Mobile Network Comparison

For the first time, smartphone shipments have outnumbered PC shipments, with 488 million devices shipped in 2011. Huge sales of the iPhone 4S, and other top competing handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy SII have contributed to this milestone. However, according to analyst firm Canalys, it could have been reached earlier if the 60 million tablets shipped last year were not included in the PC figures.

Chris Jones, Canalys’s Vice President and Principal Analyst said:

In the space of a few years, smart phones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition. The greater the availability of smart phones at lower price points has helped tremendously, but there has been a driving trend of increasing consumer appetite for Internet browsing, content consumption and engaging with apps and services on mobile devices.

Apple is at the top of the leader board, with shipments of 93.1 million iPhones, beating Nokia with shipments of 77.3 million, according to Canalys’s data. Android is close behind apples figures with 91.9 million smartphone shipments last year. Cisco has predicted that the number of mobile devices on the planet will have outnumbered human beings sometime this year!

Mobile and smartphone use is constantly growing, and as the mobile market becomes larger, so do the range of consumers, older mobiles are being offered to third world countries and new mobile devices are being released at a steady rate. It is said that by 2016, mobile networks will be carrying 130 exabytes of data each year – that’s 130 billion GB or equal to around 33 billion DVDs.

The scale of the mobile industry is incredible, and with new technology being created at an increasingly alarming rate, it’s hard to know what smart phones will have to offer us in the near future.

February has arrived, and it has brought the release of the Nokia Lumia 710, which runs Microsoft’s lush Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system. At first look, it seems like a more affordable version of the Lumia 800 – the 710 is slightly larger, although lighter, and doesn’t have the overall sleekness that the Lumia 800 has. The home, back and search touchscreen icons that are placed on the bottom of the Lumia 800 have been replaced with physical button ons the 710.

Although the retail price of the Lumia 710 is £170 less than the Lumia 800, the specifications of the phone are pretty similar. You get a 1.4GHz processor and 512MB RAM with both phones, more than enough to run the new Windows Phone 7.5.

Obviously, with the price being so different, you’re going to expect a difference somewhere and sure enough the camera is only 5 megapixels compared to 8 megapixels on the Lumia 800. There’s also only 8GB of internal storage, instead of 16 GB and there is no SD card slot if you want to boost your storage space. However, the camera isn’t as bad as you would have thought, and pictures are processed without any lag, which is always great.

The new Nokia Lumia 710 also comes with removable back covers which you can switch around to customize your phone, there are a few colours to choose from and no doubt there will be a range of patterned ones to be released this year.

The biggest difference has got to be the screens, although they are both the same size, the Lumia 800 is AMOLED, whereas the 710 is only LCD, the colours are quite flat-looking, and overall it looks less pleasing to the eye than the 800’s beautiful screen.

The Lumia 710 was intended to be a middle-priced version of the 800, and it does it’s job superbly, if you don’t have the money to buy the 800, but want a new Windows Phone, the Lumia 710 may be for you. There are currently some fantastic tariffs available that come with a free Lumia 710:

• 3 – £22/month for 500 mins, 5000 texts and 1GB data
• O₂ – £18.50/month for 200 minutes, unlimited texts and 100MB data
• Orange – £20.50/month for 100 mins, unlimited texts and 500MB data
• T-Mobile – £31/month for 600 mins, unlimited texts and 750MB data
• Vodafone – £20.50/month for 100 minutes, 500 texts and 250MB data

If you’re looking for a slightly more high-end phone than the Lumia 710, there are currently some great deals for the Lumia 800 on 3.

It’s been about three weeks since the huge mobile internet security leak on O₂. We thought we’d just give you a bit of a debrief of what exactly happened and the subsequent fallout.

Firstly, as we initially reported all mobile networks and virtual networks using O₂‘s signal were found to be leaking private phone numbers to every website you visit using mobile internet. The information was being revealed through HTTP headers that are sent to web servers when you access them. In this case, O₂ was adding a special HTTP header called x-up-calling-line-id which contained your phone number.

Once this was made public, a veritable media scrum occurred as outraged customers made their ire known across Twitter and the blogosphere. Even the Information Commissioner’s Office got involved:

When people visit a website via their mobile phone they would not expect their number to be made available to that website. We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed.

Due to this coverage, O₂ scrambled together to get the issue fixed and by the early afternoon of 25th January 2012 our readers were reporting that their number was no longer being revealed to our HTTP header checker.

O₂ also quickly published an official blog post apologising and explaining what happened and also clarified that the issue had been in effect all the way since the 10th of January.

Technical changes we implemented as part of routine maintenance had the unintended effect of making it possible in certain circumstances for website owners to see the mobile numbers of those browsing their site.

As part of their apology, O₂ also admitted:

We share mobile numbers with two age verification partners, for child protection purposes. For those customers that have not verified with us that they are over 18, we share your number with Bango.net and Eckoh.com who then verify your age before you are able to access sites with over 18 content.

In retrospect, it’s worth questioning whether this is at all a sensible way to carry out age verification. Instead of giving all age-verified sites a database of phone numbers and ages, surely it would be better to do this within the network? A simple HTTP header such a X-Over-18 and a value of Yes or No would surely be more suitable than providing people’s phone numbers and requiring the web service to do a database lookup? Worse, O₂ still haven’t given a complete list of their “trusted partners” with whom they will still be sharing your phone number without your consent.

If you have any more questions about what this security breach entailed and how you might be affected, feel free to ask us in a comment.