O2 UK Launches Low-Energy Phone Charger

UK mobile operator, Telefónica O2 has announced the launch of an energy efficient universal mobile phone charger, which the company says is amongst the most energy efficient in the UK cutting energy consumption by as much as 70 per cent compared to standard mobile phone chargers.

The O2 Universal Charger, which meets the strict energy efficient guidelines of the US Energy Star rating, contains a power control system. This system considerably reduces charge to the mobile phone once the battery is fully charged even if the charger is left switched on in a plug socket. O2 estimates that phones left on charge costs Brits over £30 million in wasted energy every year. Heat loss from the charger has also been eliminated, another source of significant energy loss from standard mobile chargers.

Recent research conducted by O2 has revealed that a typical mobile phone charger wastes over 2.8 KWh of energy per year. O2 estimates that by cutting off the unneeded charge to mobile phones, the Universal Charger could save the equivalent carbon emissions of over 36,000 cars per annum. In addition to being energy efficient, the base unit of the Universal Charger will be accompanied by an inter-changeable leads making the charger compatible with most leading brands of mobile phones and eliminating the need to use a different charger with each mobile.

Ronan Dunne, CEO, Telefónica O2 UK, comments: “People are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact products are having on the environment and with mobile the single biggest impact is the energy used in charging. The O2 Universal Charger offers customers a simple yet effective way of reducing the environmental impact of their phones and reduces the waste associated with charger disposal.”

Resource - cellular-news

Iraq to Fine All Three Mobile Networks Over License Breaches

Iraq's three mobile phone networks all face fines from the government for apparently failing to meet conditions in their network licenses - reports Middle East Economic Digest (MEED). All three networks have failed to meet QoS requirements, while Korek Telecom has been censured for failing to meet coverage requirements.

The smallest operator, Korek Telecom has a national license, but coverage which is limited to mainly the Northern region of the country. An expansion to national coverage would need the financial muscle of an outside partner - which has lead to recent rumours that Etisalat is in talks to take a stake in the firm.

"Asiacell is bad and Zain is very bad," Hayam al-Yasiri, an adviser to the Telecommunications Ministry told MEED. "Korek is breaching the licence because of the coverage and the service. Korek up to this moment does not cover many cities, although according to the licence they should cover them."

The decision on the fines is expected before the end of the year
Resource - cellular-news

Nokia Quake III gains on-phone server, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support

Remember when playing Quake III at a decent resolution required a $5,000 Alienware? Man, those were the days. Now, we can't help but be thankful for a few special Nokia handsets (the N95 8GB, E90 and N82 in particular) that can all handle the game by their lonesome. In fact, the latest version of the software adds a few remarkably awesome extras. For starters, users can now take advantage of on-phone server support, meaning that your handset can actually host a Quake III multiplayer battle (and may we recommend the server name "trashaccident?"). Also of note, the devs have tossed in support for Bluetooth mice and keyboards. We know, right? Tap the read link for all the juicy installation instructions.
Resource - Engadget

Renesas to Announce Full HD Video Processor for Mobile Phones

Renesas Technology Corp will announce an application processor that enables mobile phones to process 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution 30fps full HDTV video at ISSCC 2009, which will take place in San Francisco, California, from Feb 8 to 12, 2009 (session code 8.7).

Renesas announced in May 2008 that it was developing a full HDTV video processor (See related article).

The session is titled "A 342mW Mobile Application Processor with Full HDTV Multi-Standard Video Codec." The processor's CPU core has the maximum operating frequency of 500MHz. It supports MPEG-4AVC/H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats.

The 6.4 x 6.5mm chip was manufactured using 65nm CMOS technology. Its power consumption is 342mW when it is processing full HDTV video in real time via 166MHz 64-bit DDR-SDRAM.

Some overseas semiconductor manufacturers have already started sample shipments of their HDTV-compatible application processors. Broadcom Corp announced its HDTV-compatible processor in October 2007, while Nvidia Corp and Texas Instruments Inc announced theirs in February 2008. All these processors can encode and decode 1280 x 720 resolution 30fps HDTV video but are not compliant with full HD video.

Resource - Tech-On

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Resource - Gizmodo

Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic goes on sale somewhere in the world

If you've been gritting your teeth and letting the PR onslaught of the iPhone 3G, Storm, and G1 knock you around as you waited for Nokia's entry into the widescreen, touchscreen superphone market -- that wait appears to be nearing it's end. Nokia has gone and gotten all official and release-y with it's anticipated (if somewhat disappointing) 5800 XpressMusic... or as we know it, the Tube. According to the company's PR, the device "is now, or will be soon" available in Russia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Finland, "among others." If you'll recall, the phone boasts a 3.2-inch, 16:9 resistive touchscreen (hey, they throw in a guitar pick stylus), a 3.2-megapixel camera, 8GB of on-board storage, and the constant assurance that you're using a phone once called the Tube. No word on price or plans, but we expect cheap, and lots.
Resource - Engadget

Nokia to cease sales in Japan (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it will stop selling mobile phones in Japan except for its luxury Vertu brand after struggling to expand its presence.

Finnish Nokia has previously said it will cut costs 'decisively', expecting global mobile phone sales to shrink next year amid an economic downturn.

Japan is the world's fourth largest mobile phone market after the United States, China and India. But it makes up only a tiny part of sales at Nokia, whose products have failed to lure customers away from more sophisticated Japanese ones.

Mobile phone companies also see limited scope for growth in Japan, where 109 million subscribers, or some 85 percent of the population, already own a mobile phone. In addition, a new sales model based on higher handset prices is expected to slash annual mobile phone sales in Japan by some 20 percent.

"In the current global economic climate, we have concluded that the continuation of our investment in Japan-specific localized products is no longer sustainable," Nokia executive vice president Timo Ihamuotila said in a statement.

He added that Nokia's Japanese business would concentrate on research, development and sourcing for the global market as well as specific projects such as the Vertu brand.

The quirks of Japan's mobile phone market have prevented foreign companies, including Nokia's rivals such as Samsung Electronics and LG, from successfully targeting Japanese consumers.

Most of the mobile phones used in Japan are part of third-generation networks and boast features such as TV broadcasting and electronic payment functions.

This makes it tough for foreign manufacturers to compete with domestic handsets.

Foreign companies, excluding Sony Ericsson, only occupy around 5 percent of Japan's mobile phone market, according to IDC Japan, a research firm. Japanese manufacturers, in turn, have only a small presence outside their home market.

"Nokia is facing global earnings problems and many other issues, and this shows Japan was a low-priority market at a time when they are shoring up global operations, even though it may still be attractive," IDC Japan analyst Michito Kimura said.

"I'm not very surprised by the decision."

The move was still rather abrupt as NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's biggest mobile phone operator, said just this month that it would sell a new Nokia smartphone as part of its product line-up for the winter shopping season.

Third-ranked Japanese operator Softbank Corp also sells Nokia phones.

Nokia, which has a nearly 40 percent global market share, had originally said it aimed to increase its market share in Japan to a double-digit figure. It took only around 0.3 percent of the Japanese market last business year, according to the Nikkei newspaper.

Instead of a broad expansion, it will now focus on Vertu, its luxury unit.

The Yomiuri newspaper reported on Saturday that Nokia plans to launch mobile phone services for Vertu customers in Japan, using DoCoMo's network.

Vertu, founded in 1998, sells gem-encrusted, hand-built mobile phones with prices ranging from 3,500 euros to over 100,000 euros.

Resource - Yahoo! Tech

Opera Mini browser available for Google Android

The latest version of the popular mobile browser Opera Mini is now available for the T-Mobile G1, the first phone built on Google’s Android operating system. The Android availability is part of the improvements in Opera Mini 4.2, which leaves testing mode tomorrow.

Opera Mini is the first alternative G1 users have to the phone’s built-in browser, which is based on WebKit. Matthew Miller of ZDNet spotted Mini in the Android Market this morning, and reports that it provides “very fast” internet access, and has the added benefit of synchronizing Opera bookmarks across multiple devices. It’s also just nice to have multiple browsers to choose from, similar to the freedom of choice you have on your desktop or laptop computer. If Opera Mini takes off among Android users, that would be a rebuke to Apple, which rejected the browser as a competitor to Safari on the iPhone. (I asked Opera if there are any plans to bring its higher-end Opera Mobile browser to the Android, but the company isn’t commenting.)

The latest version of Mini has been in public testing for about two weeks, and other new features include the ability to customize the browser with new skins, additional languages (including Armenian, Bengali and Urdu), improved video, and note syncing via Opera Link. When 4.2 was announced, the update didn’t seem terribly exciting, but the just-revealed Android support changes things.

With more than 20 million users worldwide, Opera says Mini it’s the world’s most popular mobile web browser.

Resource - VentureBeat

JCB Breaks Record for Worlds Toughest Mobile Phone

The ultra-rugged JCB Toughphone has achieved a Guinness World Record for the World’s Toughest Mobile Phone. To fulfil the Guinness World Record requirements, the record attempt had to be witnessed by independent judges who would act as testers once the phone had been dropped and who would also verify the height the JCB Toughphone had been dropped from.

Click to enlarge

JCB Toughphone

The JCB Toughphone survived the first drop of 1.6 metres with barely a scratch. The bucket of the JCB 3CX Digger was raised repeatedly until it reached its maximum height of 3.25 meters. The Toughphone hit the ground, bounced and continued to be fully operational with no cracks or dents. The judges were able to continue making calls and sending texts, even after the 3.25 meter drop onto unforgiving concrete.

Guinness specified that the height from which the item is dropped must be measured and evidence of this had to be submitted, alongside the phone being fully functional following the drop. Only superficial cosmetic damage would be tolerated, even a small crack in the screen would have jeopardised the record attempt.

Bob Plaschke, CEO of Sonim Technologies, makers of the JCB Toughphone comments: "From the very start we set out to make rugged phones for people who work and play in rugged environments. We're thrilled that Guinness World Records has recognised the JCB Toughphone made by Sonim as officially the toughest phone in the world.”

The JCB Toughphone also comes IP54 certified against dust, dirt and shock and as well as being fully water-resistant.

Resource - cellular-news

While the arrival of the iPhone has generated a universally positive response from mobile games publishers and developers, the volume of paid-for mobile game downloads has nonetheless flatlined across North America and Western Europe, according to Juniper Research.

The report found that although the retail value of the global mobile games market is expected to rise from $5.4bn in 2008 to more than $10bn in 2013, the potential for growth in many key markets is being dampened by a combination of limited on-portal revenue share for publishers -- meaning that some are exiting the mobile games industry -- and poor games marketing.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, "The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive. The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely, thereby reducing consumer choice in the longer term."

Mobile Games Market to Reach $10bn by 2013 - Growth to Be Restricted by Operators

­While the arrival of the iPhone has generated a universally positive response from mobile games publishers and developers, the volume of paid-for mobile game downloads has nonetheless flatlined across North America and Western Europe, according to Juniper Research.

The report found that although the retail value of the global mobile games market is expected to rise from $5.4bn in 2008 to more than $10bn in 2013, the potential for growth in many key markets is being dampened by a combination of limited on-portal revenue share for publishers -- meaning that some are exiting the mobile games industry -- and poor games marketing.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, "The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive. The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely, thereby reducing consumer choice in the longer term."

The report also found that while ad-funded downloads have increased markedly in popularity, the revenues accrued from advertising are unlikely to be sufficient to provide developers or operators with a primary revenue stream. It argued that, with cost per mille (CPM) rates likely to fall in the face of pressures on advertising budgets, advertising would be largely employed by most publishers as a means of monetising older content.

However, the Juniper study remained optimistic about prospects for growth in regions such as the Indian Sub Continent, Africa/Middle East and South America, where the combination of increased mobile adoption and low levels of penetration of both games consoles and fixed Internet means that the mobile handset has already become the de facto gaming device.

Other findings from the Juniper report include:

• China and the Far East will remain the largest regional market for mobile games throughout the period covered by the report.
• Global revenues from in-game advertising will rise significantly from 2008 to 2013.
• Operators need to reduce data charges further for out of bundle customers to encourage casual mobile Internet usage and thereby stimulate the mobile entertainment market

Resource - cellular-news

Blogger says G1 multitouch capable

From the very beginning, Android has planned to support multitouch. The G1's touch screen is a ClearPad, created by Synaptics—a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance. Synaptics provides the touch interface driver for Android, and will at some time offer "advanced multi-touch gestures for the Android platform." Over at the RyeBlog, blogger RyeBrye has tapped into the unit's multitouch capabilities.

Synaptics offers a touch module that supports a number of single touch and multitouch gestures that include tapping, pressing, flicking and pinching. This gesture support requires no additional interpretation software on the host end, helping to lower processor demands for the screen's host.

RyeBrye writes that by uncommenting critical lines in the Synaptics driver and recompiling the kernel, he replaced his boot image with a version that supported two finger tracking and debug logging. He posted that the feedback returned by the driver includes position information along with finger width and a finger number. The number allows you to track more than one finger at a time.

He then went ahead and tested a variety of one and two finger gestures. He has pastebinned the debugging output for a half dozen tests, so you can review the data yourself to confirm how the G1 screen tracks two fingers.

As to why the G1 does not officially support multitouch at this time, RyeBrye relates feedback from a Google employee speaking off-the-record. That employee suggests that the G1 specs do not specify anything but a single touch screen, so in the future they might source screens without the built-in multitouch capacity. That makes the multitouch capabilities of the current G1 run a nice extra rather than a necessary component for future production lines. At this time, Synaptics is the sole touch interface company in the Android alliance.

Resource - ArsTechnica

800MHz CPU-packing P565 handset appears on ASUS site

ASUS' P565 has been pretty much unofficial until now, though we did see some alleged photos and specs of the device not terribly long ago. The phone has just been officially listed on the ASUS site, however, and we've got a quick rundown of its stats (which are pretty much exactly what we'd seen before). The Glide UI-sporting, HSDPA smartphone -- which ASUS claims is the "fastest business PDA phone" in the world -- runs Windows Mobile 6.1, has an 800MHz Marvell CPU, a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, 256MB flash memory and 128MB of DDR SDRAM, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and a microSD slot with SDHC support. Like we said, none of this is a big surprise, but it's the first official look we've had at the handset, though we're still waiting on word about pricing and availability.
Resource - Engadget

Sony Shows off 12.3 Megapixel Camera Unit for Mobile Phones

Sony has shown off a 12.25 megapixel camera module which the company says can be used within mobile phones - offering the highest megapixel cameraphone on the market today.

Camera Modules

The "IMX060PQ" is a new type 1/2.5 CMOS image sensor "Exmor" for use in camera enabled mobile phones that leverages Sony's proprietary formation technology to realize the industry's smallest unit cell size (1.4µm), and the industry's highest pixel count (12.25 effective megapixel resolution). Sony also announced the launch of "IMX046PQ", a type 1/3.2 CMOS image sensor "Exmor" with 8.11 effective megapixel resolution, and "IMX045PQ", a type 1/4 "Exmor" CMOS image sensor featuring 5.15 effective megapixel resolution.

Sony will also commercialize "IU060F", a type 1/3.2 lens module with 12.25 effective megapixel resolution, and "IU046F", a type 1/3.2 lens module with 8.11 effective megapixels. Equipped with lens and auto focus functions, the two modules are the industry's smallest and thinnest in their class.

Resource - cellular-news

iPhone becomes top handset in U.S., passing RAZR

Move over, Motorola. The iPhone has shaved away your lead in the mobile phone market, passing the RAZR to become the top handset purchased by U.S. adult consumers in the third quarter of 2008, according to the research firm NPD Group. The RAZR had held onto the top spot for 12 quarters.

Consumers are buying more iPhones than RAZRs because there is a "watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality," said Ross Rubin, NPD's director of industry analysis. That means consumers don't care only about looking cool anymore -- they want to look cool with a phone that doesn't have an 18% failure rate.

Research In Motion's Blackberry Curve came in third in NPD's ranking. A different report last week, from Canalys, found that the iPhone had passed RIM and Motorola to gain a 17.3% share in the smartphone market. That report showed Nokia still hanging onto first place globally. RIM could be hurting because the Blackberry has twice the failure rate of the iPhone.

Still, according to NPD, the jump in iPhone sales wasn't enough to stave off a slowdown in U.S. phone sales overall. Phone purchases declined 15% in the third quarter from the same period last year. Revenue fell 10%.

It's unclear if the iPhone rush will continue: NPD said mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards saw the greatest year-over-year rise in sales. About 30% of handsets sold in the third quarter had QWERTY keyboards. And as all of us fat-fingered people know, a tactile keyboard is not one of the iPhone's many assets.

Resource - latimes

China Mobile to Introduce G1

China Mobile is in talks with Google to introduce Android-based G1 mobile phone to China, but it is unlikely to be done before the end of this year, according to Kai-Fu Lee, chief executive officer of Google China.

It calls for close cooperation among Google, the telecom carrier and third-party handset partners to carry it out, says Mr. Lee.

Some local reports say that China Mobile is working closely now with a research team of Google China to lay the groundwork for introduction of G1.

The debut of G1 offers China Mobile an alternative to Apple's iPhone and enables it to demand more when negotiating with Apple for introduction of iPhone. China Mobile has been in talks with Apple since last year about introduction of iPhone.

Analysts say that G1 is most likely to gain the lead to hit the mainland market given China Mobile is a member of the Open Handset Alliance.

In comparison with G1, iPhone's biggest disadvantage is its exorbitant price. Though iPhone has a cool-looking appearance and a perfect interface, it is not open, says Mr. Lee.

Google officially launched G1 on October 22 along with telecom carriers T-Mobile and HTC. The phone was merely priced at USD 179.

Shortly after the launch of G1, Google announced a cooperation agreement with china Mobile, says Mr. Lee. China Mobile will be among the increasing number of mobile phone makers to adopt Android mobile phone operating system.

Lenovo Mobile, the mobile phone unit of Lenovo Group, is scheduled to a Android-powered smartphone along with China Mobile in 2009, disclosed Wang Yan, general manager of the marketing department of Lenovo Mobile during the 17th Beijing International Telecom Expo.

China Mobile is the only Chinese member of OHA, which was set up by over 30 IT heavyweights such as Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and LG. Besides members of OHA, other mobile phone makers can also use Android. The operating system is even available to knock-off handsets rolled out by lesser-known manufacturers in China.

Some say that G1 would not be an iPhone killer. Now that they have had a few days with the first Google Android powered handset, their views have stayed the same.

The Times do acknowledge that the G1 is a good smartphone, and is in the same class as the Apple iPhone, but still has a few niggles that lets it down. Where the G1 wins over the iPhone is the choice of using the touch screen or the QWERTY keypad, great if you hate using a touch screen all of the time.
Resource - cn-c114.net

Kuwait's Hits Telecom enters China market

Hits Telecom announced in a conference that it has bought 30 percent of Cinotel, china's giant telecom, for $60 million to become the first Arab company entering China's market, Kuwait Times reported.

Dr Ali Al-Shamali, Director of the Board Madina for Finance Investment Co. said that Hits will continue its expansion in China by increasing its stake in Cinotel up to 55 percent within a year.

Cinotel operates the fiber optic network which is the main network operator for the telecommunication companies in China, and covers about 32,000 kilometers long, said Khalid Al-Mutawa'a, Chairman of Madina for Finance Investment Co, and Deputy Chairman of Hits Telecom. The owners of Cinotel have an investment bank in Switzerland, a fund in Australia from the telecommunication field, the Chinese partner in addition to Hits Telecom

China is a strategically important destination attracting investors from across the world. It has a strong economy, and it is expected to play an active role in leading the Asian economies due to its geographic nature in addition to its huge population.

Resource - cn-c114.net

Nokia E63 joins the successful Nokia E71 to form a compelling QWERTY messaging device range

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced the latest addition to its Eseries range, the Nokia E63, designed for people who need to manage their business and personal lives equally well. Building on the success of the Nokia E71, the company's flagship messaging device, the Nokia E63 brings the QWERTY keyboard form factor to a broader audience at a great price. The Nokia E63 is expected to begin shipping in the coming weeks for an estimated retail price of EUR 199, before taxes and subsidies.

"Our research shows that people want a device that deals with both their personal and professional lives, but helps them to separate the two. When someone sits down at lunch, they want to update their social network or browse their personal email account and they don't want work getting in the way of that. It's another great case of technology adapting to the people that use it," says Soren Petersen, Senior Vice President, Nokia. "The Nokia E63 is a new proposition for Eseries - a messaging device where people will be just as involved in their social network as they are in their business network."

Whilst appealing to a new group of consumers with a design that feels great in the hand and has two new colors, the Nokia E63 is still very much a member of the Eseries family. Petersen continues, "People use Eseries to access their corporate mail, review their calendar and work in their business network, so the Nokia E63 still includes Wi-Fi connectivity, easy access to Mail for Exchange and dedicated key access to contacts, calendar and email."

The Nokia E63 also has the ability to switch modes with a single key press, switching from a view of corporate mail, appointments and intranet data, to a personal mode with a picture of friends, personal email and shortcuts to favorite hobby blogs or websites. Petersen adds, "The amazing response we have seen to the Nokia E71, which has very quickly become the best selling model in its category, let us know that we are heading in the right direction. People want a rich experience when using messaging, social networks and the Internet. With the Nokia E63 you can enjoy the web, update your status and work meaningfully with multiple email accounts."

The Nokia E63 also includes Files on Ovi, a service where people can get remote access to their PC files even when their computer is offline. Anyone buying the handset will have access to 1GB of online file storage for free.

The Nokia E63 will be available in ruby red or ultramarine blue with a range of multimedia features. Record and view images and videos with the digital camera and bright landscape display, listen to music downloaded from the Nokia Music Store, or a number of other sources, via the standard 3,5 mm audio jack or customize the device through the thousands of applications available for download.

Press materials and photos can be found at www.nokia.com/press

About Nokia

Nokia is the world leader in mobility, driving the transformation and growth of the converging Internet and communications industries. We make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Developing and growing our offering of consumer Internet services, as well as our enterprise solutions and software, is a key area of focus. We also provide equipment, solutions and services for communications networks through Nokia Siemens Networks.
Resource - Nokia

Malaysia Airlines to allow cell phones

Malaysia Airlines on Tuesday unveiled a new service allowing passengers to make and receive calls on their mobile phones while in air on some routes.

Passengers can also send and receive text messages, and use their Blackberry-type devices to send and receive e-mails, Malaysia Airlines, or MAS, said in a statement.

It said the airline teamed up with AeroMobile, a British company, to become the first Asian carrier to offer in-flight mobile phone and data services via satellite with passengers using their own equipment.

Customers can now safely use their mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) during the flight without affecting the aircraft systems and ground telecommunication networks, the statement said.

The service is currently available on a single Boeing 777-200 aircraft, which flies on different days to selected European, Australian and Asian destinations including China and Japan, said the statement.

The system will be installed on all wide-bodied aircraft in the MAS fleet by next year if it proves to be successful, said MAS chief executive Idris Jala.

"This is one of the in-flight service comforts that we are introducing on a trial basis for our customers," he said. "With this facility, we definitely have a competitive edge and firmly believe that both our business and leisure passengers will very much welcome this new service," he added.

Users will be billed on their regular phone bills by their own service providers as with any other international roaming call.

Passengers will be encouraged to switch their phones to silent or vibrate mode when using them in the aircraft, said the statement.

Resource - cellular-news

iriver's wave touchphone hits Korea on March 9th

After teasing us with a touchscreen phone way back at CES this January, iriver has been decidedly mum on the subject ever since, calling what we saw more of a "proof of concept" than a ready-for-market product. Well, that veil has been lifted and we're finally staring at the iriver wave, a touchphone that iriver plans to start shipping in Korea on March 9th of next year with KT, and with other major carriers to follow. Other than a touchscreen, the phone packs WiFi and the traditional kitchen sink approach of Korean PMPs, with multimedia playback, FM radio, e-books and an electronic dictionary. There's miniSD expansion, access to the Bugs Music Service for online music and we're sure a few other perks hidden under layers of Korean spec sheets. Overall the physical design hasn't really changed much from what we saw at the start of the year (looks like that 3-inch, 480 x 272 touchscreen is quite intact), but the software has certainly been refined, and is devoid of many of its original, erm, iPhone-inspired touches.
Resource - Engadget

Next: VMware Tackles Smartphone Virtualization

The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.

VMware was by no means the first to implement virtualization. But it understood ahead of others that virtualization would benefit the low end of the server market based on Intel's x86 instruction set. Now it's testing its ability to virtualize an even bigger mass market, the one for mobile phones.

There were 2.9 billion chips produced last year based on the Advanced Risc Machine or ARM designs. VMware proposes to virtualize the high end of this market so that applications developed for Samsung can run on Motorola devices as well. In theory, they'll run on the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry and Ericsson cell phones as well.

VMware has come up with a 20-30K hypervisor -- one that sips memory rather than guzzles it. The mobile hypervisor slips in between a cell phone application and the mobile device CPU, intercepting instructions from above and recasting them to meet the bare metal needs of the device below. Most cell phones are based on a common underlying ARM chipset design.

Specifically, VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform will virtualize the instruction set for all processors based on the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 designs. Gartner analysts estimate that half of the smart phones shipped in 2012 will run virtualized software.

Virtualization is going to give cell phone application developers added impetus to produce for the "open" operating systems powering mobile devices, including Symbian, Linux, and Windows CE. These operating systems will be driving some of the most competitive devices.

In effect, cell phone applications will become virtual appliances. They will be bundled with a stripped down, optimized version of its chosen operating system, then downloaded to run on a variety of smart phone handsets, ignoring the previous hard boundary between manufacturers and operating systems. The virtualization layer is able to rationalize away these differences.

VMware is basing its virtualization layer that accomplishes this on technology it acquired in October but did not announce publicly until yesterday. The acquisition was Trango Virtual Processors, founded in 2004 in Grenoble, France.

Resource - Information Week