Posts filed under News

Well, it was never actually alive, really, more just speculation and rumour. Now Microsoft have gone all official and announced that they’re not working on a Zune phone, nor do they intend on creating a phone that will challenge the iPhone.

Speaking in an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bill Gates said: “No, we won’t do that. In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile program.”

“We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone,” he added.

More info after the jump.

Here’s a story that made me sit up and take notice. Canadian Piotr Staniaszek has just been sent a bill by his mobile phone company, Bell Mobility, for a whopping $85,000!! How, you might be wondering, can anyone run up a bill so large? The simple answer, unfortunately, is data.

Data transfer in Canada is not quite as cheap as it is in Europe. For example, while I have an unlimited HSDPA connection for the flat rate fee of £27 a month, irrespective of whether I’m downloading data onto my phone or using my phone as a modem, in Canada, things are, well, slightly more expensive!

Unfortunately, Staniaszek didn’t realise this, and so he used his phone as a modem, and downloaded several gigs’ worth of content. What he didn’t know was that his mobile operator was charging him by the byte!!

Applen have been selling the iPhone with a ridiculous locked contract that not only forces people to stick with one operator for 18 months – 2 years, it also prevents them from using the iPhone on any other network.

In the UK, that network is O2 – if you want to have an iPhone, it has to be on O2, and it has to be on an 18 month contract. Across the rest of Europe, the operators you use differ, with different operators winning the iPhone deal in different countries. In Germany, T-Mobile won, for example, while in France, it was Orange.

The only common feature across all of Europe is that Vodafone lost. You can’t use an iPhone on Vodafone’s network in any country…until now!

Motorola have announced their latest financial Sales and Earnings figures for the third quarter of 2007 – and they ain’t pretty. Although the company as a whole recorded sales of $8.8 billion and a positive operating cash flow of $342 million, it’s mobile phone division is hitting crisis levels, with sales having dropped 36 percent compared to the third quarter 2006, which itself wasn’t a particularly good quarter.

In all, Motorola’s Mobile Devices unit lost $138 million in that quarter alone, showing that its new handsets just aren’t selling at anywhere near the level they need to in order for the company to sustain itself in the cut-throat mobile phone world.

Nokia is the world’s number one handset manufacturer, and has kept that position for years. Its N-Series smartphones cram in a breathtaking array of technology, and it’s now branching out into GPS Sat-Nav phones, location-based services and a wide range of innovative mobile software solutions that combine the best of mobile devices and Web 2.0.

But what does it take for a company to retain the number one position in one of the world’s most competitive markets? The answer is an army of Research and Development engineers and a tonne of cash. Nearly a third of Nokia’s total workforce is dedicated to R&D: a staggering 21,453 people. More amazing still is the amount Nokia spends on R&D – an almost unbelievable 3.9 billion Euros a year.

The payoff is huge, though. 3.9 billion Euros is an enormous figure, but it’s not even ten percent of Nokia’s net sales. With figures like that, it’s hard to see anyone toppling the company any time soon.

[Source: Nokia Research Center]

Nokia has been showing off some of the R&D it does at its Nokia Research Centre at its The Way We Live Next show in Finland. One of the most amazing services it was keen to talk about was its Point&Find solution, which literally links the real world to the virtual world via your camera phone.

The concept is simple. Wherever you are in the real world, you’ll see objects that you’ll want more information about, such as film posters, books, statues, restaurants, etc. You might want more details of a film being advertised on a poster, for example, or find out why a statue was created, or even how good a restaurant’s food is.

Nokia’s Point&Find solution lets you find this out with your camera phone instantly.

See how after the jump.

The iPhone’s impact on the mobile phone world is still being felt, as the mobile phone’s user interface becomes the star attraction (and not before time!). The latest news comes from Motorola, who’ve just bought a 50% stake in user interface company UI Holdings BV, the parent company of UIQ Technology AB.

For those not in the know, UIQ technology make mobile phone user interface software, and were wholly owned by Sony Ericsson after being spun off from Symbian. The UIQ user interface can currently be found in the Sony Ericsson P1, W960 Walkman and Motorola Z8.

Nokia has been bullish about its plans for GPS phone recently, having purchased mapping company Navteq and stating that most of its 2008 phones will come with GPS receiver. However, it has a fight on its hands for a share of the highly lucrative location-based advertising market, as both Google, with its forthcoming gPhone, and Microsoft, with its rumoured purchase of Garmin, both look to win in the increasingly competitive mobile navigation market.

New blog FinderMentalism has an in-depth article on the forthcoming battle, and reveals why Google really needs to buy Garmin before Microsoft does if it’s to stop Nokia in its tracks.

[Source: FinderMentalism]

With Nokia recently buying mapping company Navteq for $8.2 billion and stating that most of its mobile phones next year will come with GPS, it seems that the GPS device market will be the next convergence battleground in the mobile’s phone’s quest to dominate all consumer electronics.

Of course, the GPS device manufacturers such as Tom tom and Garmin aren’t taking this lying down, and there are new rumours that Garmin in particular are looking to develop a new GPS phone to take Nokia on at their own game.

What better time, therefore, to announce a new blog from the MobileMentalism stable. Welcome, then, to FinderMentalism.com, a new blog focusing on GPS devices, Sat-Navs, mapping applications, and the way in which GPS is changing the world in which we live.

HSDPA has been one of the most exciting connectivity technologies to hit mobile phones this year, offering an average download of 3.6Mbps. What 3G originally promised, HSDPA is finally delivering, with new smartphones finally able to browse the web and download data at broadband speeds.

Even mobile networks have been kind to us, offering us flat rate fees, rather than charging us by the byte (which is handy, when you’re downloading 450,000 bytes per second!).

Now, though, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has shown us a glimpse of the future that makes HSDPA look like the 9.6kbps modems of the early ’90s. DoCoMo’s latest invention, “Super3G”, offers a whopping 200Mbps download speeds – and read on to see just what you can do with all that juicy bandwidth!