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Retail giant
Unilever has extended its outsourcing deal with BT in a contract worth an extra £144m.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Fone Logistics sales director Duncan Edward has joined his former employers at dealer and distributor Activ Telecom

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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Just 99p with free delivery, offer is subject to buying a £10 top up. Available on a choice of networks; Vodafone, T-Mobile or TalkMobile. Don’t delay as this is likely to sell out very quickly.

The Nokia 1661 is frequently one of our most popular phones. It costs less than £1 (limited stock) and it has some amazing cash back deals on contract too. There are no complicated features, it’s just the thing for people who want to make calls and send a few texts. Even though it’s an entry-level phone it does have a couple of nifty tricks. Such as a speaking alarm clock and a built-in torch. Nothing cutting edge but you will find these to be surprisingly useful features!

The Nokia 1661 has six classic Nokia games pre-loaded, including Snake Xenia, Beach Rally, Bounce and Sudoku. It would be unfair to compare them to the impressive 3D games found on high end phones, but they do have their moments and are just as enjoyable, even on the primitive 1.8 inch screen. There’s also a built-in radio and a basic wired headset is included in the box. What a wonderful little phone it is.

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The Sony Ericsson Zylo is out now on The One Plan from 3. For just £28 per month you get 2000 minutes to any network, virtually unlimited texts and free calls to other phones on the same network. It also comes with 1GB of data per month. Amazing value for money. Other tariffs are available from just £13 per month.

The Sony Ericsson Zylo has social networking at its heart and includes a Walkman player for enhanced audio quality. Facebook and Twitter come pre-loaded to get you to the latest wall updates and tweets quickly and easily. Web browsing with HSPA offers a speedy browsing experience with Google Search to help you find the information you need.

The 3.2 megapixel camera features Photo fix, 2x digital zoom and geo-tagging. You can post your snaps on Picasa and Flickr to share the moment with family and friends. The camera can also capture video clips and the pre-loaded YouTube application allows you to upload your clips or view a huge variety of other videos.

The walkman player features shake control, Clear Stereo and Clear Bass to make the most of your music. Listen to your favourite tracks out loud or enjoy stereo sound on a Bluetooth headset. The internal memory can be expanded up to 16GB so you can carry your music collection with you.

Entertainment options include a FM Radio with RDS, video player and video streaming. All message options are included with SMS, MMS, Email and instant messaging.

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This new Android phone from ZTE is available on The One Plan from 3. For just £28 per month you get 2000 minutes to any network, virtually unlimited texts and free calls to other phones on the same network. It also comes with 1GB of data per month. Other tariffs avaialble from £13 per month.

The ZTE Racer sports the Android 1.6 operating system that opens up a massive range of downloadable applications, many of which are free, to boost the already impressive feature set. Styled on a Palm type design the Racer offers an up to date look that will impress.

The front fascia is dominated by the large 2.8 inch QVGA touch-screen display thus providing plenty of space for operation and content alike. 3G Internet access opens up a world of virtual shops, news and sports sites wherever you are, and finally means the laptop can be left at home or in the office. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi and wireless Bluetooth, crucial for today’s need to connect with each other quickly and safely. The ZTE Racer provides entertainment with a FM radio and offers guided navigation with GPS support.

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BT has reached a deal with the CWU union for an “unprecedented” three-year pay deal worth over 9 per cent, the company has announced.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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The pay dispute between BT and the
Communications
Workers Union (CWU) has been settled.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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BT has announced it has reached an “unprecedented” deal with the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) worth 9% over three years.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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We have an exclusive deal for you on the iPhone 4 with nothing to pay upfront. It’s on Orange Solo, costing £47 per month on a 24m contract. It comes with 1200 minutes, 200 texts, 750MB of mobile data and 750MB of Wi-Fi data.

Not familiar with iPhone 4? Want to know what all the fuss is about? The new Retina 3.5 inch display on the iPhone 4 hits you with a clarity of visuals not yet experienced on a smartphone. The individual pixels are so fine the human eye cannot see them and so brings an unparalleled high-definition experience. The 5 megapixel camera takes full advantage of this optical range and offers tap-to-focus, geo-tagging, LED flash/light, iMovie editor and video capture at 720p/30fps.

Multitasking no longer drains the battery and allows the built-in iPod to play music and videos whilst downloading the latest iBook or navigating your journey with the help of A-GPS, maps and a digital compass. The fun side of the iPhone offers 3D motion-sensing game play and the Safari Web browser gives access to more than 200,000 downloadable applications as well as putting the Internet at the touch of your fingers.

In-call features include 2 video cameras that can capture the user as well as their surroundings and dual microphones for a superior quality of sound. Messages are kept in one unified inbox and the menu assists in keeping things organised with applications that can be placed into folders.

The 16GB Apple iPhone 4 has a stylish design with a black stainless steel band and flat glossy surfaces with a fingerprint resistant coating. Truly the must have gadget for 2010, the iPhone 4 is set to make most other smartphones look rather mediocre.

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Plus development of “motoring masterclass” iPhone app costs only slightly less than brand new Audi TT Roadster, and you might be closer to Kevin Spacey online than you think

Enjoy the latest smattering of links, as picked by the Technology team

Dev aims to get Frash running on iPad >> CNET News
Canny developer brings out Frash – an application for jailbroken iPads allowing use of Flash in Safari. We await the tests on battery life etc.


Photo by mikealex on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Government spends thousands on iPhone apps >> BBC News
Freedom of Information request reveals iPhone app development costs ranging from £10,000 to £40,000 – a proposed DVLA “motoring masterclass” app (still in development) costing £40k.

On Twitter, a close-knit network >> New York TimesTell all of your friends: 98% of Twitter users are within six degrees of connection from each other.

Sony drops eBook reader prices – but UK still sky high >> PC Pro
No comment from Sony on why, despite UK price cut, we’re still getting a bum deal compared to our Stateside friends.

Everything you need to know about the fragmented mobile developer ecosystem >> TechCrunchVision Mobile’s extensive Developer Economics research report has some interesting findings, worth bookmarking for later reference. Interesting findings, for example, like app stores having reduced the average time-to-shelf by two thirds, and reduced the average time-to-payment by more than half.

Chrome OS gets ready for gaming >> ReadWriteWeb“Web browsers, like IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, haven’t traditionally been able to detect which way is up. That may soon change for Google Chrome”

The unstoppable “tech support” scam >> PC Pro
PC Pro investigate a cold-calling scam reportedly affecting UK PC owners.

Strong sales lift HTC profit 33% >> Wall Street Journal
Second-quarter unaudited net profit for the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer was $268m, up 33% year-on-year.

Facebook, Twitter, web enrich social lives, says Pew >> eWeek
“A survey by Pew and Elon found that 85 percent of 895 “technology stakeholders” and pundits agreed that the Internet has mostly been a positive force in peoples’ social lives.”

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(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, App Store, bbc, compare, compared, deal, free, google, government, HTC, iphone, latest, line, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phones, moto, new, phone, phones, prices, sony, survey, test, twitter, uk

Finding a good app is sorting the wheat from the chaff. With new releases appearing all the time, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here is a selection of genuinely useful applications to try out on your mobile.

iPhone

● LifeForceTeam Fertility (Back Door Productions, £3.99)

A unique application which provides fertility advice straight to couples, without the hassle of lengthy waiting lists. With advice from Harley Street expert Dr Lawrence Shaw, this application provides a comprehensive knowledge of everything you need to know through videos and text.

● PolyTune (TC Electronics, £5.99)

Polyphonic guitar tuning allows you to tune all your guitar strings at once, instead of plucking one at a time. Available within a pedal for a smooth £75.00, this app provides the same functionality for a fraction of the cost.

iPad

● Brushes (Steve Sprang, £4.99)

This week’s internet hit has been the artistic work of David Kassan who has created stunningly realistic portraits with an iPad and easel. Even if your skills do not match the level of his, you can certainly have fun with this easy to use painting application.

● Live Pitch (Mint Digital, free)

The best iPad apps are designed from the ground up to take advantage of the huge screen. One such example is Live Pitch – which provides real time information with from each World Cup match. A must have for any football fan, provides an entirely new way to experience football.

Blackberry

● UNO (Gameloft, $4.99)

Relive summers of the playing this classic card, number and colour game, UNO is a realistic interpretation of the original game and ideal for those morning commutes.

● Player for YouTube (Smarter Apps, free)

Simple, yet extremely useful, this handy application allows you to watch high quality videos straight from YouTube. Be sure to make sure your WiFi is turned on, or watch your data costs soar with each passing second.

Android

● Pocket IKEA (Go2mobile, free)

Ever tried to remember the name of that BILLY bookcase in the corner? Pocket IKEA allows you to browse thousands of items from everyone’s favourite do-it-yourself furniture store. Avoid the crowds and spend your time somewhere leisurely than trailing around a warehouse.

● National Rail (ATOC, £4.99)

The official application from the all the rail operators, National Rail provides the latest service updates, journey planning, fare information, platforms as well as live departures and arrivals. Essential for any commuter, and more reliable than the train services too.

Java

● iSpyCams (Warelex, free)

Fancy spotting what is happening at Abbey Road? Watch boats floating down the Seine? Check if someone is parked outside your garage? iSpyCams allows you to connect to thousands of free web cams around the world, as well as your own at home.

● UrbanDaddy (UrbanDaddy, free)

Whether you are stumbling around for some fried chicken at midnight or looking for a cocktail bar at lunch time, UrbanDaddy will help you find the best locations. Providing comprehensive guides and articles to the major cities, this is an essential companion to exploring.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, android, best, Blackberry, card, deal, free, iphone, latest, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phones, new, o2, phone, phones, sam, service, sim, test, uk, update, world

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Sooner or later someone was going to challenge the way tariff pricing has been formulated and revolutionise the industry with a new and simplified pricing method that makes sense. So, it should be no surprise to most that it is the 3 network that has taken the initiative and created The One Plan.

The One Plan offers peace of mind and freedom of use by removing the so-called ‘unlimited packages’ that are capped with a fair usage policy that can often cripple users with large and unexpected bills. Instead, The One Plan brings a huge amount of clearly defined free usage that comprises of 1GB of data, 5000 text messages, 2000 minutes to any network any time and 5000 minutes for calling other mobiles on 3.

If you’re thinking about an iPhone 4 then you’ll be delighted to see a SIM only option with The One Plan at a low price of £25pm on a 12 month contract. Pick up a SIM free iPhone 4 direct from Apple for £499 and it works out cheaper than any of the deals available on Orange, O2 or Vodafone.

If you prefer a new phone on The One Plan then 24 month contracts are available. The cost of line rental depends on which phone you choose, it starts at £28 per month for phones such as the Nokia E63 or the LG Viewty GT. The HTC Desire is available for £35 per month.

The The One Plan has placed 3 at the forefront of the UK networks with probably the most attractive and easy to understand price plan that simply makes sense.

Most popular deals on The One Plan

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The Nokia E5 has an utterly superb battery life. With up to 29 days standby and up to 18 hours talk it’s perfect for perfect for anyone who needs an exceptional battery life, such as heavy users or those who travel on a regular basis. One-touch gives access to contacts and social networking sites and with live updates from Facebook posted straight into the contact list keeping up with the latest news and gossip has never been easier.

The latest version of Nokia messaging offers full instant messaging and support for multiple email accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Ovi Mail. For business users Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveller applications are also supported. A-GPS and Ovi Maps with free walk and drive navigation boost the appeal of this 3G handset that additionally connects to the Internet and the Ovi Store in speedy fashion using the HSDPA Web browser.

The 5 megapixel camera works well in all lighting conditions, it has fixed focus and an LED flash. Images, music and video files can be stored onto the 256MB internal memory that can be boosted up to 16GB with a microSD card. Keeping up with the latest news, weather, sports and music releases is simple using the stereo FM radio with RDS and listening in private can be achieved by connecting your own favourite headphones to the 3.5mm audio jack. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and quad-band international roaming. The 4 row QWERTY keypad with dedicated nav-key fits nicely into the ergonomic design of the superb Nokia E5.

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Deal with 20:20 sees Unicom join the distributor’s ‘premier partner’ club where it will purchase all mobile devices through it exclusively

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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Subscribers to discount website Groupola can pick up handset for £400 less than Apple charges – if they are quick enough

A discount website specialising in ‘city deals’ is offering users the chance to purchase the new Apple iPhone 4 on 1 July for just £99, compared to the £499 Apple charges . Groupola.com only has a limited number of handsets available and is offering them exclusively to its email subscribers.

It says it is able to offer such low prices because it relies on group-buying to regularly offer discounts of up to 90% on events and products across the UK’s major cities and tourist attractions.

O2 is selling the 16GB iPhone 4 for £209 if you sign up to an 18-month contract and spend £30 a month, while Vodafone wants £219 for the 16GB version if you also spend £30 a month for 18 months. You can compare packages here.

Mark Pearson, managing director of Groupola, says: “Given that the iPhone 4 sold out through pre-orders alone in just 48 hours through the Apple store, we thought it was only right to offer loyal Groupola.com discount hunters another bite of the cherry. We’ve proved that the concept of group buying can work within the UK.”

To purchase the iPhone for £99 you need to be an email subscriber, so you’ll need to visit the site and sign up to receive daily alerts. You will be sent a link on 1 July which will allow you to purchase the phone on 2 July on a first come, first served basis.

“My advice is to open the link the second the clock ticks over at 9.30am – by 9.31am you may already have been too late,” adds Pearson.

The firm has admitted that the deal is a loss-leader and there is only a limited number of phones available. It has also said that people can easily unsubscribe from the daily alerts should they wish to.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, apple iphone, charges, compare, compared, consumer, contract, deal, Deals, email, iphone, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phones, months, new, o2, phone, phones, prices, sol, uk, vodafone

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Free on Vodafone with 9 months half price line rental via redemption cash back. Great deal on Samsung’s stunning Android phone with its 4 inch Super AMOLED display.

The Samsung Galaxy S has the Android 2.1 operating system and a high performance 1GHz processor to provide a superb user experience via the TouchWiz interface. The 4 inch super AMOLED display and resolution of 800×480 pixels place this smartphone in league of its own.

Web browsing is provided by a 3G HSDPA Internet connection and ensures the experience rivals that of a home computer or laptop. Google Talk, YouTube and a media player are but a few of the features the Galaxy S gives access to and with A-GPS support and Google Maps nothing has been forgotten in this must have package. The 5 megapixel camera utilises image stabilisation and auto-focus to capture high quality pictures and has the flexibility to be used as a HD video recorder.

Connectivity options include Bluetooth and quad-band reception for a better experience when overseas. SMS, MMS, instant messaging and email access ensure you can keep connected by your choice of format wherever you may go. Dimensions of 122×64x10mm make this smartphone pocket friendly and at only 118g it can be carried around almost unnoticed. The Galaxy S comes with 8GB internal memory, which can be upgraded with an additiona 32GB microSD card.

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The chief executive of the search giant believes smartphones will empower the poor and is the equivalent to the arrival of TV

Phenomenally successful, but also imitated, envied and feared – Google is the technological icon of our time. But is its ubiquity and influence a force for good?

Chief executive Eric Schmidt has no doubts. He tells the Guardian that Google has been instrumental in a generational shift in democratising information. “Over my lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access to most of the world’s information, to virtually everybody in the world having access to virtually all of the world’s information,” he said. “That’s because of web search, cheap phones and automatic translation. That’s a pretty amazing achievement and Google is part of that.”

Yet with Google active in so many areas, from shopping to video and translation to music, its competitors are becoming more numerous and opponents more vociferous. Schmidt admits: “We try to do everything … We don’t shake off the big goals.”

In an interview ahead of his keynote presentation at the Guardian’s Activate Summit on Thursday, he makes it clear Google is positioning itself for the future through mobile, with the development of its Android mobile system and with subsequent Google-branded handsets. He is keener to talk about this area than the battle with newspaper groupss such as News International, whose paywall model is partly based on what it considers Google’s parasitical attitude to original content.

The mobile battle pitches the three biggest tech firms against each other: Google, Apple and Microsoft. Analyst Gartner puts Android as the world’s fourth most-popular smartphone operating system in the first quarter of 2010 – ahead of Microsoft in a market it joined less than two years ago but behind Symbian (Nokia), Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Apple.

“I believe that the very best engineering is now going on the mobile devices — the hardest problems and the most clever solutions,” says Schmidt. “You know who the person is and where they are, and you don’t get that from a desktop app.” The 50,000 apps built for Android, mostly by third-party developers, cover almost every topic, but the one killer app is still Google itself, says Schmidt.

Schmidt describes how our online lives are now more personal, social and mobile. “When people are awake, they are now online, and that has a lot of implications for society and for Google,” he says. Google’s secret, he adds (though it’s not much of a secret), is that it can handle more data than its rivals because it has larger networks and data centres. Google in effect pulled its business from China earlier this year after moving the operation to Hong Kong, bypassingChina’s censorship regime. Google, whose company motto is “Do no evil” had been heavily criticised for its decision to do business in China and its rethink was welcomed by the industry. It also increased pressure on rivals who still operate there.

“Google doesn’t necessarily do things that other companies do. We have our own set of principles that we work hard on. In the China case, the decision was made not for revenue – it was about what we were willing to deal with. We want to be a good global citizen and we believe very strongly in the openness of information.”

Another key push from Google is encouraging governments to open information to the public, via formats that developers can build useful public services around. One recent victory for open data campaigners in the UK was Transport for London opening its travel data for commercial use, but the coalition government has indicated it may establish a broader public “right to data” that will have to be provided by local and national authorities.Schmidt says Google’s policy is to encourage governments to open their data to the public. The California-based company has teams helping to prepare “non web-resident” archives and databases for the web. “It is no longer acceptable online for government researchers to publish documents read by 500 people in printed form,” he says. “It needs to be web first.

Once that happens, there are lots of interesting things you can do to correlate real-time information, if that is what is needed, or put it on a map … government services are fundamentally about where people are, about what is going on in my town or my school.”

These projects are just as relevant in developing countries, where the introduction of smarter, cheaper phones has created a powerful network. How does Google help developing countries break through the digital divide, and ensure the opportunities of the web are open to all? “Hardware manufacturers are being incentivised to make higher volumes of lower-priced mobiles, and prices have fallen dramatically. But a young person now in pretty much any country, if they have a mobile device, can get access to pretty much all the world’s information and get it translated into their own language.”

Arriving at Google in 2001 after a career spent in Silicon Valley, Schmidt is still excited by its possibilities. “That’s a big news thing – that’s equivalent to the arrival of television.”

For more information on the Activate Summit, visit guardian.co.uk/activate

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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The Nokia X6 now comes in this special V Festival edition, called the X6V. It includes 25 free music downloads via the Nokia music store, free Bluetooth headphones worth £49.99 and V Festival and Shazam apps pre-installed.

The Nokia X6 has an impressive 3.2 inch touchscreen that covers almost the entire front of the phone. It’s pocket and palm friendly measuring 111 x 51 x 13mm and it’s great for watching movies with the 16:9 aspect ratio screen. With 16GB of internal memory there’s plenty of storage too. The X6 runs on Symbian OS v9.4 and has a 434 MHz processor, which is enough to compete with many other smartphones in its class. The new X Series range from Nokia with replace the XpressMusic range, it will focus on entertainment and social networking.

The X6’s TFT capacitive touchscreen gives a crisp, bright image and comes with scratch resistant glass. There is a built in accelerometer for automatically switching the screen from portrait to landscape, for widescreen images and videos. For texts and emails the X6 also supports handwriting recognition. A 5 megapixel camera is the same unit from the N97, it has Carl Zeiss optics, auto focus, LED flash and geo-tagging to take fantastic images and stamp them with their exact time and location using GPS. The camera also has video recording capabilities and there is the ability to edit images with software provided.

Connectivity-wise, the Nokia X6 has all the usual features you would expect in a smartphone, 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and a microUSB slot to transfer files with or without wires. To ensure you never get lost the X6 has Ovi maps sat nav pre-installed, which is now subscription-free. The X6 combines style and technology to bring a fantastic, feature packed flagship phone to the new X Series range.

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Tags: 3, all, compare, deal, Deals, email, free, latest, latest deal, mobile, n97, new, new mobile, nokia, palm, phone, phones, sam, test, Touch, xpressmusic

The transcript of the phone call earlier this week with Google’s chief reveals the real signals he’s sending out: Android wants to be the Windows of mobile phones

Android is getting too big to ignore. Photo by mathrock on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Below is a transcript (taken with shorthand, contemporaneously) of a conference call with Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, on 23 June. There may be some inaccuracies. After that, there is an analysis of what Schmidt said – and where the mobile market is.

Also on the conference call were journalists from Germany, the UK and Brazil. I won’t indicate here who asked what questions; see if you can work it out.

Call begins

Eric Schmidt: Verizon is just announcing the Droid X made by Motorola, its fourth Android phone. We have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of Android. This is one of the best phones ever made, on the very fastest network.

We’ve now got 160,000 new users per day. That’s a 60% increase per month [compared to the 100,000 figure per day that was given at the Google I/O conference in May]. If you get an increase like that going on, well, I’ve done the maths, and it looks like an incredible trajectory.

[That equates to 58m per month, a 60% increase month-on-month would mean that by the end of the year there would be about 16m Android phones being activated every day, or 480m per month - which doesn't really sounds feasible. Obviously it is going to tail off or even slow down at some stage.]

Counting the number of apps, there are 65,000, compared to 50,000 a month ago. So the growth is accelerating. OK, questions?

Q: How large is Android in the US market and European market compared to the iPhone, because it hasn’t done too well in Europe?

ES: I prefer not to talk about the iPhone as a competitor. The growth rate is very very strong, but I don’t think it’s really appropriate to make claims about market share.

Q: What’s driving that acceleration?

ES: having multiple hardware partners – LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola. The thing is it’s a totally open platorm, so open that the source is available too. Any application can run on Android as long as it doesn’t damage the network.

Q: Android is lagging in Europe compared to the US – why do you think that is?

ES: I don’t know that it’s lagging; I would have to look at the numbers. It was launched first in the US but we have enough European partners. The Droid phone was a big driver.

Q: Have you made any contacts with Nokia to discuss Android on Nokia?

ES: We have talked to everybody… I don’t want to talk about any specific companies. [A rather odd response which tailed off amid expectation.]

Q: What sort of revenues are you seeing from Android?

ES: We make zero from it. Because it’s free. (Q: but you get advertising revenue from it…) We don’t break out what our mobile advertising revenues are… [in general] we make money when people have powerful broadband devices so we invest in Android so that people can invest in it. But our mobile revenue growth is very very quick.

We know that there will be a great deal of money made in ads from the mobile industry.

Q: Do you think Android can become for mobile what Windows was for the PC?

ES: well, the thing about Android is that anybody can use it.. Android in many ways is better than Windows because it’s free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point. So anybody can build on Android, and it’s free.

Also Android has GPS and a full media stack [possibly misheard], so it can do things that even the ordinary PC doesn’t have and might never have.

Q: Who is your biggest competitor in this fight – Apple, Nokia, who?

ES: I try to spend time not focussing on those questions. Nokia has the largest market share, certainly. Apple, I was a proud board member there, I respect them. Nokia and Apple are both highly organised to be competitive.

Q: Isn’t a problem with Android that of fragmentation of the platform – that some handsets can’t update from earlier versions either because of the networks or the phones, so people are stuck on older versions which means you’re trying to cope with a broad range of versions?

ES: That’s a very good question. The first thing to say is that the networks are quite interoperable. Some phones shipped a year ago can’t be upgraded. But most can be, to 2.2, though it might take some months to roll out.

The argument about fragmentation has been used by competitors of open source for years. But we agree to support compatibility at the platform level. It’s important to understand this. Android apps will work on the current generation; any Android app written for one version will run on any phone with that version. That prevents fragmentation. Apps are written on a per-OS basis. But of course not every app written for any version will run on every version of Android – otherwise the platform couldn’t evolve.

Q: A team at Larva Labs estimated that while Apple has paid developers $1bn from App Store revenues, the comparable figure for the Android Marketplace is about $200m. Is enough money going to developers to make Android attractive?

ES: Well, I haven’t seen those figures, so I can’t talk to them. The thing is, developers go where the volume is. That’s the most important lesson from platform economics. It’s about scale and volume. It’s very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.

Q: We’ve seen other companies talking about Android-based tablets – does Google intend to produce a tablet running Android?

ES: We’ve seen a number of announcements from other companies about tablets running Android. It’s a reasonably obvious product extension that people have announced. We haven’t announced any form of Google tablet.

[end of interview]

Analysis: the timing of this announcement – on 23 June, just as Apple’s iPhone 4 was reaching its first customers – was clearly aimed at taking some of the shine off the iPhone announcement by implying that even if Apple activates 1m iPhones in the first sales burst, Android will almost match that in a working week. (Do the maths.)

That of course leaves out all sorts of maybes, gotchas and provisionals: are the activation figures volatile? What’s the churn like – how many of the activations are new customers, and how many are renewing customers? An interesting calculation from the analysts Piper Jaffray, via Fortune suggests that (in the US, at least) 77% of iPhone 4 customers were existing iPhone users.

You can look at that two ways: what an enormous number of renewals! Or you could look at it from the other end: wow, Apple grew its customer base for first-day iPhones by 23% – among people who had to wait in enormously long lines. What’s the last consumer product you recall people queueing through the day for? I recall how Microsoft managed the hype machine perfectly for Windows 95, with midnight store openings; rather less so for every subsequent OS release. The Xbox 360 got some dedicated queuers too.

But in truth, Schmidt really isn’t looking at iPhone sales; he’s not trying here to court buyers dithering between iPhone and Android. This was actually a piece of dog-whistle PR aimed at mobile developers.

Unfamiliar with dog-whistle PR? It’s like dog-whistle politics: aimed at a particular group, couched in terms which don’t say a lot to the average person, but which zero in on that target group and make them sit up. The people who Schmidt wanted to hear this latest bit of PR are mobile developers. He wants them to multiply 160,000 by 5 (working days – perhaps 6), and then by 4, to reach about 4m Android phones being activated per month, and to get them to think that this is a really good platform to be building for.

That’s the point of his “platform economics” answer. Google can only capitalise on mobile advertising once it gets Android to a specific market share. It seems like that it has already crossed it, since it’s by all accounts bigger than Apple in smartphone share in the US (and may even be challenging RIM, though still some way behind Nokia). What the numbers are like for Europe – well, we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the end of the quarter for all those numbers.

The interesting challenge though will be whether the Android platform will indeed become the Windows of mobile. That could cut both ways: sure, the handset makers don’t have to pay a levy to use Android (as PC makers do to Microsoft). But when they go to the networks (who are the equivalent, in this scenario, of PC purchasers) they may find that they’re forced to bid down, and that their margins get eroded as more rivals pile into the market.

Apple, meanwhile, can be entirely happy with not having the lion’s share of the market, yet making a colossal profit from both the hardware sales (because nobody else can make an iPhone) and the app sales. It does exactly the same in the computer market: it has about 5% market share worldwide, yet makes a stonking profit on every computer sold. PC manufacturers, by contrast, have long since reached the point where price-cutting to win share simply opens a vein in their profits.

Android could thus win – and for Nokia, the idea of using Android must look ever more enticing, since it would cut costs and let it use its heft with the networks to win back share – and yet the hardware makers would lose. That’s a great danger – not imminent, but it exists – for Schmidt, Android and Google. By creating a flourishing ecosystem of app developers, Android could make life better for the handset makers.

Oh, and the company we haven’t mentioned here at all, except in passing? Microsoft. If you look at what the Android and iPhone platforms are now doing, you have to ask how on earth Windows Phone – which will have a paid-for licence – is ever going to attract any handset makers. Schmidt’s Android dog whistle might be loud for iPhone developers annoyed at the company’s capricious treatment of their apps, but it must be loudest for developers considering whether the shrinking, forwards-incompatible pool of Windows Mobile phones is really worth bothering with.

Between the handset makers pondering the economics of paying for a Windows Phone licence, and developers wondering why they should write code for a platform, Windows Phone, that’s presently activating zero phones a day – because it hasn’t been released – versus one doing 160,000 per day, Microsoft has a real problem with Windows Phone. Apple can survive Android because it has that 77% base of loyal customers. Android has an expanding customer base.

But what on earth has Microsoft got?

* I asked the questions about fragmentation and Larva Labs.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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