Spring is over (we feel it, the thermometer as well), nevertheless, LuxiPhone goes for some “Spring Cleaning” or “Springboard Cleaning” (to use iTerms)

LuxiPhone will undergo some maintenance between today  and tomorrow EOD. Vitovox and myself ask in advance to forgive us if the website might not respond at its best while we’re having our hands at it. We’re working hard to make it even more responsive and fast to load.

We’ll post as soon as everything will be back to normal.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

Vitovox & Ka.

Today Vox switches to Orange. Say goodbye to Vox, welcome Orange!

Was curious to see if anything changed a part from the website. Said to myself that most probably would have a been a bit too soon to see changes in their offers. How wrong was I… They did change their iPhone offers. Not only changed, they improved them a lot!

Look here below:

The basic iPhone package gets 75 minutes of free calls to Europe a month! The 50Euro/month iPhone package gets 150 minutes a month of free calls to Europe and the 75Euro a month package gets a whopping amount of 200 minutes a month of free calls to Europe.

A lot of people here in Luxembourg have family/friends abroad. I guess this change will be pretty much appreciated by a lot of customers. Went rapidly to check if Luxgsm or Tango had anything similar in their offers but still not.  I shall say:” Welcome Orange!”

Maybe this will relaunch a bit the race between our three iPhone providers.

I invite you to go to check their entire site for the full details of their offers.

A double post. We read in the press that VoxMobile will no longer be. By next week it will be rebranded into Orange. What this change will bring to consumer, no one knows, only time will tell (or their press conference due next week). But I guess the worldwide Orange know-how will stir the small luxembourgish market up a bit and maybe become a serious challenger to other providers.
Another news is that the new Yellow.lu app 2.0 we announced last week didn’t have any troubles passing the Appstore approval process… It’s yours for the takin’ as we speak. I had a (quick) look at it and it felt snappier, but I will go through it a bit longer and we’ll give you an indeep review soon.
One obvious change is, that offers more services besides being a directory. Like traffic cams view, farmacies, an “around me” feature and many more. An obvious hit at their competitor Editus, but in a less “childish” way with a more polished user-interface (less standard iPhone programing, for people familiar with the sdk and x-code, cocoa and the likings). What are your thoughts? Do you like it better? Is it worse? Comments below please.

Luxembourg can already count on some local and specific apps. That’s nice already…

What’s even nicer is when one of our favourite applications announces an update. Yes, Yellow has published an update to the AppStore for approval! That’s not it, we from LuxiPhone will be able to get a full hands-on preview beforehand!

Here is it how it looks right now:

That’s the way it looks now….and I guess soon we can reveal all the improvements exclusively here

What? Are you that one person who doesn’t have yellow.lu on their iPhone? Thank God we make your life easier..get it right here

(Thanks to Yellow for the info an the pic!)

Dear all, LuxiPhone’s popularity has been growing by the day and we tried to give you the latest info as fast as we could and by any means possible. I mean you can read us on the blog, on facebook, twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter, read our posts from within the webapp… One (logical) way to deliver the info was missing so far. A native iPhone App.

Lately we’ve been working on several projects at the same time, and for legal reasons couldn’t use the trademarked iPhone word nor the iPhone shape.

We gave birth (literally) to ViKa. Our 2 next projects will be named ViKa”Something”…One project we can’t reveal just yet (it has something to do with the iPhone ) but in the meantime enjoy those teasing screens.

This is part 1&2 of the Pragma Consult’s interview.

Recap: For the ones that have been living under a rock for the past year, those are the guys that brought you apps like Tageblatt, BCEE, Hot City Walker and Hot City Esch.

Obviously being there I took the chance to ask them as many questions as I possibly could and the visit turned out into an exclusive interview that took us most of the afternoon (sorry guys, I know time is money).
Due to the amount of information I got and the little time I have to write posts I tought it would be a good idea to split the interview into several parts and repost the whole interview into one single post once I’m done.
read part one of the interview after the break…

Continue reading »

I get that question a lot and here is a tip: the rule is text is lighter then images; images lighter then music and music is lighter then videos, the heavyweight of data. So I’m abroad and I took a data plan of 50mb data roaming for 46 euros with Voxmobile. So far I’ve been checking my emails, my twitterposts, my facebook account and my google reader rss feeds quite regularly, and tons of google maps. I payed attention not to download any app, avoided download of attachements and the use of Youtube and iTunes or any streaming radio, and guess what? I managed to keep my usage in the range of 7mb/day which isn’t bad at all.

Remember to reset your data counter before you leave (settings>general>usage) so to keep an eye on your consumption and make sure to get a data plan for your stay in order to avoid surprises. Keep in mind that 1mb costs +/- 7€ without a plan and that every connection is rounded up to 100kb

I’m on a plane right now for Malta and I played 25 min. on level 2 of Gameloft’s Sandstorm, then I watched a series and 2 podcasts, listen to some music (all that with one device, don’t we just love iConvergence) and then I wanted to read some local news, in airplane mode obviously.
First app: Tageblatt. Excellent! 49 articles synced and available offline, everything was there, pics and all, except the categories, but good enough.
Second app: L’essentiel. Pretty much same experience, not as polished, basic rss feed, still, I was able to read the news.
Third app: Wort. Big, no, huge dissapointment, online network connection mandatory. The app wouldn’t even start (see screen). For such a popular newspaper this is a big downside. Especially knowing that it is possible otherwise. Another downside is the font and it’s size (when it is online). Nice touch for Tageblatt is the feature that let’s you resize your font to suit your convenience. Anyway “Wort”, this is my opinion, but unless you don’t address those issues, I rather read a newspaper that is, ehm, well, readable…

You? Yes you! Are you a developer or a producer? do you own a company or do you code in your mum’s basement? Doesn’t matter to us. We would like to here all about you and your work. If you feel like talking about your project, your ideas, your experience with XCode and Cocoa. The SDK and Apple’s approval policies. Maybe your farting app has been rejected. Whatever!

Get in touch with us. There are too few iPhone wizards out there and since our job is to report the local iPhone scene, then we need your feedback. Drop us a line either via social network or per email at: info@luxiphone.lu

The official Tageblatt app is available (for free) in the AppStore. Pragma Consult is well known in our local iPhone scene for their HotCity Walker app (as far as I have heard, they’re already working on an update. We will be posting about that sometimes soon). In the meantime let us know how you feel about the app. Do you enjoy reading it? Any bugs or something bothering you? what would you change?
thanx to Pragma Consult for keeping us in the loop.