The launch of the first iPhone model a year ago boosted interest in the technology tremendously, and the updated model available Friday likely will stoke enthusiasm further, according to analysts, quoted by an Associated Press report.
The report touch-screen manufacturers are going flat out, and more devices will soon be controlled by the tip of your finger.
“After the iPhone came out, a lot of mobile-phone companies said ‘Oh, I can make that kind of touch-screen mobile phone, too,’” Jennifer Colegrove, analyst at iSuppli, quoted by the report said.
In the US, Sprint Nextel just introduced a touch-screen phone, the Samsung Instinct, that’s very reminiscent of the iPhone. Verizon Wireless this year introduced its first two phones that use touch screens as their main interface.
Research In Motion is believed to be making a touch-screen version of the BlackBerry. Sony Ericsson is bringing out its first touch-screen model in a few months.
Colegrove projects that 341 million touch screens will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 218 million in 2007 and 81 million in 2006.
In the first half of 2007, before Apple’s iPhone launched, a big maker of touch sensors for portable electronics would make perhaps a million units per month, Colegrove said.
Apart from the iPhone, demand for touch screens is driven by new phones in Asia that allow the user to write Chinese or Japanese characters on the screen, usually with the aid of a stylus.
Most touch sensors are made in Japan, Taiwan and China by companies that are relatively unknown in the US, like Nissha Printing, Wintek and Truly Semiconductors.
Balda AG of Germany supplied the touch sensor for the first iPhone through a joint venture with a Chinese company.
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Global capital expenditure on mobile communications continues to rise due to greater emphasis on new data services, increased traffic load, and preparation for 4G deployments, a report from ABI Research said.
With the US economy’s uncertain outlook in 2008, ABI Research expects North America’s capex to remain flat this year, while other regions will increase their capex commitments for new 2G/3G deployments or expansions, all-IP service discovery platform upgrades, SoftSwitch unified core systems, and preparations for 4G.
ABI Research calculates that capex investment in 2007 exceeded €83 billion (US$131 billion), and will reach €101 billion (US$163.5 billion) in 2013.
The Asia-Pacific and North American regions are estimated to be the biggest spenders, according to research analyst Hwai Lin Khor.
“Mobile industry spending in the Asia-Pacific area is primarily driven by the emerging markets that are expanding current 2G network footprints and new 3G rollouts; many nations in this region have yet to release their 3G licenses. Mature markets such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong will be spending on service delivery platforms.”
Most current capex is still directed to voice services and 2G networks expansion, as the majority of subscriber net adds in recent years are coming from emerging markets that are fairly contented with simple voice calls and messaging services. However, there is also increased awareness of the need for early investment to ensure that networks are ready to support the capacity demanded by higher bandwidth data services.
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Taiwan’s Ministry of Finance decided to withdraw a planned NT$52.8 billion (US$1.74 billion) worth of Chunghwa Telecom share disposal, and will sell bonds instead to help raise part of the funds for a program on boosting the economy, a Dow Jones report said.
The government had hoped to raise NT$52.8 billion by reducing its stake in Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest phone services provider by revenue, to as low as 30% from 35.65%, in part to help fund the NT$120 billion government spending program aimed at supporting domestic demand at a time of rising prices, the Dow Jones report said.
But some lawmakers have voiced opposition to the share disposal, the ministry said in a statement.
“To respect lawmakers, the ministry agreed to raise the full amount (NT$52.8 billion) by selling bonds,” the statement, quoted by the Dow Jones report, said.
Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der told Dow Jones Newswires on Friday the share sale was facing opposition from some lawmakers who consider Chunghwa Telecom as a good stock that generates good dividend income.
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Taiwan’s dominant fixed line and wireless operator, Chunghwa Telecom, has placed an order for 3G mobile equipment with Nokia Siemens Networks worth TWD3.47 billion (USD114 million). The equipment will be used to expand Chunghwa’s existing 3G networks which were serving 2.59 million customers at the end of March.
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Taiwan plans to trim its stake in Chunghwa Telecom , the island’s top telecom carrier, in an overseas stock sale, a Reuters report said.
The Reuters report quoted Central News Agency saying that the move, together with a stock sale at home and a capital-raising plan, came as the government aimed to raise a total of NT$52.8 billion (US$1.7 billion).
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications owns about 35% of Chunghwa and the cabinet said last week the government planned to maintain a stake of at least 30% in Chunghwa.
The government is raising the money to fund a slew of government projects, which will help boost Taiwan’s domestic consumption and economic growth.
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Alcatel-Lucent announced the renewal of a contract for a second four-year term with Chunghwa Telecom to provide maintenance services on the carrier’s network system.
According to the company, Alcatel-Lucent will provide its maintenance services on the Alcatel-Lucent 5ESS and S12 switches that make up the operator’s Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) network, which serves approximately 12m subscriber lines.
The service support includes technical support, troubleshooting as well as repairs and return services.
The maintenance contract is expected to help Chunghwa Telecom better manage and maintain its 14 million ports in more than 700 switches distributed across Taiwan.
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- April 11th, 2008
- 12:54 pm
The WiMax Forum has certified the first Mobile WiMax products, announcing this week that four base stations and four data cards have received the Forum seal. Though the first “official” Mobile WiMax products in the market, they are targeted solely on the South Korean market where Korea Telecom has been operating a pre-WiMax network for two years.
The first wave of WiMax testing essentially certifies Samsung and its partners, who have pushed for its WiBro technology’s inclusion into the WiMax standard. Based on the same IEEE 802.16e as traditional mobile WiMax, WiBro uses unique frequencies (2.3 GHz) and odd channel sizes (9 MHz), and the equipment can only be sold in Korea. The gear is also probably the only WiMax line that will not include support for multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technologies.
That’s all fine by Korea Telecom, which immediately stated it would begin using the new certified products in its now-WiMax network. KT first launched commercial service in 2005 using Samsung gear and has signed up 100,000 subscribers and sold a variety of devices from laptop dongles to miniature computers.
While the certification of Wave 1 products for Korea is a mainly a milestone, the forum said it signals the ramping up of its interoperability and compliance testing throughout its global lab network. With the first wave under its belt, the forum will now move ahead much more quickly in its certification efforts for North American and global products, said Ron Resnick, WiMax Forum president.
“Stay tuned,” Resnick said in a statement. “We expect this momentum to continue throughout the year when the first products for the 2.5 GHz frequency achieve certification in the coming months.”
The 2.5 GHz licenses are owned by Sprint and Clearwire in the US, and Wave 2 certification is expected to produce the first base stations, home gateway and PC card products for their networks. While Resnick gave no exact date for those first products to appear, they will likely coincide with or shortly follow Sprint’s commercial launch of Xohm this quarter.
The forum also has a lot of other profiles on its plate. Global 3.5 GHz frequencies have also been identified as optimal for WiMax and have spawned numerous trials in Europe as well as small-scale commercial rollouts. The forum has also said it would certify gear at 700 MHz to support the networks of the recent auction winners.
The forum’s certification priorities, however, follow the interests of its large operator and vendor membership closely. KT was the first WiMax operator to launch, thus WiBro was the first profile certified. Sprint is next, and therefore its 2.5 GHz MIMO profile is the next to hit the labs. As more major operators make their 4G network decisions, the forum as well as its vendor membership will likely fall in lockstep.
BT has been contemplating expanding its WiFi wireless strategy to the wide area network using WiMax and is likely to participate in the upcoming 2.6 GHz auction in the UK. Japan has also become a hotspot for WiMax as the consortium UQ communications plans a nationwide rollout covering 90% of the population by 2012, using the same 2.5 GHz spectrum allocated in the US. However, UQ member KDDI is reportedly considering following in fellow CDMA operators Verizon’s footsteps in pursuing Long Term Evolution. India is another big market, having recently produced not one but two major operators pursuing large-scale broadband access plans using WiMax, one also at 2.5 GHz, the other at 3.3 GHz.
With all of the interest in 2.5 GHz, the next wave of certification will be a highly active one. The forum expects hundreds of products to be certified by the end of the year, the majority of them Wave 2, as opposed to the eight that came out of Wave 1. Most vendors opted to skip Wave 1 entirely since Samsung has a lock on the KT contract. All four vendors participating—Samsung, Posdata, Runcom and Sequans–had base stations certified. Sequans Communications won approval for a reference design built around its base-station chip, a clear indication it’s seeking OEM agreements with other manufacturers to get into the Korean WiMax business.
At the WiMax World Congress in Singapore this week, Motorola also unveiled a new compact base station, though it did not get it certified by the forum. The WAP 450 is a variant of its traditional Moto Wi4 Diversity base station, except it has a more powerful radio frequency module at the tower top. The RF module receives direct power, thus enhancing its capacity and coverage without directly boosting power consumption. Traditional ground base stations shed half of their power funneling their signals through cables to the antenna.
Motorola and UTStarcom also announced they have landed a joint contract with First International Telecom to build out a WiMax network in northern Taiwan. The deal is Motorola’s third in Taiwan in eight months.
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Worldwide handset sales increased 16% to 1.153 billion units in 2007, driven by rising demand in emerging markets, says Gartner.
Nokia, the biggest phone vendor, increased its market share to 37.8%, up from three percentage points from a year earlier. In a disastrous last quarter, Motorola fell nearly ten points to 11.9% over the previous year.
Strong sales in China and India lifted Chinese handset supplier ZTE into top ten for the first time with a 1.2% market share. But the popularity of high-end BlackBerry and iPhone devices also put smartphone vendors RIM and Apple in the top ten. Taiwan’s BenQ, France’s Sagem and China-based Bird were the three displaced from the top group.
Gartner predicted growth to decline to 10% in 2008, with western Europe and North America contributing to just 30% of sales.
Gartner mobile devices research director Carolina Milanes said the strength of emerging market demand meant that handset sales were likely to be “relatively immune to a recession” in the US and western Europe.
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- January 16th, 2008
- 7:51 am
The Taiwanese cellco Taiwan Mobile says it is aiming to double its 3G user base in 2008, from 1.3 million now to 2.6 million by year-end. The firm plans to procure between 1.1 million and 1.2 million handsets this year, of which around half will be 3G models, chief business officer Cliff Lai told DigiTimes.
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- January 15th, 2008
- 11:24 am
Scalado, which specialises in mobile imaging software solutions, has revealed that its CAPS imaging Software Development Kit (SDK) is now being used in more than 150 million mobile phone handsets.
The Swedish company currently has its software embedded in more than 50 different cameraphone models, with suppliers such as SonyEricsson and Samsung signing licensing agreements with Scalado to power its imaging applications in new camera phones. LG also became a Scalado customer during 2007. Scalado can now list four out of five of the top Tier 1 mobile phone manufacturers as its licensees, as well as several handset manufacturers in Taiwan.
End of 2007 figures place worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions at around 3.3 billion - equivalent to half the global population. Global mobile phone sales last year alone were over 900 million, with cameraphones sales in 2007 accounting for close to 750 million, or approximately 80% of the market, with this figure predicted to grow further in 2008.
As manufacturers get smarter with the number of pixels that they can offer, with many now providing 5, 6, 7 and even 8 megapixels, the need for powerful and memory efficient image processing software is evident, says Scalado. With CAPS, Scalado offers an extremely CPU and memory efficient software solution, which it says drastically decreases image processing times when capturing, viewing, and editing large images.
“As megapixels in cameraphones continue to grow, users will be taking many more images with their mobile phones, that are larger and need to be processed, manipulated and then sent quickly, so the need for fast and efficient image processing is even more vital,” says Scalado CEO, Mats Jacobson,. “Our applications have been specifically designed to bring the ultimate digital photography user experience onto a mobile device. We are working closely with the mobile industry to improve this experience all the time and finding great ways to create, browse and share pictures.”
In addition to adding new customers, Scalado also ended 2007 by expanding its global operations, launching operations in Korea, in order to be more responsive and flexible to customers in this region. These new operations will also put Scalado in close proximity to some of the emerging markets’ manufacturers, and nearer to the operators who are fast becoming leading players in their respective countries.
“The global presence that we now have in terms of handset penetration is a fantastic achievement,” adds Jacobson. “We are very proud to be working with the leading mobile phone manufacturers in the world, and we are looking forward to continuing to improve the camera phone experience even further by partnering up with key mobile platform hardware and software vendors as well as key operators.”
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iPhone demand triggers touch-screen boom
