Mobile Network Comparison

Everyone’s favourite media player, VideoLAN Client (or VLC to its friends), is finally being officially ported to Android. For those of you poor souls who aren’t familiar with VLC, it’s a free open-source player/server that is renowned for playing pretty much any file you can throw at it. And if playing almost anything effortlessly weren’t enough, VLC is very portable across platforms and can run on MacOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, BeOS and, now of course, Android as well as many other operating systems.

For the average computer user, VLC is well known for being a lightweight but extremely powerful video player. Back in the day, to play compressed videos you had to search out one of a number of different codecs depending on a seemingly-infinite number of permutations of encoding and container format. And even when your computer was bogged down by dozens of codec packs, there would still be files that just wouldn’t play at all. VLC puts an end to all this as it automatically includes a whole bunch of free decoding libraries without the need for additional plug-ins. And, despite this, it’s very thrifty with system resources. When we first discovered VLC many moons ago, it instantly became the only video player we’d consider due to its supreme convenience. If you’re still struggling with codec packs and unplayable video files in 2012, sucks to be you. But you can be grateful that now you no longer have to live like that. All in all, VLC is a godsend.

But enough digression. The point is that VLC is awesome. And it’s therefore awesome that it is now officially in the Google Play market ready for download to Android devices. There is a hacky beta version currently available if you’re a bit of an early adopter or power user but the full stable release is due ever so soon. For now the beta runs on ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv7+NEON powered phones such as the Galaxy Nexus, HTC One X or Samsung Galaxy SIII. VLC includes loads of great features such as volume control gestures, DVD subtitles and adjustments to aspect ratios. It also supports remote network streams as well as local media sources. And, of course, it can play back tons of media formats using software decoding. For example, decent phones should be able to cope with 720p H.264 videos in a Matroska container. Trust us, that’s cool. Anyway, the point is it’s coming soon to Android so you can now officially get excited 🙂

What app do you current use for video and audio playback on your Android? Do you use VLC on your desktop/laptop? And will you switch to it on your mobile?

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Mobile payments really are looking like they will be the future as T-Mobile have recently jumped on board. They will be partnering with MasterCard all over Europe to provide an NFC mobile payment solution that will hit Europe later this year. The idea of making use of the newish NFC technology is that it will allow your mobile phone to work similarly to an Oyster card – to make a payment whether for a tube journey, burrito or new laptop, all you need to do is touch your phone to the payment pad. Buy things really will be as quick and simple as that.

Overall, T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, has almost 100,000,000 mobile users in Europe and they will release their version of mobile payments in Germany and Poland to start with before rolling out to the rest of the continent. They will be working closely with ClikcandBuy who hold the necessary payments license. The combination of MasterCard’s financial expertise and the might of the T-Mobile brand will create a strong partnership that bodes well for the future of mobile payments. At a press conference, Deutsche Telekom’s Thomas Kiessling said:

With MasterCard we have a well-known and experienced partner generating growth in this important market segment. We want to build a comprehensive ecosystem around mobile payment, helping Telekom to realize its strategy of being the first choice for customers regarding connected life and work.

Of course, T-Mobile aren’t the first network to get involved in mobile wallets. Back in March, we reported on Telefonica, who own O₂, buying Boku who are an up-and-coming mobile payments company. Before that, they had already announced that they would soon be launching a money transfer app that will be compatible with all UK banks and even other mobile networks. Vodafone is another network that is early to the mobile payments game. Earlier this year they partnered with the other credit card giant, Visa. The technology hasn’t yet found its way to customers in the UK but their idea is that you can swipe your Visa payWave mobile to simply make payments of up to £15. Higher-value purchases simply require a PIN code. So Everything Everywhere, O₂ and Vodafone all have make their stakes already. It’s not yet clear will how Three Mobile aim to get involved in mobile payments.

This recent announcement is very exciting though. For the time being, T-Mobile are going to amongst the leaders in this area and their deal with MasterCard makes them one of the bigger partnerships worldwide. While it looks like nothing will be available in the UK until 2013, we will certainly be intrigued to see what happens next.

What you think of this partnership? Are you keen to get started making NFC mobile payments? Or do you think there’s no point? And what do you think of the security implications?

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Simply put, Jelly Bean is the latest update for the Android mobile operating system. In case you didn’t know, Google have been naming each new version of their OS alphabetically after sweets and desserts and the list so far has been Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich. Yum yum. What better to follow up that list than Jelly Bean which will become version 4.1 of Android.

In reality, it’s more of an update rather than a whole new version as the last edition, Ice Cream Sandwich was 4.0 and brought a huge number of stunning new features and redesigns to Android phones. In fact, Ice Cream Sandwich is still so recent that only some of the fanciest phones have got official updates for it yet. Still, that’s not to say that Jelly Bean hasn’t got its fair share of badass features.

Cementing its position as the most powerful and usable mobile operating system, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean comes with expandable notifications and user-customisable keyboard maps. Also, keeping one step ahead of the limiting and simplistic “grid of icons” design that iOS prefers, widgets are now automatically resizable. Add to this all the great features of ICS and new upgrades to contact photos, the camera app and proper gapless playback, and it’s hard to argue against this being the most modern mobile platform around.

One of the best examples of Google’s attention to detail is the improvements to the interface dubbed Project Butter. They have tried to make every aspect of your interaction smoother, more graceful and more aesthetically pleasing. While it’s not something you’d ever really think about, it makes the daily interaction with your phone that much faster and more pleasant. To show this feature off, Google got hold of a $20,000+ RED camera that shot a video of the phone’s interface at 120 frames per second really showing off how fast, fluid and smoothly it runs. Check it out for yourself:

But perhaps Jellys Bean’s killer feature is the new Google Now which seems to do everything Siri does on the iPhone and much more. And this time it has a pleasant synthesised voice instead of that harsh robot woman. You can test your phone with all sorts of questions and it will recognise your voice, work out what you mean and give you the answer in a matter of seconds. It can do simple things like set an alarm for Mothers’ Day, tell you the films Natalie Portman has been in, how much Bill Gates is worth, the fall in the stock price of Barclays or the height you have to be to ride Space Mountain. What what’s even more impressive is it can do calculations in real time, give you real time updates to football match scores and even automatically plan the fastest route to work for the current traffic when it notices you’re leaving home in the morning. Pretty neat, huh?

Some of the other notable new features (there are hundreds of them) includes new keyboard and a gestures input method. There’s also a much improved browser that runs much faster and has HTML5 tweaks. Your phone can easily replace a GPS abroad too as Maps now has an offline feature as does the voice recognition/dictation feature. Perhaps the coolest thing to try out in practice though is Android Beam which uses near field communication technology to transfer files between phones by simply touching them together.

But when can you get this in your eager hands? As mentioned earlier, you need to have a fairly new handset to run Jelly Bean now but it will be slowly rolling out onto more and more devices. The Google branded phones such as the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus will get it right away as will the Nexus 7 tablet. Other tablets such as the Motorola Xoom will get it and it should be possible to manually upgrade many phones if you want. Still, if you have an ancient phone and are drooling so much you have to upgrade, now might be time to invest in a Galaxy S3 🙂

So, are you desperate to get Android Jelly Bean on your own phone? What’s your favourite feature? And is it good enough to convince you to upgrade your handset? As usual, please drop us a comment 🙂

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