Category: General
Figures recently released by comScore reveal a telling story regarding market share for the major smartphone manufacturers in the United States. Perhaps the biggest suprise is the fall of Microsoft’s share of the market from 5.2% in November ’11 to only 3.9% in Februrary ’12. Microsoft can only …
18 months after its release on iOS, Instagram has finally come to Android. For those of you unfamiliar with the app, Instagram popularised the use of applying various filters to photos, making quick edits and then sharing them online. Although the concept has been copied to death, Instagram …
Morning all. I’ve been writing on this site for 10 years now and, I’ve got to confess, the last few hours has been amazing and shocking in equal measures. Our main problem is that our “unlimited” bandwidth didn’t turn out to be quite so “unlimited” after all. We’ll …
We have a bit of a problem. It’s an issue we get every year in February whilst covering the Mobile World Congress, but this year it’s one we can’t get around. Our coverage of the event means a massive hike in traffic. In years past we’ve seen bandwidth …
After hearing last week that Three had announced the HTC One X and S would hit their stores on Thursday, earlier today we heard that one half of Everything Everywhere were planning to launch the phones on the same day. It only seems right then that the other half …
So, we reviewed The Oona recently and filmed a hands-on video. However, we pretty much ruined the original video so I set about re-filming it today. The result is below but I wanted to see just how versatile this stand actually is. The Oona is a pretty unique …
A fairly brief but self-explanatory email has just popped in from T-Mobile. They’ll be retailing the excellent HTC One X and the slim One S from this Thursday, so if you’re reaching the end of your contract or you’re looking to switch, check their site to get your …
Google have seemingly been a little slow on the uptake of cloud storage, especially as they currently hold 7339 terabytes of emails in the Gmail service, offering over 7gb per email account. At the moment, details are sketchy, with no firm launch date or pricing information. The screen …
I have arrived in London for the first day of O2 LTE 4G testing using a LTE modem kindly supplied by the network. If you did not know, O2 have a test 4G network covering 40km distance in London and selected websites have been given a dongle to …
A new tariff from O2 will dish out unlimited minutes and unlimited text with prices starting at £26 a month if you keep your current phone. There’s a decent data allowance too – 1GB. The plan prices go up if you’re bundling with a new phone and start …
Another stand for you now but this one is a bit different. It’s not just one stand, it’s many, many stands all in one. A multi-purpose stand that you can construct and adapt to your needs. Their Oona website has just one video to show it in action …
Well, we kinda knew that RIM were going through a rough patch, but figures released today show a loss of £78 million in the last three months. This compares to a £588.1 million profit for the same period last year. The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet failed to impress and, …
The BBC have filmed a miniture movie but, instead of using expensive HD broadcast cameras, they used a smartphone instead. They’ll be showing how it was done later but the results, we must admit, are rather good. Now sure, there’s going to be some slick BBC editing and …
The mobile network 3 are announcing a plan to upgrade its network which will enable it to start legal action against Ofcom, undoubtedly this will have the knock on effect of delaying the 4G auction that is planned for 2013. Three was actually the first network to release …
Fancy a microSD card with more capacity? For £9.99 you can get this Play.com one with free delivery chucked in too. But stop – wait a second there young trigger-happy-traveller. If you stick the discount code “MEMORY20” in you can get it for just £7.99. Ooo… get in, …
Stands. They’re always a touchy subject here at Coolsmartphone. There’s usually a couple of things you have to put up with when you’re looking for one. For a start there’s a selection of stands and base units which you may have to carefully select to suit your specific …
Here at CoolSmartPhone we love peripherals and accessories for our devices. As Leigh’s recent videos on device stands have shown, we love those that are simple but effective even more! Enter the ZooGue Stylus. This device is primarily sold for iPad devices however can be used on any …
Old news this really, but people have seen it elsewhere and have nudged us about it. We heard that Voda were to take the HTC One X and One S back in February and they’ve now appeared on the Vodafone website. The One X looks to be coming …
That’s right…the United Kingdom leads the way…..albeit this time in the use of mobile devices to visit News-based sites. This is the outcome of a new report from comScore, the digital marketing intelligence company. According to comScore, over 45% of UK Smartphone users have accessed a News site …
Back in January Sky announced that their on-demand TV service “Sky Anytime+” would be opened up and available via any ISP. The exact date was a little foggy, but we’re now seeing it live. The service has been available through Sky broadband for a while now, but as …
Recently we published an article about how most of the power usage of free Android apps actually goes towards displaying the ads. Angry Birds, for example, apparently uses “70% of it’s power draw to upload information and download ads”. Presumably it’s an even higher percentage for other less …
There appears to be a bug affecting GMail on Android handsets this morning. It seems to be affecting several different manufacturers, so the problem is most likely at Google’s end. It’s quite an odd bug, as it appears to only affect certain accounts, even on the same …
The rumoured April 5 launch of the HTC One is looking confirmed now following a leak of inventory information from O2. It also reveals a potential late April debut for the Sony Xperia P and Xperia U models. Earlier this month our roving team managed to get up …
Want to win a Freetalk HD camera and headset? This is a great prize for video calls and its courtesy of our friends at Skype. The kit costs around £60 and we’ve got three of these excellent webcam and headset packs to give away. Skype, of course, is …
Got the Galaxy SII on Orange? Is it branded? Don’t fancy putting a ROM on it yourself? Well, if you tick all those boxes then you’ll have to wait a little bit longer for your Ice Cream Sandwich update. A Twitter update from Orange gives no firm date …
Thanks to the kind team at O2, I have managed to get myself onto the very limited trial of 4G LTE in London currently being run by O2 UK who are owned by Telefonica. Currently a 40km section of the capital has been enabled with this new LTE …
HTC clearly have a thing for audio at the moment, best shown buy their $300 million purchase of Dr Dre’s Beats Audio, and the subsequent highly rated integration into their new products. So that’s the sound taken care of, but what about content? Well looks like HTC have …
We like Giffgaff. They’ve done things a little differently and built up quite a following. Today, though, has not been a good day. A major service outage hit the network – one that took almost 8 hours to fix. Calls, texts and data failed completely around mid-morning today …
T-Mobile have joined many other networks in announcing availability for the slightly different iPad 3 new iPad. It should be arriving in stores today, with T-Mobile promoting the fact that their joint Everything Everywhere network and “advanced 3.5G rollout” can offer much improved coverage and speeds. You can …
We get a few press releases and research results posted through our door here at Coolsmartphone towers. This one flashed up on our radar and well, we figured it was worth telling you about. The Geek Squad asked 1,837 people about their mobile phone usage and found that …
It’s been a good few months since we looked at the Orange Signal Boost technology. Now it’s available in more and more handsets on Orange and solves that “in building coverage problem” you may have experienced. During my completely unscientific research, I’ve found that networks using the 900MHz …
O2 have confirmed via Twitter that they will be offering up the HTC One X from April 5th – just 4 weeks from today. There’s no news on pricing or plans just yet though. We do, however, have some HTC One X deals on O2 if you’re interested. …
Everything Everywhere have been given the green light by Ofcom to, in principle, use some of their 1800MHz spectrum to roll out LTE. T-Mobile and Orange already use 1800MHz for their existing 2G networks, but have enough “room” to roll out 4G LTE ahead of other networks, who …
Here in London there’s been a big push to try and get WiFi available in the Tube. London Mayor, Boris Johnson, and Transport For London have been linked with an earlier deal with Huawei. Unfortunately this didn’t see the light of day.. or should that be the dark …
Remember the Sony LiveView? It was like a watch, but a bluetooth accessory that connects to any Android phone, showing texts, emails and various other features through plug ins available from the Android Market (sorry, Google Play shop!). Original costing a fairly steep £70, Play.com have a …
If you’re looking for a Android tablet for not-much-money then the Expansys sale is worth a look. There’s more than 50% off the S7 Slim we reviewed – now £109.99, whilst the Storage Options Scroll tablet is going for £89.99 – that has a 7″ capacitive screen. The …
This diddy little gadget is called the Tivizen Digital TV receiver. It’s surprisingly small, about the size of a credit card and the thickness of a normal smartphone. Put simply, this just grabs TV signals and then pumps them out over a WiFi hotspot that it creates. You …
Vodafone have today launched the Samsung Galaxy Note on their UK network. Available online using the Vodafone Store you can get your own Note on various deals depending if you are a business or personal customer there is a plan for you starting from as little as £26 a …
There’s a great article from Bloomsberg Business week that I wanted to share, involving a study with Symantec on what people do with your lost smartphone once they get their hands on it. As part of the study, Symantec ‘lost’ a total of 50 phones in the US …
If you’re looking at this on an Orange data connection then hello! This afternoon a large portion of the UK lost any sort of data connection. It wasn’t just traffic, there was no 3G or GPRS logo at all. Switching to the T-Mobile network didn’t do anything either. …
