Saudi Arabian telecom firm Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) announced on Sunday it has launched a free WiFi service covering Makkah’s holy sites for pilgrims.

The free service is available to pilgrims and members of the public during this year’s hajj to help families keep in touch online, the firm said in a statement.

It is the second time Mobily, through its data arm Bayanat Al-Oula, has offered the wireless service free of charge during the annual pilgrimage - one of the pillars of Islam.

Khalid Al Kaf, Mobily’s CEO, said the service covers all the holy sites, including Mina, Arafar and Muzdalifah.

We’re digging the robots at this year’s Gitex, so here’s some pics of another one for you.

This is Titan the Robot, who has been impressing visitors to the technology show with his dance moves.

Apparently the eight foot high animatronic robot can also talk, sing, and even cry.

“Nobody at will have seen anything like Titan the Robot before,” said Nik Fielding his creator. “We are delighted to bring our show to Dubai and look forward to adding a totally new element to Gitex.”

We like.

Here is a picture of Ibn Sina, who according to his makers, is the world’s first Arabic-speaking human-like humanoid robot.

He’s a new type of robot that uses face recognition software, vision, speech solutions and other technologies, to help him better interact with people, and is on show at Gitex.

Ibn Sina has been created by the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML) of the United Arab Emirates University, and apparently can speak English as well as remember what he’s done in the past.

“At the IRML, a major development is taking place: robots that can have shared memories and shared friends with humans are being created; promising more interesting encounters, and a sustainable and long-lasting friendly relationship between humans and robots!’ Dr Nikolaos Mavridis, director of the IRML said in a press release issued today.

Now, we’re not doubting Ibn Sina’s vocal capabilities, but hang on a minute, he looks like he’s escaped from Madam Tussauds waxwork in London. Hmm, maybe that’s where he learned English…

Listen to what Ibn Sina sounds like, click HERE for sample one and HERE for sample two.

My wife does the shopping for our kids’ birthdays. I am only vaguely aware of what they want, and whether they’ll be delighted or disappointed on the morning of the Big Day.

My son is approaching his 16^th birthday, and I have learnt a great deal about the way people will consume news, information and entertainment in the future from his behaviour over the past few years.

My mind has been boggled by the technology he and his friends have mastered, and which they use to communicate with each other, entertain themselves and even (occasionally) use to improve their school work.

The Xbox 360, the netbook, the on demand television, the iTouch and the mobile phone are all standard issue to my son and his friends. They no longer congregate on street corners to ‘hang out’ (is that an eighties term?), but now meet in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Halo, chat on MSN, and open windows to each other’s lives on Facebook.

I have already become the dinosaur whose poor grasp of current technology is laughed at, just as I laughed at my parents’ inability to master a video recorder.

None of this will be news to a parent of teenagers. They’re all at it.

But one thing has shocked me in the past few days. I was helping my wife wrap birthday presents and discovered we have bought him a portable hard drive, on which will store all his downloaded music, videos and games.

The drive cost $150 - quite a sum for storage in this day and age. But the capacity is a whopping, gargantuan, elephantine…

…One Terabyte!

The only time I ever wrote about Terabytes was in articles about Cray Supercomputers - the type of stuff that could work out the spread of radioactive material from a nuclear explosion, or the destructive force of a hurricane.

Now, my son is about to have that much storage in his backpack.

He will be carrying his own television station filled with all his favourite shows. He will have more music than Virgin Megastore can cram into it hugely expensive mall outlets. He will have computer games that will occupy him for 50 percent of his leisure time.

He will have more media crammed into a box the size of a hardback book than the BBC had in every film can in its archives from World War II until the advent of digital video.

The mass storage he will have at his fingertips is a massively disruptive technological leap forward. He is no longer a consumer of the information and entertainment that traditional broadcasters and publishers want him to consume. His choices are entirely his own, with every desire catered for somewhere on the Internet.

A 16^th birthday is a landmark in any young man’s life, but this particular birthday may have as profound an effect on me as it has on him.

GCC nationals and expatriates become acutely aware of international roaming charges at this time of year as most companies reject enormous expense claims that include holiday phone calls.

This makes it all the more important to do some research into roaming charges, and to ensure that you connect to the best priced networks in the countries you are visiting.

For example, did you know that Etisalat customers with a contract will pay roughly twice as much for making a phone call in the UK if they connect to O2, Orange or Vodafone networks rather than T-Mobile?

Etisalat’s web site lists the cost of making a call back to the UAE as:

O2: AED8.04 per minute
Orange: AED9.49 per minute
T-Mobile: AED4.43 per minute
Vodafone: AED8.08 per minute

Irritatingly, while T-Mobile is cheapest for making calls back to the UAE, Orange is far cheaper when making calls to other UK numbers.

The price of receiving a call (AED3.09 per minute) is exactly the same across all UK networks.

Count yourself lucky if you are not a Batelco customer. Batelco has entirely different roaming charges, and the cheapest options are different for peak-time and off-peak calls. Looking again at roaming in the UK, Vodafone offers the cheapest off-peak price for calls to UK numbers of BD0.082 per minute, compared to BD0.284 per minute on Orange for peak and off-peak calls - more than treble the price!

Peak price tariffs are different. Connect to the O2 network and you will pay BD0.355 per minute, 40 percent more than the tariff of BD0.204 with Vodafone.

And if you are calling Bahrain, it is different again. This time T-Mobile is comfortably cheapest with an all-day rate of BD0.39 per minute, compared to Orange’s eye-watering peak time rate of BD1.17 per minute.

UK coverage for all major mobile networks is in the high 90 percent range, so in most parts of the country you are well advised to manually select a network rather than allow your phone to automatically find one.

The examples here give only a narrow window into the complexities of international roaming, but I urge you to do your own research before travelling this summer. Five minutes of web research could save you colossal sums on your phone bills come September.

Let me know if you have any other tips for saving money on mobile roaming.