Continue reading »]]> If you’re under the age of 18 and have been wondering why Google+ isn’t available to you – it’s because Google insisted they wanted to implement specific privacy features before it went live to minors.

Now, it’s been done – and anyone 13 years of age or older can open an account. Google say that specific privacy rules will be preset until you’re 18, but at least Google might finally get the audience I feel they should be targeting!

Continue reading »]]> O2′s in the doghouse today after an angry customer pointed out that his phone number was being handed out to the webmaster of every site he visited over a 3G connection. It turns out that if you visited a webpage from a 3G connection on your phone between 10th January and 2pm UK time today, chances are your phone number has been handed out to at least one person.

Obviously, this caused quite a lot of uproar from customers. O2 quickly responded by fixing the issue within a few hours and then posted rather a long Q&A post on their blog detailing what had happened.

It would seem the company also took the oppertunity to remind customers that some “trusted” partners are allowed to get hold of our mobile numbers if they decide it is necessary. They claim that some companies using premium rate services need phone numbers so that any charges can be added to your bill – but many customers are questioning whether O2 are actually being transparent here.

Nonetheless, this is a pretty big blow for O2 and the customer outrage has attracted the attention of the Information Commissioner. O2 also say that they’re in touch with Ofcom to discuss what happened.

Continue reading »]]> O2 recently announced that Pay Monthly customers will lose their free access to The Cloud wifi services as of February 2012.

If you’re on a data plan with O2, you may be aware that you currently have free access to both BT Openzone and The Cloud as part of your contract. Handy for making sure you’re not using your limited data allowance when you’re in a public place.

Sadly, as of 1st February 2012, O2 customers won’t be able to use The Cloud for free wifi. O2 say all data customers will still have access to BT Openzone and also to their own wifi networks (but O2 wifi networks are free to anyone, anyway).

This probably has something to do with the sale of The Cloud to BSkyB. Bit of a shame really, as there are The Cloud hotspots at my local train station and at various other public places that I use – but no major loss I guess.

Continue reading »]]> On Thursday (29/9/11), we7 converted it’s free service to a “radio” service – being the latest online music service to do so. It follows Spotify, who moved to limited music streaming in April.

The new service for free users allows up to 50 “on-demand” tracks per month, and then a limited radio service. Premium and Premium+ users still have full access to the old site at http://subscription.we7.com and can choose between the two sites.

It does prove that there really is no money in free choice-based music streaming. We7 previously blamed the music industries high streaming fee – which was difficult to match with advertising.

We7 has argued that it believes people want their music to be chosen for them on a genre basis. According to The Telegraph, it denies the move is due to increased competition.

It’s a real shame, but it seems impossible to make money from advertised streaming services.

Continue reading »]]> giffgaff has recently announced that it will, on October 10th 17th, be launching it’s latest service – data only goodybags.

These goodybags will be destined for iPad, tablet and mi-fi users who like to use their mobile connection to provide internet to other devices. Tethering will be permitted with these special goodybags.

Users may be required to order a seperate SIM for their tablet or mi-fi. Once activated, three packages will be available.

• 500MB for 30 days: £5
• 1GB for 30 days: £7.50
• 3GB for 30 days: £12.50

These seem to be very competitive pay-as-you-go prices. The nearest competitor is 3, however they have a reputation of much better coverage and data speed than other networks.

giffgaff insist that the goodybags are sold at “cost price” – meaning giffgaff makes a loss if you use all of the data in your goodybag. A bold move – and one which could be extremely risky. giffgaff are betting on some people not using all of the data in their allowance, but I’m not confident this will be the case.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how popular the goodybags become.

To order a free SIM with giffgaff and get £5 free credit on activation, click here.

Continue reading »]]> BT has recently announced that as of December 2011, a number of charges (including line rental) will be increased. This is the second price increase from BT this year.

So, as of 3rd December, line rental will increase from £13.90 per month to £14.60 per month. On top of that, their unlimited anytime call plan is increasing by 20p per month to £4.90 per month – and considering this is BT’s most popular calling plan, this is bound to hit home. If you’re not on the unlimited call plan (or making a chargeable call), your call connection fee is going up to 13.1p per call. And to finish you off, your daytime and evening call rates are going up too. “Terrific!”, I hear you say.

Somewhat strange to remember, though, that BT announced in July that their quaterly profits were up 20% due to increased demand. Does that sound strange to you?

We have to bear in mind that a large majority of people living in out-of-city areas are on market one telephone exchanges. This basically means that you’re stuck with BT wholesale for your telephone and broadband services whether you like it or not, as no other operator can provide a service. What this really means is that there’s no competition – and so BT can charge whatever they like for your telephony services.

If you’re lucky enough to have the availability of cable in your area, perhaps you might want to consider the option of moving to cable broadband and scrapping your landline altogether. We all seem to be on these huge mobile contracts which offer endless minutes – so why do we need a landline? It’s worth a thought – as cable broadband will give you a much faster speed and generally a better service.

It is annoying though – BT are just taking advantage of the fact that they can do whatever they like to charges at the moment – they have control over most of the phone exchanges in the UK and no other operator can do much about it. The only group that can make a difference is Ofcom – but they often seem to cause more trouble than good. And to the average household suffering from money shortages (having already had the warning of increased energy charges), this can only be bad news.

Oh, and if you’ve just joined their supposedly amazing “summer deal” of free service for 4 months, then £16 a month – remember, it’s an 18 month contract.

Continue reading »]]> Long time readers of GEEK! may know the Orange complaint I made in late 2009. In the past, I’ve also written to Ofcom and complained about the vague FUP that gave no details as to what they defined as “unlimited”.

Well, finally, Orange have removed their FUP and now supposedly no longer limits the amount of data people can download. Orange claim that they now offer totally unlimited downloads.

Previously, Orange would contact you if they believed you were using an excessive amount of data in a given month. If they believed that you were not taking action following their warnings, they would throttle your connection to almost unusable speeds during peak periods until they were satisfied that you had changed your ways.

I love what they’ve written though: “Some of the other broadband providers out there track and limit your speed if you reach a certain amount of data, we don’t.” Of course, they would know that – because they used to be one of the few providers that actually did it!

Continue reading »]]> Apple has today launched a beta of the new iTunes version 10.3 which, above all, includes the new iCloud functionality (or at least some of it).

You can grab your hands on the new version via this link. It’s available for Mac and Windows (32 and 64 bit). The download (at the time of writing) is running horribly slowly (currently getting about 30kb/s on the 77MB download) – but I’m guessing that’s down to demand and should return to normal sometime later this evening.

I’ll post up the good news when I’ve got it going!

Continue reading »]]> As you may have been reading in the news, Microsoft has recently agreed to purchase the popular VoIP service Skype. After a couple of previous acquisitions in the past, Microsoft has made it’s biggest purchase – this time worth well over $8 billion.

Before I even start, I think it’s fair to say that this is either going to be a monumental win or a catastrophic fail – one or the other.

The question is, what will Microsoft do with Skype? Obviously, Skype certainly hasn’t been in the green lately – it’s debts have definitely been on the rise. So, Microsoft have evidently got to make a few considerable changes – otherwise the rather large purchase will become rather a large waste of money – even on Microsoft’s terms!

I can imagine Microsoft will probably implement increased charges for the paid services. However, I do hope that Microsoft will lower the charges for features in Skype that could potentially become very popular – such as group video calling. I happen to think that group video calling was a very well implemented feature into Skype – but unfortunately Skype started charging ridiculous amounts of money for it. If Microsoft lowered charges to £1-2 per month, I would probably consider purchasing it.

The other big question is whether they will continue to support all of the operating systems that Skype currently supports. Microsoft has never really supported Linux and people are starting to ask if Microsoft will drop support for it. Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me hugely if they did – but it would be a real shame.

The sale probably won’t finalise for another few months at least, so we’ll just have to wait and see what changes Microsoft will inevitably implement. In the mean time, enjoy Skype in it’s current form while you can!