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Crazy john’s introduces prepaid broadband
- Connect to the Internet using the mobile phone network
- Check emails & surf the web on the go – school, in a cafe, on holiday,
at the park or traveling to work
- It’s prepaid – so only pay for what you use! |
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Details
| Product |
Speed |
Term |
Downloads |
Price |
Bonuses |
Notes |
Link |
|
| Crazy Johns |
Broadband |
This pack contains 1 USB Modem (Vodafone Network) + 100MB Data, + $29 recharge for $79 |
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$79 |
100MB Data |
Data sim card starter is $2. Recharge before expiry & rollover unused credit (max 15GB) |
Visit Crazy Johns |
Internet Security
Home users can
lose valuable
personal data with one click to the wrong
website. What are you doing to protect yourself? |
| 15 days |
200MB |
$10 |
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| 30 days |
750MB |
$19 |
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| 30 days |
1.5GB |
$29 |
| 30 days |
3.5GB |
$49 |
| 180 days |
4.5GB |
$79 |
| 365 days |
7.5GB |
$129 |
| 365 days |
12GB |
$149 |
OPTUS has partnered with Woolworths to launch its the Woolworths Everyday Mobile offer. The new “white label” service was launched in August 2009 and focuses on taking a share of the low cost prepaid mobile market.
Compare the Woolworths offers with some of the many other providers that also compete at the cheaper end of the prepaid mobile market.
Here is an extract from a recent release talking about Optus’ plans to expand its network and distribution through 3rd party an other relationships.
The No2 mobile company’s wholly owned youth-focused subsidiary Virgin Mobile has put a 50-store expansion on ice in recent weeks, cruelling plans by Optus to take on its faster growing rival Hutchison 3.
Optus will, however, continue to add about 100 company branded “yes” stores to its existing network of 103 shops.
The Australian understands that Virgin is well advanced with its plans, having shortlisted its two largest third-party retailers Telechoice and Allphones, to build and run the outlets.
The stores, which cost about $500,000 each to set up, will be joint ventures between Optus and the chosen partner in each case.
Optus consumer chief Mike Smith said the company would not comment on Virgin but the company would continue to expand its “yes” branded stores, most of which were owned by franchisees.
Optus has also been hit by the collapse of one of its biggest third-party retailers, the 72-outlet Strathfield Group, which was believed to be making about 500 new connections a week on the Optus network.
Despite these setbacks, the deal with Woolworths will add a new arm to the Optus distribution network and has the potential to shake up the network’s distribution models.
Late last year Woolworths denied in several media reports that it would move into mobile services, but The Australian understands the deal was signed in September.
Optus is building and operating the so-called MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) through what insiders described as a “white-label” arrangement using its new software platforms known intenally as Project Reitz.
Problems integrating with Woolworths’ IT systems had resulted in unexpected delays, sources said.
Optus declined to discuss its dealings with Woolworths but a source close to the project said the Woolworths-branded mobile phone service was months away from launching.
“Woolworths is considering a wide range of opportunities, which would provide additional value to our customers. Telecoms is one such opportunity that we’re considering,” a Woolworths’ spokesperson said.
According to sources close to the project, Optus will build the infrastructure and network systems while Woolworths puts the finishing touches on the systems that operate customer relationships and billing.
Once the systems integration is complete, shoppers will be able to purchase a mobile phone or recharge their pre-paid mobile service at their nearest Woolworths-Safeway store.
Woolworths’ MVNO plan mimics the 2003 move by giant British supermarket chain Tesco that has resulted in it accumulating more than 2 million subscribers to its service.
It is likely that Woolworths will adopt a similar MVNO business model to Tesco, offering discounts on handsets and prepaid charges when customers spend a certain amount at the supermarket.
It’s also expected that Woolworths will tie in its mobile phone offerings with its Everyday Rewards credit card program to grant customers free phone airtime or data based on spending at the checkout.
Woolworths at present awards customers fuel e-vouchers when they spend advertised qualifying amounts on their Everyday Rewards credit card.
MVNOs have been gaining momentum in Australia since Crazy John’s teamed up with Vodafone to launch its own branded mobile fleet.
Now Vodafone plans to expand its role as an MVNO provider in the coming year.
“It’s shaping up as a very active year, with a number of new MVNOs likely to enter the market,” Vodafone spokesperson Greg Spears said.
Following the collapse last week of one of Optus’s biggest third-party retailers, another of its major retailers plans to open another 18 shops this year, mostly in capital cities, TeleChoice chief executive Ehab Abdou said.
TeleChoice has more than 120 stores nationwide and Mr Abdou said the company registered 25 per cent sales growth year-on-year for the period ending December 31.
However, he declined to reveal specifics.
“The market is really healthy and business is good,” Mr Abdou said.
TeleChoice spent $6 million solely on brand marketing last year and expected to maintain or increase that amount as the business grew, he said.
“In the last three years we’ve been increasing our marketing budget. When we started we used to spend $3.5 million,” he said.
Mr Abdou said the market was not surprised to hear about Strathfield’s demise but declined to say how much business TeleChoice would gain as a result.
Jenneth Orantia – APC Magazine
Usually, if you wanted advanced functions like instant messaging, Skype, and a half decent web browser and email client in a mobile, you’d have to fork out a pretty penny for a smartphone that runs Windows Mobile, Series 60, BlackBerry or iPhone. The INQ, pitched as ‘the world’s most advanced social networking phone’, tries to merge all the different mobile communication methods together into one easy-to-use prepaid mobile, but whether it does a better job of it than the classic smartphones depends on just how much functionality you’re willing to compromise on.
If you’re simply after the basics, the INQ has got you covered. Its offers Windows Live Messenger for chatting, Skype for VoIP, Facebook for social networking, an email client, and the standard phone functions for voice calls and text messaging.
Our favourite feature is the live address book, which pulls contacts from each of your services and plugs them into the contacts list. Once your contacts are all organised, you can then open the addressbook and get a choice of how you wish to contact each person: phone (voice call, video call or text message), Windows Live Messenger, Facebook (poke, message or wall), Skype (call or message) or email. It’ll even pull profile photos from Facebook for each of your contacts, and show live presence information for Windows Live Messenger and Skype.
The INQ’s got its heart in the right place, but in practice, we found the phone to be too buggy and limited to enjoy for very long. The INQ is the most unstable mobile we’ve tested in a long time, with random resets occurring while we were signing into Windows Live Messenger, Skype, and even just browsing through the icons on the home screen. Windows Live Messenger was particularly flaky – seven times out of ten, launching the program would cause the phone to crash, and we constantly got ‘Soap Exception’ errors.
Facebook and Windows Live Messenger are the INQ’s two main drawcards, but if you’re hoping for PC-like functionality, you’re in for a big disappointment. The only features that the Facebook program offers above the generic mobile version of the site is that new friend requests and messages come up as system prompts, much like a text message or missed phone call. For all other purposes, the INQ’s Facebook application is vastly inferior to the mobile web version, and clicking on any of the stories in the main feed (of which only 12 are shown at a time, with no option to see stories before that) simply launches the Facebook mobile site anyway. Really, you’re better off just logging into Facebook through the web browser.
As for Windows Live Messenger, it’s got most of the features that you’d expect in a mobile client, like emoticons, tabbed chatting for multiple conversations, and group chats, but for some reason you only get notified of new messages if the Windows Live Messenger program is active. It can run in the background and keep you signed in, but – annoyingly – you don’t get any beeps or dialog boxes to let you know that you’ve got a new message, so you have to constantly go back to the program to check.
The Skype service is probably the most well-developed application on the INQ, letting you call other Skype users in your contacts list and send them instant messages. Unlike the Skype on the desktop and Windows Mobile, however, you can’t call landlines or mobiles – calls are strictly limited to within the Skype network. 3 charges usage on a per-unit basis, and you get a certain number of minutes and messages within each plan; on the $29 prepaid cap, you get 4,000 minutes (or over two hours a day) and 10,000 instant messages a month.
Those are our main gripes when it comes to the INQ phone; in other respects, it’s pretty decent for an entry-level mobile. It’s extremely compact and light, with a classy brushed aluminium casing and sturdy spring-loaded slider. There aren’t any gimmicky input controls or buttons: just the standard soft keys below the screen, five-way navigation pad, call buttons, and the usual numeric keypad on the lower half of the slider.
Likewise, the INQ’s user interface is nice and straightforward, with a menu carousel on the standby screen for cycling through the main programs like Messenger, MySpace (really just a link to the web site), Skype, Facebook, Web and Contacts without having to dig through the menu system. There are also a handful of widgets that you can add to the standby screen, including a Google search bar, weather forecast and large time and date.
Multimedia is a mixed bag on the INQ: on the one hand, the external speaker is one of the loudest we’ve heard on a mobile, and it’ll happily stream YouTube clips and play back stored music and movies through its media player. The music program has also got Last.FM integration, so it’ll scrobble your music and list artist recommendations and track recommendations while you’re playing music. On the other hand, it only uses the one connector for the syncing, charging, and connecting headphones (so you’ll need an adapter to use your own cans), and internal memory is a measly 50MB (although there’s a microSD slot under the battery for adding more storage).
Most browsers at this end of the market are limited to WAP only, so we were pleasantly surprised to discover the INQ has a full HTML browser, with support for multiple windows, reformatting to fit the page, and a minimap for showing an overview of the page overview while scrolling and panning. It does a good job at rendering complicated web sites, including bank and discussion forum sites, but it’s just extremely slow to use – the pages load slowly despite the phone’s fast HSDPA connection, and scrolling through pages also happens at a snail’s pace.
The latter can probably be put down to the INQ’s limited processing power. We weren’t able to get confirmation of the chip used, but we encountered a lot of lag when using each of the different functions. Couple that with the buggy state of the INQ’s firmware, and you’ve got a phone that’s more than a little frustrating to use in practice. We’re a big fan of the whole ‘smartphone for the rest of us’ concept, and love the INQ’s live address book feature, but the numerous bugs and limitations make it a hard phone to recommend – bargain basement pricetag notwithstanding.
