Free Blackberry from the utility warehouse

Body
It's a solid evolution of the Curve form factor. Slightly thinner, it's also tighter, with less wasted space around the screen and keys. The lines are much cleaner, making it sleeker and more modern, like a sports car compared to a Toyota Corolla. (It's very similar to the Storm.) The refined form has some function, too, since it feels better in your hand. It also has the Storm's dedicated lock key on the roof—no more menu-digging!

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Screen
Even though the Curve is RIM's mass market smarty (the Pearl doesn't really count), they didn't scrimp on the screen compared to the Bold. It's fantastic. Colors pop, contrast is great, resolution is solid and the viewing angle is nice and wide. For nitpickers, he colors are noticeably warmer than the Bold—kind of like the iPhone 3G vs. the iPhone—but it's totally fine.

Keyboard and Trackball
The keyboard feels almost exactly the same as the old Curve—punchiness and layout are essentially identical, though the keys now slope ever so slightly, like the Bold, but to a lesser degree. Most people probably won't even notice. The new "atomic trackball" doesn't feel too different compared to the one you're used to, just more robust and less hangin' loose.

Battery Life
We haven't done any formal tests—it'd be unfair since this isn't a final build and the software optimizations can make it even better—but it seems to be comparable to the old Curve (i.e., well over a day), even with the beefier hardware.
 

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OS and Software
Again, this isn't a final unit, so really digging into the OS and software like it's a production model isn't quite fair, but so far, it's a really stable version of the BlackBerry 4.6 OS we've seen on the Bold and Pearl Flip. And obviously, that's where   a lot of the improvement is over the old Curve. It's prettier, smoother, and just a better overall user experience, with major enhancements in the look and feel of the entire BlackBerry experience.

The Curve 8900 is fairly nimble getting around the OS, though not quite as zippy as the Bold—but that's expected since the Bold has more monstrous hardware powering it. You can kinda see this in the browser, which lagged behind the Bold in our tests even though both were on Wi-Fi. There will probably be tuneups in the final build to make it snappier, though the Bold will always have a hardware advantage.

Conclusion
What's interesting is that even though the Curve 8900 borrows heavily from the Bold in terms of design and in no way feels cheap (well the plastic-y chrome is a little cheap), it's more clearly differentiated from it than the old Curve was from the 8800. It's very much a Curve still, and clearly the consumer model to the Bold's pro position. So what looked to be a hard choice from leaked shots, isn't quite as difficult as it appeared.

The Bold is more substantial, exuding "executive" to the Curve 8900's "middle manager" or "normal person." It's clearly more powerful, and has a bigger screen. The keyboards are way different, too—personally, I prefer the Bold's larger, squishier keys to the Curve's smaller, stiffer ones. But obviously, the biggest thing is 3G. The Bold has it, the Curve 8900 doesn't, and we missed it sorely.

All that said, this thing will sell like a mother, and justifiably so. It pushes the BlackBerry you see in most people's hands (if they're carrying a BlackBerry) into 2008, exceeding the original Curve in every way.

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Company of the Year: Telecom Plus/ Utility Warehouse

By Ross Tieman


By any measure, a FTSE 250 business that is doubling revenues annually is remarkable; to be doing so in the utility sector, by definition mature, is all the more astonishing, writes Ross Tieman .

Clearly, Telecom Plus, winner of the Company of the Year award, has found an original and effective business model.

The company, where Charles Wigoder, the chief executive, and his family and friends acquired control in 1998, six months after its foundation, is unique in the UK market in offering mobile and fixed telephony, broadband and gas and electricity services to its customers on a single bill.

It does not advertise. Rather, new households are recruited to its Utility Warehouse Discount Club by a network of more than 4,000 distributors who are existing users. These word-of-mouth customer ambassadors receive a tiny percentage of the bills paid by every new customer they recruit, in perpetuity, so retain a strong interest in ensuring ongoing customer satisfaction.

Their task is facilitated by a string of plaudits from consumer watchdog magazine Which? which says Telecom Plus is the best household provider of broadband, fixed telephony and energy in the UK.

It buys bulk telecoms capacity at wholesale prices in an oversupplied market and gets its energy from producer Npower, under a deal that transfers the risk of price fluctuations to the provider. In addition, he company supplies businesses, mainly small companies, brought in by its distributors.

It benefits from a tougher economic climate in several ways, says Mr Wigoder. "Many casual jobs no longer exist, overtime opportunities are no longer there, work hours are reduced, so we are seeing record numbers of new distributors" looking to top up their income. Meantime, consumers are keener to grasp opportunities to shave household bills, and improve visibility over their outgoings.

In the year to March 2008, Telecom Plus, which is debt-free, achieved revenues of £186m and net profits of £11.9m. By September last year, it had 227,384 household customers, up 19,000 since end-March, and trends have since accelerated.

The latest spur comes from its CashBack MasterCard, a chargeable payment card which helps households economise. Using the card for purchases at retail chains such as J Sainsbury and Boots gives household a 5 per cent discount offset against their Telecom Plus bills.

Mr Wigoder says the biggest challenge is managing the pace of growth and underpinning it with flawless IT systems. But he has experience. He previously founded the Peoples Phone Company, a virtual operator, which he built from 100,000 customers to 400,000 within 18 months before selling it to Vodafone in 1996.

Since Mr Wigoder and associates control a majority of the equity, "we are looking to create long-term shareholder value rather than near-term management bonuses," he says. "There is a clear alignment between management and shareholder interests."

This has been taken from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fa80214-0...0779fd2ac.html

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