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Setbacks with the internet group’s first handset will see competing products arrive on the market first

Google’s attempt to break into the mobile phone market has hit serious problems in Britain with the launch of its flagship Nexus One device understood to have been delayed until the middle of next month.

The setback means that by the time Google’s first own-branded foray into the market this side of the Atlantic is available to consumers, its local network partner Vodafone will have launched a competing product, which analysts say is better, called the HTC Legend.

While Google has been working with the industry on the Android mobile phone software for several years, the Nexus One, made by Taiwan’s HTC, is the first handset over which the search engine group has had complete control. But launching a new phone has proved more difficult than Google expected.

It was released in the US in January, but Google’s decision to sell it solely through its website immediately came in for criticism as buyers struggled to get help with technical problems, and Google, which has traditionally relied on email for consumer contact, was forced to introduce telephone helplinessupport and the problems it has experienced in the US has given it reason to pause over the phone’s launch outside the US, to make sure it has its customer service operations in place. Last week Goldman Sachs slashed its estimate for Nexus One sales this year from 3.5m units to 1m worldwide.

In the UK, Google will not only sell the phone at full price to any customer who wants to put their existing sim card into it, but it has also teamed up with Vodafone, which will offer the device free to anyone willing to sign a £35 monthly contract.

But the delay in the launch of the Nexus One, which under Google’s original plan would have been available earlier this month, means that it will come after the launch of rival Android devices that analysts reckon are at least as good, if not better. Vodafone, for instance, will be offering the HTC Legend in April which has the same operating system as the Nexus One but is more stylish: being built from a single piece of milled aluminium. Orange and T-Mobile, meanwhile, will both be stocking the HTC Desire – which is exactly the same as the Nexus One, but has an optical trackpad instead of a trackball – from next month.

The delay also means the Google device will be available in the UK only weeks before another hotly anticipated gadget, Apple’s iPad. Several of the UK’s mobile phone companies are finalising deals with Apple to sell the tablet computer to British consumers. Unlike its last mobile device, the iPhone, which was offered through just one exclusive partner for the first two years, the iPad is expected to be available through multiple network operators from the start.

Apple will ship two versions of the iPad in the UK, one that can access the internet using short-range wi-fi networks and one that can also access 3G mobile phone networks. But Apple needs to sign deals with at least one UK mobile network, because the iPad makes use of micro-sims, meaning that buyers cannot just put the sim card from their existing handsets into it. In fact, it will be the first device launched in the UK that uses micro-sims.

Apple said earlier this month that the device will go on sale in the UK towards the end of April but the mobile phone companies believe that the 3G version of the iPad will not be available until May. Orange, T-Mobile, O2 and Vodafone all expect to be selling the iPad to customers and they are all locked in talks with the Californian company. Apple, however, has made it plain that it does not want iPad users to be tied to long-term contracts with any mobile phone operator. Instead it wants users to be able to pay for mobile network access on a pay-as-you-go basis.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Hutchison ‘looking for options’

With the merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK approved by the European Union, the current UK leaders, O2 and Vodafone, will be mulling their competitive responses. So far, Vodafone has mainly focused on revamping its software brands and its higher-value services, but it could also move to acquire the country’s smallest cellco, 3 UK, say analysts.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work

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(Source The Register)

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The European Commission has approved the merger, which will create the UK’s largest operator, after the parties allayed fears over spectrum and competition

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) – T-Mobile, the British arm of Deutsche Telekom, and France Telecom’s Orange won EU regulatory approval on Monday for their plan to merge after they pledged to give up some radio spectrum.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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The most damning indictment of phone hacking is that it was almost always used to get gossip rather than expose wrong

The fact investigators working for the News of the World hacked into my mobile phone to cut me out of a potential £30,000 celebrity scoop is not surprising. If you swim with sharks you expect the odd puncture wound. The fact this process is so simple, swift and apparently routine is shocking.

I called the Sunday tabloid one bright afternoon with the name of a celebrity chef and tales of famous London nightclubs, glamorous hotels and sexual impropriety. The reporter I spoke to was Clive Goodman. He promised me the Screws would pay the most – but something about his conspiratorial tones turned me towards a more gregarious Sunday Mirror news editor.

The News of the World was not going to let this apparent front page get away. A rapid succession of calls to my mobile followed. These allowed the caller to access my voicemail – I had not set a password. My personal greeting gave them my real name and my place of work while the messages revealed the identity of my then girlfriend, who was the source of the story.

Goodman called me on my work mobile and aggressively demanded the name of the chef’s female acquaintance. I refused.

It was after that that my mobile phone records were hacked. T-Mobile confirmed a bizarre call where someone pretending to be me failed the most basic security question – my date of birth. Despite this, the caller was able to try again just 15 minutes later and, this time being successful, he was given a full rundown of my recent calls. He then tried to hack my partner’s phone records.

Phone hacking in this way was astonishingly easy. A few years ago, it seemed to be the default method of some News of the World reporters to use information gained in this way. While other hacks were busy knocking on neighbours’ doors or visiting relatives found through birth and marriage records, journalists from the Screws instantly had a direct line to make their offers of “a life-changing amount of money”.

The true scandal here is not just the use of such illegal methods. The most damning indictment of this chequebook journalism is the fact it was only very rarely used to find real wrongdoing by the rich and powerful. Blagging your way into someone’s phone records would be morally defendable if there was a genuine and compelling public interest. Journalists rightly enjoy more latitude under the data protection act and human rights laws – if there is a real reason for subterfuge.

The Press Complaints Commission code states: “Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest.”

Muckraking has served the public good: by rummaging through the bins of solicitors Benjamin Pell discovered documents showing the then Tory minister Jonathan Aitken had been involved in Saudi arms deals. But how many of the 100 people targeted by the News of the World’s phone hacking will turn out to be rogue arms dealers, corrupt politicians and corporate killers? And how many will be minor celebrities?

The full armoury of investigative reporting – GPS tracking systems and hidden cameras, “lilly-whites” and “honey traps” – was unleashed against footballers, Big Brother contestants and It girls. And now public figures of means can turn to Max Clifford as a form of defence and use “pay as you go” mobiles. So the tabloid hacks turn on less wealthy, less protected victims.

This is an abuse of power by newspapers owned by one of the most powerful media tycoons in the world, Rupert Murdoch. Moreover, the man in charge of the News of the World when this abuse of power was taking place was Andy Coulson. Coulson, we know, jumped ship as the Screws hit the Goodman phone-hacking iceberg and is now captain of spin for the Conservative party as it sails towards power.

This has serious implications. If the Tories win the general election, as predicted, Coulson will be at the very heart of government with an army of civil servants working for him. Yet, by his own admission, when managing a small team of reporters, he was incapable of detecting flagrant criminality on a huge scale.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Orange relied on iPhone to persuade new customers, while T-Mobile dived back into the pre-pay market

Orange and T-Mobile, who are preparing to merge their UK businesses this year, both had a bumper Christmas, but for wildly different reasons. While Orange relied on the iPhone to persuade people to sign-up to long-term contracts, T-Mobile threw caution to the wind and jumped back into the pre-pay market.

But as both companies had to slash prices and offer customers ever more favourable tariffs in order to remain competitive in the cut-throat UK market, they saw margins decline and average revenue per user – a crucial metric for analysts – take a tumble.

In the last three months of 2009, third-placed Orange added 404,000 new customers, while fourth-placed T-Mobile gained 571,000.

Orange’s figures included 266,000 new contract customers, its best ever fourth quarter performance, and four out of every five of those customers signed up to a 24-month deal, suggesting they were either getting an iPhone or another high-end smartphone, such as one running Google’s Android operating system or a Blackberry.

Orange ended O2’s two year exclusive hold on the iPhone in November and sold about 90,000 in the first month.

Orange’s revenues in the fourth quarter were €1.29bn (£1.13bn), down from €1.3bn, including its struggling residential broadband business, which lost 50,000 customers in the quarter and now has just 840,000 users. There has been intense discussion within Orange about closing down the broadband business, selling the customers to a rival ISP, such as BSkyB, but management have decided to hold onto the operation and it is now offering a free 32GB iPhone to customers who sign up for its high-end home broadband package.

Margins at Orange, meanwhile, declined to 18.4%, down 2 points compared with a year ago, while its average revenue per user – across both contract and pre-pay customers – was £21.41 a month in the fourth quarter, down from £24.25 a year ago.

As it does not have the iPhone, T-Mobile, in contrast, put all its focus on attracting new pre-pay users, putting a lot of marketing spend behind its “free texts for life” for any customer topping up by at least £10 a month. In the second half of the year, T-Mobile added 629,000 new pre-pay users, 570,000 in the run-up to Christmas alone.

All but 1,000 of its new customers in the fourth quarter were on pre-pay.

Revenues, however, were down in the quarter to £737m, from £820m a year ago, with margins of 20.1%, down dramatically from 24.8% a year ago.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) was £18 a month, down from £21 a year ago.

In the same period, second-placed Vodafone added 410,000 new customers with ARPU of £20.40, down from £21.5 a year ago, and margins of 23.2%, down from 25.9%. The UK’s largest mobile phone company O2 will report on Friday.

The fact that three of the four largest players in the UK added almost 1.4 million brand new customers means that either O2 and 3 saw subscriber numbers fall off a cliff, or the first quarter of this year will contain a nasty surprise for at least one operator.

It is unlikely that O2 has seen its winning streak come to a complete halt, given O2 boss Matthew Key’s upbeat statements about life since it was forced to give up its exclusive hold on the iPhone first to Orange then Tesco Mobile before Christmas; and then to Vodafone last month.

As a private company, rival 3 does not provide regular figures, but its owner Hutchison Whampoa, which keeps a very close eye on its mobile phone business, would react fast if UK chief executive Kevin Russell had lost hundreds of thousands of customers in the last three months.

For the past few years, 3 has had between 3 and 4 million users and will report financial figures at the end of March.

It is more likely that because of the way in which the mobile phone companies count pre-pay customers as active or inactive that the first quarter of this year will see a balancing of the books. More than half the new customers added in the fourth quarter so far, are pre-pay users and are likely to have switched between pre-pay providers. But while their new network will count them as a new customer from day one – ie in the fourth quarter – the network they are leaving will not count them as inactive until they fail to make a call or send a text within a 90 day period. As a result, they are not likely to have been identified as customers who have defected until sometime in the first quarter of 2010.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• European commission set to approve plan to create UK’s largest mobile phone company
• Proposed merger could still face a challenge from Vodafone and O2

The merger of Orange and T-Mobile looks set to get the go-ahead from the European commission after a last-minute deal was thrashed out over the weekend to secure the future of 3, the UK’s smallest mobile phone network.

The merged business would be the UK’s largest mobile phone company, with almost 30 million customers, and Orange and T-Mobile have agreed to hand back some of the mobile phone spectrum it would own in order to allow this to be used by rivals to run super-fast wireless broadband services.

The commission has yet to inform the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) about its decision, and the merger could still face a challenge from Vodafone and O₂, which are understood to be “lukewarm” about the concessions made over spectrum.

The commission’s decision is a blow to consumer groups that had been campaigning for authorities in the UK to investigate the deal.

This month the OFT formally requested jurisdiction to investigate the merger from the commission, which had until 1 March to give a decision. The OFT will tomorrow publish the reasons why it had asked to be allowed to run its own investigation, although the commission now believes it has dealt with any concerns. It was the OFT’s request that spurred Orange and T-Mobile into action.

Fears that the merger, announced last September, would become clogged up in the UK’s lengthy competition procedure led both companies to come up with a solution that met the concerns of the commission about the deal. The OFT and Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, were extensively consulted by the commission during the process.

The main concern was about the merger’s effect on the future of 3, which has driven price competition in recent years. However, over the weekend, 3, which is owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, signed a new deal with T-Mobile and Orange, which will give it access to 3,000 more mast sites across the UK over the next few years, bringing the total to 16,000, the largest 3G network in the country.

Second, the UK authorities and Brussels were concerned about the level of control that the merged company would have over the scarce resource that is wireless spectrum. Specifically the merged group would have the vast majority of the spectrum granted in the 1990s, when Orange and One2One were launched, at 1800MHz. As reported by the Observer a week ago, T-Mobile and Orange have agreed to hand back a quarter of the spectrum the merged group would hold.

Neither 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, O₂ nor the OFT would comment.

The OFT will tomorrow give its reasons for asking the commission whether it could have jurisdiction over the case, in a stock exchange announcement.

A copy of its reasoning, seen by the Guardian, makes it clear that the OFT’s main concern about any deal was also the future of 3. “The OFT considers that any weakening/elimination of Hutchison 3G would effectively result in a reduction of vertically integrated competitors from five to three and cause significant detriment to competition in mobile retail telephony,” the document reads.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• HTC’s Legend smartphone will come to UK in April
• Analysts hail design classic in same league as Apple
• Vodafone snaps up handset for Europe

HTC has come of age. The Taiwanese mobile phone manufacturer, once known only as the maker of Windows phones under the SPV brand, today unveiled a new phone sporting Google’s Android software which analysts are predicting could steal a march on Apple in the smartphone design wars.

The HTC Legend, which runs the latest Android software called Eclair, is made from a single block of aluminium and has a very bright and clear 3.2 inch AMOLED (ultra-bright LED) display. Vodafone has grabbed the handset in Europe, wary of losing out after missing the iPhone in some of the company’s key European markets.

The Legend will come to the UK in April and already analysts are predicting that it will be a design classic following its launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Legend’s clever use of milled aluminium casing could scoop Apple’s direction for the next iPhone design,” said CCS Insight.

Despite its body being engineered from a single piece of aluminium, the HTC Legend has a removable battery – something which the iPhone conspicuously lacks – which slides out from a compartment at the bottom of the phone. The back of the battery casing also contains the phone’s antenna so that its metal body does not hinder signal strength.

HTC has updated the user face – called HTC Sense – that sits atop Android on the device. Alongside refinements to the phone’s address book, so that contacts can be organised into groups such as business contacts and friends, it pulls information from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter into a single Friend Stream of updates.

The Android platform has been the making of HTC. It created the first phone, the G1, using the software, while the Legend is the new version of another successful Android phone, the Hero. The Legend, however, has a rather less intrusive “chin” at the bottom of the device than the Hero.

Alongside it, HTC also unveiled the HTC Desire, which also uses HTC Sense. It had previously been codenamed the HTC Bravo and several UK operators have been vying to get hold of it as it is essentially the same as Google’s own Nexus One device, which HTC also produced. However, it has an optical trackpad rather than a roller ball, and is understood to be cheaper than the Google device.

Orange said it will be stocking the HTC Desire from April and it will be free on selected monthly tariffs. It is likely to be priced the same as the iPhone, a policy Vodafone is expected to follow with the Nexus One in the UK when it launches next month.

The HTC Desire will also be available in the UK on T-Mobile from 26 March.

The Desire has a large 3.7 inch AMOLED screen, like the Nexus One, and contains the 1GHz Snapdragon processor which is also found on the Nexus One. It includes such iPhone staples as pinching to zoom on web pages while it also automatically recalibrates text so that when you zoom into a page, you do not have to scroll left and right to get to the end of a line.

Crucially, it also supports Flash, which Apple still resolutely refuses to back.

HTC also announced the HTC HD mini, which uses the 6.5 version of Windows Phone rather than the series 7 platform launched by Steve Ballmer yesterday.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Microsoft made a splash by pre-announcing the Windows Phone 7 Series phone yesterday, but it might all be forgotten by the time phones appear for the (Christmas) holiday sales season

Microsoft’s launch of its Windows Phone 7 Series phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday was a huge success if you judge it by the amount of press and blog coverage. But it also provided very few details, including when phones would go on sale. Microsoft says they’ll be out before Christmas, but so will a lot of other new phones.

Microsoft’s list of Windows Phone 7 partners includes Asus, Dell, HP, HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba, and it expects to have phones on most networks, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. In other words, Windows Phone 7 is still a platform. Microsoft hasn’t followed Apple’s proprietary route, though whether phone makers will still have access to the phone’s source code and the right to change it remains to be seen.

The demos showed the Windows Phone 7’s roots in the attractive user interface developed for Windows Media Center PCs and reworked for the Zune HD and the free Zune 4.0 software for Windows*. They also showed the phone’s extensive integration with Windows Live and Facebook, though at the moment, it looks as though Twitter is supported via Windows Live.

Email support includes Microsoft Exchange synchronisation, Live Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other services.

But it’s not clear where Microsoft stands on supporting Silverlight, Adobe Flash, or the still-emerging HTML5 standard.

Silverlight support would be welcomed by companies who want to put their business applications on the phone, and it would answer the objection that — apart from Microsoft Office — Windows Phone 7 phones are aimed much more at consumers than at businesses.

Adobe Flash would be welcomed by many users and web developers, and would give Microsoft a selling point against Apple, which refuses to support Flash. However, the question is still open. The Seattle Times managed to get a quote from Karen Wong Duncan, a Microsoft product manager: “We do not support Flash. We are partnering closely with Adobe. As Steve Ballmer said earlier, we are not opposed to having Flash on the platform.”

HTML5 support would be welcomed by everybody, especially if Microsoft included an expensive H.264 video codec for playing YouTube and other videos without using Flash. But we don’t know what sort of browser will be included in Windows Phone 7 phones, or what its capabilities might be.

Windows Phone 7 also has an Xbox Live connection, and users will be able to score points in multi-player games, but Microsoft didn’t provide details. Apparently we’ll learn more at the Mix 2010 conference in March.

Finally, there has been no mention of what has sometimes been called Pink: the code-name for putative next generation versions of the old Sidekick device. (Microsoft bought the company.)

The lack of detail makes it look as though Microsoft has announced too early. Presumably it couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a splash at WMC, and there’s only one a year. Next year’s congress would be too late….

* This is worth a download if you want something to manage an MP3 player: it’s much nicer than Windows Media Player. However, you won’t be able to use the Zune Marketplace outside the US.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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• Phones with the new software will appear at the end of the year
• Nokia joins forces with Intel to create a free software platform

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer is hoping that 7 will turn out to be a lucky number again. With Windows 7 helping to bury the ghosts of the poorly received Windows Vista in its core PC market, the software group is hoping to repeat the trick with a new version of its software for mobile phones, a device that has refused to yield to the firm’s attentions despite almost a decade of trying.

Windows Phone Series 7 is the result of a complete overhaul of Microsoft’s vision of the mobile phone. It has abandoned its attempts to turn mobile phones into mini-PCs, focusing instead on giving users easy access to social networking, music, video and mobile phone applications. Coincidentally Ballmer’s presentation, at the mobile industry’s annual trade show in Barcelona came hours after the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia revealed a tie-up with chipmaker Intel that is headed in the opposite direction.

The two companies have pooled their software development resources to create MeeGo, a free software platform which they reckon will pave the way for the next generation of wireless communications devices.

Both companies have Apple, Blackberry and Google, with its Android mobile phone platform, firmly in their sights. Fierce competition has eroded Nokia’s share of the market over the past year, and Microsoft fears that if it cannot get back in the game now, it may never manage it.

Ballmer admitted that Microsoft, which has failed to gain any significant share of the mobile phone market, had been forced to “retool and reform” its mobile phone software two years ago. “There is no doubt that the phone market is highly competitive, highly dynamic, super-exciting,” he said. “There was no question in our minds… that we needed and wanted to do something that was out of the box, clearly differentiated from our past and clearly differentiated from other things that are going on in the market.” “We’re taking a big step,” he added. “I hope seven’s our lucky number.”

The first phones using the new software will not appear until the end of the year and Microsoft is being very prescriptive about what they should look like, which has raised questions about whether handset manufacturers will be willing to make Windows Phone devices that they will be unable to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

Manufacturers including HTC, LG and Samsung have, however, signed up, while Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and Orange are all likely to sell the devices in the UK. The proliferation of so-called open source software platforms – such as Android – has raised the question of whether Microsoft, which still charges hardware manufacturers a licence fee to use its Windows Phone software, should adopt the same model.

Refusing, as ever, to actually name Apple, Ballmer spoke about “vertical competitors” – companies that make devices as well as the software that sits on them, such as Apple – saying “their model is really clear, it’s sell devices. We sell software to companies that make devices” and that is not going to change. “My mother used to say to me, if something is free, you should take a look and find out what the real cost is.”

Nokia, however, has become a convert to the idea of open source platforms. Having bought out its partners in smartphone software developer Symbian and made that available free to all developers and hardware manufacturers, it announced a tie-up with Intel under which it plans to do the same for the next generation of mobile devices. Nokia was already working on an open source platform for so-called internet tablets, called Maemo, which it used in its recently launched N900 phone. Now it is merging it with a similar programme which Intel ran for laptops, called Moblin, into a new platform called MeeGo.

“It is the future of how we think people are going to use computing,” said ­Renee James, Intel’s head of software and services. “From Intel’s perspective, we see expansive growth which brings new users to computing and at the heart of that has always been software innovation and that happens when there is a stable platform that developers can bet on being there long-term. So I consider this critical to the long term growth initiatives of Intel.” The first MeeGo devices will start appearing in the second half of the year, but Intel already has hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and Samsung making laptops for its existing open source platform and they will all be moved over to MeeGo.

“They have understood the only way to beat Microsoft, Google and Apple is to do it through scale – get the platform to more devices,” according to John Strand, owner and head of Strand Consult after the announcements at the Mobile World Congress fair.

Immediately dubbed MeeToo by some analysts, MeeGo will create an open source software platform which Nokia reckons will be used in a new generation of wireless devices. Both companies want to attract a wide range of operators, handset manufacturers and software developers.

“This is not a closed club,” said Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s head of devices. “We are inviting everyone into this. “MeeGo will create a new strong single platform that will drive the future of mobile computing.”

The announcement of MeeGo, however, immediately raised questions about the future of Symbian, but Öistämö stressed: “This is very consistent with Nokia’s software strategy. Symbian is the perfect environment for democratising the smartphone, what MeeGo allows is the future of mobile computing … well beyond what can be done with smartphones today.”

The deal may raise some eyebrows at Google, however, as Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini has sat on the Google board since 2004.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

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O2 and Orange are to join more than a dozen mobile groups in a project to pool resources and create ‘app’-style services across their range of handsets

More than a dozen of the world’s biggest mobile phone companies, including O₂ and Orange, are hoping to strike back against the success of Apple in persuading people to download and use mobile applications – or “apps” – by building their own competing open platform which can be used by developers of games and other services.

The mobile networks hope that by pooling their resources, creating technology that would allow services to be developed that will work across a huge range of handsets, they can claw back some of the ground they have lost to companies such as Apple and Google and generate additional revenues from third-party developers.

The mobile phone networks fear that at the moment they are in danger of becoming little more than “dumb pipes in the air”, with all the revenues created by applications going to software developers and the companies that operate the stores that supply them.

Apple has already seen over 3bn apps downloaded from its App Store by users of the iPhone and iPod touch. Google, meanwhile, has an application marketplace as part of its Android mobile phone platform, and several devices sporting the software will be unveiled at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest trade show, which starts today.

But it is not just Google and Apple that are profiting from the “apps explosion”. Steve Ballmer will this afternoon use the Mobile World Congress to unveil Microsoft’s latest attempt to break into the mobile phone industry. Windows Mobile 7 – or Windows Phone, as Microsoft has dubbed it – includes an application store that allows users of Microsoft devices to download a host of games and other applications. Even phone manufacturers such as Samsung and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, are getting in on the app act, while Nokia already has its Ovi store open for business.

Several of the world’s biggest operators are part of the Open API initiative, which allows application developers access to some of the core information contained within their networks, such as location and billing. Essentially an API (application programming interface) allows a developer to integrate its application with another piece of software. The Open API plan, for instance, allows software developers to create programmes that can be paid for by consumers on their mobile phone bills.

But the new consortium, which will be announced by industry trade body the GSM Association at the Mobile World Congress today, is designed to go even further. The recent explosion in mobile phone software – from Apple’s iPhone to Nokia’s Symbian platform, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone – means the “apps” market is becoming increasingly fragmented. Also, consumers who switch from one device to another will soon find themselves having to download – and pay again – for all the applications they had on their old phone just because their new phone uses different software. The operators fear that they will be at the receiving end of the subsequent consumer backlash.

Orange, Telefonica – which owns O₂ in the UK – T-Mobile and several other operators are already signed up to the GSMA plan. Vodafone, however, is ambivalent as it is engaged in an open platform alliance called the Joint Innovation Lab with China Mobile, Japan’s Softbank and Verizon Wireless of the US.

In fact, applications are likely to be a highlight of this year’s Mobile World Congress, with developer workshops taking place throughout the show, helping programmers create for Android, BlackBerry and Vodafone’s recently announced Vodafone 360 platform.

Several companies will also announce their own app developments. Today, for instance, British digital music group Omnifone will announce that it has created a version of its mobile music service that runs on Android phones. Omnifone, which has access to a catalogue of more than 6.5m tracks, is looking for network or handset partners who want to launch an unlimited download or streaming music service on Android devices using its platform. It already, for instance, powers Vodafone’s unlimited music service in the UK and recently clinched a deal to have its MusicStation service pre-installed on Hewlett-Packard laptops and computers. Omnifone is currently developing apps for both the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

Skype, meanwhile, will today announce that it has created a version of its popular free internet telephony service for Nokia’s Symbian operating system, which is already used by more than 200m mobile phones worldwide. Skype is now available as a free iPhone app, which has been downloaded more than 12m times since its launch in April last year.

The Symbian version will initially be available as a download from the Skype website but will appear on Nokia’s Ovi store in the next few weeks. The company, which was sold by owner eBay last year, is planning an Android version for later in the year. Skype, which allows people to call other Skype users anywhere in the world for free, is also expected to announce a partnership with Verizon Wireless, which is likely to raise some eyebrows as in the past the American network’s joint owner, Vodafone, has blocked internet telephony services from its own networks.

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(Source The Guardian)

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A new set of audited figures for mobile internet use, the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics, reveal a landscape with one very tall peak

More than 25% of UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the Internet from mobile phones in December. And what were they looking for? The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics, published for the first time on Friday, provide an insight: on the mobile internet, people want to know what their friends are up to – and perhaps do a bit of flirting.

Facebook has a clearly lead in GSMA’s top 10 UK mobile internet sites, with 5 million unique users against 4.5 million for all of Google’s sites. (Mobile internet users want answers, too.)

And the domination is much greater in terms of times spend online and page views. Facebook had 2.6bn page impressions – nearly three times as many as Google, and more than a third of the 6.7bn total. Nearly half the total minutes online in December were spent at Facebook Mobile – 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn, with Google on 400m in a very distant second place.

One fifth of UK mobile subscribers now tote smartphones, which is driving a rise in mobile interent use. In December, already 25% of UK’s population or 16 million people accessed the internet from their mobile phones and viewed a total of 6.7bn pages.

Besides Facebook and Google, the sites of the mobile phone operators scored well, with spots three to five going to Telefonica Mobile Networks (owners of O2, with all those iPhone users), Orange Sites and Vodafone Group.

Finally, the BBC site on the seventh spot indicates that people are reading the news on the go. Breaking news is also available on the mobile networks’ sites, and those of Microsoft and Yahoo at spots six and eight.

Regarding unique users, Apple’s and Nokia’s site come in last in the top 10 UK mobile internet sites in December. Once you look at page views and time spent online, Flirtomatic – which is integrated into most mobile operator portals – also comes into the picture.

Mobile minutes spent online:

1 Facebook 2.2 bn
2 Google 396m
3 Microsoft Sites 166m
4 Orange Sites 139m
5 AOL (and Bebo) 106m
6 Apple 104m
7 Vodafone 89m
8 BBC sites 84m
9 Flirtomatic 55m
10 Yahoo 49m

The GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report was commissioned by GSMA and comScore in partnership with five UK mobile operators: O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK. It is being audited by ABCe.

Richard Foan, managing director of ABCe, who also chairs the web media standards committee JICWEBS, called the new metrics “a great step forward for mobile media”.

The figures are based on irreversibly anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK mobile operators, collected with consent from a representative sample of mobile users. In addition, Wi-Fi traffic, not seen in the mobile network traffic, is captured in the server-side logs of media owners and ad networks.

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(Source The Guardian)

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T-Mobile shifts 10,000 BlackBerrys per week during Christmas quarter, as BlackBerry Storm 2 9550 debuts on contract and Curve 8520 on prepay

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s consumer watchdog has asked for a say in the planned merger of the UK arms of France Telecom’s Orange and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile, raising prospects of at least a delay to any deal.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Which? campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected British consumers

Consumer groups today welcomed confirmation that UK competition authorities have asked Brussels for permission to investigate the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile.

A spokesman for Which? said this morning that it had campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected UK consumers.

“We have been very keen to have this looked at because T-Mobile and Orange have networks here. This merger affects British consumers and we think it should be looked at,” a Which? spokesman said.

If T-Mobile and Orange merge they would have a 37% market share of retail customers in the UK, or 40% including the virtual mobile network operators such as Virgin Mobile that use the two companies’ networks to run their services.

In December Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel wrote a joint letter to Neelie Kroes, the Brussels competition commissioner, urging a UK review of the deal, which is originally under the scope of Europe because two thirds of the turnover of the parent companies – France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom respectively – is generated outside the UK.

The OFT confirmed to the stock market this morning that it had made a request to the European commission to refer the UK aspects of the proposed joint venture between the two companies.

“The OFT’s initial view, following consultation, is that the joint venture threatens significantly to affect competition in mobile telecommunications in the UK,” the OFT said in a brief statement.

“If the request is granted, the OFT intends to examine the proposed joint venture with a view to deciding whether it should be referred to the Competition Commission for an in-depth investigation,” the OFT said.

If the OFT is handed the powers to investigate, it would delay the plans by the two mobile phone companies to consummate their deal, which was originally announced in September and slated for approval by the Brussels competition watchdogs as early as mid February. The OFT would conduct its own analysis of the situation before deciding whether to refer the tie-up to the Competition Commission for a detailed investigation that could last as long as six months.

The OFT said it had petitioned Brussels under Article 9 of the EU merger regulations.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• Orange and T-Mobile hoped to escape UK scrutiny
• Merger would create country’s biggest operator

The Office of Fair Trading is calling for the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile to be investigated by the regulatory authorities in Britain rather than merely subjected to scrutiny in Brussels.

The news, expected to be announced on Wednesday, will be warmly welcomed by consumer groups that have campaigned hard for OFT scrutiny of the deal. There are fears the merger, which will create the UK’s largest mobile phone network, could hamper competition and force up prices for consumers.

It is a blow for Orange and T-Mobile, currently the third and fourth placed networks in Britain, as it means a further delay to a deal originally announced in September. They had hoped scrutiny of the merger would be confined to regulators in Brussels, with clearance possibly granted as early as mid-February. Orange and T-Mobile have been lobbying the OFT, the telecoms watchdog, Ofcom, and Brussels regulators in recent weeks to try to assuage competition concerns.

But the OFT will inform the European commission that it remains worried about certain aspects of the merger and wants to subject it to further scrutiny, dragging out the process for weeks, possibly months. The OFT is understood to be particularly concerned about the effect on the UK’s smallest mobile phone network, 3, and the merged group possibly having a stranglehold on the country’s mobile phone spectrum.

The OFT’s decision raises the possibility the deal could be referred to the Competition Commission, whose investigations can run for six months or more. The OFT is not, however, believed to be planning to call for an immediate Competition Commission inquiry. Instead it hopes to use the threat of one to wrest a number of undertakings from Orange and T-Mobile.

The deal would give Orange and T-Mobile more than twice the mobile phone spectrum owned by market leader O2 or second-placed Vodafone, and more than five times the amount held by 3. The government is hoping to auction more wireless spectrum over the next few years, including the slice of the airwaves freed up by the switch to digital TV. But before it can start the sell-off, the regulator needs to deal with the capacity the companies already own. Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile all want to upgrade the spectrum they were given in the 1980s and 1990s to carry so-called 2G voice services, making it capable of running 3G mobile broadband. But they all own different parts of the spectrum and 3 has no legacy network capacity at all.

As part of the government’s Digital Britain process, its independent spectrum broker Kip Meek suggested a wholesale restructuring of the airwaves, capping the amount of spectrum any operator could hold in return for freeing up existing spectrum for 3G.

The Orange and T-Mobile merger was announced towards the end of his negotiations. He was able to take it into account but the whole deal has been thrown into confusion by objections from BT, which is threatening to take the government to court.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills extended the consultation deadline on the plan by a month in an effort to appease BT. But the new deadline, this Friday, might not leave time to enact the necessary secondary legislation before a general election. The OFT is concerned the T-Mobile and Orange deal might go ahead with no workable spectrum plan in place and it wants to ensure the merged group does not rule the airwaves.

The merger with Orange could also jeopardise T-Mobile’s network sharing deal with 3. The operator has helped cut mobile prices in the UK and chief executive Kevin Russell said yesterday its two-year-old network-sharing joint venture with T-Mobile – called MBNL – is an important part of its future. The OFT is concerned the introduction of Orange could unsettle the venture, hampering 3’s ability to compete.

“MBNL for us is a fundamental strategic platform,” Russell said yesterday in a presentation to analysts about his network. “It is a fundamental piece of our strategy, any exposure, however remote, to that not being supported by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile is a risk for us we believe needs to be closed off.”

Delays and trade-offs

The OFT has no power to force companies to change the way mergers or acquisitions are structured, but it can threaten to bring in the Competition Commission to run a full-scale inquiry. Many companies would rather reach a deal than go through that lengthy process. Last year the OFT struck a deal with the Co-op: the supermarket agreed to sell 133 stores across the country in return for having its merger with Somerfield passed without a competition inquiry. The stores were snapped up by rivals such as Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. In the spring, the OFT accepted undertakings from Global Radio that it would sell a clutch of radio station in the Midlands – including Beacon, Mercia and Wyvern – to avoid a Competition Commission inquiry into its £375m acquisition of GCap Media, after raising concerns that the deal could harm the region’s advertising market. More recently, the Co-op proposed selling some of its funeral parlours in the south west to gain clearance for its acquisition of Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society, an independent co-operative which as well as being a food retailer is also a provider of funeral services.

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(Source The Guardian)

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New Mobile & Latest Deal News!

The new Nokia X3 has some fantastic deals on T-Mobile’s new tariffs. £20 line rental gets you a free Nokia X3 with 100 mins, 100 texts and unlimited mobile internet, plus £198 cash back. The deal is available now at e2save or Onestopphoneshop.

The Nokia X3 is the first S40 phone to be compliant with Ovi Store. The new X Series has been created for multimedia phones for ultimate entertainment. The X3 is a compact slider phone, measuring 96 x 49 x 14mm. It has been designed to make you stand out in the crowd with metallic colour accents and ‘high tech’ design. A key component of the X3 is its music player which boasts stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and a 3.5mm audio jack. There is also an FM radio that doesn’t require earphones for a signal as the X3 has a built-in antenna.

There is a 3.2 megapixel camera to capture those special moments and you can share them with friends by uploading them straight to Flickr or Ovi, or transfer them wirelessly with stereo Bluetooth. The phone comes with a 2GB microSD card but can be expanded to 16GB, providing plenty of storage for music and pictures.

Compare all Nokia X3 deals

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There were various subtexts and conundrums presented by T-Mobile’s presentations to dealers at its partner conference last month

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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Apple says it will not reveal UK pricing for iPad until its launch at the end of March

Apple has surprised would-be buyers of its new iPad touchscreen computer, saying it will not announce UK prices before it launches at the end of March.

Although it announced US prices for all six versions of the touchscreen “tablet” device with and without 3G connectivity at the launch on Wednesday night by Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs, the UK office said today that there will be no UK prices offered until the launch, expected in 60 days’ time – or 90 days for the 3G versions.

However, the MacWorld magazine website takes an “educated guess” at UK pricing for the iPad, which it predicts will range from £388 to £591 for the Wi-Fi model, and £490 to £693 for the Wi-FI and 3G model.

The iPad is a 9.7in tablet computer with a virtual keyboard which can surf the web, do email, display ebooks and play video. US prices start at $499 for a basic version with Wi-Fi wireless networking but no 3G connectivity, rising to $829 for a 3G version with 64 gigabytes of storage. However iPad users in the US will have to pay separately for 3G data plans being sold separately by Apple’s exclusive mobile partner there, AT&T, which already supplies the iPhone there.

Mobile phone companies in the UK – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – are looking to strike similar deals in Europe ahead of a launch later in the year. The Guardian understands from multiple source that no choice has been made.

Apple initially sold the iPhone through exclusive partners in the US, UK, France and Germany, but for the iPad the British mobile phone networks are not expecting Apple to offer exclusivity. None was willing to comment on the iPad.

Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, commented: “To me, the really interesting thing is what we are seeing is devices designed with how the consumer uses the internet very much in mind, rather than just a computer that was made for business use trying to fit the consumer.”

Bloggers and commentators had mixed reactions to the device. It cannot run Adobe’s Flash software, used by many advertisers and games companies online to create eye-catching motion on web pages, which some see as essential to web browsing. Many women were dismayed by the name: the San Francisco Examiner pointed out that “for North American women the word ‘pad’ means but one thing, a sanitary napkin”. But Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, about the move towards cloud computing, described the launch as “the day the PC died”, saying that Apple “wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age.”

Without a price ahead of the launch it may be difficult for retailers to judge the public’s interest – and so whether the device will sell in large or small numbers. Amazon’s Kindle, which includes mobile networking in the price, only launched recently in the UK, and Amazon has never disclosed sales numbers, though it is reckoned to have sold only about 500,000 to the end of last year.

The decision to keep the UK price under wraps is unusual for Apple, which usually announces UK pricing simultaneously with any launch, and could either indicate concern about exchange rate fluctuations, or a desire to keep people intrigued about the device, or that non-US networks are seeking to sell it with some sort of subsidy.

Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499.

However, Apple has forced AT&T to give up persuading customers to sign long-term contracts in order to subsidise the iPad; instead, it will effectively be available on what in Europe would be seen as a 30-day rolling Sim-only contract such as those offered by O2 and Vodafone.

“It does not look as though it has the traditional subsidy model,” said Harrison. “If you put Wi-Fi and 3G in it, it is actually more expensive not less expensive.”

In a note relating AT&T’s financial prospects following the news, Jonathan Schildkraut, analyst at Jefferies & Co investment bank said the tariffs are “in line with the current data add-on options available with voice packages, and well below the roughly $60 plans currently offered by wireless carriers for a laptop card. The prepaid plan can be activated directly from the iPad and, because there is no contract, can be canceled at anytime.”

Meanwhile anyone who already has a wireless broadband “dongle” under a long-term contract and is thinking about installing its SIM card into an iPad will be disappointed. The iPad is the first mass-market mobile device to use micro-Sim cards, which are smaller than the current range of Sim cards and were designed for small consumer gadgets such as Birmingham-based Lok8u’s range of wireless-enabled wrist watches.

The iPad is also likely to prove a major headache for makers of similar devices, especially Taiwan’s Asus which recently announced plans for its own tablet, and Nokia which last year unveiled a “booklet” computer with built-in 3G. There are also understood to be several tablet computers running Google’s Android software in the works, with France’s Archos rumoured to be planning to release one in March.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Several mobile phone carriers keen to sell Apple’s iPad in the UK

Steve Jobs has fired the starting pistol in the race to bring the iPad to the UK, with several mobile phone operators and retailer Carphone Warehouse interested in selling Apple’s new tablet computer to consumers this side of the Atlantic.

Jobs announced on Wednesday that a version of the device that can access 3G mobile phone networks as well as Wi-Fi will start shipping in the US in April under a deal with AT&T, which already supplies the iPhone in North America. Mobile phone companies in the UK – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – are looking to strike similar deals in Europe ahead of a launch later in the year.

Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse, welcomed news of the Apple device, adding: “To me, the really interesting thing is what we are seeing is devices designed with how the consumer uses the internet very much in mind, rather than just a computer that was made for business use trying to fit the consumer.”

Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, was Apple’s exclusive third party retail partner for the iPhone and Harrison obviously hopes to repeat the experience with the iPad.

“Our perspective is we play in the world of connectivity and particularly mobile connectivity and this device fits well within that; we think there will be a whole range of them. This is an extension of a smartphone perhaps even more than it being a smaller PC. It is much more in the territory that we operate in,” he said

“We have done a phenomenal job with the iPhone and smartphones in general and bringing connectivity is something we would be delighted to talk to Apple about.”

But the AT&T deal shows that Apple may be approaching the involvement of mobile phone operators with the iPad in a very different way from the way that it uses them for the iPhone.

Traditionally, mobile phone companies “subsidise” the up-front cost of hardware – usually mobile phones, but increasingly laptops – in return for persuading a customer to sign up to a long-term contract. The operator assumes it will make the subsidy back over the life of the contract. That is how the iPhone is sold in the US and Europe, while even Google followed this model with its Nexus One, signing a deal with T-Mobile in the US which sees the phone’s $529 price tag fall to $179 in return for signing a contract. Vodafone is expected to sell the Nexus One in the UK at roughly the same price point as the iPhone.

Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499.

But with the iPad, Apple has forced AT&T to give up on persuading customers to sign long-term contracts. Instead the iPad will effectively be available on what in Europe would be seen as a 30-day rolling SIM-only contract such as those offered by O2 and Vodafone.

Customers have two pricing options in the US, a mere 250MB of data for $14.99 a month, or unlimited data for $29.99 a month. That means that while the basic version of the iPad – without wireless capabilities – will start at $499, the 3G version of the device will start at $629. Under the traditional operator model, the 3G version of the device would have been cheaper.

“It does not look as though it has the traditional subsidy model,” said Harrison. “If you put Wi-Fi and 3G in it, it is actually more expensive not less expensive.”

In a note on AT&T following the news, Jonathan Schildkraut, analyst at Jefferies & Co investment bank said the tariffs are “in line with the current data add-on options available with voice packages, and well below the roughly $60 plans currently offered by wireless carriers for a laptop card. The prepaid plan can be activated directly from the iPad and, because there is no contract, can be canceled at anytime.”

“Given the prepaid nature of the service associated with this product, including the no contract/cancel at any time feature, we expect that AT&T would not have to subsidise the device. We would view this as a significant positive – given the large subsidy associated with the iPhone (estimated at up to $400). Additionally, this would imply better overall economics around the device (without the initial margin dilution of an iPhone sale),” he said

“The flip-side, of course, is that the usage patterns of this type of device are unknown. However, given the multimedia capabilities, and the video functionality in particular, we would assume that iPad could be another network hog. This could drive incremental congestion issues on AT&T’s already strained network – leading to further network dissatisfaction, and potentially a need for ongoing higher levels of capital spending”.

In other words, not getting people to sign a contract gives the operator very little chance to factor the potential cost of future infrastructure investment into its pricing plans. Then there is the worry that applications which allow internet telephony – such as Truphone and Skype, which are already available on the iPhone and will port to the iPad – will further erode the network’s profitable voice and text traffic.

Apple initially sold the iPhone through exclusive partners in the US, UK, France and Germany, but for the iPad the British mobile phone companies are not expecting Apple to offer exclusivity. None of the mobile phone companies was willing to comment on the iPad.

Incidentally, anyone who already has a wireless broadband “dongle” under a long-term contract and is thinking about buying an iPad and putting the SIM card from their laptop card into the iPad will be disappointed. The iPad is the first mass-market mobile device to use micro-Sim cards, which are smaller than the current range of Sim cards and were designed for small consumer gadgets such as Birmingham-based Lok8u’s range of wireless-enabled wrist watches.

The iPad is also likely to prove a major headache for makers of similar devices, especially Taiwan’s Asus which recently announced plans for its own tablet, and Nokia which last year unveiled a “booklet” computer with built-in 3G. There are also understood to be several tablet computers running Google’s Android software in the works, with France’s Archos rumoured to be planning to release one in March.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, android, apple, card, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, Deals, drive, free, gadget, gadgets, google, iphone, largest, line, maker, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, nokia, o2, orange, phone, phones, sam, service, sim, Sim Card, sol, sony, sony vaio, sony vaio laptop, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, uk, vodafone, world