Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

The Samsung Galaxy is S is receiving a lot of good press from it’s Super AMOLED screen, super fast processing abilities and above all its HD content. This week also saw the announcement of iPhone 4.0 and Samsung were quick to judge and slam the Cupertino’s baby’s screen, claiming it wasn’t a patch on their Galaxy S’s. Well now iPhone 4 is incoming, so to the Galaxy S, which you could essentially get in your hands by tomorrow (iPhone Pre-order starts tomorrow)

For a quick recap on the Galaxy S it has a 4” WVGA Super AMOLED touchscreen runing that wonderful Android OS. There’s also the usual suspects too, HSDPA and WiFi connectivity and a 5MP camera which is capable of shooting HD video. Couple all this with a 1GHz processor and a file extension support that will make your PC blush, this is some serious kit.

Vodafone are offering the phone on pretty much its standard new smartphone contracts. £35 a month for 24 months will get you the phone for nowt. If you only want an 18 month contract then you’re looking at £40 a month

Now after our iPad officialdom release news t’other day, Apple themselves released the plans for data usage before the mobile carriers had done it themselves. Now I dont’t need to go into great detail about the plans as it’s plain for all to see in the image. What is surprising is how different the prices are and the options you get. Vodafone especially.

After looking at it long and hard, it obviously depends on what kind of usage you think you will use with your iPad. O2 offering more daily usage for your money than Orange but Orange offering more usage in a monthly frame. Vodafone’s tariffs appear to be ludicrous in comparison.

Obviously this is just the prices for the 3G/WiFi models of the iPad which cost more than the just WiFi so also bear in mind you will have to pay for the iPad itself.

As of yesterday one can now pre-order Google’s top notch ‘Droid phone the Nexus One on a Vodafone contract. Before punters could only buy one direct from Google, which unless you had all the cash spare in one go hasn’t been easy for those looking on a subsidised contract.

Available in stores on the 1st May if you pre-order online you could receive it a day earlier. The cheapest contract deals start at £25 for a 24 month contract and obviously different deals and prices are in effect as to what minutes, text and data allowance you can get.

To top that off, it is believed that Android 2.2 or “Froyo” as it’s being named should be available in May, or so rumours suggest. It has also been said that the Nexus One will be the first phone to get the OS upgrade too. This has come about from apparent phones spotted online, surfing the web using what is more than likely a test of Android 2.2. Couple this with the fact Google are having a conference at the end of May and hopefully that’s when we’ll get the details.

Hopefully all the older droid phones still not running 2.1 will get a quicker upgrade.

Google’s “Nexus One” phone has been stirring up plenty of interest in the past few weeks, not only as Google’s next big phone after the slightly disappointing one that was on T-Mobile not so long back (apparently this is the phone that should’ve been) and the apparent lack of originality in the name(according to the Philip K. Dick family estate saying they stole it from the author’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? AKA Blade Runner). However all this aside a little birdie(a Voda spokesman to Engadget) let slip that the release will be “imminent” and should be shipping “within weeks”

The UK will be the first country in Europe to receive the Nexus One with the rest of Europe having to wait till later in the year.

The Nexus One is a collaboration between HTC and Google and from what we’ve seen it looks nice and on paper looks………nice!!! Powered by Snapdragon, OLED touchscreen, 5MP camera, Android 2.1 OS(animated wallpapers, lovely window transitions……..nice!) This could really be the next best rival to the iPhone. Hopefully when we get the full officialness we can let you all know the exact prices and dates!!

The hotly anticipated N900 phone from Nokia has been unveiled on the Vodafone website under the coming soon bracket making it the first network to be selling what will hopefully be Nokia’s comeback phone against the iPhone, when it hits our stores in January.

The sequel to the N97 and what looks to be a more robust, better working phone(gutted because i got the N97…..typical)  had been rumoured to be on Vodafone Ireland recently but now its got the “officialness” now on Voda UK. Similar to the N97 in looks and size this powerhouse of a phone can multitask like no other. using the Maemo 5 OS which is based on Linux this will allow the phone to operate with ease and speed, add to that an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 1GB RAM you can really see this phone will work wonders.

Usual features like a 3.5” high res(800x480), resitive touchscreen(which although not as good as a capacitive one like the iPhone, but Nokia really has got this one working quite well), 32GB of internal storage, 5MP camera, WiFi, Firefox based browser with Flash 9.4 support and Ovi connectivity for all those apps.

Not too sure of any price ranges as of yet as it’s still “coming soon”

Soon UK 3G customers of Vodafone will be able to get a whopping 14.4Mbps mobile broadband, making it faster than what most people have on their home broadband. The super fast speeds are being primed after they were trialled in various locations in the UK (London, Liverpool and Birmingham)

Vodafone has said its new service will be available to 80%  of its users whether they be mobile dongles or phones with no extra cost to upgrade to the service. Easy peasy then for you to be viewing sites or your favourite youtube videos even faster than you already were.

Obviously the likelyhood of you getting a 14.4Mbps connection speed will be slim, but it’s claimed an average of 10Mbps will be achievable still a lot faster than current mobile speeds and your average ADSL or Cable Home user. Could this be the end of home broadband, all we need is unlimited usage and it could be the future of broadband.

Vodafone have made a landmark move in scrapping the roaming charges across Europe. This change will take effect from June and will be a 3 month trial initially.

All Vodafone Pay As You Go and Pay Monthly customers will benefit from the change as long as they have opted into the network’s free Vodafone Passport scheme.

If you are a Vodafone customer, but haven’t yet signed up to Passport you can do so for free from tomorrow, simply by texting the word ‘Passport’ to 97888 if you pay monthly or to 2345 if you use Pay as you go , or you can visit vodafone.co.uk/roaming.

Roaming charges have been the bane of frequent travellers for many years due to the potential to rack up excessive phone bills. Therefore the move could see Vodafone win over a considerable amount of customers. For regular travellers abroad this could be an huge saving on mobile bills. Vodafone have provided a table below showing some examples of roaming charges.

Unfortunately, data use abroad is still subject to roaming charges.

A new page on Vodafone UK’s site confirms that the HTC Magic will launch at some point during April 2009.  No pricing or specific launch dates are given, nor is there any way to preorder the Magic; instead would-be buyers can register for updates.

The HTC magic is very similar to the T-Mobile G1 in terms of specification however it lacks the QWERT keypad which is no replaced with a new on-screen keyboard.

The specification includes:

• HSDPA
• GPRS
• Built in GPS navigation
• WiFi
• MP3 player
• 3.2-megapixel camera
• Email

It will also measure 117 x 55 x 14 mm making it slimmer than the G1 by 3mm