- February 1st, 2008
- 8:49 am
Speculation is mounting that Google is plotting the launch of a mobile phone in partnership with computer giant Dell.
Senior industry sources claim the two companies will reveal their plans at next month’s 3GSM telecoms conference in Barcelona, al-though Google insiders deny an announcement is due in the near future.
But the rumours will once again throw the spotlight on Google’s mobile strategy, which has been the subject of much conjecture over the last year.
There had been widespread talk of Google launching its own handset, known as the “Gphone”, to go up against Apple’s iPhone, which launched in November last year.
But the world’s largest search engine surprised the industry by announcing an operating system for mobile phones called Android. The software makes it easier for developers to create mobile applications that run on many different handsets.
Android, which will be available this year, will bring all of Google’s online services to mobile users.
At present, mobile phones use a variety of operating systems to access the internet, including systems from Microsoft and London-based Symbian.
Marketing Week revealed last year that Dell was also planning a move into mobile phones after poaching Motorola executive Ron Garriques to run its new global consumer group (MW March 1, 2007).
Dell already produces personal digital assistants (PDAs) and strategy analytics director Neil Mawston says: “It makes sense for Dell to have a high-profile entry back into the market because its last effort with PDAs pretty much flopped.”
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
This year’s edition of the International Mobile Gaming Awards is preparing for the festivities of granting the winning title to the most creative game concept that will subscribe.
This is one of the most important competitions in the domain and has also considerable importance in the evolution of the winner’s career. The prize is also worthy of mention, as a total of USD 40,000 will be granted in five categories.
Contestants can win the following titles:
o Excellence in Connectivity (multi platform, social networking)
o Excellence in 3D
o Excellence in Game Play
o Best licensed IP-based game
o Best Casual Game (Typically developed in Flash or Java).
Winners of this competition get a real good start in their mobile game developing career. They receive a lot of attention from the press, players and, most important, from companies that now take their ideas more seriously. This means more potential projects for development and a great deal of more self confidence.
Maarten Noyons, founder and Managing Director commented that every year brings pleasant surprises for the jury. For them, it looks like the registered applications develop at the same time with technology.
He said that “In 2006 many exciting new connected games and multiplatform games entered the competition, we saw games that were using all the features of mobile phones including microphone, camera, motion sensors and connectivity. We reviewed location based games and 3D games with stunning high quality graphics, and simple, addictive 2D games developed with Flash. This year we are expecting to see innovations and improvements in all these areas”.
Entries are accepted on a tight time limit, before 6PM on 24 September 2007. Some of the concepts will be selected and announced by the end of October. From that point on, they will have until the 28th of January 2008 to develop their ides into a demo version. The final winners will be announced on the 13th of February 2008, in a ceremony at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Numerous advertisements on station walls and in the press promote Fusion handsets — dual-mode devices designed to switch between the normal cellular network and Wi-Fi connections — for the home and for business. Although the initial Fusion devices were unattractive by current standards, newer models being introduced offer a more compelling mix of form and function.
The company is also the driving force behind the Wireless Cities initiative, which will see twelve urban centres across the UK turned into “hotzones”, a widening of BT’s existing Openzone Wi-Fi hotspot network.
It is also no secret that BT is pushing hard for spectrum to be made available for the long-distance wireless technology WiMax when Ofcom launches auctions later this year. At the recent 3GSM conference, some sources even suggested that BT regretted having pulled out of the mobile game by selling off BT Cellnet, now known as O2, and was in effect trying to roll out a new mobile network using unlicensed wireless spectrum instead of GSM or 3G.
Last week, ZDNet UK spoke with BT’s head of mobility, Steve Andrews, to discuss these and other issues.
Q: BT has been increasingly busy in the mobile sector. What is your strategy?
A: The mobility strategy is focused on three core segments of the market: consumer, BT Business [for SMEs], and the corporate enterprise market. Our strategy is founded on building from a customer’s requirement of always being connected. What we’re aiming to do for our customers is allow them access to applications — services such as video and, of course, voice — in the office or out and about. What we want is that customers can always be in touch with whatever they want to do with a device.
To achieve that, we are wirelessly enabling, wherever possible, BT’s fixed network. That means wirelessly enabling at particular places where customers are likely to have intensive communications.
Q:And this is where Fusion comes in…?
The first part of our strategy has been a hub strategy for the house. We now have almost a million hubs installed in people’s homes and offices, about 800k of which are consumer hubs. That means people can connect now to BT’s broadband network wirelessly with a whole raft of devices.
We also extended our Openzone offer for applications and services to consumers, so you can take whatever you like doing at home out and about to thousands of locations. We are now extending our strategy to Wireless Cities.
The consumer offer is absolutely focused, given that we’ve got the infrastructure, to applications and services that are attractive to customers to use. We spent a lot of time working on making mobile phones broadband-centric with Fusion. There will this year be over a hundred Wi-Fi-enabled phones.
Q:How many models will BT make available?
At the moment we are working through our ranging of how many BT will have — we are planning that now. The second thing is that you will start to see an increased focus on the applications, such as linking BT Vision and other services into our mobility platform.
In the enterprise area, we’re doing a lot of work with Microsoft to allow Microsoft applications to be used out and about — email and VoIP-type services, IM and field force automation applications. We have a product that we’ve developed with Microsoft [the HTC Excalibur, or S620] — we’re the first to integrate [SIP-enabled] VoIP into that.
We will also extend hosted email, which we already offer, to the mobility proposition. So push email for the Microsoft phone will come out with that phone, as will Windows Mobile 6.
One of the big problems with dual-mode handsets has been battery life, particularly when running power-hungry applications. Has this now improved?
The battery life is not bad but needs improving. We’re still doing more work to improve it. For the launch, we will achieve the threshold of using it for a day, charging it at night-time. We also have extended battery packs in trial at the moment.
We have various segments of the market that we’re pursuing with mobility. We will have field force automation applications.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Mobile operators have barely rolled out their new third-generation wireless networks, and they’re already talking about the fourth generation. As next-generation cellular technologies — including those of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) project, whose mission is to guide the evolution of GSM cellular networks — have trouble getting off the ground, the industry has been turning its attention toward the WiMax packet-based technology.
“If the 3GSM show is any indication, then I think we will be hearing a lot about WiMax at CTIA,” said Mohammad Shakouri, vice president of marketing for the WiMax Forum, referring to the 3GSM World Congress trade show held in February in Barcelona. “The technology is getting close to commercialisation, and there has been a lot of buzz the past several months.”
WiMax, which is similar to another packet-based wireless technology, Wi-Fi, already has the foundation for a strong ecosystem thanks to support from handset and infrastructure makers including Motorola, Samsung and Nokia, as well as from chipmaker Intel.
These companies are all expected to have WiMax products in the market sometime this year, and some will be shown off at CTIA. Samsung, for example, is expected to have on hand some of its already-announced WiMax-ready gear, including a handset, ultra-mobile PC and a new USB dongle that offers wireless broadband for laptops.
The WiMax Forum, the industry group that promotes the technology, has almost completed the necessary certification requirements for new products, another major step that could help push deployment. According to Shakouri, products using the 2.3GHz spectrum, which is used primarily in South Korea, will be certified by mid-year. Products using the 3.5GHz will be certified in the third quarter, and products using the 2.5GHz spectrum, which is used mostly in the US, will have certification available by the end of the year.
WiMax, whose transmission distances range from a few hundred feet in densely populated areas to more than a mile in suburban areas, can support peak data speeds of 20 megabits per second, although average-user data rates fall between 2Mbps and 8Mbps. Data rates for the next-stage 3G cellular service — sometimes called 3.5G — are about 3Mbps.
1.Asian markets lead the way
Momentum among carriers is already building. In Japan more WiMax-compatible spectrum will be allocated by the government later this year. Korea Telecom in South Korea is already committed to launching its WiMax service this year. There are also plans to launch WiMax services in India, Malaysia and Pakistan, as well as in parts of Eastern Europe, Shakouri said. And the government in Taiwan is spending $1bn (£510m) to encourage the manufacture and development of 2.5GHz WiMax products and applications.
In the US, Sprint, the number-three carrier, has already said it plans to spend $3bn in the next two years to build a WiMax network, which is expected to be able to provide service to 100 million people by the end of 2008. Sprint is using its existing 2.5GHz spectrum, half of which it acquired from its merger with Nextel, to deliver the new service.
On Monday, Sprint announced several new cities that will be part of the WiMax network, It also named which of its named infrastructure partners would be developing which markets. Motorola will be developing Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Minneapolis, and Grand Rapids, Mich. Samsung will develop Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Providence, R.I. And Nokia will develop Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
Sprint had previously announced that Chicago and Baltimore/Washington DC would be the first two markets to get the service, by the end of 2007. And Nokia had also previously named it would develop four markets, in Texas, for deployment in early 2008: Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
Currently, the only other operator in the US using WiMax is a start-up called Clearwire, which was founded by mobile-industry billionaire Craig McCaw. Today it delivers WiMax broadband services to fixed locations, but eventually the company will offer mobile service as well. Clearwire, which raised $900m in venture backing this summer, went public earlier this month.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
While browsing around on Google, I found this intersting post which holds the vision of Morten Hjerde on the mobile games industry and explains why he stopped working in it.
I met Morten once in Cannes at 3GSM. I remember he had a great word puzzle mobile game and though I was working for an aggregator/developer (Overloaded), we never managed to really launch the game. Now, years later, Morten expresses his feelings toward the industry and the problems he faced. a lot of small- and mid-sized developers can probable relate to a lot of the subjects that are touched. The company he worked for was called Ememess and is now part of Zapdance.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
The rumor mill is abuzz with speculation that a cabal of mobile operators including Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom and AT&T/Cingular will meet not-so-secretly at next week’s 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona to explore the creation of a mobile search engine poised to challenge U.S. search giants Google and Yahoo. British newspaper The Telegraph reports that operator representatives will discuss a series of alternatives that includes pooling their combined resources to acquire a majority stake in an existing search engine provider or creating a white-label service backed by a single advertising team and technical staff. “There is a big play in mobile search that we need to be part of, and we are exploring those options at a very high level,” an anonymous U.K. mobile executive told the paper.
For more on the mobile search rumors:
- read this Telegraph article
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
- February 12th, 2007
- 11:15 am
Telecompaper writes…Motorola has launched a range of new handsets at the 3GSM trade show. These include two HSDPA handsets, new Q smartphones, music mobiles, a TV phone launched with BSkyB, three mobiles for emerging markets and a mobile navigation system. The Motokrzr K3 is the company’s multimedia HSDPA phone available from the first quarter. The clamshell handset includes two cameras allowing photos and video calling, as well as 64 MB of internal memory and Bluetooth and USB connectivity. The Motorizr Z8 is another HSDPA slider, on the market from April. The phone has a media player and 90 MB of internal memory expandable up to 4GB with a microSD slot. The handset will launch in cooperation with UK broadcaster BSkyB’s mobile content service, including on-demand TV. For the music market, there is the slider Motorizer Z6, its first Linux-Java phone with Windows Media playback, and the Bluetooth Motorola S9. From Q2, the Motoslvr L9 will be available, offering an EDGE handset with FM radio with RDS, 2 megapixel camera and memory card slot.
In its Q smartphone range, the company announced the Q q9 running on Windows Mobile 6 with HSDPA, Qwerty keyboard, push e-mail, 256 MB of memory and a card slot. The Q GSM is a GSM version of the original CDMA Moto Q, offering GPRS and EDGE, Windows Mobile 6 and multimedia and office features. The q9 will be availble in Q2 and the Q GSM from the second half of the year. For emerging markets, the company has expanded its Motomobile range with another three handsets, the EDGE-enabled W510, the W215 and W205, all availble from the first half of the year. Finally, the company also unveiled two systems for handsets and smartphones running on its Motonav navigation platform. The T805 and T815 Navigation Systems include a GPS receiver for Bluetooth phones for accessing directions and maps, with acces to the Motonav subscription service.
Wireless Mobile Telecom
- February 12th, 2007
- 10:51 am
About-Electronics writes…Mobile TV and GPS are expected to dominate water-cooler conversations at this year’s 3GSM Congress, the mobile trade fest running in Barcelona February 12-15. The event, which has seen attendance explode from just over 20,000 five years ago to an anticipated 60,000 this week, is the number one event in the mobile phone calendar.
Vodafone and T-Mobile are both expected to push the latest variants of Mobile TV technology hard; consumer reluctance to spend on extra small screen entertainment is likely to be countered with a new breed of free-to-view advertising supported programming. But while Mobile TV is a big topic, not everyone is convinced that it’s going to be big business.
GPS-enabled phones are being touted as a safer bet.
Nokia’s announcement that it will offer navigational Smart2Go software and services free of charge, will set the tone. The mobile giant expects to make revenue not from subscribers, but from advertisers eager to be promoted by map users. Ralph Eric Kunz, VP of Nokia Multimedia says: “smart2go gives consumers a free way to explore the world around them. In addition, the navigable map data used in the smart2go solution makes it easy to convert a broad range of connected mobile devices into full personal navigation devices.?
The current version of the smart2go platform is available on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices. A rebranded ‘Nokia Maps’ version will become available on other Nokia N-series phones.
In related news, Vodafone has inked a deal with MySpace which allows users to access and edit their profiles on the networking site, directly from their phones. Mobiles will also be released with pre-loaded MySpace Mobile software which will allow users to listen to music or watch video streamed from the site.
Wireless Mobile Telecom
- February 12th, 2007
- 10:33 am
PRNewswire writes…Mobile Content Networks,Inc. (MCN), a leading provider of mobile search solutions, today announced it was selected as the official mobile search platform for the 3GSM World Congress to be held on February 12-15, 2007 in Barcelona, Spain. 3GSM.mobi,built by Roundpoint Inc., provides show information and uses MCN real-time
mobile search technology to enable access to show information and numerous
third-party content sources.
“With over 50,000 attendees expected at the 3GSM World Congress in
Barcelona, we see the importance of providing information about the
congress schedule and the 685 exhibiting companies. On the mobile version
of the events exhibition catalogue (3gsm.mobi), MCN has worked to deliver a
mobile search facility in short space of time ensuring ease and speed of
access to the right information while on the move at the exhibition,” said
Bill Gajda, GSMA Chief Marketing Officer
Content available from 3GSM.mobi includes:
* Complete listings of show exhibitors
* Weather from weather.com
* Local Barcelona maps from mobil.bcn.cat
* Currency exchange from ratesfx.com and oanda.com
* Restaurant, dining, night life and bars information provided
by barcelona-on-line.com
“It is unusual to build a comprehensive search solution for a portal
that is only going to be available for four days,” said Trevor Shonfeld,
Chairman and CEO, Roundpoint, Inc. “MCN’s turnkey mobile search platform
enabled the 3GSM portal to connect directly to a wide variety of content
sources, with a quick and cost-effective implementation.”
MCN MobileSearch.net is the industry’s first real-time search platform
designed for the unique needs of the mobile marketplace. The platform is
based on a federated search approach that enables a broad range of vertical
and horizontal search experiences. Content is connected directly from a
wide variety of sources, and new content channels and monetization methods
can be quickly added and updated.
“Participants at trade shows, sporting events, and other major
gatherings rely on their mobile device for voice and text messaging. At
this year’s 3GSM World Congress, attendees can also use their mobile phone
to easily navigate the show as well as the surrounding city,” said Marc
Bookman, CEO of MCN, Inc. “The 3GSM.mobi search solution provides access to
all the key information a 3GSM visitor to Barcelona may need. This highly
focused and short-lived mobile portal represents a new trend in Event
Marketing.”
Wireless Mobile Telecom
- February 12th, 2007
- 9:34 am
LEGITreviews writes…Samsung Electronics Co. has unveiled a new mobile phone that features some of the sleek design and functions of Apple Inc.’s much-hyped iPhone. Samsung’s Ultra Smart F700 will be exhibited at next week’s 3GSM World Congress, a telecommunications exhibition in Barcelona.
The ultra-thin iPhone is controlled by a large touch screen. It plays music, surfs the Internet, and runs a version of the Mac OS X operating system, among other functions. Samsung said the Ultra Smart F700 also has a full touch screen as well as a traditional QWERTY key pad that slides out “for users who are not yet familiar with a touch-screen-only user interface.”
Wireless Mobile Telecom
Google and Dell tipped to reveal iPhone rival plans (USA)
