Mobile Network Comparison

We’re now well into March and it’s time to have a look over the previous month’s news from the world of mobile phones.

In February we’ve had some interesting technology headlines. The month started off with lots of new Android phone rumours and the announcement of HTC’s new M7 flagship smartphone. The HTC CEO Peter Chou revealed it before Chinese New Year and took some photos with its massive 13 MP camera. It was later revealed that the official name will be the HTC One and it will come with a 1080p display, a quad-core 1.7 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM.

Other Android phones announced were the new Intel x86 powered phones and the Samsung Galaxy IV strongly hinted for an April (or even March) release. Just in time for Android Key Lime Pie which is due soon after.

We also got rumours about new Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720. Both will have 1 GHz CPUs and half a gig of RAM and will be fully announced later at Mobile World Conference.

February saw iTunes hit 25 billion song sales. That’s a lot of albums. In other Apple news, the Exchange calendars bug was fixed with the release of iOS 6.1.2.

RIM also launched their new version of their mobile OS, BlackBerry 10. They also announced their new handsets, the traditional Q10 and the touchscreen Z10.

But enough of that. Continuing our round-up, here’s our selection of the very best articles and news stories from February. If you missed them the first time round, they’re well worth going back to take a look at.

Bill Gates: We were wrong about the iPhone

In this post we looked at an interview with ex-Mircosoft CEO and tech kingpin Bill Gates. In it, he hinted that Microsoft is willing to admit that they completely misjudged the smartphone market. Microsoft were initially very dismissive of the iPhone when it first came out but since its massive success, they have been desperately trying to play catch up in the mobile field. And not just because they are struggling with the dwindling importance of their traditional strong point – desktop computing. Only time will tell whether they are too late.

4G auction falls short and 4G auction winners and losers

It’s been a long time coming by Ofcom finally completed the final round of the much-anticipated 4G mobile spectrum auction. In the end, there were a couple of surprises but some people were most shocked by the fact it raised over £1 billion less than expected. We contributed some analysis as to why the auction was such a flop and how this is going to affect George Osborne in the run up to the next budget. Our other article went into more detail about just how much spectrum each company bought, whether you’re likely to get a better signal now and how it shifts the field for the nationwide roll-out of 4G services.

Data to be more important than voice in 5 years

Finally, thanks to a report from the GSM Association we took a peek into the future where mobile data is predicted to change the way we live. The pervasiveness of high-speed mobile internet access around the world is expected to make a huge difference to our lives especially in healthcare, transport and education. Could there really be savings of £250 billion just from mobile phone networks?

We hoped you liked our look back at the month of February 2013 and checked out our favourite articles. What were your favourite news stories?

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In a recent interview with CBS, Bill Gates has admitted that Microsoft missed a trick with the popularity of smartphones. Gates, ex-CEO of Microsoft and the founder and funder of the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world was probably referring to quotes made around the time the iPhone originally launched.

Back in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the following in an interview:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

It’s pretty clear now that Ballmer turned out to be completely wrong on all counts. And Gates admitted in a recent interview that Microsoft made a “mistake” by not foreseeing the influence and importance smartphones would play. Microsoft had invested quite a lot in tablets and normal mobile phones but was left floundering by the success of Apple’s iPhone. Even now, with the advent of the new Windows Phone 8 operating system, Microsoft still trails behind Android, iOS and BlackBerry in global phone sales.

At the time of the iPhone launch, Microsoft was pushing software called Windows Mobile. This was way before the advent of the modern Windows Phone OS and it paled in comparison to offerings from Apple and Google. Microsoft finally gave up on it in 2008 and took two more years to introduce Windows Phone. In the meantime, the smartphone market has exploded and, after initial gains by Apple, is now dominated by Google’s Android as well as Apple’s iOS.

The strategy Microsoft has used for mobile phones since hasn’t helped it gain much traction. They seem mainly concerned about making money from mobile rather than making the best possible experience for end users. While we applaud the fact that Bill Gates has admitted the mistake several year later, it remains to be seen whether Micrsoft’s position in the mobile market can ever recover especially after mocking the iPhone back in 2007.

Bill Gates recently revealed that he uses a Surface Pro to use the web when at home but he hasn’t said anything about what phone her personally uses even if it should be safe to assume he runs a Windows Phone.

And in case you haven’t got enough Bill Gates yet in this article, here’s a little something to leave you with:

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