Monthly Archives: February 2011

I have been having a look around, again, at the various options for selling old phones that you no longer need and spotted Cash4phones who offer a phone recycling service for almost any model you can think of.

What surprised me the most were the prices on offer for some of the high-end handsets. The iPhone 4 (16GB) will get £300.12 and the HTC Wildfire will take you home £70. I had previously presumed that the best way to dispose of old phones is eBay or shops like CEX, but when you take into account the related charges incurred on eBay, not to mention the potential dodgy characters who could win the action, and the fact that CEX seems to be offering much less than before, phone recyclers are now a potential resource to dispose of your old phone.

On the Cash4phones site, there is this comment- “Cash4phones is dedicated to helping the environment – and by sending us your old mobile phones, you are helping us save the planet.

We guarantee that all phones sent into us will be recycled or disposed of in the most efficient way for the environment.” I am not completely sure what this means, but it sounds as good a way to dispose of an old phone as I can think of so maybe it is a decent option after all.

As I have said in the past though, always shop around to see which service offers you the best deal. Your recommendations in the comments thread may help other readers dispose of their phones as well.

Today’s comment of the day comes from Peter M. concerning the budget Android phones- “I can’t help thinking that this is creeping commoditisation and will devalue Android.  There is little incentive to purchase a premium Android handset if you can get a cheap handset with all the same features.

By avoiding Android (which I’m not putting down, I think it’s great – this is all about the economics) Nokia can keep pumping out premium handsets.”

The launch of the Xperia Play is designed to close the gap between iOS and Android in terms of gaming. The release is a curious one because, besides the ability to play PlayStation quality games on an Android phone, the only real difference is the use of hardware buttons for gaming. I am presuming that hardware buttons will be needed to play these games, but of course hacks will follow and maybe all Android phones will be able to play the games and even if they don’t this leaves the main question.

Is the employment of hardware buttons on a smartphone enough to make the gaming experience better than on competing platforms? I have pondered this long and hard and decided that it may well be. When I consider the quality of games on iOS, some of which are stunning in their implementation, there is still something missing. Angry Birds, Can Knockdown and games that are designed for touch screens are great to play, but driving games and other genres such as football suffer slightly from a disconnection between player and game. I have never found a driving or football game on iOS that offers the immersive experience I found on the PSP despite the wonderful graphics and layers built into some of these games.

There is little doubt in my mind that buttons will make a big difference to the gaming experience for particular games, but that this alone is not enough to make Android suddenly feel like the future of mobile gaming. The tie-in is potentially great, but it does lead me to wonder if we will see dual smartphones in the future. Half PSP and half smartphone in the same body or a DS phone (which is basically a phone shaped Nintendo DS) with part set aside for Android.

Buttons will make for a massively improved gaming experience, but there are likely many different variations on the way surrounding gaming and smartphones. I am looking forward to seeing how this one plays out.

In the nine years I have been running this website last week was the week that shaped the future of smart mobile devices more than any other.

The big news was of course the strategic partnership between Nokia and Microsoft and this will have a far reaching impact on the smartphone market for some time to come. Whether that impact turns out to be a positive one remains to be seen, but some big changes are on the way.

So why did Nokia choose Microsoft?

BlackBerry- RIM has a similar problem to Nokia in that the software does not reach the level of the hardware and this is what is causing a loss of market share. An alliance between the two would make so sense at all and would create mass confusion outside and inside the organisations.

Android- This to me still makes the most sense for Nokia. The charge against this move was that Nokia could not differentiate itself enough against the competition if it used Android for its smart devices. This is of course complete nonsense now that it has chosen Windows Phone which, if anything, lessens the opportunity for Nokia to stand above the crowd even more. Think about it for one moment- in 6 months time you could go out an buy a new Android phone from HTC, Samsung, ZTE or Nokia. Which would you choose? I am confident that I would go for a Nokia-Android phone above the rest. Nokia knows how to make phones that work, Nokia knows how to deal with signal, battery and all of the other aspects that make a good smartphone practical. Nokia knows how to design good looking phones that appeal to the masses and often at very competitive prices. Nokia could design a huge range of mobile phones that take in the entire price range using Android and would have a relative standard of freedom to boot. There would be problem areas, but I do wonder if a huge opportunity was missed with a Nokia / Android tie up. And I mean missed by Google. Google can afford Nokia, but I guess it stayed away for fear of pushing the likes of HTC away from the Android stable. But where would HTC go? Besides Android, the big manufacturers are not making big bucks on any other platform so they would probably have to stay put and compete with a Google owned Nokia.

iOS- No I haven’t gone mad, but I have wondered about a world where Apple let Nokia build iOS handsets. What better way to combat the threat of Android which could potentially dominate in a way we have not seen in the mobile industry before. It would never happen because Apple wants, and needs, to control the software and the hardware, but as a theory it has some merit.

webOS- I said before that Nokia should have done everything possible to buy Palm last year, but it didn’t happen. A tie-up with HP was a possibility, but I suspect that HP is putting a lot more into webOS than we realise at this time. Mobile is the sector of the moment and a company as large as HP will want a part of that. It simply doesn’t need to share that potential with anyone else.

So we are left with Microsoft and Windows Phone. A mobile OS which has spectacularly managed to not set the mobile world alight. An OS that doesn’t have enough within it to compete with the likes of iOS and Android at this time. There is a good argument that you cannot fight iOS or Android by dancing with the devil and that two other companies needed to bring their expertise together to compete. I get that, but I feel that Nokia really had no choice, but to go with Microsoft for two reasons. For a start there was no one else they could get into bed with and this article explains the more corporate reasons behind the partnership.

Can two companies with the expertise of Nokia and Microsoft make something good out of this partnership? Maybe, but there are significant challenges ahead. Symbian is supposed to be resigned to the budget end of the market in the future, an OS that is not particularly easy to use and one which will come under huge competition should Apple decide to release a cheaper iPhone, and let’s not forget the budget Android smartphones which are selling in healthy numbers already.

Many of us will have looked at the announcements from Nokia, Microsoft and HP last week and thought that they showed promise. In a week when Apple and Google said nothing these announcements merely showed promise. No killer blows, nothing to make us wait with anticipation for the results of these announcements to come to fruition and we haven’t seen what Apple intends to do next.

I personally feel more hopeful for HP than I do for the Nokia Microsoft partnership, but I am not going to discount the possibilities. Apple and Google have it easy at the moment, but still need to work very hard to stay ahead. I’m still not convinced that the others did enough last week to make them work even harder.

3TW stands for ‘that was the week that was’- the title of a meeting one of my previous managers used to hold every Friday. It was highly corporate and mostly full of politics. I can’t help but feel that there was a lot of that forcing the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft to happen.