Tag: smartphones

A recent report has shown that 70 percent of consumers pay more than necessary for talk, text, and data.

Research by European firm, Consumer Champion, has indicated that between two thirds and three quarters (70 percent) of consumers in the United Kingdom are paying more than necessary for mobile technology services such as calling, text, and data plans.

It pointed out that many are paying for more services than they require and are locked into 24-month contracts.

Others, particularly children, have mobile technology service plans that are two low for their usage. This means that parents run the risk of regularly running up additional charges when they have exceeded their plan limits. The results of the study showed that an estimated 77 percent of consumers in the U.K. could be saving a minimum of £50 (around US$75) per year by changing their contracts. However, it also underscored the fact that there are some service providers that make it very challenging to switch, as they apply a charge to unlock handsets.

The result is that families across the country are paying billions of pounds too much for their mobile technology service.

The average savings, according to Consumer Champion, for seven out of every ten people, could be an average of about £159 (around US$240) each, simply by choosing a contract that better reflects their actual needs. For families that are paying for mobile service on four smartphones, that could bring about an annual savings of over £600 (about US$900), which is certainly nothing to laugh at.

Among the causes for the selection of the wrong plan by consumers is that the majority of smartphones – for example the Samsung Galaxy and Apple iPhone models – are sold along with 2-year contracts that require users to pay a monthly fee in order to cover their service and the cost of the handset, but that have a limit to the number of calls, text, and data usage that are included.

As many mobile technology users are on plans that will charge them more when they exceed the capped amount of calls, text, and data – particularly in the case of children – additional fees are run up that make the service far more costly than it would have been if they had upgraded their plans to something that covers a larger amount of service.

A recent study has revealed that these programs are leading gadgets to be wiped as a regular practice.

According to the Fiberlink division at IBM, and a recent data analysis that they have conducted, one of the biggest smartphone trends in BYOD programs is to remotely wipe mobile devices.

This feature is proving itself to be exceptionally popular among enterprise clients who run these programs.

The figures from Fiberlink have shown that among the users of the MaaS360 cloud platform, there are currently an average of 450 mobile devices that are being wiped on a daily basis. This makes the practice a considerable one among smartphone trends in businesses. This platform is based in Pennsylvania and is used for the management of millions of cell phones and other gadgets in enterprises worldwide.

Among smartphone trends in the enterprise community, this has become a sizeable one across all of its verticals.

What the data analysis showed was that while there are many different Mobile Device Management (MDM) features available through the MaaS360, it is the device wiping that has seen some of the largest growth across all of its verticals.

For every three minutes of the day, enterprises are now wiping another device. This means that in the average day, 450 smartphones and tablets are wiped, which represents a massive 130,000 in the last year. Moreover, Fiberlink pointed out that this represents the equivalent of between 10 and 20 percent of the total average device fleet for the firm in the last year.

What the firm means when it says that a “wipe” has been conducted, is either of two different activities. The first is a complete wipe, which was the case in about one of every three gadgets that were wiped. The second is a partial wipe, which is made up by the other two out of every three mobile devices.

The smartphone trends showed that approximately half of these remote wipes by businesses occur automatically while the other half is specifically initiated by an administrator. Among the top reasons given for the automatic wiping, the lead was that the gadget has become “jailbroken” (which has to do with Apple smartphones and tablets), as opposed to being lost or stolen.