O2 new lease plans for iPhone 4S let you have it with no upfront costO2 new lease plans for iPhone 4S let you have it with no upfront cost

You are living in the UK, desperately want the new iPhone 4S, and you are currently running a little low on cash? If you tick all the boxes, you might be interested to hear that O2 will let you have your dream smartphone on a lease with no money required upfront.
The carrier will let you have the smartphone on a 12-month lease without demanding any cash up front. For £55 per month you are getting the 16GB version of the Apple iPhone 4S without any initial investment, whereas on a regular 12 month contract you'd need to pay at least £49.99 upfront and that's if you go for the £62/month deal.
The lease offer includes 750 minutes per month, unlimited texts, 500 MB of data and unlimited UK Wi-Fi plus insurance for the precious phone. That's roughly equivalent to what you are getting on the regular £42/month contract.
Naturally, there's a catch. And if you ask us it’s big enough to steer anyone that's not completely desperate away from these lease plans. Under the conditions of the Lease contract you are not the owner of the phone and you need to return it to O2, when the 12 months are over, so it's actually more of a rent kind of deal.
So, it turns out that O2 believes that the iPhone 4S will be worth under £100 after 12 months, as that's how much you are saving for giving up on it. And no, it's not that they suppose that customers will treat it badly and that will drop its price. There's a dedicated clause saying that "with O2 LEASE, the phone isn't yours and if you don't return it in satisfactory condition at the end of your lease, you may have to pay substantial charges".
Any takers remaining may head to the source link or just head to the nearest O2 store to get their shiny new Apple iPhone 4S.

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Apple releases iOS 5.1 beta 2 to developers

The second beta for the upcoming iOS 5.1 update has been seeded to developers. The big change in this update is the ability to delete individual images from Photo Stream.

Currently, when you take a picture on an iOS device, Photo Stream (a feature in iCloud) automatically syncs it with all of your Apple devices. With iOS 5.1 beta 2 onwards, you can manually delete an image on a device running this update and it will automatically get deleted from other iOS devices running this update. Older images, however, will have to be deleted manually from all the devices.

In other news, Apple has also released iTunes 10.5.2 update that brings "several improvements for iTunes Match" and "fixes an audio distortion problem when playing or importing certain CDs".

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HTC Desire HD, Incredible S and ChaCha getting Android 2.3.5

We reported a couple of days back that HTC is seeding the 2.3.5 Gingerbread update to the Incredible Swith the Desire HD in the waiting list.

HTC UK have confirmed that the 2.3.5 update has been released in the UK for the Incredible S and Desire HD, which will get some good Sense 3.0 loving along with all the bug fixes and optimizations in the update.

While the update has been confirmed for the UK only we've received reports from other European countries as well, so be sure to check your Desire HD for an update even if you live outside the UK.

Reportedly the HTC ChaCha has been also getting an OTA update to 2.3.5 (at least in New Zealand) but its Sense version has remained on 2.1. We'll update as soon as we get some official information.

Thanks, Cosmin Gaman and Ryan Brown for sending this in!

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EXCLUSIVE: Big Sony Ericsson Arc HD (Nozomi) live shots pop up

Now look what we found in our mailbox this morning. We just received photos of the upcoming Sony Ericsson flagship and some specs to go with them. Unfortunately, we didn't get the name cleared out so we don't know if the earlier, Sony Ericsson Arc HD rumors carry some water or not.

The smartphone codenamed Sony Ericsson Xperia Nozomi will come with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread at launch and will be built around a 4.3" LCD display of HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels). The 12 megapixel camera with FullHD video recording was also confirmed by our tipster.

Next, the rumored Snapdragon chipset featuring a couple of 1.5GHz Scorpion cores and the Adreno 220 GPU is indeed what you will be getting on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc HD. There will be an HDMI port as well, so sharing 1080p content with your HDTV will be a breeze.

Sadly, the Arc HD will lack a microSD card slot and you'll have to make do with the 16GB or 32GB of onboard storage (depending on the version you pick). At least, with 1GB of RAM your multitasking needs should be taken care of pretty well.

Interestingly, though, the handset uses a microSIM slot and the battery seems non-user-removable.

   
Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc HD a.k.a. Sony Ericsson Nozomi live shots

The tipster couldn't provide us with an official launch date, but we are keeping our fingers crossed for an announcement at CES at the start of next year.

   

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HTC Wildfire S gets to Android 2.3.5 as well, no Sense 3.0 though

HTC continues its series of Android 2.3.5 for its lineup of smartphones with the entry-levelWildfire S. The Taiwanese company is now seeding the new Gingerbread release to the most affordable of the trio of smartphones that it announced back at the MWC in February.

Much like the HTC ChaCha, though, the Wildfire S won't be getting to taste Sense UI 3.0. We suspect this has something to do with the hardware of these not being unable to handle the latest version of the HTC home-brewed UI.

Early user reports suggest that the update fixes the Wildfire S bugs with unlocking and call answering, but there's no detailed changelog provided just yet. We also don't know if it's already available globally or if it's only available to some markets for now, so if you happen to own a Wildfire S, feel free to drop us a line in the comments mentioning if you got the update and your country.

Details about further updates for the HTC lineup are also scarce for now, but we guess we will know more in the following weeks.

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Asus Padfone with quad-core Tegra 3 coming in early 2012

It seems that the elusive Asus Padfone is about to finally materialize. The smartphone that can convert to a tablet is now said to come in early 2012 and it will get a nice specs boost to make it up to us for the delay.

According to the latest rumor, the Asus Padfone will be running on a Tegra 3 chipset, featuring no less than four Cortex-A9 cores (okay, five if you count that helper core, but that doesn't really count here). That would make the Padfone one of the first smartphones to pack so much punch under its hood and will certainly make it one of the more desirable devices at the start of next year.

If the NetbookNews.com sources got everything right, the Tegra 3-powered Asus Padfone should be unveiled at MWC 2012, which is just under three months away now.

Asus managed to outplay many of the other manufacturers with its Transformer tablet at the start of 2011, and theTransformer Prime is looking to be the Android tablet to have this holiday season. Will they manage to achieve something like that with smartphones with the Padfone?

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Samsung SCH-W999 is a 2xCore, 2xSIM, 2xScreen droid

In collaboration with China Telecom, Samsung has unveiled the SCH-W999 Android smartphone. It's a clamshell phone with two 3.5-inchers of WVGA resolution - one on the inside and one on the outside. Both screens are of the SuperAMOLED variety too, which is a treat even now with the Plus out on a couple of devices.

   
Samsung SCH-W999 promo shots

The SCH-W999 comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a dual-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm MSM8660 processor, 5MP camera, dual-mode GSM/CDMA EV-DO 3G, Bluetooth 3.0 and dual-SIM support.

The SCH-W999 will arrive at China Telecom next year (no specific dates are available) and is expected to have a price as high as $1570 so it isn't what you'd call a bargain. Worldwide availability is unclear as of now but we can't really see too many people line up for the peculiar droid, but hey - we could be wrong.

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Samsung demos a transparent flexible AMOLED on video

We didn't need much convincing to believe that flexible and transparent screens have a great future. Smartphones and tablets these days are about the touch experience and any updates done to the screen itself have a great potential to improve the general user experience greatly.

Still, Samsung felt that it's a good time to release another visionary video demonstrating where the achievements of its R&D department can get us.

It's quite impressive right? Of course, it would be naive to expect anything like it from the first batch of flexible AMOLEDs, which should be out as early as next year. We are not sure when the transparent part of the deal described above will also come to the shelves, but we guess it will take another year at the very least.

Nonetheless, it's good to know that smartphone technology still has room for improvement and we might have something else besides pixel count and contrast to quarrel over in the works.

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