffgaff?

Update 21:34

Well that was useless…

So it seems we don’t really know anything other than nobody can say how long this outage will last and that it’s something to do with the voice call hardware that is, for some reason, affecting texts and data too.

On the plus side we have got Twitter updates working again even if Giffgaff aren’t providing much info on their Twitter account:

@emma_loopy Hey Emma, we know this is annoying, no ETA as of yet and we'll update here as soon as we know anything.

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

Official Update 21:30

We have no further updates at this time. Unfortunately we don’t have an ETA for a fix yet. As soon as we do we will let you all know.

Official Update 21:29

All we know at the moment is, it was a problem with piece of hardware that manages voice calls. Any other information we find out will be updated on the thread.

Official Update 21:27

Thanks again so much for the patience you’re showing with us on this. We know how important it is to be connected and we’re working as hard as we can to make sure we can bring the system back online as soon as possible.

Update 21:18

We haven’t been able to get data to actually work at all. And nobody on Twitter seems to either. Is data working for anyone at all? Is it really “intermittent”?

Official Update 21:15

Thanks for your comments about your varying degress [sic] of data service – I’ve added this as intermittent at the top of the thread as it’s a more accurate representation of the service currently.

I also want to assure you that we’re still working hard to make sure that this is resolved as soon as we can.

Update 21:13

We’re getting unconfirmed reports that Tesco Mobile is unaffected (although O₂ is definitely fine. Anyone with a Tesco Mobile SIM able to verify this for us?

Update 21:11

It’s just past 9pm and the issue has been going on for over two hours now. The community thread just hit 100 pages! Still no sign as to when it will be fixed though 🙁

Lots of people saying that data definitely is not working in opposition to Giffgaff staffer t_will. Only a few are saying it is still working.

Official Update 21:01

zobia22 just responded to a post where someone claimed that the outage will continue until 30th April:

We have no idea how long calls and texts will be down for. As soon as we do have a time frame or any more information, we will update this thread.

Update 20:57

So Giffgaff are saying that data should still be working. No luck here though. What about you guys?

And anyone else managed to receive any texts in the last couple of hours?

Official Update 20:54

I’ve just heard from the tech team and they’re looking at a couple of different options right now. The issue appears to be with a piece of hardware that manages voice calls, which we’ll be fixing shortly.

After investigation, the reports that data is affected appear to be incorrect, so I’ve marked this as available. If you’re having problems with your data allowance please make sure that your settings are correct and that you have an active allowance.

Official Update 20:50

We are updating the thread as soon as we get any information. Once we have more details on what is causing the issue, we will update the thread.

Update 20:50

Could the end be nigh?! We just got a text into our text Giffgaff phone. It was sent at 20:48 and arrived by 20:49. If texts can be received maybe they can be sent too? We’re trying our best to test this hypothesis out… Let us know if you have any luck too…

Update 20:47

Some black humour in this difficult time 🙂

what did one giff gaff user say to the other? nothing

— Eajaz Suarez MUA (@Eajazzz) April 23, 2013

Official Update 20:42

Seems they are trying to deflect the blame. But no hard information about what exactly is causing the fault.

I just want to jump in to reassure you all we are doing everything within our powers to get this resolved as soon as possible. We are working with our third parties and we will update as and when we know more.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.

Update 20:39

An update on the data issue. We’ve been in contact with several other Giffgaff users as well as running our own tests – it seems that the phone will still say it’s connected to data but won’t be able to load any pages or send/receive any data. So data seems to be down everywhere now according to what we’re hearing. Is it working for any of you?

Official Update 20:35

I’ve noticed a few people concerned about this, so wanted to make clear that emergency calls to 999 should still work while we’re experiencing this difficulty, so if you are experiencing an emergency that would require it you should still be able to get assistance.

Update 20:32

Giffgaff users are getting ncreasingly irate. This is from hogweed on the forums:

Well time for the giffgaff boss to resign. All his plans to make sure this didn’t happen again have ben [sic] shown to be incompetent lies.

It is fair to mention that Giffgaff have had more than their fair share of outages. Usually it’s been O₂‘s fault but at the moment it seems this problem rests squarely on their shoulders.

The forum thread is now up to 42 pages and is being updated faster than we can read it….

Official Update 20:31

Just wanted to thank you for all your comments so far. We know how much people rely on their mobile phones and we’re working as quickly and as well as possible to ensure that service is restored as soon as we’re able.

Update 20:29

The good news is that the Giffgaff community forum seems to be standing up to the strain at the moment. The bad news is that there’s still no word on the cause or duration of this outage. Even worse, we haven’t had our dinner yet 🙁

Official Update 20:20

It appears that this issue may also affect data service intermittently. I’ll update the title to reflect this, so if you see anyone posting about losing their data service please direct them to this thread.

We’re still working on the issue and will update you once we have plans for a resolution.

So there you have it, data is officially affected too.

Update 20:19

The Giffgaff community thread (when you can get it to load) is now up to 20 pages…

User therosey1973 (I mean “member”) just reported that she couldn’t get a taxi so had to walk 3 miles home…

Please help spread the word by linking to this page if you have a website or by tweeting a link so that people can keep up-to-date with the outage.

Update 20:17

We’re getting reports that data is now down too. Our own tests are not yet conclusive but we strangely got redirected to the URL http://tablet.o2.co.uk/ when trying to visit Google. We suspect data will be fully down soon too but still have no idea what is causing the outage. Giffgaff haven’t given any clues at all. What experience are you getting?

Update 20:16

No updates of any substance from Giffgaff recently. We still can’t access the community post and their Twitter account is just trying to reassure indiviudals rather than discuss the problem and its solution.

Update 20:13

Sorry if your comment isn’t approved immediately – they are coming in quicker than we can publish them at the moment! Don’t stop though…

Update 20:11

Can anyone positively confirm that O₂ and Tesco Mobile are unaffected by this issue?

Update 20:10

Seems tweets aren’t embedding properly. We’re working on fixing it but for the time being just visit the URLs.

Update 20:07

Giffgaff have officially confirmed that the outage is nationwide.

@Ashley_Armitage It's not you. It's us. Everyone is experiencing it right now, we'll update you when we have more information. Thanks.

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

They have also said that they are unable/unwilling to give an estimate for how long the downtime will last.

@Kimmuirxo Hey Kim, we don't have an ETA right now, but will update on here when we do.

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

Update 20:05

Our tests and comments from users seem to show that data is still working. But what about the speeds? Are you seeing any difference compared to what you usually get?

Update 19:59

Giffgaff just confirmed that calls and texts are down. Are we to infer from this that data is still fine. Does yours work? Let us know…

@HollyReijs Evening, calls and texts are currently down, but we'll update you as soon as information becomes available.

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

Update 19:53

Update from Giffgaff:

@StefanGauntlett Hey, there's no new updates right now, but we'll inform you when there is here as well.

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

We’re really hoping they will be able to give an estimate for the restoration of service soon.

Update 19:49

We just ran some tests and it’s still definitely not working. Even triggering Airplane mode and back again or doing a hard reboot of the phone does resolve the issue.

Update 19:46

The Giffgaff community is struggling under the strain of all the customers without service. It keeps going down making it harder for people to get information. Our server is taking a beating too but we’ll do our best to keep it going for you guys…

Update 19:43

Just rejigged this post so that the latest updates are at the top and so you don’t need to keep scrolling down to check if anything new has been posted 🙂

Update 19:40

Offical word from Giffgaff:

We are having a few issues with the network we use at the moment. Please bear with us for updates check the Community http://t.co/Obqpv9yvhO

— giffgaff (@giffgaff) April 23, 2013

Update 19:37

Nothing new to report from Giffgaff yet unfortunately. But from what people have been tweeting us and commenting here, this definitely seems to be nationwide. Reports coming in of the network being down from all over the UK. Keep them coming so we can see if there are any improvements anywhere over the course of this issues…

Update 19:30

Just a friendly reminder – please help us keep track of the outage by commenting below with your location and which services are currently unavailable. Cheers 🙂

Update 19:29

There are currently a torrent of tweets about the outage. Please refer people to this post for the latest updates and use the hashtag #giffgaffoutage to keep track of the problem.

Anyone else on giffgaff's network down?

— chloeeeee!✌ (@chlomaryjane) April 23, 2013

@nero5193 I think it must be a nationwide thing. Hope it gets fixed sharpish, it's super annoying

— Penny (@pr_89) April 23, 2013

someone inform me when #giffgaff is working again please

— THAT GIRL (@beth_ebdon) April 23, 2013

Texts not sending for some reason. Wonder if @giffgaff are having any technical problems. D:

— Mark Teo (@Mahzes) April 23, 2013

@giffgaff I have problems with my phone, I have enough credit&I have unlimited text, but I can't send calls or texts&can receive them..HELP!

— Party Animal (@JaimeGoddard) April 23, 2013

Giff gaff is down can't send texts or any calls this happening to anyone else?

— Duncan Corbett (@DuncanC95) April 23, 2013

Update 19:25

If you are on Giffgaff and your network is currently down, please comment below with your location and the services that aren’t working. We’re currently trying to get a picture of whether this outage is nationwide or localised. We have already had emails from people in Sussex, West Mids, Glasgow and London about their phones not working.

Update 19:22

Some forum threads from users about this issue: 1, 2, 3, 4.

But still nothing on the official Service Updates board.

Update 19:19

Twitter is currently awash with reports that people can neither text nor call. There’s still no official word from Giffgaff acknowledging the outage.

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