Vodafone has teamed up with leading web brands to bring services usually associated with broadband-enabled PCs to UK mobile customers. The mobile operator, the world’s largest by revenues, has inked deals with a long list of big hitters including AOL, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. In February a tie-up was announced with News Corp’s MySpace and today’s announcement also covers that popular social networking brand.
The company said most customers won’t need to buy a new handset – Vodafone Mobile Internet takes pages designed for a PC screen and compresses them by up to 10 times.
Vodafone’s UK CEO Nick Read has promised the rollout “will revolutionise the way customers use the internet” – though services such as Google search, popular webmail or making and taking bids on eBay are already available across a range of operators.
The latest push comes with new pricing. For example a £7.50 monthly addition for subscription customers gives up to 120MB of data downloads per month. Full pricing details are available from the Vodafone website.
[Submitted by Imran Asad]
