The BarclayCard Wireless Festival this year has a treat in-store for all attendees… a PayBand wristband which can be used to make all festival purchases. This makes the festival the first ever fully contactless-enabled music even in the UK!

The wristband will be accepted by all vendors at the festival and customers will not need to enter a PIN or sign anything, making the whole process super fast. Payments will be capped individually at £20 per transaction and users can top-up online or at the festival using a Visa, Debit or Mastercard.

Help points will be set up around the festival venue and BarclayCard staff will be on hand to check balances, report any lost wristbands and generally help out.

The PayBand comes with a 100% fraud guarantee from BarclayCard and will be automatically deactivated after the festival has taken place, with remaining funds being refunded to the card you topped up from.

Those who opt for the wristband will also have access to BarclayCard Unwind benefits, which include fast track entry, goody bags and chances to win backstage tours, as well as access to luxury toilet facilities!

Proof that Android is still going strong comes as the Google Play store recently reached its fifteen-billionth download.

Originally launching in 2008 as Android Market, the store rebranded to become Google Play earlier this year, and offers users more than 500 million to download to all their devices.

In comparison, Apple’s App Store reached the heady heights of 15 billion in July 2011, and reported that its download figure currently stands at 25 billion, as of March 2012.

With figures like these it doesn’t look like it will be long before Android downloads have not only caught up with Apple’s… but surpassed them.

Fantastic camera samples from the Nokia PureView 808 have been released by Nokia… and we’ve got to admit, theyr’e pretty darn impressive!

The dynamic range and the amount of fine detail is incredible, whilst the colours are vibrant and intense. Also apparent is the extraordinary shallow depth of field which is something that is pretty difficult to achieve on most phone cameras.

Nothing currently on the market can even come close to taking images like those captured by the 41 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera featured on the PureView 808… Currently tipped as due for release in May, we say, bring it on!

The full gallery of images can be viewed here.

Register your interest in the Nokia PureView 808…

The financial results of Motorola Mobility’s first quarter have been announced and, let’s just say, things aren’t looking too rosy.

The total revenue for the period was $3.1bn (of which $2.2bn was from mobile devices) but the company faced a net operating loss of $85m, $24m more than the same quarter last year… oh dear.

Motorola shipped 8.9 million mobile devices during the quarter, out of which 5.1 million were smartphones.

However, Motorola is still in the process of being acquired by Google, at an acquisition cost of $12.5bn. As the acquisition is thought to be purely based on patent rights, it wouldn’t be a huge shock if Google sold the company on rather swiftly!

See Motorola MOTOLUXE deals from just £13.50 a month…

LG is reported to be dropping Windows Phone and has no plans to release any devices running on the operating system.

The decision is most likely based on weak sales and the impending threat from the Nokia/Microsoft partnership.

For now, this decision seems to be a wise one on LG’s behalf due to the fact that the Lumia lineup is currently the most popular WP brand. Combined with the low user demand, it seems like a good move for LG to focus entirely on the Android Os for the time being.

Vertu phones are luxuriously expensive!

It was reported at the end of last year that Nokia was looking into selling Vertu, the luxury phone maker, to raise funds. Apparently the deal is now nearing completion, according to the Financial Times.

Permira, a British private equity group, is the purported buyer and it is willing to shell out €200 million for the company. However, as yet, neither Vertu nor Permira have confirmed the deal.

EQT, another private equity group, is also said to have been interested in Vertu, but according to the Financial Times these negotiations are going nowhere.

This is bad news for you if you were hoping to acquire a gold-plated luxury handset running on Windows Phone anytime soon, but it makes sound financial sense for Nokia to get rid, especially as last week it was overtaken by Samsung as the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer.

Apparently HTC is planning to bring chip production in-house for its lower-end smartphones.

According to China Times the Taiwanese manufacturer is looking to partner with ST-Ericsson to bring production of application processors for future low end devices in-house.

By producing processors in-house it will allow greater control over manufacturing and more effective costing of hardware. Both Apple and Samsung have bought lower end devices to the market that have been cheaper to manufacture.

Samsung Mobile has posted a rather cryptic message on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, which states Destination:tgeltaayehxnx. Confused? So were we… until someone pointed out that this is actually an anagram…

The deciphered anagram actually read TheNextGalaxy, and if you visit the website by the name of tgeltaayehxnx.com you will find a timer counting down the hours until… tomorrow lunchtime… so what is this all about?

Another clue is in the source code of the website, where a message states: “Discover how Samsung is about to challenge the way you view the GALAXY once more.”

Does this mean Samsung are actually going to announce the Galaxy SIII handset sooner than the 3 May date? More likely, is that tomorrow will kick off some fantastic advertising campaign which will culminate in the big reveal on 3 May of the Samsung Galaxy SIII…

… whichever, we’re intrigued!

Don’t have an iPhone 4S but feeling ever-so slightly jealous that you’re missing out on voice-response app Siri? Rest assured… now all Apple users can also enjoy the delights of chatting to their gadgets!

Netherlands-based developer Sparkling Apps has released its own version of Siri, called Voice Answer. Initially rejected by Apple for nearly three months, the copycat-app has now been approved by Apple and is live in the App Store, and usable on any iPhone, iPod or iPad running iOS 4.2 or later.

The app is based on data from Wolfram Alpha, among other sources, and lets users ask questions by either speaking to the app or typing in a question. It’s currently priced at just £2.49, much cheaper than shelling out for an iPhone 4S!

The company is now going “full speed ahead” implementing more features into the app, including location-based place finding and email/SMS and more voice function commands. Additionally it’s adding in a bit of a sci-fi theme and is planning to create an animated robot for the interface.

See the video of Voice Answer in action below!

Apparently HTC will be ditching the Beats Audio headphones with their Beats incorporated smartphones.

The company’s executive Martin Fichter said in an interview that an “accessory like the headphones doesn’t factor in when someone is buying a smartphone…if they want a Beats headphones they’ll buy it directly”

This news is a complete U-turn for the phone manufacturer as when it first announced the deal last summer. HTC bundled a pair of Beats headphones with almost every high-end smartphone including the HTC One X, and One S, Sensation XE, Sensation XL and the HTC Rhyme.

HTC will still be incorporating Beats technology in the smartphones but will not be putting the headphones in the box. It’s possible the $300 million partnership between the Taiwanese manufacturer and Dr Dre’s headphone brand may have not being what HTC was expecting as its revenue from this year’s first quarter dropped by 35% from last year’s Q1.

At the moment buymobilephones.net are still selling the HTC Sensation XE and HTC Sensation XL with included Beats headphones. Order now while stocks last!