Brentford City Learning Centre (CLC) is to run the trial along with technology company Academia, following a two year independent research project on the use of technology in learning carried out by Professor Michael Gibson, formerly head of education at Kingston University. Gumley House was selected after a competition to design the classroom of the future revealed a high interest in technology among pupils.

Simon Elledge, manager at Brentford CLC commented: “In most schools mobile phones are viewed as distractions and banned from the classroom. But, as technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, we wanted to understand how it could be used positively in the learning environment.

“The girls in the trial are encouraged to use the iPhones as much as possible, with permission from teachers of course. They will be monitored using questionnaires, spot checks and individual feedback, and the data collected will be independently analysed and shared with the other 104 CLCs nationwide to the benefit of pupils throughout the UK.”

The pupils will be allowed access to data free of charge, within a fair usage policy, if they keep at least £1

worth of credit on their devices. There is a significant number of educational applications they can download for free, but if they wish to obtain one with a charge attached they have to make a case for its educational value to Elledge.

“The whole purpose of the trial is for children to inform us of what applications will be educationally useful,” he told GC News.

If you are an iPhone user, don’t forget to download the barablu app to enjoy free VoIP calls to any destination in the world.

You can get it by going to our download section which will direct you to the Apple Itunes store.

We hope you will enjoy it. Please give us your feedback, as we rely on your comments and ideas to make sure we keep providing the best VoIP solution.

We have also updated our list of supported handsets lately. We have added no less than 100 devices to our list. You can find them all here.

We try to keep our list of supported handsets up to date but sometimes there are phones that might be left out, so if you don’t see your phone on your list you can try to select a similar model and see if barablu runs on your device. If you have any doubts please contact our support team – They can help you and verify whether your phone is supported or not.

How does it work?
The calls are handled a little differently on Java compared to our other platforms. Basically, all calls from Java will be routed through a local number – We call this an “Access Number”. This means that your operator will charge you for a local call, or use up any free minutes you may have.

All initiated calls from the Java client will require that you are routed through our access number, so all Java calls will be charged by your operator at local rate.

You will not be charged by your operator or from barablu when you receive calls from other barablu users.

The first thing you should do!
Is to make sure that you update your barablu profile so your mobile phone number is the same as the number of the SIM inside your phone. This is very important. If the SIM number and the mobile phone number in ‘my profile’ are not the exact same then the voice calls will not work.

Where does it work?

You can use barablu java calls everywhere in the world but we can only route you through access numbers in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and UK, so it will only make sense to use it in these countries. If you select any other country than those listed above, and make a call you will automatically be routed through our Austrian access number and your service provider will charge you the applicable rate.

Call Schemes
To help you understand how it works we will go through each possible scenario and tell you how the call is handled and how you will be charged.
There are 4 different call schemes – Here is how it works:

1) Java call to any other user (PC, Nokia, WM)
If you are signed in to your Java phone and calls someone else who is logged into barablu on another device, then neither one of you will be charged by barablu – This is treated as a normal barablu call.
Your operator will charge you for a local call to our access number.

2) Java call out to landline/mobile phone
If you want to make a call to someone to their landline phone, barablu will charge you the applicable rate.
Your operator will charge you for a local call to our access number.

3) Other barablu user (PC, Nokia, WM) call Java
If you receive a call on barablu from one of your friends who is logged into barablu on another device, then you will not be charged by barablu or your operator.
The user who is calling you will be charged by barablu because the call will be treated as a ‘barablu out call’.

4) Java call to Java
If you are signed into barablu on your Java phone and want to call another barablu Java user then (like in scenario 3) the call will be handled as a ‘barablu out call’. This means that you will be charged by barablu and your operator will charge you for a local call to our access number.
The Person who receives the call will not be charged at all.

Other users
As you can see in point 3 barablu users signed into barablu from other devices will be charged at barablu out rates to call users who are online from Java phones – Therefore we have created a new icon for our Java users, so you can always see if a person is signed into his Java phone and this way know if you will get charged.
The new icon looks like this If you call someone with this icon you will be charged by barablu.

Happy Calling!
The Java installers are available from our download page. Find your phone on the device list and try it out!

For further info see our userguide.

The Phone is available for international pre-order, but unfortunately it will not ship until the end of January, so if you thought you had just found your final x-mas present I’m afraid I’ll have to dissapoint you.  The phone itself shows some promise, though – It features a 624 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM, wi-fi, 2 MP camera and 400 minutes of talk time, along with a 2.5” touchscreen, microSD slot, and 3G connectivity. It promises to be a worthy rival and great alternative to T-Mobile’s G1.

The Kogan Agora and T-Mobile G1 can look forward to some significant competition as it was recently announced that 14 new members will join the “Open Handset Alliance” including Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, and Vodafone Group Plc. They are joining a list of members that also include companies like HTC, Motorola, T-Mobile, and Intel. This means that we can surely look forward to a bunch of new exciting devices next year running the Android OS.

I’m sure you will all be happy to know that here at barablu we are working on a barablu version for Android. Our developers are working very hard and we are expecting to be able to offer it to you in the year to come. By the time we are going to offer barablu for Android we hope you will have a wide range of Android based devices to choose from.

We have carried out some generel bug fixes and optimizations to voice and performance.
Check it out and let us know what you think!

You may also notice a few changes to our website – We have changed the Sign Up process and done some changes to the “my barablu account” area. So if you Sign In to your account to check your call history, add credit or seomething else then don’t be surprised by the very different look.

For careless unfortunate users like myself there is hope, though. Golden Shellback coating is a new and unique coating that protects your phone from damage if it is exposed to water.  The coating can repel oils, synthetic fluids, dust, dirt, and water based solutions, and it is almost invisible, so your device will still look slick and stylish. 

The coating is developed by Northeast Maritime Institute in Fairhaven, MA USA. It was originally developed to solve a problem of water proofing a ‘man overboard’ system, which needed to be able to function when exposed to water. This has now evolved into the Golden Shellback, which can be used for smaller devices like mobile phones, cameras, Mp3-players, and laptops.

Unfortunately it does not mention on the website when this will be available, but rumors have it that the price will be around $50-75 depending on the size of your device. Bigger devices like laptops are likely to be more expensive.

Watch the video here:

 
Golden Shellback Waterproof Coating from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

According to a study carried out by the company 44 percent of users left their old devices unused at home. Only 3 percent of the respondents recycled their phones and 50% were unaware that their devices could be reused.

The Integrated Nokia Kiosk – Or just INK – has been designed to make the process as simple as possible for the customers, who only have to follow instructions from the screen. 

In an interview with ZDNet Asia Nellie Abdullah (Nokia Malaysia’s environmental coordinator) said:

 “The survey revealed that one of the main reasons why so few people recycle their mobile phones is because they simply don’t know that it is possible to do so.”

“In fact, up to 80 percent of any Nokia device is recyclable. Materials such as cobalt, nickel, copper, iron, aluminium, plastics, and even gold can be recovered. It can be reused to help make new products such as steel and other metal products, plastic cones, and in the case of precious metals like gold, into jewellery.”

As an extra incentive Nokia have announced that they will plant a tree for every phone recycled. Users who recycle their phones can monitor the growth of their trees, as Nokia will provide the coordinates of the tree planted and instructions on how to view the tree via Google Earth.

Most of us have probably done it before. Seen or heard of a new interesting phone. And to learn more we have entered our preferred search engine and typed in the name or model number of the phone, followed by key words like “review”, “test”, “rate”, “feedback” etc. and then browsed through our findings.

With online shopping on the rise, I’m sure that quite a few of you have also considered – or maybe already tried – to purchase your next mobile phone online.

But sometimes a review, however good and detailed it might be, is not always enough to take the leap of faith and purchase a mobile phone from an online shop. You want to explore the phone and its features by yourself. Get a feel for the UI, menu system and usability.

Now, how do you do that without having to actually go to your local phone retailer?

You go to tryphone.com, of course!

It is an exciting new website, which offers everyone the possibility to test drive mobile phones before buying. The phone you choose to test will appear in your browser and then you are able to interactively navigate through the menus, thus getting a feel for the setup and User Interface.

There are also demos available, displaying how to ‘add contacts’, ‘change wallpaper’ etc. You can find specifications for the available handsets and finally, there is a section dedicated to user reviews.

One thing I particularly liked was the “compare” feature which allows you see two phones side by side, and then lets you navigate them both at the same time – If, for example you have doubts whether the Nokia N95 or the Palm Centro is the right phone for you, this is an excellent way to find out.

Of course, this still doesn’t beat going to your mobile phone retailer where you can hold the phones in your own hands, but I would say it is as close as you can possibly get right now without getting out of your chair.

Tryphone is still in its beta stage, and there are only a handful of phones available at the moment, but I’m sure that they will be adding new devices to the list on a regular basis.

Certainly this will help a lot of people, who are considering to upgrade their phones, to make the right decision.

Well done Tryphone!

The new releases contain some generel bug fixes and some optimization to voice quality while also reducing the bandwidth slightly. 

We have also integrated AIM and ICQ and our new barablu skin on windows mobile and symbian, plus our new Multi File Transfer feature. The Multi File Transfer enables you to send more than one file at the same time to different users.

As always, your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!