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Report for app store GetJar forecasts number of downloads will rise from 7bn in 2009 to almost 50bn in 2012

Mobile app downloads are expected to increase from more than 7bn downloads in 2009 to almost 50bn in 2012, according to a report.

The independent study, carried out by Chetan Sharma Consulting for Getjar, the world’s second biggest app store, forecasts that the global mobile application economy will be worth $17.5bn in 2012, more than CD sales, which it predicts will be $13.83bn.

It says that market will continue to grow exponentially as mobile devices become as powerful as computers, and wireless networks deliver consistently higher bandwidths. “With the consumer appetite for mobile apps rocketing, the opportunities for developers are huge,” says the CEO and founder of GetJar, Ilja Laurs.

The study says that initially the focus of making revenue from apps was based entirely on paid downloads or subscription-based models, but this is going to change. Today, advertising-based revenue accounts for about 12% of app revenue, but by 2012 this figure is expected to rise to 28%. For some platforms such as Google’s Android, advertising revenue is predicted to be even bigger than revenues from paid downloads.

The price of mobile applications ranges from $0.99 to $999 but the average selling price in 2009 was about $1.90, the study says. Over the next three years this is predicted to decrease by 29% and apps will get cheaper; however, advertising revenue derived from apps is likely to stay relatively flat.

By 2012, so-called “offdeck” apps that are offered independently from a carrier will be the biggest revenue generator, accounting for almost 50% of all app revenue. By comparison, in 2009, apps available from mobile operators still accounted for more than 60% of all app revenue, but this will fall to just under 23% by 2012.

As the WSJ Digits blogger Jennifer Valentino-DeVries points out, the study will by no means be the last word on the subject, but it provides at least a look at why so many companies are excited about mobile.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, android, App Store, blog, cheaper, compare, comparemobiles.com, comparison, consumer, global, google, growth, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, sol, three, uk, world

The Conservative Party’s decision to wait three years before considering
whether to use a portion of the BBC license fee to implement 100Mbit/s speeds by
2017 could backfire, according to research firm Point Topic.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, bbc, compare, comparemobiles.com, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, three, uk

Orange and MVNA partner Transatel target SMEs primarily, with new MVNO deals with fixed line providers Unicom and Axis Telecom, and also with niche operative Catalyst

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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The company’s chief technology officer said he expects a launch of mobile handsets with 4G capability within three to six months after launching its 4G network

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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Woo! Convergence!

Ninety per cent of a game’s source code can now be shared between an Xbox, a PC and a phone – assuming one wants an Xbox game on a three-inch screen.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

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(Source The Register)

Tags: 10, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, phone, sol, source the register, three, uk

Why the collapse in online advertising might be leading you to read pretty much anything about Apple’s new gizmo

Hey, have you heard? Apple’s iPad is having production problems! And it’s not having production problems! Also, it’s going to cost £389! Or possibly less, or more. And in the UK the 3G version is going to be exclusively on Vodafone. As well as being on Orange and O2. Also, it’s going to be released in the UK two weeks after the US, where it’s being released on March 26, or actually 29th, except it’s being released at the same time. And it’s going to cost..

OK, enough breathless murmery. Let’s clear the air. There is an astonishing amount of speculation going on about Apple’s iPad. Very little of it seems well-founded – or even grounded in logic.

The facts about the iPad: Apple hasn’t given a precise launch date; “60 days” was the best Steve Jobs had on 27 January. It’s not given one for the UK either. It hasn’t said how much the various models will cost in the UK. It hasn’t said whether the 3G mobile-connected models will be available in the UK (though it’s expected) and it hasn’t said which network(s) it will be going with.

Which is about par for the course for some Apple products. And of course is enough for ever so many “news” stories.

Let’s start with some of the things where people are prepared to put their names to the claims. The Register reports that Vijay Rakesh, an analyst at ThinkEquity analyst, told investors in an advisory note on Thursday that checks with manufacturers suggested “some minor delays” in ramping up production for the tablet. They can only make 200,000 to 250,000 iPads per month at present; production may not hit 800,000 to 1m units per month until at least April.

“We believe this is just a minor hiccup in a longer-term entirely new revenue stream and product road map for [Apple],” Rakesh wrote.

Earlier this week another US analyst, Peter Misek at Canaccord claimed that “unspecified production problems” will hold initial availability to about 300,000 units – and said Apple may keep the iPad to the US only or delay the launch into April.

This was then contradicted by DigiTimes – usually the fount of unspecified vague insights into the Taiwanese and Chinese computer manufacturing insights which turn out to be bang on 50% of the time, and completely off the other 50% – which was told by Foxconn Electronics that everything’s on schedule and that it should be able to ship between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads this month.

Apple said.. nothing. Conclusion: they all could be right. The iPad was announced in January, and if Foxconn has been making 200,000 for a couple of months, it’s got a nice stockpile sitting waiting for a container ship. Meanwhile Foxconn could be ramping up production towards that 800K figure. So we conclude: forecasts of a US-only launch unlikely to come true. And “delays into April”? Remember that at the launch (scroll to 7.22pm) Steve Jobs announced that they Wi-Fi only models would go on sale in 60 days, the 3G models in 90 days because they “require approval from carriers”. 90 days from the iPad launch takes you… into April.

OK. Assume that it is going to launch in the UK at about the same time as in the US. Two questions: how much will it cost? And which networks will the 3G version be available on?

The cost question is interesting. Apple has told us it won’t announce the UK price until it launches at the “end of March”. We’ve done our own calculation (helped by Macworld) which gives us a starting price guess of £424 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only (Macworld suggests £388), ranging up to £705 for the Wi-Fi/3G 64GB model (Macworld: £693).

And which operators? No clues. Obviously, we speak to our contacts there; but so far they’ve had little to offer.

So what then are we to make of the sudden flurry of emails recently from really small sites (and I do mean really small) which claim to know the launch date and/or chosen carrier?

Here’s an example I received recently: “We just got word on Vodafone being the official launch partner of the iPad in the UK, direct from Vodafone. Details in the below blog post. This is from the same guy who provided details that O2 would be the Palm Pre’s UK carrier well before announcement.”

And a link to the site. But we’re not going to link it here. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Then there was the email from another site which said it had the price for the low-end iPad: “We are pretty confident regarding the pricing, the tip came from a source who works closely with Apple UK, obviously we can’t say much more about this.

“We are 99% sure that the base model will be £389, regarding the other prices of the 32GB and 64GB models, our source said that these are likely to be the prices, although he did mention that the prices on the last two aren’t set in stone as yet.”

(I should point out that the other site didn’t approach me; I contacted it to ask how sure they were of their sources.)

Hmm, so have we missed a trick? Are we getting blown out of the water by dedicated bloggers running niche sites who have contacts in just the right places? Perhaps. But consider another possibility. I spoke to someone who has very good contacts in the mobile phone industry.

The reply: “My source at Voda says nothing signed yet but is checking, also it’s kinda weird but [the person quoted in the Vodafone story] left a year ago.”

So why the certainty in that story? My contact noted: “There are going to be more and more stories like this as the collapse in online advertising has pushed sites into e-commerce and they need the links from [the Guardian] to push them up the [search] rankings. There are quite a few mobile phone so-called bloggers already in the UK who are actually little more than affiliate channels for the mobile phone operators. That’s often how they get their stories. Watch the links when you click through, it’s often quite instructive. There is, for instance, a very well respected UK mobile phone blogger who gets a lot of very good Orange scoops. Of course he does, my mates at Orange point out, the other half of his business is a retailer for Orange so he finds out about new phones at the same time as the rest of the channel. Is that journalism? Who knows these days.”

We conclude: the maths suggests that the iPad will very likely come in around the £389-£399 mark (we like the Macworld number better than ours, which by being above £400 isn’t a marketing-friendly price sticker). Networks? Whichever ones can handle the micro-sims that the iPad uses. Given that Apple is still with only one network in the US, but in the UK has signed up three (O2, Orange and Vodafone; Tesco is a virtual MNO), it’s hard to know whether it will try to be a kingmaker again or prefer to spread the love like butter among them all. Rationally, being on all three (while making them think it’s exclusive until it’s announced) would be better for sales – people could just add an iPad plan to their existing contracts.

OK? We hope that puts your minds at rest about prices and operators. As for launch dates… well, Apple traditionally goes with Tuesdays or Fridays. Strictly, 60 days from the iPad announcement puts you on Sunday 28 March, so take your pick: Monday 29th, or Friday 26th? Or might it get pushed further along? As for the 3G version, if there’s a 90-day delay, then you’re not going to see it until April 27 (on the 90-days-from-iPad-ground-zero principle). So even that US analyst could be right.

And remind us what you’d be buying an iPad for? We’re interested to hear.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, best, blog, compare, comparemobiles.com, contract, email, launches, line, maker, marketing, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, o2, orange, palm, phone, phones, prices, released, sam, sim, sol, three, uk, vodafone, world

‘We succeed because we celebrate failure’

Google’s European sales chief says that desktop PCs will be “irrelevant” in three years.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

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(Source The Register)

Tags: 10, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, sol, source the register, three, uk

People are buying increasing numbers of smartphones, but are they living up to the media hype? Fanfare thinks not….

Smartphone sales are growing fast, but “57% of smartphone users are disappointed with handset and application performance,” claims a report from Fanfare (PDF: registration required). However, the results reflect a very small sample: “155 members of the public” and “the survey was conducted online and filled in anonymously,” so don’t bet your lunch on its applicability to the Great British Public.

Most of the issues appear to be internet related, with streaming media, web browsers and social networking applications causing the most problems. And then there’s the part that could be important to Fanfare, which offers automated testing services:

“55% of respondents cannot tell whether individual problems stem from the handset or the mobile network and, as a result, 53% instinctively blame the smartphone manufacturer whenever an issue arises.”

Dissatisfied smartphone users typically tell their friends and family (57%) and social networking sites (58%), which could have a negative effect on sales. Indeed, it makes social networks much more of an influence on purchasing than “traditional media” (by 64% to 40%).

Fanfare marketing man David Gehringer says: “The Apple App Store and Android Market have served up billions of app downloads, giving smartphone owners the ability to use their phones in new and exciting ways. But now that the novelty is wearing off, users want their applications to be more reliable.”

The report says:

“Looking ahead, three quarters of respondents (74%) believed that handsets will become less reliable and that this is unacceptable. The vast majority (88%) said that they are happy to wait until handsets have proven reliability before purchasing – suggesting consumers are becoming more cautious as a result of negative experiences.”

I’d like this to be true, but I can’t really see much evidence. It seems to me there’s a big fashion element to smartphone sales and (based on a much smaller sample than 155) people like being one of the first to own a sexy new gadget. How well they can make it work it is another matter.

Nor is this a criticism of media darlings such as Apple’s iPhone, HTC and Google Android phones, various BlackBerry handsets and the odd Palm. All of these seem more reliable and usable than what I remember of the Nokia 7110 or 8110 (The Matrixphone), while disappointed iPhone owners seem to be a very rare breed indeed.

So, are you happy with your smartphone, and if not, is the backlash about to start?

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, android, App Store, apple, Blackberry, blog, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, gadget, google, HTC, iphone, line, marketing, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, nokia, palm, phone, phones, sam, service, sol, survey, test, three, uk

Music phone offers

After Nokia’s sexy X6 music phone? Both Virgin Media and 3 this week said they will be offering the handset this month.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

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(Source The Register)

Tags: 10, 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, Deals, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, nokia, phone, sol, source the register, three, uk, virgin

It’s been a tough year for Palm. The company is betting everything on its new handsets, the Pre and the Pixi – but with sales not doing as well as expected, the company issued a profit warning yesterday.

To explain what was happening, chairman and chief executive Jon Rubinstein sent out a memo to the company’s staff.

As is typical with these things, it was largely stuffed with corporate speak and coded messages – so I’ve come up with this handy paragraph-by-paragraph translation that might help explain what Palm thinks is going on.

Team,

Hey guys! Whatever I say, don’t forget we’re in this together.

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million.

We’re not selling as many phones as we thought we would: sales were flat despite the fact that we started selling handsets with Verizon – America’s second-biggest phone network (with 91m users) – in January.

We were expecting sales to go up. They didn’t. This could be awkward.

We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion.

Given how sales have gone over so far, we’d probably need to double our sales in the next three months to satisfy our original targets. Let’s be honest, that’s not happening, is it?

As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being.

People aren’t buying enough of our phones. And networks don’t want to order phones that people aren’t buying.

On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

(Before we go on, I’m going to sugar the pill. Over the past year or two we’ve been burning through our cash reserves like crazy – having some money in the bank buys us some more time. That’s awesome news!)

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March.

Yes, it sucks – but the pain you feel today is nothing compared to the pain you would have felt if we’d suddenly announced in a few weeks that we’d missed our targets by 30%.

In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

We’ve been trying to work out what’s gone wrong…

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales.

…and we’ve decided it was Verizon’s fault.

To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products.

In fact, we think they’ve done such a bad job that we’re trying to school them so that they actually know what our products do. Plus, we gave it a cool name that implies we’re taking action!

Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm.

Not many people know we exist – but when they know we exist, we sell a few more handsets. That’s got to be positive, right?

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

We need to get better at a few things – largely the “making things” part, and then the “selling things” part. Perhaps some of you haven’t been as focused as you need to be (yeah, I’m talking to you).

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

I’m not firing anyone… yet.

We’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Give me a few weeks to prepare before asking me anything.

Go team!!!

jon

I secretly watch lots of cheerleader movies.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, blog, compare, compared, comparemobiles.com, drive, launches, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, networks, new, palm, phone, phones, sol, station, three, uk

TalkTalk has awarded A Novo its broadband fulfilment for a further three years, following on from an initial two-year period

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(Source Mobile News CWP)

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The EC will not support disconnection of unlawful file-sharers in the Acta global copyright-enforcement treaty, the trade commissioner has said

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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Pioneering smartphone manufacturer predicts substantial shortfall in three-month revenue, sparking precipitous drop in its stock as it battles Apple and BlackBerry

The pioneering smartphone manufacturer Palm, originally renowned for its breakthrough Palm Pilot models, saw its shares plummet 17% on a profits warning as it revealed that its sales are struggling in the face of competition from BlackBerrys and Apple iPhones.

Palm conceded todaythat its latest phones, including the critically acclaimed Pre and the cut-price Pixi, have failed to take off as quickly as it had hoped. “­Driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Palm’s chief executive, Jon Rubinstein.

A trading update from the Californian company forecast revenue for the three months to February of $300m-$320m (£195m-£210m), far short of analysts’ predictions of about $425m.

The warning is a serious setback for Palm, which has been fighting an uphill battle to challenge bigger players such as Apple and the Canadian company Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry smartphone. By early afternoon on Wall Street, Palm’s shares had slumped by $1.45 to an 11-month low of $6.64.

Although it broke ground early in handheld devices with its Pilot models in the 1990s and later its web-compatible Treo phones, Palm has fallen behind in the race to capture the imagination of ­consumers.

Its Pre phone, released last year, runs on a new operating system called WebOS and incorporates a phone, a GPS system, wireless internet and a slide-out keyboard. It has won several industry awards but has lagged in other areas – for example, few third-party applications are available for the Pre in comparison to the hundreds of thousands written for Apple’s iPhone.

Experts have become increasingly dubious about Palm’s growth prospects. Ehud Gelblum, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, was initially positive but said in a research note that his optimism had waned, blaming Palm’s US network provider: “Verizon has puzzlingly refrained from providing the marketing muscle behind the products that we had expected.”

In the US, Palm has recently launched the budget-model Pixi, priced at $99, in an effort to attract younger customers.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, apple, apple iphone, Blackberry, compare, comparemobiles.com, comparison, consumer, growth, iphone, latest, marketing, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, new, palm, phone, phones, released, sol, test, three, uk, update

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.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, android, apple, best, Blackberry, compare, compared, comparemobiles.com, contract, deal, free, google, iphone, largest, line, marketing, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, prices, sam, sol, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, three, uk, vodafone

One of Britain’s first fibre-to-the-home networks, which uses the sewer system for connectivity, has moved a step closer to going live

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(Source ZDNet UK)

Tags: 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, networks, new, sol, three, uk

• 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.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 3, all, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, deal, drive, largest, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, new deal, o2, orange, phone, phones, service, sol, t-mobile, three, uk, vodafone

Easy to like. Hard to love

Review  Motorola’s Google-happy Droid handset can be summed up in three words – and a bit of punctuation: “Nice phone, but…”…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work

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(Source The Register)

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Despite Google’s protests, its entry into the mobile phone market will change the game – and makes operators ‘dumb pipes’

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, tried to reassure operators this week that the search engine’s direct entry into mobile phones through its Android platform was designed to make telcos money, not to turn them into “dumb pipes”.

He told anxious operators at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that Google had no intention of building broad infrastructure to compete with the operators. Google’s protests that it is helping others to make money will be taken with a pinch of salt by other businesses such as newspapers and sat-nav operators (who have been undermined by Google’s free alternative) but welcomed by consumers.

Of course Google isn’t going to build a rival infrastructure. It is going to bypass it altogether by using Wi-Fi as it becomes increasingly available and letting users choose which operator they might use in conjunction. A week ago I bought Google’s new Nexus mobile device from its US website as my main phone.

Make no mistake, it is game-changing in two important ways. First, it turns the operators from arbiters of how you can use your phone into the equivalent of finance companies. I paid $529 (£338) for a SIM-free phone. I could have left it at that and just used it at the increasing number of Wi-Fi hotspots around town – but that would deprive me of incoming calls and the ability to use services such as mapping in places where there is no Wi-Fi. So I signed up with O2 for a pay-as-you go Sim plus an “unlimited” data package for a very reasonable £7.50 a month. If that isn’t turning the operator into a “dumb pipe” then I don’t know what is.

Others have offered Sim-free phones in the past. What makes this different is that it comes with Google’s integrated suite of services, giving an easy user experience. One click and my Gmail comes up, another one and the day’s calendar, or Twitter or whatever – appears to fill the ample 3.7in screen.

The game-changing part is the way Google is bringing voice back to the telephone in a way that hasn’t happened before. A few months ago I tried the company’s voice search out by speaking an inquiry instead of typing it in and was amazed that it got it right the first three times. Now, on a more extensive test, while well under 100%, it is highly impressive and I intend to use it as my default method of searching for standard queries. It beats the otherwise impressive Vlingo (on my BlackBerry) for speed and accuracy.

Google could have another killer app in the rollout – starting in the US – of its own internet telephone system for mobiles. When that is seamlessly integrated into all the other features that 150m Gmail users enjoy then Google could become a major international telephone operator in its own right. And if Wi-Fi ever becomes ubiquitous, then the sky’s the limit. All this will provide competition for Skype and the up-and-coming UK based Truphone, which I use for all my long-distance calls via a downloaded web app from my iPod Touch. Truphone has its own killer app that neither Skype nor Google has – you can get through to a real human being when things go wrong. Miracles can happen.

If the existing operators come under siege in a few year’s time as a result of web telephony, then they have only themselves to blame for the often contemptuous way they have treated consumers. Sure, they have, commendably, invested billions in much-needed infrastructure, but that is no excuse for what they have done.

They have made three major errors of business strategy and are about to make a fourth. First, they built walled gardens around their phones – depriving users of the universality of the web. One early Vodafone smartphone didn’t even have Google on it. When I inquired why, I was told there was no demand for it. As a consequence of their walled gardens of selected products they paid pathetic revenue shares to content providers thereby strangling an embryonic industry at birth until Apple resuscitated it. Had they opened their walls and given developers a fair return they could have created an app revolution long before Apple.

Second, by milking their customers for exorbitant amounts every time they used their phones to access websites, they delayed the mobile data revolution by several years. It was only when Apple insisted on adopting a fixed tariff – though it wasn’t the first – that web access from phones soared.

Third, by treating promiscuous customers more favourably than loyal ones they abandoned the basis of trust that all good brands need. And the next mistake? They are pushing for abandonment of “net neutrality” whereby all customers are treated more or less equally. They hope to make more money by giving bandwidth preference to content they get money from. You can imagine how popular that will be if some customers get slow broadband or none at all to make way for other people to watch Sky or Virgin videos.

As a phone, Google’s Nexus is the usual mixture of pluses and minuses. It has got a great 5 megapixel camera as can be seen here and a much better screen resolution than the iPhone, but the touchscreen itself is less reliable. Although it has over 20,000 apps in its store – and growing – they are not yet near the quality of the iPhone’s archive. Surprisingly, I have been very disappointed so far with Google’s mapping which ought to be its biggest strength. On a cloudy country walk it failed to make any connection with a satellite for a longitude/latitude fix and as mobile reception was flaky it didn’t download complete maps.

Unlike Nokia’s maps, which can be embedded in your phone Google has to rely on a web connection to download them each time. The other thing about it – and most other similar – phones which doesn’t get reported much is that it is actually difficult to read the screen when you most need to – walking in daylight. But one has to admit for all these occasional quibbles the new generation of smartphones offers awesome yet affordable technology. I would not have dreamed it possible 20 years ago.

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(Source The Guardian)

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BBC says project aimed at delivering English lessons through mobile phones in Bangladesh has got off to a good start

In mobile technology, it is often the developing world that leads the way – by using mobile phones to teach people a foreign language, for example.

In Bangladesh, more than 1m English lessons have been downloaded to mobile phones as part of the BBC’s Janala sercvice, the corporation announced today at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona.

Offering hundreds of three-minute audio lessons and SMS quizzes for less than 4p, Janala – meaning “window” – provides low-cost education through handsets – in a country where English is not as widely spoken as elsewhere in Asia.

The service is very simple: by dialling “3000″, mobile users access classes ranging from “Essential English” to the more advanced “How to tell a story”. The BBC has also set up a website giving learners free access to content.

According to Sara Chamberlain, the head of interactive for the BBC World Service Trust, the broadcaster’s aim was to make English – the international language of business – within the reach of millions of non-Anglophones. It is aimed at young people living on less than £2 a day.

This news report shows students learning English with Janala.

Since it was launched in November 2009, 1,030,583 Janala lessons have been accessed, with Bangladesh’s 50 million mobile users eager to learn English to improve their access to the global economy.

More than two-thirds of people who use the beginners’ service return, which is impressive considering the 5% “return rate” for mobile products in Bangladesh. The BBC said overall 39% of callers returned to Janala.

An impressive majority of Bangladeshis – 84% – consider English essential to securing a good job and educating their children, according to a BBC survey.

“We knew demand for English was strong in Bangladesh, but the response to BBC Janala has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Chamberlain.

“The growth of mobile is clearly creating an opportunity to provide access to education in a way simply not possible before.”

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(Source The Guardian)

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The company has unveiled three products that aim to help mobile network providers handle their data traffic better

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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