xseries

3 Mobile Internet Seminar gets live-blogged!

In London today, 3 UK held a Mobile Internet Seminar with folk from 3 (that's us!), Yahoo, Skype, Jaiku and the London School of Economics.

According to Ewan from SMS Text News, "it also featured toast, coffee, tea, orange juice and croissants". Nice :-)

For those of us not there, the event was blogged live by Stuart Dredge at Tech Digest. He must have fast and furious fingers because he managed to keep up with all the presentations and discussion throughout the morning.

To read his report, drop by here. And, for a taste of the event (as opposed to the toast and croissants) here's the first few posts from Stuart's excellent summary of the event:

"We're kicking off with 3's John Penberthy-Smith, introducing the event. He kicks off with a bold assertion - in 10 years time, more people will be using the mobile internet every day than use fixed-line broadband now. " That's quite a bold statement, but I think it's quite conservative – it may come sooner..."

"9.25: He believes 3 has started in the right direction with X-Series, but there's more to do. Some of its key services are popular though: between July 2006 and January 2007, Yahoo got 82 million page views through 3. After X-Series, between March and June 2007 it racked up 62 million. Meanwhile, 118 million MSN Messenger messages were sent and received in May 2007 alone through 3's network (does this mean 59 million actual messages?).

"9.30: 3's John Penberthy-Smith outlines the future of mobile internet as far as 3 sees it. It'll involve software downloads becoming the norm, advertising having an impact – but only if relevant - and the mobile operators working with established internet companies as partners..."

To read the rest, drop by Tech Digest now or read Ewan's view on it.

//de

It's almost here!

It's a stretch but we think we can get away with writing about the new Transformers movie - which will finally be here next week - simply because the cinema is one of the few places in the world where you have to have your mobile turned off.

Whew! It took us hours to work out what the connection to Transformers and mobiles was, but we did it!

It you want to see the trailer, go here, and if you want to see when we last mentioned the Transformers on the X-Series blog, go here.

//de

Google launches mobile Picasa

MoCoNews has a small piece on Google launching a mobile version of its Picasa photo management software - nice if you're into snapping when you're on the move. If you're interested, check it out here. If you're not, enjoy our totally gratuitous photo (above) and this equally gratuitous plug for our excellent X-Series Flickr Group (join it and you can add your photos to our ever growing pool).

This piece made me think a little about how many more photos I've taken since having a camera in my mobile. Some non-essential data from my bloated iPhoto software: 2004 (1,975 pics), 2005 (3,545 pics), 2006 (4,513 pics) and finally, this year so far 2,977 pics!   

//de

A pocket full of wry

Gollum was one of the first characters in modern fiction to ask the  question. Then, somewhat later, Lord FlashHeart asked more or less the same thing ... in, albeit, a slightly more risqué  manner.

Modern life has lead more than a few of us to go to any length to stay connected, wired up, in sync and in tune with everyone and everything we may possibly need. To be disconnected is unthinkable, to not have 'stuff' within arms length, well, frankly...unforgivable.

To stay connected, you could go for this sort of thing, but only if you like looking/feeling like you've run through an electronics shop covered in glue. One of the X-Series team swears by this but admits to getting strange looks on the train and the occasional offer of directions to the nearest Bobsled run.

He's got the idea. And these guys obviously have far too much spare time on their hands.

Which is why this little offering rather tickled our fancy.

There's a chocolate fish for the first reader to guess what it's about without either having seen or heard of it before.

//ms

Note: Judge's decision is final, no correspondence will be entered into, and, well, you should know, that we've already eaten the chocolate fish, so the best we can do is send you an image of the empty wrapper. But it's the thought that counts!

Write On Bloggers!

If you want to write for our little X-Series blog there's still time (in fact, there will always be time!).

Just send us an email at blog.xseries@three.com. While we don't have any $$/££/€€ we do have the ability to link back to your own blog/flickr or other site everytime you post.

So come on, let us know about yourself by this Friday. It's easy!

:-)

//de

The X-Series Blog Needs You!

It seems like only yesterday, but in reality the X-Series has been with us for over seven months. Since its launch to an eager public in November 2006, the X-Series has arrived in almost every country that has a 3 business, with our colleagues in 3 Italy and 3 Austria joining us most recently.

Throughout that time the X-Series blog has been exploring the world of the mobile internet, helping out X-Series users when it can, and generally trying to keep an open line between you and us.

We've explored stuff like Jaiku, set up our own Flickr group, and been busy moblogging.

While we will continue to do this, we are now keen to open up the blog to more contributors.

So, want to write for the X-Series blog? Email us at blog.xseries@three.com with a short (50-200 words) sample submission of the type of thing you think you'd like to write about. We'll be picking a handful of volunteers (yea, sorry, probably should have mentioned that earlier!) to become authors on the X-Series blog. 

We're after people with a point of view about the new world of the mobile internet, and people who want to write about what's happening now and what should happen in the future.

We're interested in getting people from around the globe to write for us. So whether you live in Hong Kong, Australia, Indonesia, Austria, Sweden or Italy it makes no difference. We welcome people from anywhere - even countries where 3 doesn't yet have a presence.

So come on, get writing. Applications close on Friday, June 29. We'll let you know within a few days of then if you're on board or not and then we'll send you our editorial guidelines and we're away!

To apply send an email with your sample post to blog.xseries@three.com. Mark the subject "X-Series Blog Author Application".

:-)

//de

PS: even though we tweaked it a little, the picture we used here is in the public domain and from the US Department of Defence.

moblog.co.uk getting active

We've noticed a lot of unofficial activity happening over at the X-Series moblog as fellow X-Seriesers help each other push their X-Series mobiles to the limit.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about drop by. Even if you don't want to get into the geeky self-help stuff going on, you can always just upload a photo you've taken for others to comment on or even set up your own moblog. Just remember, the moblog is mainly there as a place for you to upload any images you take when out and about, and any suggestions or help from users of it is quite unofficial (i.e., we can't offer support on it).

Warning out of the way ;-)

Click here to visit: http://moblog.co.uk/blogs.php?show=13641

//de

3 Italia hits 600,000 DVB-H subscribers

Interesting little piece in mocoNews on our colleagues at 3 Italy who recently hit 600,000 DVB-H subscribers.
3 Italy has been at the absolute forefront of DVB-H globally and the new figures are encouraging.

mocoNews was referencing an article from Unstrung, which goes into a lot more details about the figures.

Read it here.

//de

The History of Mobile Phone (US perspective)

Nice little slide show over at PC World which shows a very light weight history of the mobile phone, starting with a massive Motorola and ending with Apple's iPhone.

Along the way you'll see a host of odd stuff including Nokia's game phone (who can forget sidetalking?) and the Moto iTunes phone (hmm).

We found this via textually.org.

For a more detailed history, check out Wikipedia.

//de

Ciao X-Series!

The X-Series has arrived in Italy!

Our colleagues in 3 Italy become the latest 3 business to launch the X-Series. Welcome on board!

If you want to find out a little more, from full demos of videofonini, to complete pricing details, get yourself over to http://www.3xseries.it/

:-)

//de