Tom Gidden

Over the past week or so there's been a furore about location tracking in iOS. While it initially appeared to be a fresh discovery of machiavellian intrusion, the story's a bit more complicated than that.

After a couple of months with Three PAYG, I've moved to Orange PAYG.

Three was fine, with a good, cheap service. However, I wasn't totally satisfied with their data rate. Coverage was good, but data still seemed sluggish. While it was marginally better than O2, and substantially cheaper, I still feel it's not as good as it could be. There's also something substantial missing from Three's PAYG offering: free WiFi. The lack of The Cloud or BT Openwhatever on Three is particularly noticeable. While I barely used it while on O2, there are several occasions where Three's coverage let me down and one of BT's nodes mocked me mercilessly sitting there with a strong signal in my iPhone's WiFi list.

I've been using the O2 Cocoon as my main phone for a few weeks now, and I'm fairly happy with it. After covering the design of the phone and the music features previously, I'll wrap up by covering the rest of the features.

The first part of my review of the O2 Cocoon was mainly about the hardware: the look and feel of the thing you hold. This time, I'm going to look more at the phone's music features.

As you might have gathered from some of my previous posts, I do enjoy playing with new mobile phones, and I really enjoy ranting about them at length on the internet. So, I was stoked to receive an email on behalf of O₂ offering to let me try out their new "Cocoon" music phone.

Thanks again to the LG Shine Blog, I received an LG Shine KU970 mobile phone to review. This is the newer 3G version of the KE970 I reviewed earlier this year.

Okay, I've covered the the physical aspects and the audio aspects, so now it's time to wrap it up by looking at the camera, the software and finally the phone-call-making bits of the LG Shine.

On Monday, I covered the external hardware aspects of the LG Shine I've been loaned. For the time being, I'm going to skip the actual phone features, and play with the sound effects, ringtones and music features it offers instead.

Now that I've had a bit more of a play with the pre-release LG Shine that arrived on Saturday, I can now start to make a few conclusions. The first is that this really is a nice piece of kit.

This morning I received a pre-release LG Shine KE970 courtesy of the LG Shine Blog, as a lead-in to the product launch in early February. I've spent a couple of hours using it, and I must say I'm impressed so far. I've got about five pages of notes, niggles and thoughts that I'm going to write up over the next few days. In the meantime, I took some pictures of it, my old Nokia 6280, and some fruit. Not exactly art, I'll admit.