Mobile Network Comparison

It’s hard (and sad) to believe it, but summer is already over. It was a busy belter for sure, and we got some great weather but the days are already getting longer and the kids are already back at school. Before you know it, the shops will be playing carols and you’ll be thinking about making the first batch of mulled wine of the year. But before that happens, let’s take a while to look back at the best mobile stories from the summer.

We’ve had some great headlines over the last couple of months. Not least the various leaks about Apple’s new iPhone 5S. While we are fairly certain about the name, very little else is known for sure until secretive Apple makes an official announcement. There are strong hints there will finally be a 128GB version as well as a new gold-coloured option though. Stay tuned as we’re expected to hear much more tomorrow.

There were also lots of juicy rumours about new Android phones and tablets such as the Motorola Moto X, the Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and and the stunning Samsung Galaxy Note III with its massive screen. Full official details are due any day now. But one of the most intriguing things about having a large screen is the possibility for gargantuan 4K screens at an unbelievable 640 ppi resolution as they are now supported in the latest version of Android Jelly Bean 4.3. Android as a digital ecosystem is also doing incredibly well as it has been reported that their sales account for almost 80% of all smartphones these days.

In other news, we saw the launch of the first phone running the shiny new Firefox OS as well as plenty of new devices running Windows Phone OS. BlackBerry is still on the decline, however.

But what else has been happening? Here’s a round-up of the five very best articles and news stories from the Mobile Network Comparison blog.

Sainsbury’s and ethical business

At the beginning of the month, we reported on a new virtual mobile network being launched by Sainsbury’s. However, after a while, it became clear that there was more to it than it first seemed. The choice of CEO Justin King to use Vodafone as their network provider deserves some scrutiny as he’d repeatedly made statements saying that businesses should pay a fair amount of tax back to the state and not try to avoid their ethical responsibilities.

However, Vodafone are well known in the UK for their complicated arrangements for evading tax payments. Despite taking in over £40 billion in revenue and paying out billions to shareholders, Vodafone didn’t pay any tax at all last year. Check out our full story for details of their tax records and the issues with Justin King going into business with them despite his strong claims about the rights and wrongs of businesses’ tax affairs.

Revealed – the great mobile tax con

Continuing our reporting into UK networks’ tax avoidance, we wrote a detailed article covering exactly how much mobile operators are paying in tax. This article revealed shocking facts such as the fact that foreign-owned EE has 25 million UK customers but spends almost 150% on paying shareholders than the total 2013 budget for all NHS A&E departments in the country.

For more details on how much money mobile companies are making, how much they are paying their executives and how much tax they are contributing and paying back to society, you can’t miss this post.

Lenovo A789 review

This summer we also published our first ever mobile handset review. The Lenovo A789 is typical of a Chinese phone that’s not available directly on the UK market – much cheaper than the norm but packing an impressive specs list and a unique feature set including great ideas such as dual-SIM capability and a built-in FM transmitter.

We got our hands on one and played around with it for hours and hours to work out its best pros and cons. Our full review includes a detailed critique of the hardware, specs, design and operating system of this great value phone.

iPhone 5S to have fingerprint scanner

This post looked at one of the most interesting leaked features of the new iPhone 5C – a fingerprint scanner built into the touchscreen. We looked into industry claims that using fingerprint scanners on phones will change the way we use technology forever. Our analysis not only went into detail about the likelihood of this being confirmed for the new iPhone but also unravel some misconceptions and truths about privacy and security on iOS.

PAYG showdown: 321 vs Giffgaff

Finally, we wrote a massive 1,100 word post on Three Mobile’s groundbreaking new 321 tariff. This new deal slashes prices and offers what seems to be the UK’s best value PAYG price-plan with calls just 3p, texts coming in a 2p each and mobile data costing a cheap-as-chips 1p/MB.

But is it really the best value option for you? This detailed price comparison post does what we do best and really delves into real world costs to see if there are any better ways to save money on your mobile. If you want the actual cheapest deal available, don’t miss this read.

We hoped you liked our look back at the summer’s mobile stories and went back to have a look at our best articles. Let us know your favourites and if you think there’s anything we missed out in the comments below 🙂

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Is Apple’s famous 1984 advert being taken too seriously in Cupertino these days? We’re sure you all remember that classic video and at the time Apple used it to claim that they would ensure that the future would not resemble George Orwell’s chilling dystopian vision.

In his keynote speech, Steve Jobs portrayed Apple as the only company to “ensure future freedom”. However, we have seen new Apple patents that would allow covert police or government operations to remotely prevent wireless communication whenever they want and impose blackout conditions. The patent allows government agencies to transmit a special kill signal to all Apple devices in a given area and prevent them from recording videos or taking photographs.

The scary implications of this are not hard to imagine. The rise of the mobile phone has been a great equaliser and has help the public reign in and publicise police brutality. Mobile phone footage has been a fantastic tool for popular protesters during the Arab Spring and in alerting the Western world to atrocities committed in Syria. And who can forget this chilling footage from London of balaclava-wearing police attacking an unarmed bystander causing him to die:

The news about this new patent has led many to fear that authorities could order a blackout during public protests to allow them to get away with police brutality, abuses of power or even cover-up large-scale injustices. Governments would have the final say on when these powers could be used and it has been reported that they only need to claim that a situation is “”sensitive” and that it needs to be “protected from externalities” to flip the killswitch.

Apple have also made statements alluding to the fact that this technology could be used to allow intelligence agencies to cover-up illegal state activity such as the PRISM surveillance programme revealed by Edward Snowden. What would governments be able to get away with if they had control over these powers?

It’s not yet clear whether Apple will implement this intellectual property into its products now what checks and controls will be in place to govern its use. However, it is somewhat alarming that a company who warned consumers about being enslaved by technology is actively promoting ideas like this.

What do you make of this news? Can preventing people from making recordings in public ever be justified? Will Apple introduce this technology soon? If so, how confident are you that its use won’t be abused? Finally, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper has revealed a list of the companies collaborating with the NSA and the British spy agency, GCHQ to pass on all your private communications to secretive government agencies. Some of the UK’s largest telecommunications companies have given GCHQ unfettered access to their network infrastructure including undersea fibre optic cables carrying phone calls and internet traffic.

This programme has been planned since at least 2009 and for almost two years now, GCHQ has been able to store copies of all data transmitted along these cables and store it for up to 30 days. At no point in time has the UK government made its citizens aware that this has been taking place. The companies revealed to have been giving up their users’ data include Vodafone and BT as well as Verizon Business in the US.

GCHQ has gone to great length to hide the identities of the companies involved. Internal documents claim that this is done for reasons of sensitivity as breaking the news could lead to high “high-level political fallout”. Even in internal documents, Vodafone has not been explicitly names – instead it is referred to by its codename “GERONTIC”. GCHQ plans to massively expand this information gathering in the future.

This news will dismay anyone concerned with privacy, civil liberties and the overreach of national governments. This almost certainly breaches the Data Protection Act. But each of the companies is legally obliged to hand over their data to GCHQ and they are also prevented by law from revealing the existence of these spying programmes. According to the Guardian, GCHQ is handling 600 million “telephone events” each day, has tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables which deliver more than 21 petabytes of data a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library every 7.5 minutes.

Edward Snowden, the American computer analyst who revealed the details of these government spying programmes, is now finally out of the Moscow airport departure lounge. However, he is wanted in his home country and has nowhere to live until he receives asylum from a nation state. The information he helped to publicise also shows that 300 analysts from GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts had direct access to search and sift through all the private data collected under this programme. These telecoms companies are even letting the spying agencies access information that didn’t originate from their users but that passed through their networks nonetheless.

What do you make of this gross abuse of power? Is Big Brother already here? Do we as UK citizens and customers of telecommunications companies have a right to expect a decent level of privacy? What can we do if we disagree with this? And is there any defence for such wide scale and untargeted surveillance of the general public?

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