Mobile Network Comparison

Alexandra Zagury has been named as the new managing director of the UK and Ireland branch of BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM). Struggling smartphone manufacturer is made the move following Rob Orr’s defection to up-and-coming rival Samsung back in June.

In the meantime, the MD or the whole Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Robert Bose, had been taking on the job an interim basis. There has been a lot of speculation that Zagury would takeover but it has only recently been confirmed that she will step into the position. Replacing Zagury in her previous post will be former Yudi Moodley who was previously the business management director for the Middle East and Africa.

Alexandra Zagury is a graduate of the London School of Economics in London and has been with the company for several years now. Ahe spent much of that time – total of about 18 months – working as a director for the South Africa, Southern Africa of BlackBerry.

During this period, she relocated to BlackBerry’s offices in Johannesburg. She is also hold a position as the MD of the Turkey branch in Istanbul as well as working in many senior roles for BlackBerry in the UK.

Despite her wealth of experience, there is no doubt at all at that her job will be a very tough one as she desperately aims to alter the fortunes of struggling BlackBerry. In recent years, and especially following the tough competition from Apple and Google, profits are income have been falling at BlackBerry and there’s little doubt in industry that the BlackBerry 10 platform has been all but a failure according to adoption figures.

Dispute this, Alexandra Zagury has strongly suggested that the BlackBerry 10 platform – running on QNX – is obsolete positions allow BlackBerry to lead the way mobile phones to mobile computers. She has claimed that the experience offered by this operating system means that user experience will not be, might as phones become more and more powerful.

Alexandra Zagury will also be aware that the UK market is much more competitive and a tougher nut to crack than Africa. She recently tweeted that BlackBerry drives 14% of Internet traffic in Africa but this is mainly due to the fact that older BlackBerry devices are available for much lower cost and the latest android and Apple smart phones. It’s also not certain whether they’ll be to keep up this trend as smart phone manufacturers target developing regions with cut-price android offerings.

#BlackBerry drives 14% of internet traffic in Africa – The Washington Post http://t.co/OdTmi18Vkx

— Alexandra Zagury (@alexza) November 15, 2013

It is also telling that, despite BlackBerry accounting for 14% of aggregate Internet traffic in Africa, major competitors to is BBM messaging platform such as what’s up and Skype are fast rising rivals. Dated protocol WAP is also third in the list behind BlackBerry suggesting that when high-speed mobile Internet becomes more common, the more traditional offerings allowing smart phones to connect a regular mobile networks will become more popular as they have done in more established markets. Mobile Internet access is still rather in its infancy in Africa and as it matures, BlackBerry will have a tough time trying to hold onto its portion.

What you make of this news? Does Alexandra Zagury have what it takes to turn around BlackBerry’s fortunes in the UK market? Or is it simply too late for the struggling company already? Please let us know your thoughts and opinions.

Welcome to our first app review. Today we’re going to be looking at the latest version of SwiftKey, a replacement keyboard for Android smartphones.

SwiftKey has been out in the Play Store for a few years now and we been using it as our main keyboard was long as we can remember now. It has tens of millions of installs on phones worldwide and has made the top apps list in over 58 countries. It’s been described as a “creepy-fast typing experience” but how have we been getting on with using it?

After you install the app, SwiftKey allows you to select your language and then instructs you how to set it as the default keyboard so you can use it it all text entry areas within Android. This means you can use it for everything including e-mails, texts, calendars and even instant messaging programs. Having this consistency across the entire user experience some of the great benefits of the Android.

The actual appearance of SwiftKey is fairly minimal – it’s smart and professional but not all that different from the normal keyboard. There are various customisation options including the size of the keys and also colourful themes to choose from if you so desire. One thing you will notice is the very prominent suggestions bar above the keyboard that is always present even if you haven’t started typing yet. This demonstrates the importance of SwiftKey’s signature feature – shockingly-intelligent auto-prediction.

The developers have studied natural language extensively to work out what words are likely to follow others depending on the particular lexicon, grammatical rules and the type of vocabulary you usually use. So, for example, if you have already typed “the dog went to fetch” the next two suggested words would be “the” and “a” and if you type in “the” it might suggest something like “stick” next.

Even better, you can allow SwiftKey to analyse your text messages and e-mails to better understand the style of writing you have and so it can customise its predictions just for you. In this way, it learns words that you use commonly as well as the way you use them to form sentences. It combines this with really great automatic correction of typos and mispresses. Together, we find that this means you can usually type away at a pretty frenetic pace without worrying about making manual corrections and changes along the way.

In fact, while using it we found that we could frequently walk down the street taxing away without even having to glance down at the screen because SwiftKey would make allowances for any typos and inaccuracies from not paying attention to the screen. It makes on-screen keyboards a bit less of a pain to use and really makes for far fewer moments when you’re frustrated as you feel you’re being slowed down by your input device.

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Of course SwiftKey can’t compete with a full-size physical keyboard, but we found it gets pretty darn close. We would even frequently find ourselves wishing that our computer had the sort prediction capabilities that SwiftKey offers to make typing that much faster.

Naturally, it’s not entirely perfect. Before you have trained it up much, you might find that there are many words missing from the dictionary and it sometimes makes some odd suggestions. Also, the suggestions sometimes move position just before you have a chance to click on them meaning that you occasionally insert the wrong word by accident. However, overall, occurrences like this are pretty rare and it must be said that it’s a massive improvement on any other keyboard we’ve used.

Some other great things we like about SwiftKey is the ability to have multiple languages. This is great if you are a polyglot and frequently need to write in multiple languages. It also activates up to three languages simultaneously so you don’t have to toggle back and forth – great if you simultaneously and find yourself code switching mid-sentence.

SwiftKey also has the best numberpad and symbol layout we’ve seen in any smartphone keyboard. It even gives you quick access to the symbols through long-presses on the keys and even has the option to select accented characters and diacritical marks by the same mechanism.

Finally, SwiftKey copied the Swype method of sliding across the keyboard to enter words. While it takes some getting used to, it turns out to be surprisingly quick and accurate. We still find it to be somewhat slower than using SwiftKey’s default auto-suggestion feature, but if you are a fan of this style you’ll be happy to know that is supported. There are also some advanced customisation options and different layouts available for larger screens and tablets.

On just one of our phones, the statistics that SwiftKey records show that it has saved almost 60,000 keystrokes already as well as corrected about 20,000 typos. Overall, we’ve made full use of the auto completion function as the software has completed words for us halfway through about 10,000 times. We don’t make use of the flow feature as we find it to be a little bit slower, but SwiftKey estimates that the net increase in typing efficiency has been over a third overall which is pretty substantial if you think about it.

SwiftKey is available for a free trial in the Play Store but it’s only a few quid if you want to buy the full version and we would highly recommend that. While Google’s default Android keyboard has been steadily borrowing its features and has dramatically improved in recent iterations, SwiftKey still has significant advantages over other keyboards. We certainly couldn’t go back to using anything else.

Up-and-coming Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Zopo have just dropped a bombshell – in just a few days time, they’re about to launch the world’s first true octa-core mobile phone. The new handset is going to be called the Zopo ZP700 and the official launch date will be 21 November.

Zopo are a relatively new mobile phone manufacturer and are currently pretty much unknown outside of China – after all, they have only been around for less than a year now and they are only marketing themselves in East Asia. However, they are already starting to make a name for themselves in the Chinese market and are already one of the most popular brands in the region.

Zopo also caught the eye of us with their recently-released and very impressive Zopo ZP980 Android smartphone which got out highest-so-far handset score in our comprehensive video review last month.

The newly-announced ZP700 model will be a significant step up from the ZP980. Like almost all Chinese Android smartphones, it will be based on a chipset from Taiwanese company MediaTek – the MT6592. This is the world’s first true octa-core system on a chip and will be able to leverage increased parallelisation in order to provide greater power efficiency and blazingly-fast processing speeds.

Existing smartphones on the market with octa-core CPUs can actually only activate half of their cores at once. In comparison, the MediaTek True Octa-Core allows for all eight of its cores to run simultaneously. In combination with the new 28nm die size, this will offer the ultimate combination of performance and power-efficiency.

The exact clock speed of the ZP700’s processor has not yet been announced, but we can’t wait to see the performance of this new chipset. We do know that the chipset is capable of running between about 1.7GHz and 2GHz per core – pretty impressive speeds we’re sure you’ll agree.

Not only will it come with that beastly eight-core CPU, but the new ZP700 phone will come with a complete set of technical specifications to die for. The latest rumours are suggesting that the device will have a screen larger than 5 inches with a 1080p full-HD resolution. The chipset will also likely boast ramped-up graphical capabilities as we have exclusive information that the graphics chip will be upgraded from the PowerVR SGX544MP to a much more powerful ARM Mali-450 MP GPU. Certainly great news for all you gamers out there 🙂

The other specs that we expect to see on the new phone will be a full 2GB of RAM and 32GB ROM as the internal SD card. Of course, it’ll have dual cameras including a stunning 13 megapixel main camera and, of course, dual-SIM capability. We also are hoping for an even higher-capacity battery to keep the phone running for days and days.

As for the design and form factor for the ZP700, it looks like Zopo will be aiming to take a leaf out of Apple’s book. The handset has a very iPhone 5C-type feel to it with a colourful pastel-shaded battery cover and a stylish and unobtrusive look to the whole phone.

How much difference do you think having a true eight core processor will make to the ZP700? Well Zopo finally break into the Western mainstream with the release of this phone? How much do you think it will cost, what scores do you think it will get on benchmarking software and how will it compare in real-world usage to current top-end smart phones like the HTC One, iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S4? Stick around as we report all the latest view following the launch event on 21 November.