Mobile Network Comparison

Rumours are spreading that catalogue store Argos is going to offer its own mobile phone contracts later this year. There have been unconfirmed reports over recent days that Argos will launch it’s own pay monthly deals from its hundreds of UK stores. Analysts are saying that we could see Argos Mobile on the high street as soon as April 2013.

There is no firm news about the plans yet though. Initial reports suggest that they will start by trialling mobile contracts and, if things work well, will consider starting their very own virtual network. There is still no information about which operator they would run their services on.

It is thought that Argos is particularly keen on the move as its mobile income results have been particularly poor recently. The success of budget virtual networks such as Giffgaff and Ovivo have severely cut into their margins. This is especially the case as Argos has traditionally made good income on commissions from PAYG deals with the main network operators.

However, their plan to go into the contract market is risky and may not be well advised given it orders of magnitude more competitive than the PAYG market they are already struggling in. Still, it is reported that they are hiring industry experts such as Vodafone manager Ben Murr to help get the new service off its feet.

As well as contract services, it is thought that Argos will offer SIM-only deals too. The Argos network could turn out to be a strong competitor of rivals such as Phones 4u.

The official word from Argos has yet to come though. A spokesperson refused to confirm any of the rumours and proposed commercial partners have either denied or refused to comment on the plans.

However, despite this, the industry is abuzz with talk about this development. It is thought that if Argos can make the most of its existing customer base the new venture could be very successful. In fact, analysts are suggesting that Argos Mobile could grow its user base to a mid-six figure size within about two years of launching. This would make it one of the larger virtual mobile networks if this was realised.

What’s your take on this? Do you think that Argos Mobile would materialise? Can it compete with other virtual networks on price? And would you use it on your phone?

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The Google Play store officially replaced the Android Market one year ago and to celebrate this birthday Google has decided to give all Android uses a gift in the form of some special offers and sales. The festivities will last for a whole week and you can get savings and money off on all sort of content. Items that are currently discounted include not only apps and games but also movies, music and magazines. And that’s not all. We also spotted some exclusive in-app content that’s only available now and cool bonuses such as exclusive in-game characters. You can even get discounts on accomodation.

Some great spots we’ve found include the pilot episode of the fantastic drama Breaking Bad absolutely free, Donnie Darko for just £4 in HD and 50% off games such as Monopoly and Plants vs Zombies.

But some of the content available is a little underwhelming. At the moment lots of the movies and music on offer are very old releases and there doesn’t seem to be very big savings available for new films at all. In fact, a lot of the “deals” aren’t discounted at all when compared to other online stores.

With a quick look around, we found DVDs available in supermarkets for the same price as Google’s deals. And some of the apps they claim to be giving away were always free.

Having said that, the celebrations have only just started and we don’t think Google would want to blow everything right away. Hopefully things will improve over the week and more and more great deals will be revealed. Keep and eye out on Google Play for the latest offers and surprises. After all, for Black Friday 2012 they had some pretty special deals. If you spot anything outstanding over the coming days, please come back and let us know in the comments.

Do you remember when Google Play was first launched a year ago? Do you use it regularly? And what’s your opinion of the current sale? Excited or let down? Let us know!

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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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