Mark Bridge writes:

A few months ago James wrote about the slow adoption of mobile and contactless payments in the UK. Now we hear that Kenya’s M-PESA mobile money transfer service has arrived here. Yes, m-payments are finally going mainstream in the United Kingdom. Well, sort of. Well, alright, not at all really. What’s happened is that people in the UK are now able to send money to M-PESA users in Kenya. But what about the progress of mobile payments in the UK?

James Rosewell writes:

It seems to be accepted that the Apple iPhone will be the top selling mobile phone this Christmas now it’s available on almost every UK network. The more interesting question is which handsets will hold the number 2 to 5 positions - and what operating system will they be running when the smartphone scores are announced in the new year?

Microsoft announced Windows Phone last week and I commented on the importance of persuading their heartland fans to move from iPhone and other platforms to Windows Phone. Disappointingly, finding a mobile retailer willing to sell a Windows Phone is not easy at the moment. Orange tell me they’ve withdrawn the one model they were going to offer from Toshiba. Vodafone didn’t even know what a Windows Phone was.

Iain Graham writes:

I have just bought (well, been given) a new mobile phone!  It, of course, cost me nothing, because we still haven't learnt in this industry, but it came with the now obligatory, shrink-wrapped, 140-page instruction manual on how to use it!!  A perfect cure for insomnia!  I read the opening page or two and it might as well have been written in Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it made to me!!  (I then realised it WAS written in Serbo-Croatian and so I turned to the correct language section) and it was just as incomprehensible!

Even worse, the manufacturers (who are too tight to pay for the printing in the name of 'going green') put the instruction manual on a CD!!

Mark Bridge writes:

A few months ago I was at the launch of DataWind’s UbiSurfer netbook, a device that includes 12 months of internet access with the surprisingly low purchase price. A light-hearted presentation compared the UbiSurfer's web access with the Apple iPhone’s “there’s an app for that” TV campaign – and reminded us that many popular web-based iPhone apps cost money whilst web pages were free to access. Pay for a currency converter – or access one online for nothing. Pay for a train timetable application – or go to the mobile web for free.

Commonsense may send consumers straight to the web… but convenience and marketing has still sent plenty to the Apple App Store, which celebrated two billion downloads recently. I didn’t think much more about this until I saw a report in Newsweek earlier this month.

James Rosewell writes:

Whilst the mainstream press were busy covering the marketing launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 or 'Windows Phone' as it’ll now be known, I spent some time with the geeks looking under the hood at Microsoft’s new desktop (Windows 7) and server (Server 2008 R2) operating systems. The event was packed full of IT professionals whose jobs and careers are heavily involved with Microsoft. They were there to learn about the latest products ready for deploying them within their organisations. These are the people that keep e-mail systems working, decide what applications you’ll be using at work, choose the technology that companies use on the web and increasingly steer corporate mobile strategy.

So what mobile phones were these people using?