For all our readers in the UK, eXpansys have been busy cooking up some news deals to tempt you in your hour of need for gadget-related goodness:

• Acer beTouch E200 Windows Mobile 6.5 - Normally £249.99 Now £219.99 Save £15
• Acer beTouch E100 Windows Mobile 6.5 - Normally £234.99 Now £219.99 Save £15
• Nokia 6700 Classic Silver - Normally £209.99 Now £194.99 Save £15
• GMAX 2-Bay Alloy Desktop Hard Drive Enclosure – Normally £39.99 Now £34.99 Save £5
• Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 3.6/7.2 Mbps ExpressCard – Normally £49.99 Now £29.99 Save £20
• B-Stock Palm m500 PDA + Accessory Pack – Normally £34.99 Now £24.99 Save £10
• Chilly the Singing and Dancing Polar Bear – Normally £7.99 Now £4.99 Save £3
• Premier Systems Keyring Breathalyser - Normally £4.99 Now £1.99 Save £3

Personally, I am liking the look of the HSDPA ExpressCard – I’ve been trying to find a use for my ExpressCard port on the Mac – seems like this might be it!

These deals are available on Friday the 20th of November 2009 between 11am and 5pm by following the links above only. Normal pricing will apply outside of these hours.

So I was typing away this evening, and thinking about the movie Swordfish – an enjoyable romp featuring John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, and of course (who could forget) Halle Berry

There are several priceless moments in that film where the lead characters are spewing techno-babble that is devoid of any joined up thinking – trojans, firewalls, ciphers, you name it – all mashed together in meaningless, cringe-inducing, gibberish. But that’s kind of what makes the movie good!

It got me thinking, there must be some of these types of moments involving mobile devices – and then suddenly a couple hit me – but before I name them, feel free to zing a comment on the end of this piece if you can think of others – as I said, there must be lots, right?

Great moment #1: Die Hard 4.0 (2007) - Justin Long is using a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Communicator, when the mobile networks all drop (as the bad guys are busy taking them down). He turns to Bruce Willis and says something along the lines of surfing the military satellites, and lo and behold, one dodgy cable later, he’s up and running with a mobile data connection!

Great moment #2: Cellular (2004) – a thriller movie, with Kim Basinger and Chris Evans. There’s not a specific moment as such in this film, but they sure do eke out the moment the battery on the mobile phone is running down – it goes on for seemingly forever. As we all know from the irritation of real-world calls, once the battery bleep comes on in-call, you are very soon going to be out of juice!

So what moments can you think of – and no using ‘The Matrix’ as an example please, although there are some quality moments in there too

I’ve reported on the Amazon Kindle International Edition before (here), which is an interesting device, because its packing a SIM card in it that can roam seamlessly across network in Europe – in fact you could argue it’s the main way of acquiring e-books for that device.

Well now there’s another (yes, another) e-book reader, the Bookeen Cybook Opus, which has a couple of interesting traits:

1. Some kind of landscape mode
2. A price-point that is worryingly close to the Kindle

Yep, that’s right, this bad boy isn’t packing 3G data, yet it’s only $40 cheaper – that’s not good, is it?

Right now, from a mobile data connection perspective, Kindle is cream of the crop – but could we see a newer revision of the Opus coming soon, with 3G or WiFi data? Quite possibly.

[Via: e-reader-info.com]

GoPayforit has announced that it has launched its new mobile small payments service to enable bloggers and content owners to more easily sell content online.

“When making small donations of £5 online, or buying one-off pieces of content from websites for say £1 or £2, entering your credit card details can be a long and tedious process,” said Chris Newell, CEO, GoPayforit. “Many potential customers may not even have a credit card, while those that do often just don’t want the hassle of entering all that information, meaning there is a huge drop-off at the payment stage.”

Newell continued, “Not only that, but for many smaller sites there are a lot of hoops to jump through to use credit card payment on the site. GoPayforit is both easier to set up for the website and easier to use for the consumer, making it a better experience for everyone.”

Orange has been rated the top provider for overall mobile broadband quality for the second time, according to a survey by independent research company YouGov.

Orange achieved the number one position in both quality and value for money, while customers have also rated Orange’s mobile broadband service top in nine out of 15 categories, including ease of use, staying connected and overall network coverage.

Orange is also continuing to invest in its network for voice and data – much like the other guys I think.

The data issue is only going to grow in the coming few years, particularly with ‘unlimited’ mobile web add-ons (both for contract and PAYG users) becoming the norm – so this is all good news

O2 today unveiled plans to accelerate growth of its mobile network and build extra capacity for mobile data, in a multi-year programme of investment (running to hundreds of millions of pounds).

The planned investment will cover upgrade of the current radio network and also the delivery of new sites. 200 sites will be delivered in London alone in the next 12 months, 40 of which will be live by Christmas 2009. In 2010 other areas of the UK will see similar developments.

Derek McManus, Chief Technology Officer for O2:

“Anticipating growth in demand for mobile services, we have quarter on quarter increased investment in our voice and data networks. Our £500m investment over the last two years has enabled us to offer our customers the best products in the world, including the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre.

“In the past 12 months the mobile industry has seen an unprecedented change in demand. The introduction of world-class devices, in combination with a wide variety of data applications, has brought about a dramatic change in customer behaviour and created an exponential demand on mobile data networks. To put this in context, watching a YouTube video on a smartphone can use the same capacity on the network as sending 500,000 text messages simultaneously.

“We are now aggressively accelerating our network growth programme to ensure we have significant headroom for the future and retain our focus on being number one for customer satisfaction.”

Fairplay on O2 – they’ve taken their share of criticism for issues of network bandwidth/contention with the hugely accelerated data consumption coming from the likes of the iPhone, and are pressing on in addressing the issue.

The data issue is only going to grow in the coming few years, particularly with ‘unlimited’ mobile web add-ons (both for contract and PAYG users) becoming the norm – so this is all good news

I wrote a piece yesterday about first impressions the N900, which really seemed to upset some people – chief amongst the objections were the fact that not everyone believed I have the N900 – well it’s picture-time, check it out:

Other objections included black-and-white statements that resistive screens don’t support multi-touch – with a couple of minutes Googling, I think you’ll find that multi-touch on a resistive screen is entirely possible – it just happens not to be on the N900 – shame …

Others were of the opinion that I must be an Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) Fanboi – something I strenuously deny. Oh, BTW, the pictures above were taken using an iPhone 3GS

Ben

So I just received an N900 in the post today, and one of the things I do like to do with new hardware, is to give it the ‘five-minute fiddle’.

For those of you that are not familiar, the aim of the five-minute fiddle is to spend a very short period getting first impressions of a given handset/service, and then write things up with a summary ‘gut feeling’ about it.

Unpacking

My N900 is a full retail model, and so I got a good feeling for the real end-user experience when opening up the packaging of this little bad boy. It’s an understated box, with a good amount of accessories included – and of course, the device itself. One thing I did ponder as missing was a case for the N900. Now I’m not suggesting some kind o’ freaky faux-leather belt-holster affair (that was SO 90s!), I am talking just about some kinda simple slip case, to protect the decent size screen – and the fact you are carrying a 500 GBP/Euro handset around with you!

Hardware form-factor

Although in my opinion Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has dropped the ball in a big way on software in recent years, their hardware design is usually (I say usually, to exclude things like the N96) pretty good – overall, I think the N900 has good hardware. It IS a chunky monkey, make no mistake, and it’s certainly not ’sleek’ – much more blockish than I was expecting. However, it is clad in various types of black material – now given black is my favourite colour, this is no bad thing!

The Slide mechanism and keys are okay – keys possibly a touch small, but it’s going to take some time typing to find out if emails/texts can be knocked out with ease. For right now, it’s certainly all very satisfactory, and at a push I would say it’s ‘good’. One thing I really wasn’t sure about is the kickstand that surrounds the camera – it seems VERY flimsy indeed – to the point where I wouldn’t want to stand the handset up on it. That’s quite a surprise, since one of the good things (and there weren’t that many) with the N96 was it’s cheeky little kickstand!

The (touch)screen is well-lit, a decent size, and … er … resisitive – darn! I personally cannot stand resistive screens, because it’s difficult in my view to regulate your pressure when scrolling lists etc on screen – and this often means you end up accidentally selecting things – unfortunately it’s the same here, which is a such a shame – this device could potentially have been a killer with capacitive screen (maybe that’ll be the N901 or similar probably….!).

Software / UI

So this is really where it’s at with the N900 – does the UI/software cut the mustard? Well, with my five-minute play, I have to say I’m not convinced one way or the other. It did take me some time to orient myself with the Menus/UI, and try out some things which I thought would work on the device (notably one thing that didn’t work was two-finger pinch/squeeze for zoom in/out. Shame.

So apart from the time needed to get used to the UI, overall I think it’s reasonably clear – the four or so homescreens work out well, and to my mind borrow heavily from the iPhone – but they don’t animate between them as smoothly.

As regards programs that are installed, it would appear that Nokia has included web-links as ‘application icons’-  and in fact you have to download apps once you have pressed the icon  which is simply a link to a website. I can’t help but feel this is a weak approach for building out menus, and also the tedium of waiting for an App to download and install is not good.

Other Apps that work well are the standard ones you would expect – email, calendar, contacts, phone. There’s nothing revolutionary about these, they just do their job well.

Conclusion

I’ve yet to spend some serious quality time with the device – but my initial thoughts are that the hardware (excepting the resistive quality of the screen) is better than the software. Although I’m wary about judging too quickly, my gut feeling is that the software isn’t quite at the level you would expect as a power user of the device. Going forward, it may be that the OS is upgraded and bug-fixed, and that usage improves significantly. For now though, my rating would be somewhere between ‘average’ and ‘quite good’.

Oh, it’s all going off in the UK at the moment, with the news that thousands of UK subs on the T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) network have unknowingly had their data sold on to third parties, for what is apparently substantial sums of money!

For those that don’t live in the UK, we tend to take our data privacy quite seriously indeed – there are plenty of laws that are designed to protect – but what do you do when people on the inside are harvesting your details and selling them on to middlemen? The goal of selling on the data was to allow other companies to call these people before their contracts finished, and move them on to other deals.

Unfortunately the punishment for these offences are purely financial – which is why some are calling for a prison sentence to be introduced. Certainly a fine isn’t going to stop organised criminals from going about their ‘business’.

I do feel sorry for those people that have had their records misappropriated, because they are now the source of multiple calls today from various third parties (since the data has been shared around) apparently – quite apart from the fact that sensitive personal data that could be used to fraud them, is out there on the InterWeb.

Hopefully T-Mobile can get things back on track really quickly, and minimise the problems for people who are currently suffering. I’d think that perhaps decent gestures of goodwill would go a long way to helping, but that’s just me with my consumer hat on

Orange is launching People Projects, a new Facebook application that lets people communicate with their social network and create groups online that want to support, or be part of community projects.  This is in line with Orange’s “brand vision” ( which is “Together we can do more”).

The new service encourages web users to discover a number of projects or initiatives where they are based, get in touch with the project owners or other volunteers, and communicate with one another.  It also lets the groups demonstrate their achievements and share them with the world. Starting in the UK and France, People Projects is an application developed for social networks (with Facebook leading the way), as well as its own supporting site:

Facebook app: http://apps.facebook.com/people-projects/

Website: http://www.peopleprojects.orange.com/home

The Facebook application enables web users to manage and fulfill shared projects, whether they are personal or community-focused  (e.g. holding a neighbourhood picnic or organising a charity event).

From today, all web users registered on Facebook are able to download the People Projects by Orange in order to create their own project and invite people to take part. In the future, Orange will offer the application on other community networks in addition to Facebook.  Initially available on the Web, People Projects by Orange will later be released for the mobile.