Out of the blue Vodafone has announced it will be abolishing international roaming charges for both pre-pay and pay monthly customers during a three month evaluation period this summer.

Starting 1 June, the trial will be available to all customers who register for Vodafone’s long running ‘Passport’ service. This will then see calls, texts and MMS messages simply extracted from their regular plan allowances – or in the case of pre-pay: at standard pricing. 35 countries will be covered in the plan, so deep breath:

Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canary Islands, Channel Islands, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Isle of Man, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madeira, Malta, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Vatican City, New Zealand and Australia.

On top of this from tomorrow Vodafone will cut the cost of pre-pay calls to mobiles and landlines from the US, Canada and China to as little as 5p per minute. Calls to 54 more countries will be charged at just 5ppm to landlines and 15ppm to mobiles.

“These are two great value offers for our customers this summer,” said Vodafone UK consumer director Ian Shepherd. “With our Vodafone Passport promotion you can sit on the beach with your phone switched on knowing you can take and make a call just as you would if you were in your back garden.”

Now this is hugely exciting news and something we expect will go down very well with consumers. The big question therefore is will Vodafone eventually make the trial permanent and will it force other telcos to follow its lead?

The company said on Friday that it had begun distributing the update to its G1 handsets in the UK, and that US G1 owners can expect the update to begin arriving in one week.
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News of the impending update first arrived last week, when the company told UK users to expect Cupcake during May after the final build of the software was pushed live.

The eagerly anticipated Cupcake update adds a number of features to the G1 handset, most notably the ability to utilize the device’s touch-screen keyboard capabilities and new components which allow users to shoot video on the handset and upload directly to YouTube.

News of the Cupcake update’s arrival comes as the software’s other name, ‘Android’ has grabbed headlines. Earlier this week Google was listed as one of 46 companies being sued by a US business owner who claims to own the rights to the Android name.

I think I’ll be waiting for the Haykuro version of it before I flash this ROM!

http://www.htc.com/www/support/android/adp.html

Basically, Google is reported to have cut off the access to the Android Market for those handsets that were recently updated to the new version of the platform. The problem wasn’t noticed right from the beginning, and it has been reported that the access to the application portal has been blocked as a result of more and more users downloading and installing the update.

Interesting though is the fact that there are two builds of the update running into the wild, the “G,” or “Google-sourced” line, and the “H,” or “HTC-sourced” line, and that only the former is affected by the Market change, while the latter still allows users to access the portal and download applications.

Similar problems with the Android operating system were previously reported as affecting the Dev 1 devices running under the platform, and Google stated back then that the owners of such handsets were prevented from accessing the Market due to the fact that they were also offered access to the root files of the phone, allowing them to modify applications.

What determined Google to prevent users who updated their G1 phones to the Cupcake release from accessing the Android Market is still unknown, but some suggest that the move was meant to stop the spreading of the release to more devices. It makes sense in a way, given the fact that this wasn’t the final release of the platform iteration, though no official explanation has been given. Hopefully, the final version of Android 1.5, due for release by the end of the month, will not include this limitation, and users will be able to enjoy both the Cupcake and access to applications for their device.

http://code.google.com/p/sapphire-port-dream/

Talks over at xda-forums reveal that after having seen Haykuro’s releases the new cupcake is set to promise!

Take a look at the official Google blog here : http://android-developers.blogspot.com/

Just follow these steps:

1. Press your phone’s < Home > button, then press < Menu >.
2. Select Settings and then Applications.
3. Select Manage applications.
4. Select Google Mail Storage and then select Clear data. Answer OK when prompted.
5. Return to the list of applications by pressing the < Back > key.
6. Select Google Mail and then select Clear data. Answer OK when prompted.
7. Restart your phone (Press and hold the < End call > button, then select Power off. Press < End call > to power on).

Your phone will re-sync with the server after restarting (this may take several minutes).

This worked for me, so hopefully it does for you!

If you have a Facebook account, this application is for you. Made by Mike Hearn it has saved me hours of time.

Previously, I would get images of my contacts, put them into Photoshop, crop, save … etc etc etc … you get the drift?

With this cool little application, you just enter your Facebook details into it and it will go online, search through all of your contacts then update those contacts on your phone with the Facebook image online!

There are a few addiional options that I would have lked personally, however as a first release this is a real time save and good app to have!

http://www.cyrket.com/package/net.plan99.fbsync

Assuming that you already have root, then you can use your 3G connection as a modem with any wifi device.

You can download this app from the Market or visit the developers page here : http://code.google.com/p/android-wifi-tether/

Well if you are like me then you like to have your own ring tones on the phone, they may be edited version of your mp3′s or other files.

It’s annoying when you are listening to your music, then all of a sudden a 45 second ring tone plays right? Well here is the solution in order to have all your ring tones moved to your SD card, and also save a load of space from your phone!

Open up your Terminal Emulator, and assuming you havealready obtained root, type the following :

mount -oremount,rw /system/dev/mtdblock3 /system

cp -r /system/media/audio/ringtones /sdcard/

rm -R /system/media/audio/ringtones

You can also do this with your ‘notifications’ and ‘alarms’ folder!

When are we going to get a music player that comes with all the eye candy the iPod gets? Can we ever haves scrolling album covers, and the nice menu’s and themes the iPhone offers?

Will someone ever make such an app …. or are we going to have to develop one of our own here at metserve.com ?

What does everyone think about that?