Staff Reporter

A further 69 stores will be fitted out by the end of 2004. The format has been piloted in 10 stores in the south of England. The chain claims that turnover increased by 50 per cent in the newly fitted stores.

Virgin Mobile already has numerous stores-within-stores in Virgin Megastore but these will be Virgin Mobile-branded and segregated from the rest of the store and staffed by people trained in mobile technology and retail methods. They will be able to show customers how to set their phones up use voicemail set up VirginXtras and copy their SIM directory to their new phones.

Winners were Stefan Hirst (Best Branch Manager – Commercial St Hereford); David Gabb (Mystery Shop Award) and Paul Lucas (The Julian Stafford Award – from CPW Services). Fforestfach in Swansea won National New Store Opening under Clark Gilmour while The South West was Best National Area under Steve Williams.

BBC sports pundit John Inverdale hosted the awards evening.

Another the MC60 has a colour screen and integrated camera and interchangeable front and back covers and keypads. Other features are polyphonic ring tones special effects and games. It weighs 86g and is available in three colours: aquamarine titanium and grenadin.

The MC60 also features polyphonic ring tones and a variety of attachable covers. It weighs in at 85g and comes with 250 hours of standby time. It will be available in the UK from September 2003.

The A52 is a no-frills handset with no MMS and camera. It does however support enhanced message services (EMS) and is configured with pre-installed images sounds and animations. It weighs 84g and has 250 hours of standby time and five hours of talk time.

Shipping in September it is aimed at entry-level consumers in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe Latin America and Africa.

The first service allows mobile users to buy a ringtone for any song they have tagged – that is captured and sent via the handset to Shazams song recognition service.

The second allows them to send a 30-second clip of a tagged track to another phone.

The two new services are part of Shazams bid to become the ultimate mobile phone music portal.

The services are being launched with the support of a 250000 marketing campaign that will run across radio and other media.

Shazam music and marketing director Vijay Solanki said: Theres more to Shazam than just music recognition with mobiles. Now we have a unique method for buying ringtones and for consumers to send music clips to friends all through their mobiles.

Shazam was voted Best Innovative Service (Multi-media) at the 2003 Mobile News Awards for its music recognition service.

The service available across all four networks allows users to send in a snatch of music they hear in a bar or on the radio to discover the identity of the song and the artist.

O2 said it connected 98000 net new customers taking its total to 12.05 million customers in the UK. Vodafones overall UK active customer base dropped by 63000 customers to 12.16 million despite attracting more than 240000 customers to its live! service.

Vodafones overall customer base including inactive customers rose to 13.30 million.

In Q1 Virgin Mobile gained 253000 subscribers while T-Mobile lost 441000 subscribers.

Orange remains number one UK network with 13.31 active users but Vodafone still has the strongest contract base at almost 5.2 million compared with Oranges 4.3 million and O2s 4.06 million.

Analysis of the Q1 figures reveals an overall drop in UK mobile subscribers of 150000.

The total number of UK subscribers was 49678000 at March 31 compared with 49830000 at the end of 2002.

Vodafone also reported a drop in annual contact customer ARPU from 553 to 532. Pre-pay ARPU grew from 118 to 125.

Vodafone says sales of Vodafone live! and its Mobile Office GPRS PC card are expected to generate data revenues over the coming year. Vodafone promises 3G services by the end of the 2004 financial year conditional on the availability of handsets. The network claims 3G handsets will be only available in limited quantities until 2004 affecting its ability to launch. However 3G network roll-out is going to plan.

Vodafone subsidy reductions have reduced pre-pay customer acquisition costs from 26 to 10 per subscriber. Contract customer acquisition costs increased slightly from 116 to 117.

Vodafone revenue growth has been adversely affected by reductions in interconnect rates imposed by Oftel. Its appeal against the ruling will be heard soon.

The total number of chargeable person-to-person text messages sent across the four UK GSM networks in April 2003 totalled 1.66 billion taking the cumulative annual total to 6.5 billion for 2003.

Aprils figure takes the daily average to 55 million compared with 44 million in April 2002 and 30 million in April 2001.

As Aprils figures continue to show texting has become the premier communication tool for the millennium. Around 65 million text messages were sent on the last day of this seasons football Premiership as football fans relied on friends or football alert services to receive up-to-the minute news from Premier League grounds said MDA chairman Mike Short.

The FCS Mobile Independent Reseller (MIR) group will focus on and promote the interests of independent mobile resellers selling fixed and mobile solutions and services.

Cellular service provision has long been the traditional independent route to market for the mobile networks and provided the original mobile resale model said MIR group chairman Jason Halsall of ED Communications.

But following the recent extinction of some SPs there has been some unfair negativity concerning the resale market sector.

He went on: This attitude needs to change and we perceive the emergence of the virtual service provider to be a good and natural evolution of the SP market.

Halsall rejects the suggestion that VSPs are a dying breed and that the failure of SPs such Anglo Communications was because of a reliance on VSPs.

The failure of Anglo was because of bad management not because of VSPs. All the service provider has to do with the VSP is carry out a thorough credit check and then take a percentage of the profits. VSPs have very low churn levels and high customer retention.

He went on: They can be valuable partners. VSPs have a bad name in some quarters of the business and we want to address this. We want to show that we are a serious and upstanding organisation and we want the industry and businesses in general to know that we can do a lot of good business.

Halsall is also confident that the MIR group will not go the way of other defunct FCS groups such as the Crime Prevention Inspectorate and the Q quality assurance scheme which were wound up within a year or so of launch.

We have a lot of passionate people involved in the group who take their business very seriously. Already we have had a good response and our members are keen to make the group work.

FCS chief executive Jacqui Brookes added:

The FCS was founded to provide a voice for the independent mobile communications sector and our cellular service provider group has been one of our most outspoken and high-profile groups. Our new FCS MIR group has been formed to highlight the value of customer service provided by the independent reseller sector to UK business both corporates and SMEs.

The WiFi service is already live in 27 hotels across Europe.

Swisscom Eurospots service claims data ransfer rates of up to 11Mbps and says it operates at up to 100 times the speed of the fastest dial-up modem BlackBerry or GPRS device.

Horseferry Road Magistrates Court heard Adel Mohmed Radwan went into a Carphone Warehouse shop in Marylebone with a faulty loan phone that staff had given him.

Radwan demanded a replacement phone and threw the loan handset on to the counter in a rage.

The court heard that supervisor Deirdre John-Baptiste offered him a different phone. But he refused and started to become abusive. She refused to serve him and he turned on store assistant Natasha Ravenueau. She also refused to serve him because he was being abusive to her colleague.

John-Baptiste told the court:

He just got worse and said I am going to kill you. I said: This is pathetic all this over a phone.

Radwan is alleged to have refused to leave the store. He was then asked to take a seat while the police were called which he did.

Radwan denied making racist remarks or being rude and aggressive. He denied being angry towards the two women but was found guilty of two charges of racially-aggravated threatening and abusive words.

He said he felt the company ran a good service as he had been back to the store five times over the previous year with a faulty handset and it had always been repaired without charge.

In a separate case an Algerian-born man faces jail after trying to steal a womans mobile from her handbag while he was drunk.

Mourad Magroufel a jobless waiter from Hammersmith London pleaded guilty to attempting to steal a 300 phone from student Esther Clarke at Waterloo Underground station on May 18.

The court heard how Magroufel who had been drinking wine and beer had just lost his own phone. Magroufel was bailed until June 13 for probation reports.

Perth-based Scottish Communications Systems (SCS) will concentrate on developing T-Mobiles services for the SME market.

Central to this will be the development of tailored services for the business sector with packages and incentives including free services and quarterly health checks to ensure customers are getting the best deal available.