Vodafone is the latest to get involved in the mobile music business with the announcement of its own download store, Vodafone Music.
It’ll allow those with 3G handsets to browse and download tracks directly to their phone, and is currently compatible with 11 models, including Sony Ericsson’s W910, W890, W880, W850, V640, V630, K850, K800, K770 and K610 handsets, and Nokia’s N73.
 |
 |
The excitement surrounding the launch of iPhone 3G probably would have passed me by if it weren’t for the fact that my in-tray was full of press releases all saying the same thing: “Hi, I’m a mobile games publisher. I’m releasing stuff on the popular new Apple phone. Please tell your readers to buy some.”
Mobile games publishers are really excited by iPhone 2.0 - for a lot of the same reasons they were really excited about Nokia’s N-Gage application. It’s a single platform, so they don’t have to write 600 iterations of each game to different handsets. It also has its own attractive online shop, which makes downloading games a pleasure - unlike trying to buy Java games from your standard mobile’s network operator portal.
But iPhone potentially offers much more than N-Gage. OK, so the user base is microscopic in comparison to Nokia’s. However, it’s the type of customer that’s important. According to startup iPhone developer Ngmoco, iPhone users spend up to 60% of their phone time on activities other than phone calls - they want to download stuff.
Also, there’s a major mobile gaming bugbear that the iPhone addresses and N-Gage never did - the interface. The Apple product boasts motion sensing capabilities and a multitouch screen; it couldn’t be more tuned into the zeitgeist if it changed its name to Wii phone and started offering fitness games.
Developers are also getting hassle-free access to the camera and GPS functionalities, which should finally lead to the development of mainstream location-based and augmented reality games.
And then, of course, iPhone is … well, the iPhone, the latest wrap of indefatigable Apple crack; a semi-religious artifact crafted by industrial design demi-gods. When Steve Jobs says iPhone is going to be a games platform, it bloody well is going to be a games platform. When some suit in Nokia with an unpronounceable Finnish surname says N-Gage might be quite good, frankly who gives a damn?
Anyway, if you have succumbed, check out EA’s Scrabble and Tetris conversions or Gameloft’s Brain Challenge and Platinum Sudoku, or wait for the much-vaunted physics-based platformer, Rolando (rolandogame.com), which iPhone enthusiasts are calling innovative and groundbreaking, but the rest of us see as just a stylish take on some well-used ideas. Hey, that sounds sort of familiar …
|
|
We didn’t have much (well, anything) to say about the recent iPhone launch because it certainly seemed as though the rest of the tech press/blogworld had that one… um… thoroughly covered. However, with the glowing reports earlier this week about how amazing it was that Apple had sold 1 million iPhones over the weekend, Carlo Longino has put that into perspective, noting that it’s not quite as impressive as most people seem to think. First, as he notes, since the launch was international (rather than the original iPhones US-only launch), it’s no surprise that it would sell many more. But, more importantly, he notes that recent stats on mobile handsets shows that 282 million handsets were sold in the first quarter of this year, and that Nokia alone appears to sell approximately 1.28 million handsets per day. So, yes, selling 1 million handsets over the weekend is a nice round milestone — and certainly other handset makers are probably jealous of the attention it’s getting. But, it’s not having a huge impact on the overall handset market just yet.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
BT is in talks to buy Silicon Valley internet-phone software developer Ribbit as it looks to create a one-number web-based communications platform to take on the likes of Google and Skype in the burgeoning online telecoms market.
Ribbit, founded two years ago and based near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, claims to be “Silicon Valley’s first phone company”. It has created software that allows programmers to design applications that tie together mobile phones, fixed-line phones and even social networking sites into a single online communications hub.
Reports in the blogosphere said that BT is spending $55m (£28m) on the company. No actual deal is understood to have yet been signed off, and BT refused to comment today.
Bringing together the information stored on the internet with mobile phones and computers, a trend known as unified communications, has been mooted for many years. But the take-up of broadband and the creation of fast mobile phone networks has made it easier to achieve. Last year Google snapped up another Californian company involved in this area, called GrandCentral, for about $50m.
Ribbit’s technology is open to any software developer to use - a model known as open source - so they can build their own applications. London-based Square Circle, for instance, has created a web-based phone application that looks like a chalkboard. American business communications group Salesforce.com, meanwhile, has a Ribbit-based application that lets a company’s sales people keep track of all their calls and contacts through a single web page and costs $25 per user per month.
Ribbit is also testing a consumer platform called Amphibian, which looks like a social networking site with a phone attached. It allows users to transcribe voicemail messages left on their mobile as text on a web page, meaning they can search for keywords in a message. Calls can be patched through from a mobile to a computer; not only will the caller’s number be displayed but Amphibian can pull up their profile and latest postings from sites such as Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Because the system is open, calls from other web-based telephony services such as GoogleTalk and Skype can also be accessed.
Google, too, is experimenting with open-source mobile communications with its Android mobile phone operating system, due to start appearing in the first generation of handsets towards the end of the year. Application developers are likely to use the platform to create unified messaging services. Apple, meanwhile, is also letting developers create applications for its iPhone device and a Ribbit service has already been created.
Ribbit has raised about $13m from venture capital firms Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures. It was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ted Griggs who serves as chief executive, former AT&T product development head Crick Waters and two of Griggs’ colleagues from his previous company, telecoms software group Syndeo Corporation: Peter Leong and Ramani Narayan, Ribbit’s head of marketing, meanwhile, used to be head of marketing at another Californian start-up in the web telephony market called Jajah. He previously worked for Apple.
|
|
Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat has an excellent article on AdMob, a top company in the mobile advertising space. Marshall does some back-of-the-envelope calculations to come up with some revenue figures and notes that AdMob is poised to start “minting” money as the mobile web takes off. It may happen, but I wonder if the mobile ad market will really be as big a deal as some make it out to be — for a few reasons. First, it seems incredibly unlikely that mobile ads get anywhere near the clickthrough rate of web-based ads. Given the scenarios under which mobile content is usually called up (on the go, looking for something specific), it seems likely that mobile ads would get significantly less attention. Second, and more importantly, the concept of “the mobile web” still seems like a temporary invention that is destined to go away. As the iPhone has shown, it is possible to design a rather competent browser that can show “the full web” on a mobile phone. With mobile network speeds increasing, and more handsets bound to offer similar browsing functionality in the not-too-distant future, the distinction between the mobile web and the regular web seem destined to go away. At that point, specifically mobile ads will make even less sense, and the market will simply return to the existing market for web ads.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Nokia moved to counter the growing threat of Apple and Google in the race to supply the next generation of mobile phones by taking control of the British software company Symbian yesterday and announcing plans to make its mobile phone software free of charge.
Symbian, which Nokia helped create with the UK-based Psion 10 years ago, makes the operating system software that sits on so-called smartphones, handsets that can access the internet and play music. As mobile phones become more powerful and people do far more than just make calls and send texts, the software that powers these devices has become a crucial battleground.
Symbian has about 60% of the global smartphone market with its technology in more than 200m handsets already. But the recent entrance of Apple into the market with the iPhone and plans for Google to do likewise with its Android operating system later this year have threatened the positions of Symbian and Nokia, which makes four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide.
Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s vice-president, insisted that the company’s move, which has been under discussion for several months, had nothing to do with the threat posed by Google or Apple. “Looking at this as a response to anybody would not do any justice to the boldness and magnitude of what we are doing.”
Analysts were in no doubt about the Finnish company’s motivation: to prevent Google’s Android operating system, due to appear on phones towards the end of the year, grabbing a significant slice of the market. Nokia’s plans to stop charging for operating software also pose a threat to Microsoft and the BlackBerry developer, Research In Motion.
Nokia is spending €264m (£209m) on the 52% of Symbian it does not own and bringing on board its 1,600 staff - more than 1,000 of which are in London and Cambridge. Ericsson, which has 15.6% of Symbian, Sony Ericsson, with 13.1%, Panasonic, with 10.5%, and Siemens, with 8.4%, have already agreed to sell. The last remaining shareholder is Samsung and Nokia expects the Korean firm also to sell its stake. Nokia then plans to integrate its own smartphone operating system - called Series 60 - with the UIQ standard developed by Motorola and Sony Ericsson and the MOAP platform of Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. It will roll together all these systems, in the form of about 10m lines of computer code, into one free-of-charge software product that is “open source”, or accessible to all, within two years.
That new product will be controlled by a non-profit organisation called the Symbian Foundation, which already has more than 20 members including Vodafone, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG. All members will be able to use the new operating system to install on handsets or develop applications free of charge.
Many mobile phone firms complain that the sheer number of operating systems makes it very hard to develop new revenue-generating services.
Setting up the foundation means Nokia will be abandoning hundreds of millions of pounds of software-licensing revenues. Symbian alone made £160m last year by charging mobile phone makers for its software. For Nokia, however, the ambition is to make it as easy as possible for engineers to develop applications for the new system, which will make Symbian handsets more attractive to consumers and consequently to mobile phone companies.
“I am convinced this will lead to us selling more phones,” said Öistämö.
Symbian’s chief executive, Nigel Clifford, described the creation of the Symbian Foundation as “epoch-making”. Analysts said it would also frustrate Google, whose Android system is also “open source”.
Emeka Obiodu, at the industry analysts Global Insight, said Google’s plans had been “fatally derailed” by Nokia’s move.
“Nokia is taking the fight to Google on its own terms,” he said. “Google prides itself on open-source credentials and is eager to build up a coalition of industry players to push through with its agenda (which is to cultivate a viable platform for mobile advertising). However, Nokia has nipped that in the bud.
“By tying up the top five mobile handset makers, key chipmakers and the likes of AT&T and Vodafone, Nokia wants to starve Android, and similar initiatives, of influential industry players, leaving them to toy around with smaller players with lesser chance of changing the status quo.”
It will also be a blow to Microsoft, which has toiled for most of the past decade to get into the mobile phone market and now faces the prospect of its main rival becoming free of charge. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system has only 13% of the market and costs handset makers $8 to $15 a phone to use.
|
|
Sony Ericsson recently announced a total of five new handsets to the market, spanning the range from budget throwaways to feature-packed behemoths.
We’ll choose one of the latter for this particular report since it offers what we believe is the highest resolution camera on a mobile phone in Europe to date.
The C905 sports no less than 8.1 megapixels, which is set to be the new standard for existing 5MP models to follow. Whether or not we’re getting into ’silly’ territory now is for the consumer to decide. Personally we think that if you’re a good enough photographer to need more than 5MP you’ll also know that you’ll need a proper camera to get the best out of the pictures.
|
|
BT wants us all saving energy. It also wants us to do it by buying its new series of planet-friendly phones.
The first series in BT’s £2m drive to become more energy efficient are DECT cordless phones and include the BT Graphite 1500 with answering machine, BT Graphite 1100, BT Freestyle 610 and BT Freestyle 650 with answering machine.
The company has promised that more than 90% of its phones will be more energy efficient by July 2008 and that it won’t charge extra for the privilege. How nice.
The new handsets have power units that draw half the power of current units. According to BT, replacing its fixed line and DECT phones with these new models will reduce CO2 emissions by 195,000 tonnes in the next three years – the same as taking 57,000 cars off the road for a year. The advantage to our collective pockets will be a cool £39m reduction in electricity bills.
Gavin Patterson, BT group managing director, Consumer said: “BT has continued to address environmental concerns by launching phones that consume approximately half the electricity of previous models; this will make a major contribution to the reduction of CO2 emissions.
David Jackson, buyer at Argos added: “These phones are a simple, affordable solution to help customers reduce their electricity consumption and reduce their carbon footprint.â€
You can get the green phones at Argos and BT.-Martin Lynch
[BT]
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Motorola Inc. on Tuesday introduced
two new versions of its Q smartphone that will support GSM and
HSDPA, a high-speed wireless standard being rolled out in
Europe.
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Top world mobile phone maker Nokia
unveiled a thin “Barracuda” phone and six other handsets priced
under 100 euros (68.24 pounds) on Thursday, including its
cheapest 1200 model expected to sell for 35 euros.