Posts filed under News

Nokia has made certain attempts to encroach on Google’s territory over the past few months – or, rather, what it sees as Nokia territory. Take mobile advertising, for example. Nokia will ship over 35 million GPS-enabled mobile phones this year alone, each of which is capable of supporting location-based mobile advertising. This just happens to be fertile Google territory, as the search engine giant sees all forms of online advertising as its own, and location-based mobile advertising in particular is estimated to be worth billions in the near future.

Google may have the advertising prowess, however, but what it doesn’t have is control over the devices that will ultimately deliver mobile advertising. Step forward Nokia, who not only have the devices equipped with GPS, they’ve also just bought NavTeq, the mapping company that powers many of the world’s Sat-Nav systems and mapping software, including – yup – Google Maps!

Now this is where it gets really interesting. Nokia has been showing off a Google Maps-killer called Maps on Ovi at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco that by all accounts makes Google Maps look like a dinosaur. Unlike Google Maps, which does all the processing on the server, Maps for Ovi is vector-based and does all the processing on the client – making its response time much faster.

Couple this with Nokia’s latest handset the Nokia Navigator, which comes with a built-in compass, and Nokia’s place in the location-based market suddenly looks a lot stronger than Google’s. Nokia are even releasing a series of APIs for Maps on Ovi, enabling anyone to create their own applications for it that will work not just on PCs, but on any Nokia device capable of supporting the new mapping service.

“Yelp is just a mashup. Twitter is just a mashup. If they want to make their applications work with our APIs, great,” said Nokia VP, Michael Halbherr. “But Google is our competitor.”

Disappointing news reaches us that Nokia will not be updating the glorious-looking Nokia N93 any time soon. In fact, the marvellous twisty form-factor will not be used on any new Nokia phone until at least 2010. This is sad, as the N93 was genuinely innovative and really makes the phone stand out head and shoulders above its competition.

The N93 was one of the first N-Series phones, and really helped established the brand as cutting edge. With its mix of shapes that it could pull, you were never entirely sure whether it was a phone, a camcorder or a PDA, but that was part of its appeal. Indeed, the form factor was validated by the fact that many new dedicated camcorders now sport a similar look. Sadly, though, Nokia has decided to leave the design to them, and have deemed it either to be too unwieldy or simply too fat for a mobile phone.

I guess this is only to be expected, as the recent trend has been for phones to slim down. By 2010, though, we can expect all of the technological marvels that were squeezed into the N93 to be small enough to fit into a device with a similar form factor, but that is much smaller, which I guess is good news. Until then, it might not be a bad idea to snap one of these beauties up either new or on EBay, as if ever a phone was destined to be a collectible, the N93 is it.

[Source: The Nokia Blog via BoyGeniusReport]

It’s no secret that Motorola’s handset division has been in trouble for some time, but things are starting to look extremely perilous for the former number one hadnset manufacturer. After recording record losses when other companies have reported record profits, losing the number two slot to Samsung, and talking about possibly selling off the loss-making handset division as a separate company, the last thing Motorola needs is for a large international telco to drop its products.

So guess what T-Mobile, the large international telco, has just done? Yup, shelved the launch of the Motorola Z6w, which it was set to carry this summer. Ouch! The Z6w was a weak phone, to be sure, with Wi-Fi and precious little else. Certainly it was years behind its competitors, and it didn’t have the style or even the rapidly-fading cache of the RAZR.

Motorola isn’t the only US mobile company doing really badly at the moment – US mobile phone telco Sprint Nextel Corp is seemingly doing much, much worse. After losing a million customers in the last three months alone, the company has announced a $505 million loss for the same period. One of the reasons is the success of the iPhone, which helped iPhone carrier and Sprint arch-enemy AT&T to gain 1.3 million customers during the same period.

However, the iPhone isn’t the only reason – Verizon also notched up an extra 1.5 million customers, yet it doesn’t carry the iPhone. No, the major reason is Sprint’s recent purchase of rival Nextel, which has led to a plethora of poor service complaints from customers, causing them to leave in their, well, million! Worse, Nextel cost Sprint $36 billion, yet may now only be worth just $5 billion – a $31 billion loss! Ouch! In response, Sprint has fired 4,000 of its employees, closed outlets, and has just begun a fierce price war to gain new customers, but it may be too little too late.

So the iPhone may not be the sole reason that Sprint is in trouble, just as it’s not the sole reason that Motorola’s handset business is also recording record losses – it’s just that it doesn’t exactly help them either!

[Source: Bloomberg]

Just when you thought the Apple iPhone hype had died down, we have surprising news that there are no more 8GB iPhones on sale in the UK. Carphone Warehouse has completely run out of stock, all online stores are telling their affiliates not to promote it anymore (no point, really, as there aren’t any to sell!), O2 only have a few more left in their stores, and no more additional stock is expected. What’s going on? Is this the end of the iPhone in the UK?…

Right, now April 1st has been and gone, we can get on with the real mobile news – thankfully! Apologies to regular readers for the lame April Fool’s joke on April 1st. Everyone else was doing it, but that’s no excuse, and after finding myself bored senseless by reading lame joke after lame joke, I realized that I’d committed the same sin on my own blog! So, no more April Fools from now on!

Anyway, on with the news. A newcomer to the mobile phone world, ClarityLife, has released a new mobile phone that offers, well, nothing at all! As you can see from the pic, you get four huge buttons, a monochrome screen, and a one touch emergency button on the back…and that’s it.

In a move that has stunned market analysts, Nokia has agreed to partner with Apple to develop a new successor to the iPhone. Alarmed by the rise of the iPhone, which is set to net Apple $3 billion this year and up to $45 billion next year according to market analyst Piper Jaffray, the giant Finnish phone maker has decided its best option is to work with Apple to develop an advanced smartphone that will be a hybrid iPhone/N-Series phone, combining the high-tech features of Nokia’s N-Series range with the iPhone’s revolutionary interface.

An insider at Nokia says the new super-phone will be a class-leading N-Series phone called the Nokia N-iPple, and will feature the same user interface as the iPhone, together with many of the high tech innovations that Nokia’s N-Series is famed for. The insider claims the list will include:

• HSDPA
• aGPS with support for both Google Maps and Navteq Maps
• 7 megapixel camera with auto-focus
• DVD quality 60fps video recording (similar to the LG Viewty’s)
• 3.5″ haptic touchscreen with iPhone interface
• iPhone accelerometers
• MP3 player with Nokia’s new Flair Loop audio enhancement software
• Tight integration with iTunes
• 3D graphics plus support for Nokia’s N-Gage platform
• Built-in video projector
• High precision halogen light
• Class-leading magnetometer
• Integrated lighter
• Reduced ironing option

Nokia and Apple are unsurprisingly being tight-lipped, with both declining to comment on the rumours. However, much of the Apple blogosphere is jumping on comments Steve Jobs made at this year’s MacWorld conference as evidence that such a phone is currently being developed. During the conference, when asked by a journalist for information on any forthcoming new Apple phones, Jobs stated simply: “nipples.”

With CTIA Wireless starting today, Apple and Nokia might publicly announce the deal in a move that will overshadow much of the other news coming from the conference – which is exactly what Apple did last year with the launch of the iPhone.

Update: Yes of course this is an April Fool’s joke. I’m not sure which is more ridiculous, a phone with a “Reduced ironing option” or the thought of Apple and Nokia ever working with each other!! I was going to claim that Nokia were buying Apple, but given what’s happening in the banking sector at the moment, with every slight rumour causing the share prices of a bank to collapse, I figured I better play it safe! And did nobody get “Flair Loop audio enhancement software”? Flair Loop? Anagram of April Fool? Anyone? On my own here, aren’t I?!

No more April Fools jokes, I promise!

Motorola are looking to separate their mobile phone division from the rest of the company in what some are seeing as the prelude to offloading the division altogether. According to the company’s press release, Motorola are “…exploring the structural and strategic realignment of its businesses to better equip its Mobile Devices business to recapture global market leadership and to enhance shareholder value. The company’s alternatives may include the separation of Mobile Devices from its other businesses in order to permit each business to grow and better serve its customers.”

Obviously this doesn’t mean the Mobile Devices division is for sale yet, but by separating it from the rest of the company, it makes selling it a whole lot easier.

Sony Ericsson have trademarked the name Xperia for what the trademark application shows is a range of seriously well equipped mobile phones. Specifically, the trademark lists functions such as:

• camera
• instant messaging
• e-mail
• Internet connectivity
• radio
• record, play, transmit, receive, and/or manage music and video
• play electronic games
• upload photographs and text onto online journals or web logs
• function as a personal digital assistant (PDA)
• function as walkie-talkies
• satellite navigation
• remote control for computers and run multimedia presentations

Now, a lot of these functions have already been squeezed into many of Sony Ericsson’s existing phones. However, by trademarking a new brand name, it does seem as though a new range of high end Sony Ericssons are just around the corner.

[Source: Trademork, via EngadgetMobile]

Despite a relatively weak CES 2008 showing, LG has announced that it’s giving up on the low end mobile phone market, leaving it entirely to Nokia and Samsung to slug it out.

LG will be focusing on the mid-range market instead (around the $300 mark), which, not coincidentally, is the price range of its phenomenally high-selling LG Shine and Chocolate phones. These phones have sold a whopping 5 million and 15 million units, respectively, so LG obviously knows which side its bread is buttered.

This could explain why LG’s recent phones (with the exception of the LG Viewty) have all been pretty average. Mid-range phones tend to have mid-range features, making them good enough, but unlikely to set the world on fire.

Let’s hope they also throw in a few high end phones as well, and not concentrate solely on the mid-range.
[Source: Korean Times]