WE NEED A BLUE RINSE REVOLUTION TO BRING THE INTERNET TO EVERYONE

MORE than nine million adults in the UK have never been online, according to new official research. 

The annual report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) claimed 9.2 million had never been on the internet, a million less than in 2009, but a shocking statistic nevertheless.

Who are these people and where have they been?

Well, the research reveals that the majority of the over 65s – 60 per cent – had still never surfed the web and almost half of those without formal qualifications are in the same boat. 

May I boldly suggest that something needs to be done, and quickly. We need to give these people a virtual paddle to navigate the information superhighway.

Surely, it is these people – the elderly in particular – who stand to benefit the most from the wonders available online? 

My mother is almost 73 and deaf. She would be lost without her internet connection. Her deafness makes socialising very difficult but since she’s signed up to Facebook she has managed to find and re-establish relationships with friends and cousins she has not seen or spoken to in years and made lots of new friends too. It is, very much, her lifeline to the world beyond her village.

The Government has already promised to do everything it can to get everyone in the UK online. It needs to push this promise up the priority list – particularly for the more elderly. With things like Skype they can be in regular touch with grandkids and family at the very least. They deserve it more than anyone.

A huge 60 per cent of the adult population in the UK say they use the internet either every day or almost every day.

That’s great news. 

Just over 19 million households have an internet connection, according to the survey, which is 73 per cent of all UK households.

Now, Mr Cameron and Clegg, you have a responsibility to launch the blue rinse revolution we’ve been promised.

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eXpansys UK has thrown out the rule book by offering free shipping on all UK orders before the end of the month on www.expansys.com.

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eXpansys UK has thrown out the rule book by offering free shipping on all UK orders for a whole seven days on www.expansys.com.

The major online retailer for consumer technology, has announced the offer already to its faithful twitter followers, but is now shouting loud and proud.

The charges, ranging from £3 to £37, have been completely wiped in this one time deal. 

The offer ends at the end of Wednesday 18 August, so don’t miss out. Get clicking!

In a market supposedly dominated by Apple they have managed to increase turnover from £1.4bn to £2bn and figures for the last three months suggest that even bigger record sales are on the cards.

I’m guessing Nokia aren’t too chuffed. The Swedes dominated the mobile phone market in modern times but have seen HTC, Samsung and Apple massively leapfrog them since the smartphone market opened up in the last two years.

"Normally, June is an off-peak season. The sales figures are really amazing," Michael Chiang of Taiwan International Securities told the AFP news agency.

Apart from its own ‘must-have’ smartphones, HTC was also the design brains behind O2's XDA smartphone and Google's Nexus One phone.

But it is in expanding its own brands, like the beautiful and ‘most-wanted’ HTC Desire, on the back of massive success stories like the HTC Legend, which has seen it out-sprint even the boldest of positive predictions in the last 12 months.

Better still, the amazing HTC Wildfire Android smartphone is now in stock at eXpansys.

It is, as you’d expect of all HTC gear, packed to the brim with fantastic features you can’t leave home without.

Want a phone that’ll give you lightening-fast access to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr all at the same time? Check.
                                      
Want to be able to recommend apps to mates and colleagues straight from your phone by sending them a link? Check.

Want the kind of next-gen Caller ID that tells you your caller’s Facebook status and birthday date when they ring you? Check.

Check out the HTC Wildfire Android available for £229.99 at http://www.expansys.com/d.aspx?i=200153

SOME may say it’s far from a smart move but expect other mobile networks to follow O2’s lead sooner rather than later and bring an end to unlimited data allowances on smartphones.

The word among insiders is that the newly-merged Orange and T-Mobile are already preparing to follow suit, as are 3 and Vodafone. If that happens the floodgates will, as most suspect, be wide open.

Until now, smartphone subscribers have been free to browse or use their chosen App Store on their smartphone as much as they want for a fixed monthly payment. But that is all about to change.

Nobody likes to tell customers they are going to get less for the same price, of course, so managing the whole unlimited capping affair has been something of a PR headache for O2, I imagine.

It was no surprise that O2 was quick to point out that only three per cent of its 21.4 million customers will be expected to pay extra charges.

Clearly it is no longer economic to keep giving the heaviest users so much bandwidth for so little cost because the more they use, the lower the returns for O2.

But the facts often look conspiratorial in black and white, don’t they?

O2 chief executive Ronan Dunne even went to the extraordinary measure of writing a frank but political sensitive blog about the changes on the O2 website. A sure  sign there were some trembly knees after the announcement.

So what does it all mean?

Well, in a nutshell smartphone customers will be data-capped at between 500MB and 1GB depending on their monthly tariff.

Most smartphone users come nowhere near those limits of course. So, for most of us it will be business as usual. Just get used to the fact that the word ‘unlimited’ is about to be deleted from the smartphone dictionary.

The new tariffs came into force on Thursday June 24 – the same date as the iPhone 4 launch. 

Microsoft's bid to take over the hugely lucrative video game market has just been revealed in Los Angeles with the launch of Kinect, a hands-free device that lets you control a game without a controller.

Nintendo's Wii has ruled the roost since it was released in 2006, with about 70m of the consoles sold worldwide – 30m more than Microsoft's Xbox 360. But with its new motion-sensing gadget the Xbox 360 has set out its stall to win the gaming battle by focusing on the living room market for easy, family games.

Kinect uses a video camera, infrared sensor and microphone to track players' actions and commands and convert them into on-screen movement. It maps 40-odd points on the body and uses them to control all on-screen actions without any noticeable lag whatsoever.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Voice recognition is also in-built. So, when you want to turn the Xbox on, just say “Xbox on” and the machine starts up. Want to turn it off? Just say “Xbox off” and it obeys.

At the annual E3 Video Games Convention in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft showed clips from several Kinect games, including a sports sim, which sees players running and jumping over hurdles, throwing a javelin and playing football. There was also yoga, white-water rafting and a game called Dance Central, in which players perform moves in time with a pop soundtrack, including tracks by a host of stars like Lady Gaga.

Your front room will never be the same again.

The Xbox 360 is due 21st July and is available to pre-order now for £199.99, click here for more info.

The Kinect wireless controller is available for pre-order, dates and price to be announced shortly, click here for more info.

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