Blog

The past couple of years have not been kind to Vodafone in the UK. O2 and Orange are formidable competitors that seem to have outsmarted Vodafone at almost every turn and have won some major victories in the battle for the consumer. Vodafone's shown significant improvements in recent months, but there's still some way to go.
Vodafone's strength has always... Read more

In this business it's hard not to get seduced by the never-ending succession of all-singing, all-dancing high-tier phones, but it's important to keep an eye on the low end of the market. Basic, inexpensive phones still account for the vast majority of global mobile device sales and even in mature markets they make up a significant proportion of sales. You only h... Read more

Watching the Vodafone quarterly results Webcast this week, a few things fell into place for me. The announcement that Vodafone was to scrap roaming charges in some countries for three months started to make more sense.
Initially, I thought including roaming calls in ordinary bundled minutes was a smart reaction to regulators' complaints about the cost of ... Read more

Over the weekend I picked up a Polaroid Pogo printer. In the UK, O2 is selling them for half price, making them much more attractive than when they cost almost 100.
It's a neat little device. It's about the size of a large mobile phone (the picture below left shows it next to a Nokia N81 for comparison). The Pogo prints on three-inch by two-inch sheets of... Read more

Reading Ben's Hotline about the O2 Joggler, I think he's identified a trend for "kitchen PCs". The Joggler is more of a souped-up picture frame than a full PC, but it performs many of the functions expected of a device in the kitchen. It has a calendar, can play Internet radio stations and display photos. Its reduced feature set means it's only 150 or free to cu... Read more