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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)
Posts Tagged “three”
Mar
08
2010
 
Microsoft flaunts cross-platform gaming goodiesPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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 Read Full Story…
Mar
05
2010
Picking facts from speculation on iPad launch prices and datesPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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.
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Mar
05
2010
Google says desktop PC is three years from ‘irrelevance’Posted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
‘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 Read Full Story…
Mar
03
2010
Most smartphone users are disappointed, claims FanfarePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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:
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:
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?
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Music phone offersAfter 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? Read Full Story…
Feb
26
2010
It’s not our fault: Decoding Palm’s memo to staffPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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.
Hey guys! Whatever I say, don’t forget we’re in this together.
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.
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?
People aren’t buying enough of our phones. And networks don’t want to order phones that people aren’t buying.
(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!)
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%.
We’ve been trying to work out what’s gone wrong…
…and we’ve decided it was Verizon’s fault.
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!
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?
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).
I’m not firing anyone… yet.
Give me a few weeks to prepare before asking me anything.
I secretly watch lots of cheerleader movies.
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TalkTalk has awarded A Novo its broadband fulfilment for a further three years, following on from an initial two-year period Read Full Story…
Feb
26
2010
Europe ‘will not accept’ three strikes in Acta treatyPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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Feb
25
2010
Palm shares plummet as it issues profit warningPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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.
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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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Feb
24
2010
Three ISPs sign up for Bournemouth sewer fibrePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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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Feb
21
2010
Orange and T-Mobile merger finds favour in BrusselsPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
• European commission set to approve plan to create UK’s largest mobile phone company 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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Feb
19
2010
Motorola Droid – the not quite iPhone killerPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Easy to like. Hard to loveReview 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 Read Full Story…
Feb
18
2010
Google’s Nexus shows the way forward for mobile phones | Victor KeeganPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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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Feb
17
2010
BBC’s education service Janala has delivered 1m lessons in three monthsPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
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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The company has unveiled three products that aim to help mobile network providers handle their data traffic better
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Feb
15
2010
Two dozen mobile carriers unite against Apple’s App StorePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Two dozen of the world’s largest mobile-phone companies, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile and Vodafone, are teaming up to create an “open international applications platform,” which is obviously in direct response to Apple’s success with its own iPhone App Store. Release. The announcement was made this morning at Mobile World Congress. In addition to the 24 carriers, the GSMA and three device manufacturers – LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson – are also supporting the initiative. All combined, the group reaches 3 billion subscribers worldwide, making it easily the largest app-store initiative. However, the task will also be exceedingly complicated because of the massive scope and technological barriers in uniting so many disparate platforms and operators. Called the the “Wholesale Applications Community,” it aims to create a wholesale platform for mobile apps that provides a single point-of-entry for developers. In other words, it wants to solve the massive fragmentation problem. The group intends on using common open standards that will allow developers to create apps across multiple platforms. Those standards include JIL, which Verizon, Vodafone and China Mobile have been working on, and OMTP BONDI. Those two standards are expected to evolve into a common standard within the next year. Ultimately, they pledge to work with the W3C standards bodies to create one solution for developers to create apps and port them across mobile device platforms and operators. The full list of operators are: America Movil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom Austria, MTN Group, NTT Docomo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Telenor, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, VimpelCom and WIND. The four operators in the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) mobile apps initiative – Vodafone, China Mobile, SoftBank and Verizon Wireless – are also included.
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The annual showcase of the latest games, marketing wheezes and software updates for the mobile telecoms industry is opening in Barcelona From tiny start-ups looking to get their games and gizmos in front of Google, Vodafone and Microsoft to veterans of the telecoms industry who will be glad-handing old contacts, this week’s Mobile World Congress will host a clutch of British technology firms hoping to turn back the tide sweeping in from the US and far east. UK Trade & Investment, the government body that supports British firms overseas, is helping out 120 companies at the show and part-funding the attendance of 50. The Cambridge-based Hypertag is typical of the firms being taken there. It has developed pioneering technology that makes it easy for advertisers to connect with consumers through poster sites that use short-range Bluetooth technology. Advertisers can use the technology to offer people anything from free music and game downloads to money-off vouchers direct to a phone. After being funded by the Technology Strategy Board, set up by the government three years ago to invest in innovative technologies, Hypertag has worked for 18 months with the billboard firm JC Decaux and PSI, the airport advertising part of Aegis. Having tested its technology in Luton airport, Hypertag is looking for partners in Barcelona. “We’ve got technology which we know companies want to use and now it’s all about sales,” said director Jonathan Morgan. UKTI is also helping Movirtu, which is targeting the billion people in developing countries who live on less than $2 a day and cannot afford a mobile phone but may spend 30% of their income on phone calls. Its MX Share service, already tested in Africa, allows people to make and receive calls and texts on someone else’s handset, without them needing their own expensive sim card, handsets or additional software. At the show, Movirtu will launch a new service that will give users easy access to information on healthcare, education or even agriculture through mobiles. It is also looking for network partners in developing countries, said the chief executive, Nigel Waller. “We would like to move forward with a number of operator agreements to give us scale.” Also eyeing the developing market is Synchronica, which will showcase two new low-cost MessagePhone handsets that offer all the functions of a BlackBerry, such as emails and texting, but at under $100. Other UK-listed firms include Intec, which specialises in billing systems for mobile networks, the Bluetooth-chip designer CSR, mobile marketing specialists 2ergo and mobile banking experts Monitise. But it’s not all about gadgets. Also plying their wares will be Foof Productions, the Gateshead-based mobile phone game creators, and the Middlesbrough-based developer, Fluid Pixel. They are the creative parents of Animentals, a mobile game that takes a twisted take on the virtual pets craze spawned by Tamagotchi in the 1990s. Already available on Nokia’s Ovi store and with an iPhone version due out soon, Animentals takes place in the hospital of Dr Foof, who must nurse a collection of crazed pets back to full mental health, partly through a series of challenges. The Animentals range from the depressed Goth penguin Pingoth to the highly unstable Furball. “What Dr Foof is offering is rehab for damaged digital pets,” says the game’s producer Andy Banks. After four days in the hothouse of the congress, it’s a need many of the attendees will recognise only too well.
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Feb
11
2010
Why we should pay more for our phone apps | Victor KeeganPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
The only way to encourage developers to create great apps for all mobile phones, and not just Apple’s iPhone, is to reward them – and that means paying more Easy to use mobile applications of the kind that Apple is pioneering are a huge economic opportunity to generate growth and jobs but also a conundrum. At a time when the whole world of computing is migrating into the “cloud”, with data stored out there on the web rather than on our computer desktops, the mobile world is moving in the opposite direction: nearly all of these games and services are being downloaded on to our mobile devices. The result is that we are using our apps – and few more so than me – through dedicated silos rather than on the web. This has advantages, not least because data stored on your phone can be accessed more quickly, but also a big downside. This is partly because you are a prisoner of your service provider such as Apple, but mainly because if these apps were made for the web, then every phone would be able to access them, users would have big opportunities to share and developers wouldn’t have to spend money they haven’t got making multiple apps for incompatible phones. At the moment, if you want to port an iPhone app to devices running Google’s Android operating system, you have to start building again from scratch. Apps would be much cheaper if they could be built to run across different platforms. Tom Hume, managing director of Brighton based FuturePlatforms, points out that Apple developers have to work in the Objective C computer language, whereas the HTML5 standard requires only minor changes between platforms. FuturePlatforms operates a Google-style “gold card” system, allowing staff time off to do their own things. One developer used this option to produce an unofficial app of the Guardian for phones using Google’s Android operating system which in some ways is more flexible than the iPhone app (eg, it can download the paper during the night). Make no mistake, something really big is happening with apps as this amazing device we still call a mobile phone extends its tentacles ever deeper into our lives. Today it is games, social networks, reading, search, location-based services; tomorrow health, work, painting, education, who knows what. The stats are startling. According to technology research company Gartner, physical downloads of apps reached 2.5bn last year. These were overwhelmingly on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. But since iPhones amount to less than 1% of all phones, you don’t have to be a genius to realise the enormous potential. It could be that Gartner’s predictions of 4.5bn downloads this year and an astonishing 21.6bn in 2013, equivalent to more than three for everyone on the planet, will prove an underestimate. The good – or bad – news, is that a staggering 87% of these downloads will be free for users. That’s great for you and me, but it is not an obvious way to encourage a growing industry to hire people to make up for the black hole caused by the banking collapse. Many of these “free” downloads will be supported by advertising and others will be corporations promoting their brands. But most will be free because creators don’t think they can charge for them. At the moment, there is a grave distortion in the balance of power. Most of the money is going to the app shops such as Apple – which controls the gateway to the developers, who are often on £60 or more an hour – with the content providers squeezed in the middle of an increasingly crowded market. I have been talking recently to developers – partly to research this column and partly because I am trying to do an app of my own to see how difficult it is (more of that at a later date, maybe). The overwhelming message is how difficult it is to make enough profit to justify the investment when costs are so high and the market flooded with freebies. Sure there are some who make good money, such as existing branded games being repackaged in mobile form and niche services. The most successful income-earning apps last year – satellite navigation guides at £30 a pop – have been undermined by Google bringing out a free turn-by-turn street navigation option. Unsurprisingly then, ustwo of Shoreditch – maker of, among other things, mouthoff, an app that enables the phone screen to mimic movements of your mouth, which had mouth-watering publicity here and in the US – couldn’t make a respectable profit at 59p. Indeed, the company admits “the bottom line is that it’s impossible to make money at the 59p price point for 99% of studios”. Toiluxe, a neat 59p iPhone app that uses satellite signals to tell you where the nearest toilet is in London – whether the Ritz hotel or a public convenience – got publicity in several newspapers but not enough to make a respectable return given that the developer only ends up with only 60% of income after Apple and Vat (levied at higher Irish rates where the servers are based). The obvious answer is to raise prices, but that is easier said than done in an environment where so much is available for nothing – as newspapers in a different neck of the woods know full well. It is all quite crazy, really. People who pay more than £2.50 for a cup of coffee that is gone in a few minutes are reluctant to pay £1 for a paper that will last for hours or an app that will be with you for ages, probably with free upgrades. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find an app among the hundreds of thousands on offer on the iPhone despite the growth of apps helping you to do just this (ie, looking for relevant apps) such as Chomp, or Mplayit on Facebook or Apple’s Genius. There must be hundreds of great apps that hardly anyone has discovered. Goodness knows what it will be like in a few years time. There is an elephant in the room even though it is invisible at the moment: the bedroom programmer, shorthand for individuals working on their own. The reason is that it is very difficult to write code for a phone in the way that kids could program their BBC or Spectrum computers in the 1980s, a phenomenon that led the same kids to create a thriving computer games industry. Uncle Steve won’t let you near his phones except on his own terms. It may start to change with Google’s Android operating system based on open source, and I know of at least one developer working on an app to enable people to do their own coding on a phone in a (relatively) simple way. If that happened maybe a new generation of cloud coders could send the apps revolution off in a whole new – and much cheaper – direction. The best things in life are not always free.
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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 
