MWC 09: Orange and HP's mobile broadband tag team

Just days after the GSMA announced that the world had reached its four billionth mobile connection, Orange and HP have partnered to push the numbers even higher.

The three-year, pan-European collaboration will add weight to the 100 million mobile broadband connections already counted as part of the four billion figure. As part of the deal, announced at Mobile World Congress both companies co-distribute notebooks and HP Minis with either mobile or fixed broadband connectivity.

"The demand for mobile broadband is a global phenomenon. Adding a select range of HP Notebooks and Minis to our successful portfolio of connected offers is just the kick-off phase," said Olaf Swantee, senior enterprise vice president of Orange's communications services, in a statement.

"Together, we will define new ways to bring services to customers, from co-marketing activities through to distribution, supply chain and care, reinforcing our commitment to make it easy for everyone to access the internet and their content, whenever and wherever they want."

The Compaq Mini 700 is one of the new options available in the UK. Customers can benefit from this internet-connected notebook for just 30 a month.

Click here for more news from Mobile World Congress 2009.

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.