Digital Content Editor
Alex Angove-Plumb is a Digital Content Editor at WhistleOut and an award-winning journalist. He's been in the tech publishing industry since 2010, putting him a few short years away from the title of Grizzled Ancient in his chosen profession. He was an original WhistleOut-er before running NBN Co's corporate blog for two years, then moving on to a lengthy stint at CHOICE. Now he's come home.
Over his career, Alex has learned more about phones, telcos, and the NBN than he'd like to admit, and is happy to put his expertise to good use by helping our readers navigate the often-confusing morass of buzzwords and gotchas that tech marketing can throw your way.
When not shaking his fist at kids these days, you might find Alex tinkering about the house doing arguably destructive DIY, messing with one or both of his cats, or trying just-one-more-run in whatever roguelite he's currently obsessed with.
Huawei has unveiled the world’s slimmest smartphone in London – the Huawei Ascend P6 – measuring in with an impressive profile of just 6.18mm. The P6 represents one of the more appealing devices to come out of the Chinese manufacturer to date, backing up its compact size with an attractive metal design and the industry’s first 5MP front-facing camera.
The Sony Xperia SP is the mid-range sidekick of the more heavily specced Xperia Z and ZR handsets. It delivers solid specs and a relatively smooth Android experience, albeit without many of the newer features boasted by the current generation of flagship devices.
The Nokia Lumia 520 is a super-affordable smartphone from Nokia. Running on Windows Phone 8, it offers the smartphone experience to folks who are either unable or unwilling to spend large amounts of money on a new device, but who are still after a reliable smartphone experience.
In 2013, smartphones are all about the features. HTC has Boomsound, Blinkfeed and the Zoe camera, while Samsung has a plethora of S-branded apps, including a health monitor and universal TV remote. Meanwhile, we've seen mostly incremental changes in hardware, with slightly faster processors, bumps in RAM and larger screens.
Optus held a network event today in which it announced its recent 3GPlus accomplishments and outlined plans for 4G expansion in the near future. The overall focus of the last few months’ worth of data was to do with 3GPlus coverage and consolidation across most of Australia, with particular attention paid towards increasing indoor coverage.
The NBN is set to achieve world-leading download speeds of 1Gbps by the end of 2013, equalling Google Fiber’s achievements in Kansas, US. 1Gbps is around the upper limit of the current fibre to the premises/home (FTTP/FTTH) architecture of the NBN. While the speeds are frankly astonishing, most users really won’t see the benefit for years to come. The current max speeds of 100Mbps that the NBN is offering is more than enough for even the most bandwidth hungry personal user with today’s online services available in Australia.
So we’ve had the BlackBerry Z10 for a little a while now and we’ve got a much better idea of the device as a whole. If you’re unfamiliar with the Z10, it’s BlackBerry’s flagship device for the new BB10 operating system. The iconic smartphone manufacturer has ditched its aged, yet popular, mobile OS and started again from the ground up.
Vodafone (VHA) may be running a little behind schedule with its 4G LTE network that it originally hoped, but never promised, to have up and running by February of this year. A short while back Australia’s largest 3G-only carrier went and added the Samsung Galaxy S3 4G to its lineup, meaning that an announcement was likely not too far off.
The HTC Windows Phone 8X is HTC’s current Windows Phone 8 flagship device that, while doing nothing to slow HTC’s growing reputation for questionable names, has seen its fair share of popularity in the WP market. Sporting thoroughly modern hardware, the elegant WP8 UI and stylish case design make for a blending of power and visual appeal that’s rarely seen in the handset market. But looks and specs aren’t everything, so we grabbed one ourselves to check it out in our own Windows Phone 8X review.
The BlackBerry Z10 has been hailed as BlackBerry’s last best hope for survival in the smartphone market. It’s the new BB10 OS’ flagship, sports a totally modern set of hardware specs and is a step in a different direction for BB in terms of stylistic design.