3 the UK 3G network are rumoured to be ready to announce a new handset after the success of it’s Skype Phone. The phone, manufactured by INQ (Hutchinson Whampoa’s new handset making division), will basically be based on Facebook, meaning that we’ll be seeing unified contacts, texting through messages and IM through Facebook chat. The phone itself, the INQ1 (as it’s the company’s first handset, the name makes sense), is a fairly basic slider, though it carries an HSDPA connection for super-fast network speeds.

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So carrying on from Part 1 having now arrived in France with thanks to TomTom and the iPhone I really wanted to be able to carry on posting the latest news while I was away. Now for those who have been regular readers of Mobile Tech Addicts you will know that it is a very new blog and keeping it fresh and interesting to build up our audience figures has been a lot of hard work but proving very successful so the timing of this family holiday could not have been worse.

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Three are offering mobile broadband with free USB modems and a 5 Gig allowance for £7.50 per month with an 18 month contract. This is an amazing deal and the links can be found after the break. We recently reviewed this mobile broadband and found it to work great in City Centres but not so good outside of these areas. Full details after the break.

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Sales of pre-pay dongles have rocketed to 8,000 per week in the UK, according to figures from retail analyst GfK.

Priced at around £50, pre-pay dongles are increasingly seen as a flexible way of getting broadband access on the go when used in conjunction with a notebook.

The GfK figures represent an eight-fold increase on to six months ago when just 1,000 per week were being sold.

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3 launched Mobile Broadband Starter Kits for Pay As You Go customers. Containing a Mobile Broadband ZTE or Huawei e220 dongle pre-loaded with data, the Kit allows new users to be up and running within minutes with no need to organise their own Top-ups.
Kits are available with varying amounts of pre-paid credit which can be used over 3, 12 or 24 months giving customers the flexibility to use their allowance whenever they want over that period. Once the pre-paid credit period is over, customers can continue to use their Starter Kit dongle by simply buying Top-ups and Broadband Add-ons via the regular channels. The Kits are available online or in 3 Stores across the UK from 4 June.

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Engineers at 3 are busy rebuilding the firm’s pay-as-you-go top-up database after the server carrying it fell over on Sunday.

Customers were left unable to add new credit for several hours, either over the phone, online or in 3 stores. A 3 spokesman said today that it took action to ensure that pay-as-you-go users were able to make calls if they had run out.

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I was very lucky tonight to be able to accept an invitation from Mike Manna of the T4 Show to join him on his podcast to discuss mobile phones from a UK perspective. If you haven’t checked out Mikes site please do so and subscribe to his podcast as its a great show.

We chatted for nearly an hour about UK Networks, Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it was very enjoyable.

The podcast is available now here

If you remember where we finished off Part 1, it was all a bit of a let down as I couldn’t purchase any credit to test the modem out as Three’s site was down, if you don’t remember please check out Part 1 of the review here.

Anyway this time I plugged the modem into the USB port, the software automatically started up, I hit connect and boom straight onto the Three HSDPA network. I logged into my Three account and bought a pre-paid credit of 1 Gig of data for £10.00.

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Part 1

So I drove into Newcastle this morning and decided to call into Starbucks to test out the new Three USB mobile broadband modem. I plugged it in and have to say I was impressed, the drivers and launcher software are already stored within the modem and installed themselves without any need for me to do anything.

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