Mark Bridge writes:
The UK is beginning its week with news of a long-awaited sporting victory for Andy Murray. The telecoms world had its own much-anticipated good news last week, when European roaming rates fell again. And regardless of Neelie Kroes’ plans to abolish roaming rates completely, there’ll definitely be another roaming cut in 2014.
Mind you, not all the headlines have been that positive. HTC’s preliminary results showed an improvement from the previous quarter, although the company is still very much battling from the baseline.
Even more unexpectedly, Samsung’s share price dropped after its interim quarterly results suggested that profits have hit a new record level. Apparently it wasn’t enough of a record to please some people.
There was also bad news for insurance intermediary Policy Administration Services, which was fined £2.8 million for the way it had handled Phones 4u mobile phone insurance complaints, and also for anyone who visits third-party application stores from their Android phone. Mobile security startup Bluebox Security has discovered an Android issue that makes 99% of all Android-based devices vulnerable to attack from apparently-legitimate apps. They’ll be revealing more details in a few weeks’ time, which is just about long enough to sell your current handset and buy a Firefox OS smartphone.
On the positive side of the coin, EE launched its double-speed 4G service and introduced a 'pay as you go' 4G tariff, Three UK revealed a ‘back to basics’ pay as you go offer and Vodafone teamed up with Sainsbury’s to create a mobile phone service for the supermarket.
In addition, Nokia agreed to take over Nokia Siemens Networks, proving it’s not as strapped for cash as many naysayers had suggested. Another hard-won victory, you could say.
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