According to the BBC’s Rory Celan-Jones, many of us are now relying on expert bloggers before buying our gadgets.  In particular Stephen Fry is singled out as having one of the sassiest incites into technology.

So with the BlackBerry Storm’s £10m campaign behind it and shortages reported in both Vodafone and Phones4U stores, this must be the most successful launch since the iPhone3G, isn’t it?

Possibly not, so it appears.  Not withstanding the much reported lack of WiFi and BES support, the BlackBerry Storm has come in for strong criticism from Stephen Fry and another guru, David Pogue of the New York Times.

“Shockingly bad”, “terrible lag”, “disappointment”, “BlackBerry Dud” are just some of the standout comments.  So the upshot could be that after the initial rush of first adopters and style wanabees, the next wave of buyers, having read these trusted commentators, will stay well away from the toxic Storm.

Though with Lewis Hamilton extolling the virtue of the Storm on YouTube  I wouldn’t want to bet either way.

After a particularly quite year, Nokia has suddenly pulled something out of the bag; a feature phone with new features!

Surpassing all of their high end smartphones, the Nokia 6260 doubles the screen resolution of their recent N96, has potentially faster internet with 10.2Mbps HSPA+, WebKit & Flash Lite browser and the usual WiFi, A-GPS and 5Mpx Carl Zeiss  camera.  The only flaw appears to be the single band 3G access.

This pretty much sets the standard in features for a feature phone (SE’s C905 only having a quarter VGA screen), but leaves Nokia’s Symbian range all the poorer.  Perhaps there are more rabbits in Nokia’s furry winter hat.

With the Advertising Standards Authority gently wrapping T-Mobile’s knuckles over their guaranteed “You won’t find more minutes for £30.” advert, it seems that 300,000 of them had no minutes at all. (The Register)

Courtesy of a failure in T-Mobiles network, users had a 6 hour respite from friends, relatives and colleagues gabbling about their weekend non-spending spree.  So with the backups out of their dusty closet and lots of crossed engineering fingers everyone should now be back having their One2One’s.

Perhaps the G1 reboot problem (now fixed) is still haunting the network?

With reduced profit and income forecasts, the mobile world is taking strident moves to reduce costs (mainly sacking people).

Blyk, the ad funded youth mobile network, are one of the latest.  Whilst Blyk have only 200,000 subscribers, they must be hoping they can emulate Virgin Mobile’s three fold rise in contracts subscribers.

Blyk’s target market does unfortunately appear to be unhappy with their service, some having lost patience with previous SMS and MMS messaging issues and problems with customer service.  Founding directors Jon Fisher & Jonathan MacDonald have also jumped ship.

Considering the 25% response rate, and the target student market, advertisers should be very happy.  Yet how will Blyk improve customer satisfaction if it “streamlines” too much of the company?

Reported by trade mag, Mobile Today, the much anticipated and lusted after (by BlackBerry aficionados) BlackBerry Storm was no where to be seen in some Vodafone stores last weekend. 

Considering the Sunday Mail had a favourable comparison between the Storm and iPhone 3G, there would have been many of the 70,000 people left acutely disappointed with the lack of stock.

Considering the debacle over at Orange with the BB Bold (network issues), Vodafone had an opportunity to show how a handset launch should be handled, especially as Vodafone used Lewis Hamilton as part of its campaign.

Perhaps McLaren should have delivered the phones instead.

It can’t be a good look to have a press photo of a new business handset with business bad news all over it!  With the launch of the E63 and its prescient web image, there can’t be much cheer for Nokia’s pals at Nokia Siemens, the infrastructure wing.

Synergy and adjustments are comforting words for investors but not for the 9,000 employees having their lives and families adjusted.  Inevitably whenever two large competing companies merge there will be synergy adjustments, but this comes on top of the failure of Benq Siemens and the restructuring of Nokia’s mobile divisions.

Credit crisis, recession, unemployment surges, trade shrinking, how right was Nokia’s image makers.

The HTC Max 4G first of the WiMAX 4G (10Mbps) handsets is hitting the market.

Whilst it lacks any 3G connectivity, the next generation of fast internet devices will be soon for sale in Russia on Yota. 

Looking rather like the HTC HD, it has Windows Mobile 6.1, large 3.8” 480 by 800 screen, WiFi, GPS and GSM for normal out of coverage calls.

Like many telecom companies in countries with no or poor telecom infrastructure, Yota has taken the opportunity to leap frog 3G for 4G.  The accepted belief is that LTE will prevail over WiMAX, but for now some lucky Russian customers can laugh at Europe’s low speed 3G networks.

It can’t be a good look to have a press photo that has unemployment rate up, recession and credit crunch on a business mobile!

But with the evident success of the E71, Nokia obviously had it mind to release a down market version for general management bods.  Not for them the classy metal structured top tier phone, plastic will do.

Whilst the E63 retains the E71’s high colour screen, it does loose the 3.2 Mpx autofocus camera in favour of a 2Mpx, and HSDPA, though this may not be too much of a problem if all a small business needs is a usable email centric handset.  WiFi plus VoIP support are also retained.

Set at a very affordable 199 Euros, the E63 should be available free of charge on most contract tariffs and could eventually be a good pre-pay offer.

O2’s iconic XDA brand has always been targeted at the professional end of the market demanding a long contract commitment before you were deigned worthy of high tech mobility.

That’s all changing with the recent release of the iPhone 3G on prepay and today, 10^th of November, the O2 XDA Zest. 

Typically prepay users were always given low spec handsets, but the XDA Zest is anything but. 

With HSDPA, WiFi, 2.8” VGA screen, GPS, Windows Mobile 6.1, 3MPx autofocus camera and FM radio, the XDA Zest has everything an iPhone competitor could need.  Plus at only £250 (less a penny) from the 17^th of November, the XDA Zest is £100 pound cheaper than the cheapest Pay and Go iPhone 3G. 

The XDA Zest must be a strong contender for the small business customer upgrading from their traditional Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobiles in the next few months.

Canalys has just released their latest smartphone sales research for Q3 2008.

Whilst the whole sector is shipping more products, Nokia sales are slipping, softening by 3.4% to 15,485,690 units.  Apple, however, has had a phenomenal rise of over 500% to nearly 7 million units.  BlackBerry and HTC sales have also risen ahead of the market to 6m and 2.3m respectively.

Consequently sales of Symbian handsets are declining rapidly (down to 18.5m from 21.2m), though still leading the market overall.  This may turn round later in 2009 as manufacturers take the opportunity to use Symbian’s open source code in preference to LiMo or Android, though that could be doubtful.

Perversely it is Samsung that is now showboating Symbian with their i8510 INNOV8, whilst Nokia suffers from the delay to market and terrible feedback from their underwhelming 2008 star handset, the N96.  This has to be worrying for Nokia moving into 2009.

There are an incredible number of iPhone devotees in London.  Go into any café, pub or train and there will be a good number using their iPhone’s as they fill up their ‘down’ time.  Though with the credit crunch, there is a lot more time to be downed.

According to a UBS analyst, Maynard Um, Apple are drastically cutting back the number of iPhones from 9 million in the third quarter to an expected 4 million in Q4. 

Obviously this could be a normal response to slack post Christmas buying trends, or a lead into a new iPhone.  Yet with the credit crunch looking particularly painful in 2009, Apple may just be reading the phenomenal change in spending patterns just right. 

Cheap SIM deal anyone?

Nokia’s ability to design, manufacture and market low cost handsets is really second to none.  With its announcement of another seven affordable handsets Nokia can seemingly ‘publish’ the millions of new handsets as if they were just magazines rather than a highly complicated piece of technology.

Targeted at emerging markets, Nokia simultaneously announced an experimental service, Nokia Life Tools, in India to provide agricultural and educational information to remote communities.  Similar services in Africa have allowed farmers to find the best price for their produce elevating their families’ standard of living.

On the same day as the upbeat announcements comes the suggestion of further redundancies at Nokia as they try to refine their product development focus, potentially affecting 450 employees and closing its Turku site in Finland.  

With the demise of Nokia’s business divisions this must be a stressful time for Nokia employees.