Mobile Choice Blog

Orange offers Bebo Mobile for £3 a month

Have you got a Bebo profile? If not, your children probably have: the social network is extremely popular with younger internet users here in the UK. Earlier this year, Bebo announced plans to go mobile in partnership with Orange, and that partnership has just been extended with a new subscription deal.

For £3 a month, Orange customers can sign up to Bebo Extra, which gives them unlimited access to Bebo's mobile internet site without paying any data charges. They'll be able to send comments via SMS, receive notifications back in return, and also send Bebo Mails by text.

It sounds like a good deal, although we wonder if this sort of thing will be free in the not-too-distant future, once users are on unlimited data contracts, and the social networks have advertising on their mobile sites. MySpace is working with Vodafone and O2, while Facebook has an operator-neutral WAP site, so mobile social networking is clearly on the up.

Bebo website

Orange gives no Christmas cheer to Nokia and Motorola

They might together account for over half of all mobile sales, but it seems Nokia and Motorola have fallen off Orange's Christmas (SIM) card list. The Register has noticed that in Orange's Christmas handset line-up, there aren't any new phones from either manufacturer, despite them being respectively first and third in the phone makers chart.

There's already speculation that Nokia's absence is due to its decision to launch the Nokia Music Store in competition with the operators' own services, but that argument wouldn't apply to Motorola, which has stuck to its guns in making its handsets work with the operator offerings.

It's not great news for either manufacturer, although it's not exactly tip-top for Orange users hoping to upgrade to the latest shiny phone from Nokia or Motorola. It's more evidence of the upcoming battle between operators and manufacturers as the latter try to launch their own mobile services though.

(via The Register)

When is a Christmas mobile exclusive not an exclusive?

Want a Sony Ericsson W910i music phone this Christmas? You'll have to switch to Vodafone then, as they've bagged the exclusive. Oh, but wait a minute, that's only on the Havana Gold coloured edition. If you want the red W910i, you'll need to go to Orange, who've - you guessed it - bagged the exclusive.

Presumably later this week, O2 will announce that it'll be exclusively selling the khaki-coloured W910i, while T-Mobile will proudly unveil the exclusive cheese-shaded W910i, and 3 will parade its exclusive pigeon-coloured W910i. Possibly.

It's enough to make us wonder: would people actually switch operators in order to get a particular shade of their most coveted mobile phone? And if not, what's the point of all these exclusives? And cheekily, we wonder how many of these handsets will be advertised with a big EXCLUSIVE tag on them, with the implication that, say, the W910i isn't available on any other network.