T-Mobile & Orange To Merge Mobile Phone Businesses
News is afoot that T-Mobile and Orange are planning to merge their businesses and make a united stand against the growing competition. This could be good news for Google and its Android Mobile OS as potentially G1 and its successors could be marketed to a much greater audience. One of the downfalls of Android / G1 in the UK has been the fact that T-Mobile have the only handsets at the moment, which is great if you live under a T-Mobile antenna, but no so much fun if you move around a lot, as coverage is certainly sporadic at times.
“Following yesterday’s news that T-Mobile was the subject of bids from Vodafone and Telefonica (the Spanish owner of the O2 brand), comes today’s announcement that T-Mobile is to merge with France Telecom’s UK brand Orange.” Source: Shareholders Portal
Orange mostly have the HTC 3G smartphones at the moment,as well as the Blackberry, and T-mobile sells many Blackberry contracts, plus a growing number of Android phones.
The future of mobile technology is certainly 3G, and with improvements in coverage and speed, more people will use mobile phone browsers as standard. This merger is going to give the resultant company (T-Orange?) a huge market share in the UK, and will be a kick in the balls for Vodafone.
