Mark Bridge writes:
It’s claimed there’s recently been some dodgy equine activity in the mobile industry. No, I’m not talking about the dancing pony that promoted Three UK. I’m not even making lasagne jokes. I’m talking about the ‘Trojan horse’ threatening to monopolise the mobile marketplace.
That Trojan horse is the Android platform, according to a complaint to the European Commission… and those companies doing the complaining include Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle. They’re part of a coalition called FairSearch, describing Google’s distribution of Android as “predatory”. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
Sticking with legal activity, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading has launched an investigation to find out whether some free mobile applications and web-based games for children are breaking the law.
It’s not saying anyone is; it’s just checking because consumer protection law doesn’t allow products to include a ‘direct exhortation’ encouraging children to make a purchase. The results of its fact-finding are due to be published later this year.
In other news from the past seven days, a lot of things appear to be going up. Worldwide tablet shipments are expected to increase 38% this year, the number of mobile HTML5 browsers is forecast to rise by 87% this year and app downloads are already up by 11% since the end of 2012.
Also increasing is the UK’s spending on mobile advertising – up 148% to £526 million in 2012 – along with global spending on location-based ads.
4G data speeds are on the way up, too. EE says it’s going to double the speed and the capacity of its UK network, introducing maximum data speeds of over 80Mbps.
And one final increase: a large-screen smartphone from Samsung. This new ‘phablet’ is packing the biggest screen ever seen on a Samsung phone; bigger than the Galaxy S4 and the Note II. It’s equipped with a 6.3-inch display and is called the Samsung Mega. Yes, Mega. Well, with a screen that size it was hardly going to be subtle, was it?
| Every Monday morning we summarise the past week’s mobile industry headlines in a newsletter that’s very much like this article. To receive it, simply register your email address at TheFonecast.com by clicking the link at the top right-hand corner of our home page. |