
Wotta bargain!
'Tesco to flog its own smartphone'
Can we get two for the price of one?
Tesco is preparing to launch its own high-end smartphone later this year, chief executive Philip Clarke revealed today. The Android mobe will follow on the heels of the successful Hudl tablet; has UK's biggest retailer was able to shift 550,000 units of its own-brand cut-price 7-inch slab. A new version of the Android tablet, …
This is the reason I refuse to use supermarket club cards. If you use them they know everything you buy from Tesco, use their bank and they know what else you spend your money on, use their mobile network and they know who you call, and now they'll know everything about you thanks to the spyware in their phone.
Are we sure they aren't a subsidiary of NSAGCHQ Inc?
"Are you implying that Tesco is positioning itself to become a 'superpower'?"
I've seen that episode of 'Time Trumpet'...
More like worried that the information will be used as evidence should a crime happen near you. Don't put it past the police to request your purchase history.
A friend was questioned quite a few times in question with a murder that happened very close to him. Imagine if a recent purchase has been some new kitchen knives, some bin liners and some gaffa tape. I think that would have put him higher up the suspect list.
You can't really trust the Police even now. Barry George was convicted or murder based upon a miniscule speck of material that may or may not have been gun residue. So while he was freed he still spent around 6 years in prison.
Tesco can mine an enormous amount of data out of a loyalty card - the store you shop most in, what times you shop, the frequency of visits, your average spend, how special offers affect your spending, which parts of the store you visited most, your loyalty to Tesco, your brand loyalty, your favourite brands, your inclination to buy ingredients or prepared products, your preference for automatic / staff tills, your relationship status, your social class, your ethnicity, if you've had a baby recently, how fat / drunk you are, whether you're pregnant, and of course the name, sex, age & address filled in with the card.
Some of this information is obviously more useful than others and is probably useful for running their business - anticipating demand for products, setting staff levels etc.
I expect the amount of cross talk between Tesco Clubcard and other services like banking is quite limited thanks to EU data protection laws.
You mean like most other behavioural advertising, which seems to tell you about stuff you've just looked at or stuff you've just bought, rather than the stuff you'll be looking for, next.
Either that or telling me people who bought this, also bought these - And I've never worked out what use there is for that piece of stupidity.
I do not actually care if Tesco knows what food I buy, if I was going to buy anything I did not want tracked I would buy elsewhere.
£10 off a tank of fuel is not to be sniffed at just that Tescos know what I buy in THEIR store.
It is not like they have aisles upon aisles of sex toys or anything embarrasing.
Since I am not buying cheap crap alcohol, and ready meals I do not have that embarrasment,
I avoid other tracking, but shopping at Tescos, what can they actually do which adversly effects me?
> I avoid other tracking, but shopping at Tescos, what can they actually do which adversly effects me?
I certainly agree. If you fret too much over it, you'll end up a paranoid nutter in your bunker compound, surrounded by crates of ammo and tins of beans and foaming over data tithed to our acronymic lords and masters...
However, I believe the onus should be on Tesco et al to prove that they will not adversely effect us rather that us trying to prove that they do.
what on earth do you buy from the supermarket then? are you worried they'll start sending you insulting text messages based on your last delivery
All you are demonstrating here is a lack of imagination. Yes, that is what they could currently do, Tesco the supermarket. How about Tesco the bank, Tesco the insurance agency? Would you like to be turned down for a mortgage because (and this won't ever be specified, anywhere) because you spend more than £40/month on booze, or you have bought king size rizla before?
Now show some imagination, what if more people and agencies get access to this data. Get sacked from your job because you were refused a US entry visa?
For $JOB I do exactly this sort of work. Given multiple disparate, anonymized datasets and one non-anonymized data set, and you can quickly build a picture of who Joe Bloggs actually is.
Companies want to collect personal data like this because it improves their profits by determining edge cases for which they can charge more, or because they can sell it on to other companies to do the same. Oh, you thought you were only giving your data to Tesco? Nope, Tesco are free to "anonymize" the data and re-sell it.
All of this data is currently stored and mine-able only because people freely choose to give them their personal data - data that belongs solely to them - in reward for poxy BOGOFs.
If you fret too much over it, you'll end up a paranoid nutter in your bunker compound, surrounded by crates of ammo and tins of beans
There is definitely something in that, but you do not have to go insane nor have a bunker to avoid the worst identity tracking - just don't give them your data in return for 15p off a tin of tomatoes.
I expect the amount of cross talk between Tesco Clubcard and other services like banking is quite limited thanks to EU data protection laws.
This makes me sad - the entire purpose of structuring Tesco Group as the receiving party of clubcard data is to facilitate Tesco Bank's access to that data.
If you do not use loyalty cards you must be hiding your participation in a terrorist organisation - just like those dangerous hackers who enable privacy features in the browsers. Failure to carry a mobile phone is sufficient evidence for being arrested for suspicion of terrorism:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/mobile_phone_tracking/
Remember, being suspected of terrorism means you can be imprisoned for 28 days without charge:
http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/policy.php?id=1039&display=motions
ref ammabamma
Thing is Tesco have competitors, I could pop down to Asda and try to park, I could slum it at Sainsburys, drive miles to the other Sainsburys, or pay too much on a long drive to Morrisons.
My local shop is a large supermarket about 1/4 mile away. So I use it.
And come to it I trust Tesco more than the government, as governments can become more authitarian (see Nulab)
dude, if you use a debit or credit card, then **ALL** the places you use it will know **everything**...
ANY mobile phone you use, will tell you where you are, and what you say...
the only way to avoid it is to put lots of cash under your mattress, and live in a cave out of sight...
Just one problem, Banknotes get changed now and then, so if you do not use them for very long, your millions of notes will soon be worth **NOTHING** !!!!
"Just one problem, Banknotes get changed now and then, so if you do not use them for very long, your millions of notes will soon be worth **NOTHING** !!!!"
Thats not true.. The Bank of England will pay face value of any UK note you present to them, you just have to journey up to London.
Really? I reckon given a decent enough spec, this thing will fly off the shelves. Look how well the Hudl did from a standing start, I think that gives *some* idea of the demographic of buyers in Tesco - they want cheap but decent (and the Hudl is both, I would expect this to be as well - similar spec but cheaper than SS high end)
The Hudl is relatively low end in terms of both specification and price. It's was good value when it came out but today you can easily get a tablet of similar spec and lower price. Anyway from my experience most of them are owned by kids, which are not really Tesco's core demographic with limited spending power
Tesco says their phone is going after the high end, presumably because that's where the money is. But the real question is what price it will be. it will have to have a significant discount for people to abandon established manufacturers for basically a marketing tool. Especially when a Moto G covers a lot of those basis already
>I can't imagine Samsung or Apple users being tempted
That's probably because you are misreading what Tesco's mean by "high-end". I suggest that the Hudl was a high-end tablet for the price point. Putting a "high-end" spec'd phone in the space that Samsung et al put their so-so mid to low end phones would probably get attention...
Given Archos have a range of smartphones, wouldn't be surprised if this isn't another Archos joint venture.
Oh no! However, I am very happy with my Tesco Mobile SIM only deal, at £10 a month for 1000 minutes, 1GB and 5000 txts. If you look on their website, they keep doing some very good offers that appear for a few weeks then vanish. Catch one and you've got it on a 12 month contract.
If the branding is not too bad (Don't want to be advertising Tesco for them. If it had say that Hudl Logo I would be ok with that) and the bootloader is unlocked I might get one presuming it is half decent hardware and well built.
A war between Tesco and Amazon can only be good for the customer.
They just don't want the staff getting hassled when the charges for carrier bags come in, so they are shipping them in thinner and thinner plastic with strategic slits already supplied, so you plump for the re-usable ones.
Asda have been doing the same for a while now, which is why despite some adept double bagging I still had to sweep up 3 bottles of Fursty Ferret the other week.
Had the 5p charge in Wales for years now, Have never yet paid it - I just keep some of the "bag for life" in the car - Ok I paid 6p for the Asda ones (cheaper than Tesco) but they have long since been swapped out when they split or wore through. Ive not seen anyone giving staff hassle over it, we are just annoyed that the 'tards in Cardiff bay are as grabby as the 'tards on the Thames - and just as divorced from reality as any other politician.
I dont do all my shopping at Tesco plus I often shop for family and neighbours using my Clubcard so Tesco have a very confused idea of "who I am". As for the mobile - the Tesco SIM only plan suited me both in terms of cost and being a 30 day contract, if a better deal comes along then I'll be off. Maybe I'm strange but I shop at places that fit the need and "target price", not because it is xxxxxxx (insert name of chain here)
Tesco started using "disintegrating"* plastic bags a while back.
I used to use one of those little sock thingies to hold them for reuse or rubbish bin liners until it started dispensing small fragments of plastic.
* The ones which break down after 30 days or less. Less being the operative word.
You are the Product, not the crap they sell to [redacted].
Get one of these and try going shopping in your local ASDA (Wallyworld.uk) with location turned on. Watch for the adverts pleading for you to return to the fold.
Ignore them, and ....
Suddenly you phone loses connection to the network and all your Tesco Phone connectied friends get tweets calling you a traitor to the cause.
Oh god No!
I'm with Tesco Mobile at the moment, only because they gave me a good deal on a Galaxy S3. I thought at the time, "OK, so they use the O2 network, it can't be that bad."
I was right, its not that bad. Its worse. I can barely get a signal at home, in fact anywhere thats not "city centre" has an atrocious signal, and I have just over a year of a two year contract left.
If they want to make a success of their own phone, they need to use a better carrier network imo.
It's not just you with this issue
I was on a Tesco PAYG phone for years and it worked all over the house.
I wanted a contract phone and ended up with a Galaxy S3 on O2
No signal to be found anywhere near where I live, but
If I put the sim into my old Tesco phone, Hey Presto, Full signal on O2 everywhere
I think it's the Galaxy that's the problem, not the network in my area
I don't know where they'll find a niche in the market for this really. Aiming at the high end like they are apparently planning feels like a non-starter if the Tesco brand is going to be plastered all over it.
Not to mention the hurdle to clear to be considered 'high end' keeps going up - the super cheap (for what you get) Moto G has redefined the mid-lower end of the range, and you can get older model Samsung galaxies brand new now for (comparatively) dirt cheap.
"Hello, from our GPS tracking you appear to be going in to a different store. The products you are most likely to buy can be bought cheaper at your usual Tesco Temple.
If you choose to continue in to this store you may find your phone becoming hotter and hotter - leave now you traitor before we burn your nuts off!"
Trying to integrate yet more services and thus expecting me to turn more of my life over to a single corporation isn't going to get me off the budget supermarket that simply wants to flog me stuff and get money for it.
This was all forecast back in the 1950s in Pohl & Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, a dystopic look at corporatisation and the role in it of advertising. It seems still to be in print, no excuses for not having read it.
Regardless of what brand they stick on it, how can they expect to compete with the Apples, Samsungs and Sony of this world? How will they tempt anybody away, even with huge discounts?
And it's bad enough seeing 'Sent from my iPhone' tagged on the end of an email. The day I see 'Sent from my Tesco Phone. P.S. 3 for 2 on Tena Lady', well...
The Hudl was a success because it was affordable and in time for Christmas (actually, I think they sold out). The Hudl is pretty much a Tab 7" or iPad Mini clone, visually. This means that those in poorer families are able to afford a "high end" looking item, even if it's not a "high end" example of that type of hardware. iPad Mini is £200-400, the Tab 3 7" is roughly the same price as the Hudl, but with slightly less spec.
I don't think Tesco will be able to repeat this with their phone. Apple's nice, but it's still out of budget for a lot of people. Same with the higher-end Samsung Android phones. Even with the best specs in the world, Tesco isn't exactly a status brand. Rappers won't be boasting about their Tesco phones. If they're going to be successful, they should make a budget phone that looks nice, but crams as much spec as people can afford for Granny's first smartphone.
Your logic is good, but you're assuming that Tesco is going to be sourcing from a well known vendor (I won't say manufacturer for obvious reasons.)
There are now several Chinese manufacturers making stuff with relatively high specs because they can, but they don't have sales or marketing budget. Supplying Tesco would give them an immediate and free market presence.
This is basically how Apple works (design, marketing and sales operation for Chinese manufacturing), the difference is that Tesco only has to break even to win, and they don't have the R&D costs.
Oppo and Oneplus are the obvious suspects. If I could buy the Oneplus One at Tesco prices, I might even ignore the branding, just like people will ignore the Toyota badge to get a GT-86 because it's 2/3 the price of a Boxster.
This post has been deleted by its author