Mobile Network Comparison

Remember OVIVO? We first looked at them almost two years ago and even had a two-part interview with their founder and CEO Dairush Zand.

Unlike other virtual mobile networks, OVIVO takes a somewhat different approach. It is the only network that is supported by advertising and m-commerce and therefore beats even the most cut-price competitors as they are able to offer free calls, texts and data every month to its customers.

You don’t even need to sign up to a lengthy contract or even commit to monthly top-ups – OVIVO is a PAYG network so all you need to get started is an unlocked phone or tablet.

Joining OVIVO

Because of the fantastic value a totally free mobile plan offers, there’s a small one-time fee to get started. But from then on, you get completely free minutes, messages and mobile internet every month.

To benefit from these bargain-tastic tariffs, just head to the OVIVO website and order a SIM. There are various choices and you can select the plan that most suits your needs, choosing either Freedom 0 – OVIVO’s £0 per month plan – or one of the alternatives. Depending on the plan, some or all of the sign-up fee is returned in the form of credit. For example, with Freedom 0, you pay a £20 sign-up fee and get £15 credit once you’ve activated your SIM.

Once you’re all set up, the Freedom 0 tariff features 200 minutes, 300 texts and 500 MB – the largest free allowance available anywhere.

OVIVO’s Tariffs

If you have a tablet, MiFi or internet dongle they also offer a very popular Data 0 plan which gives you a whopping 1GB of data completely free every month.

Of course, if you’re a a heavier user there are also options that ensure you won’t be using up your allowances. For example, the Freedom 20 plan for phones, and the Data 10 options for tablets offer a larger allowance at reasonable prices.

Outside of your allowance, OVIVIO are a great choice too as their standard rates easily beat the major networks. For example, PAYG calls are just 8p per minute compared to 25p on Tesco and O₂ and 30p on Orange and T-Mobile.

You’ll also be relieved to hear that they have a UK-based help team and that calls to customer services are free from OVIVO mobiles.

OVIVO Rewards

OVIVO rewards its customers with extra free credit as a thanks for porting your number to their network. Another reward comes if you recommend OVIVO to a friend. When your friend activates their SIM they will be prompted to enter your phone number, and you will receive £5 free OVIVO Credit.

The rewards program also includes OVIVO Offers. This is an exclusive service for OVIVO customers, which showcases great discounts and deals from various high street brands such as Argos and Boots.

OVIVO’s advertising

Of course, the reason OVIVO can offer such fantastic deals is because they show you adverts in return for free monthly allowances. When browsing the internet on your phone, you just need to watch short unobtrusive commercials that you can skip after 5 seconds.

OVIVO Mobile also promise that they’ll only chose adverts that they think you’ll be interested in and that they’ll never sell your information to third parties. Understandably, they do not allow the use of VPNs or other services that bypass advertising.

Getting started

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the OVIVO site now to get started with what must be the UK’s best value mobile network. OVIVO is a pretty unbeatable offer and with no ongoing charges and free minutes, texts and mobile data every month, it’s definitely worth picking up a SIM even if you just keep it as a spare.

If you’re looking for a great pay-as-you-go deal, you better be quick because until the end of the month, EE is offering all pay-as-you-go customers 2014 free minutes to call any standard UK number.

The offer is valid for all new customers signing up before the end of January 2014. And it’s available for everyone regardless of whether they’re on Orange, T-Mobile or even EE’s new 4G pay-as-you-go service.

It’s really simple to get started, first of all you just need to order a free SIM from either Orange, T-Mobile or 4GEE. Of course, you also benefit from being able to use signal from all the networks as they are all owned by EE.

To qualify, there is a bit of a catch as you have to regularly top up £10 to receive your monthly allowance of 168 free minutes. However, the good thing is that the bonus minutes come on top of your existing tariff. And you can use them for any call to UK based mobile or landline number as well as calls to your voicemail service.

As an example, if you sign up to Orange’s Dolphin plan, you get 400 texts and 1 GB of data free every month. And with this year special offer, you also get 168 minutes as well as your £10 top up in airtime credit. And of course, don’t forget that if you decide the top £20 each month on the Dolphin plan, you get unlimited free text as well as 3 GB of mobile data. So while, at first glance, it might not seem at the most competitive deal you can actually get a huge amount for your money if you choose the right tariff.

T-Mobile also have attempting deal with their £10 Smart Pack. Once you’ve included the bonus minutes on offer, this gives you a total of 268 min, 400 texts and the whole gigabytes of mobile data awful £10.

Although it can’t offer as good deals, 4GEE might also a good choice as it comes tonnes of extras including 2-for-1 cinema tickets and pizza express every Wednesday, free wifi internet on the London Underground, £5 off ADSL and fibre broadband deals as well as the UK’s first and broadest 4G network.

Want to get your free 2014 minutes this year? Order your free SIM today before it’s too late.

Camera quality on the mobile phones we carry around with us has increased at a phenomenal rate over the last few years. When the first camera phones came out, it was nigh on impossible to make out what the grainy, low resolution, noisy mash of pixels was meant to represent. however, nowadays it is becoming more and more common for people to leave their compact camera at home and rely a mobile phone to capture photographic moments instead. Phones like the Nokia N95 really pushed the envelope with high quality optics and dedicated shutter buttons to make taking good-looking phones on a mobile phone more of a breeze than ever.

In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago that we saw the release of the first generation of digital cameras. Just a few years later, mobile phones offer unrivalled improvements in resolution and clarity. But which handset is going to give you the best shots? Which phone will give your Facebook selfies the most likes? Who is top dog of the camera phone kennels? Join us for our run-down of the five best smartphone cameras in the world right now.

5. Sony Xperia Z

Sony has probably got more experience in the digital camera world than any other major smartphone manufacturer. The camera on the Xperia Z uses the same 30 megapixel sensor as in their digital SLRs.

As for features, the camera can produce decent quality 1080p videos as well as HDR stills and panoramas without extra software. Of course, there are also a variety of digital filters and effects you can apply to your shots. The shots look good and have consistent saturation and exposure but the optics could be better.

 

4. iPhone 5S

The iPhone 5S‘s camera includes a dual-colour LED flash for better skin tones, a huge f/2.2 aperture and a bigger sensor than before. It also has the Apple A7 chipset to help with image processing. Unfortunately it is still lacking image stabilisation.

Of course it also features like an improved panorama mode and the ability to add a slow-mo effect to your videos using the phone. The HDR photography mode seems to work really well, producing nice wide shots with minimal effort.

In terms of performance, the lowlight photos are better than we expected; probably due to the large aperture size. The flash is certainly an improvement on the previous tone-reproduction qualities but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. We are glad to see that overexposure is less of an issue now though. Unsurprisingly, a very decent effort from Apple’s flagship.

 

3. Samsung Galaxy Note 2

Coming in at in third place is the Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s packing a massive 13 megapixel autofocus main camera which can handle full HD video at 30 frames per second.

As you would expect with Samsung, there’s a wealth of options available when using with the camera (not all of which you might want to make use of on a regular basis). However, some of the most usable shooting modes include panorama, action and the HDR mode. Another fun one is the Eraser mode which composites multiple images to remove unwanted moving subjects from the background.

The image quality is great although you might have to do some manual white balance tweaks. We’ll also impressed with the reaction time of the shutter. Our sample images look great and the colours in our shots came out well-exposed, rich and sharp. It also massively useful to have an expandable micro-SD card slot to hold all the photos you take especially due to the large resolution.

 

2. HTC One

Don’t be fooled by numbers and statistics. Even though the HTC One only claims to have a 4 megapixel camera, the “ultra pixel” sensor size is much larger than average and each pixel can capture more light and hopefully produce better quality results. The sensor is also coupled with a very fast f/2.0 aperture at a nice, wide 28mm focal length.

Taking photos with the HTC One is a pleasure mainly due to the excellent and bright screen which really makes it easy and clear to see how the shots are being framed and how they turn out. There are the usual shooting options such as various scene choices, night mode, panorama mode and the now-ubiquitous HDR.

In practice it seems the marketing guff around the “ultra pixel” sensor may well have some substance behind it. We were very impressed with the quality of the shots even when compared to the other phones in this shootout. Our photos came out really well especially at high ISO sensitivities – this is probably another of the benefits of the large sensor. The phone feels great in the hand when taking photos and images are crystal clear sharp.

 

1. Nokia 808 PureView

Finally, we get round to the winner of this test and it won’t surprise many to hear that it’s the Nokia 808 PureView. Hailed as a revolution in the camera phone arena, Nokia have packed a massive sensor into this phone that is capable of producing 38 megapixel images. Yes that’s not a typo – you read that right: Thirty. Eight. Megapixels. Astounding!

Of course, it takes more than just pixel count to produce good quality images, and thankfully Nokia have coupled their sensor with high quality Carl Zeiss optics. The aperture is nice and fast at f/2.4 and because of this it produces great images in low light conditions. The Xenon flash is also quite a powerful beast.

In general, the photos really look great – crisp and sharp and every pixel well exposed. Simply put, the quality of photos from this phone blow away those from its rivals. The huge sensor and a high-quality lens pretty much unparalleled in the smartphone arena. The only issue we have with this amazing piece of kit is that would have liked to see more options for manual control over the various exposure settings.