This week the mobile operator Orange revealed a tasty bit of insight about their customers messaging usage over the holiday period.
The festive season in 2008 was a record one for Orange, with more than 100 million text messages being sent on Christmas day. On top of that over 1 million picture messages were sent by customers on the same day.
Orange said that expected a 10% increase in picture messages to approx 1.1 million being sent this Christmas, giving quite a good indication of growth rates for MMS in general I think.
New Year’s Eve is just as popular with an expected 120 million text messages likely to be sent, compared to 106 million last year and 1 million picture messages.
Orange UK customers can now upload their pictures to their Twitter stream by simply sending them to 86444.
The service is run through a photo site called Snapshot which is run by Orange, and it all works pretty seemlessly too. I tried it out today and you just send your first MMS and get a SMS back which links you to a Twitter authorisation page. Read More
A couple of weeks back I wrote about the fantastic Orange ‘Good Things Should Never End‘ website and how much fun it was to play around with. Well it turns out their agency Poke Fallon (in conjuction with Unit 9) has managed to go one better with the bloody brilliant Friend-O-Meter.
Friend-O-Meter utilises the information available on your Facebook, Twitter or Myspace accounts to quiz you on your friends. The multiple choice questions range from ‘What percentage of male to female friends do you have?’ or ‘Who’s birthday is it in October?’. Pictures also appear asking you to match the face to the friend.
Oh and to top it off, the person with the quickest and most accurate answers wins a Motorola DEXT and the title of ‘Best Friend In The UK’.
Over the next 18 months Orange will be launching a range of ‘future phones’ which showcase new innovation in technology. The first up is the LG touch screen watch phone.
It features 3G, video calling, a touchscreen and the ability to compose text messages by only viewing one word at a time on the tiny screen.
The limited edition phone will go on sale from 9:00am on the 27th August in the Orange Shop, Bond Street Station, London at the hefty price tag of £500.
Check out the video below for a preview.
Came across this the other day on the Orange website, it’s a widget for Pay As You Go customers which displays your current balance, minutes, texts and also allows you to top up and manage your account.
The widget works on Windows Vista, Mac, iGoogle and even Facebook. There are currently 619 active users for the widget on Facebook.
It doesn’t seem to be actively promoted or available for contract customers, not sure why but it’s defo a useful tool.
Wow mobile gaming is moving Fast!! webOS to Work with Unreal Engine 3 
