Great affordable phones from China incoming

Great affordable phones from China incoming

China is no longer the underdog when it comes to phone-making. Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi are all brands that have grown tremendously and have an original design with a lot of interesting features.

Until now, though, you could not officially buy their phones in the United States.

This will change in 2018. Huawei, the world's third largest phone maker, has confirmed that it will bring its awesome Mate 10 Pro (review here) to US carriers. AT&T will be the first one to have the Mate 10 Pro in the US.

Meanwhile, Xiaomi has entered Europe in 2017 with one pilot market - Spain. The company has said that it is planning on expanding to the United States as well, but wants to arrive with a bang and is preparing itself carefully. All of this means more devices and more choice for consumers.

Vodafone 4G plans revealed: Free Spotify, anyone?

 

O2 has already revealed its 4G plans and is set to launch its crazy fast LTE network later this month, but what about Vodafone? The big red network’s just announced its 4G plans, and they’re coming in fast – fancy some free Spotify Premium with your mobile contract?

Vodafone’s getting ready for the launch of its super speedy 4G network on 29 August in London, with 12 more cities on the way before the end of the year, and you’ll be able to jump onto the company’s Vodafone Red 4G-ready plans from 12 August. And to make things sweeter, Vodafone’s giving you the choice of grabbing either Spotify Premium – worth £9.99 per month otherwise – or access to all the action from Sky Sports Mobile TV as part of your plan. How’s that sound?

If you’re upgrading from a current Vodafone Red plan, you can grab either streaming service, get double the amount of data you currently have and access 4G for an extra fiver a month on top of your current plan. Vodafone’s main 4G offerings come in three different sizes: Red 4G, Red 4G L and Red 4G XL, each at different price points with double the data caps as the current Red plans (1GB, 2GB and 4GB) and unlimited texts and calls.

Let’s start with the base Red 4G plan, which starts at £34 a month: you can choose from either streaming service for the first six months, which will then cost you £4.99 a month for Sky Sports or £9.99 for Spotify Premium. On the other hand, if you opt for the Red 4G L plan, which starts at £39 a month, or the Red 4G XL plan, which starts at £44 a month and arms you with 8GB of data, you’ll be granted with either streaming service for free for the whole of your two year contract. After two years, you’ll have to fork out for the service yourself, but that’s not bad for two years worth of free Spotify on any device.

Already got a 4G phone and want a SIM-only deal? You’ll find Vodafone’s SIM-only plan start at £26 a month, but just like the base Red 4G plan, you’ll only get Spotify and Sky Sports for the first six months. It’s still a lot better than nothing, and compared to O2’s deal, which will include access to an as yet to be named music service, sounds a lot more exciting, given Spotify’s critical mass and huge suite of apps for every platform under the sun.

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Mobile payments to hit $1 trillion by 2017?

We are all use to playing games on our phone, angry birds itself is the biggest selling game for mobile devices, but over the past year we have seen an acceleration of what’s being dubbed m-commerce. M-commerce is when someone actually buys a product or services through a phone or tablet.
IDC Financial Insights has issued a new report on the future of mobile payments & the future is bright. According to the report Mobile Payment volume over mobile devices will exceed $1 trillion by the year 2017

But according to Aaron McPherson, practice director for Worldwide Payment Strategies at IDC, that's just a drop in the overall transaction bucket.

"Even at a trillion dollars that's a big sexy number in the grand scheme it's not that much," McPherson said in a call with Mobile Payments Today. "It's clear that (mobile payments has) a long ways to go," he said.

McPherson said the total mobile payments market will represent only a small fraction, just 2.5 percent, of the total transaction volume that mobile payments could, at least theoretically, address. He said that number, which includes cash, check, ACH and cards, is closer to $50 trillion.

Even with that caveat, however, McPherson said mobile payments growth will continue to accelerate.

McPherson also noted that a couple of results from his research surprised him a little. "One of the things that jumped out at me was just how big (m-commerce) is," he said. He explained that most of the money being attributed to "mobile payments" is actually money being spent through m-commerce, meaning consumers shopping from a mobile device instead of online or in a store. "It's a much higher percentage of the total than I was expecting," he said.


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