Last week I had an opportunity to meet with a bunch of guys (and girls) from 3 Mobile on their New Year Meet Up. I went to a similar meet-up before in the past, but the difference this time was that we got to meet different people who responsible in different part of the business. Some from PR, some from Product Development, others from Network. The result was quite interesting, deep and insightful conversations, of which I would like to share with you.
First one was about Network, I’m talking about the mobile network. If you read my previous post about the Wireless Mobile Broadband – MiFi, you would know that the worst thing that could render this device useless is indeed the lack of network coverage. No signal, no 3G reception, no Internet, no WiFi, nothing!
The good news is, 3 recognized its failing and started a plan in motion to rectify it. I was talking to one of the guy from Network department and he was telling me that from last year they’ve started to replace their Tower with Nokia’s branded device, which apparently better than what they had before. This replacement plan should be finish, he claimed, by the end of this year.
Moreover, and this is the interesting stuff, he revealed that they are going to ’share’ their mobile bandwidth with T-Mobile :) This definitely will help the problem with network coverage as I presume when this is done, 3 customers would be able to use 3G network owned by T-Mobile and vice versa. Although with the news of Orange and T-Mobile possible merger looming on the horizon, it could disrupt this expansion plan.
Ok, enough with ‘techie’ things, let’s jump to the meaty stuff :) I had a chance to have a chat with somebody from Product Development, and my first question was. of course, which mobile handsets that 3 have in the pipeline. What can we expect to see in a couple of months. At which point he reached into his pocket and showed me a ‘couple’ of his ‘toys’.
The first one was the Samsung i5700 AKA Galaxy Portal. It’s a touch-screen Android phone. Unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough to get a shot of it, but you can read about it here.
The second phone I saw was the Sony Ericsson XPeria X10 ! X10 is the first Sony’s Android handset. This time I had a chance to take a snapshot :)
I didn’t manage to play with it too much, but first impression was good. Here is a bit of video clip from Sony website on X10.
The last handset I saw was making me ready to throw away my Nokia N97 :) It was again from Sony Ericsson, and like N97, it’s got the same Symbian OS, and No it’s the crap Satio! It’s the Sony Ericsson Vivaz!
It was really nice on my hand, slimmer than N97. Like the X10, it has also 8.1 Mp camera and smile Detection, but unlike its sibling, the 16:9 nHD Touchscreen is capable of producing 16 million colour :) It seems to be a perfect mobile handset for an ‘avid’ video producer as you can upload your video straight to YouTube. Check out in more details here.
As for me, I’m ready to exchange my N97 right now!
So, 2 Android Phones and one Symbian. I think we could see a bit of hope (more choices, of good variety ones) in the UK handset market that has for me been dominated by iPhone for the last 2 years.
Thanks for 3 and 3mobilebuzz for the opportunity.
