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Monday, January 21, 2013

Last week at The Fonecast: 21st January 2013

Slip slidin' away

Mark Bridge writes:

There’s plenty of snow disrupting the UK – but, thanks to the mobile telecoms industry, thousands upon thousands of people are able to work from home. We’re all feeling pretty pleased with ourselves right now, aren’t we?

Pedestrians may have been skating down pavements but a different kind of trouble on the high street dominated much of last week as music, DVD and occasional mobile phone retailer HMV went into administration. All the company’s shops will keep trading while the search for a buyer continues. Meanwhile EE said it was getting rid of 78 of its duplicate stores; almost inevitable when the rebranding of Orange and T-Mobile left many towns with two places to find Everything Everywhere. Oh, and the Metropolitan Police reckons around 10,000 mobiles will be stolen in London this month.

However there was good news from the UK as well. From next spring, most people with a UK current account will be able to transfer money by quoting the recipient’s mobile phone number rather than a sort code and account details. “Payment by text message” said many of the mainstream news stories, although that’s not exactly the case.

Over in the USA, Facebook enhanced the iOS version of its Messenger application to let users speak to each other without paying call charges. The VoIP feature was launched in Canada earlier this month but there’s no sign of a UK announcement yet.

Financial results from eBay and PayPal suggested they’d had a particularly good year with customers using mobile technology, while a drop in Intel’s profits gave the impression they could do with more mobile sales.

Talking of which, new research says shipments of large-screen ‘phablets’ are expected to more than double this year. Expect 60 million smartphones with a 5-inch screen (or bigger) to be shipped worldwide during 2013. Looking slightly further ahead, more than half of all mobile phones shipped next year are expected to be smartphones, according to ABI Research.

Which prompts a couple of questions. If the majority of devices are ‘smart’, it seems inappropriate to call them ‘smartphones’ any more. What should we call the next generation of smartphones... and how will we spot them amongst their less-smart predecessors?

Every Monday morning we summarise the past week’s mobile industry headlines in our newsletter. 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.
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Opinion Articles

‘The Eyes Have It’ at Mobile World Congress

James Rosewell writes:

DoCoMo are one of many network operators and handset manufacturers demonstrating innovative new products as Mobile World Congress. Our eye was caught by the employee demonstrating “Eye Controlled Earphones”. It’s a good job the ladies from the CBOSS stand weren’t walking past at the time.

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'Mobile Money Monday' at Mobile World Congress

James Rosewell writes:

Monday’s Mobile World Congress conference agenda dedicated one of 4 streams to Mobile Money - Transfers, Transactions and Technology allowing all stakeholders to share experiences and debate the future of Mobile and Money.

Two types of service dominated presentations and panel discussions; Near Field Communication (NFC) technology enabling payment at traditional Point of Sale (PoS), and the Mobile Wallet replacing plastic or cash.

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‘Innovation Corner’ at Mobile World Congress

James Rosewell writes:

Here’s my pick of the 3 most innovative companies I’ve uncovered at the 2010 Mobile World Congress.

Cootek.com win the prize for simplest innovation... an accurate touch screen keyboard. They’re a few months away from being ready to release the software to handset manufacturers, but the demo handsets worked very well. The keyboard assumes the user is not going to press the intended key, but in fact might miss and press another key in the same area. Based on this knowledge and an extensive dictionary of words and language context, it’s able to determine the intended word with surprising accuracy. I sincerely hope their technology will be made available for the Nexus One in the not too distant future.

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Google “Mobile First” from Eric Schmidt’s Key Note at Mobile World Congress

James Rosewell writes:

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, presented a compelling vision of a mobile centric future. The phone has become the “high value end point” for Google services enabled by a combination of increasing handset power, mobile data networks and cloud computing. By far the scarcest resource is the bandwidth available through the mobile data networks. Google appear committed to work with Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to maximise bandwidth usage, although several audience questions suggested scepticism from the main stream mobile industry. Eric expressed a need to maintain a harmonious relationship with MNOs stating Google could not operate its service on mobile devices without their co-operation.

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The great Windows Mobile 7 conspiracy theory

Mark Bridge writes:

I like a good conspiracy theory. A good one, mind you. None of this “Funny thing happened on the way to Mars” nonsense. Oh no, not me. And, despite occasionally mirroring Jerry Fletcher by balancing a bottle on the door handle, I’ve never been inclined to publish such a theory. Until now.

You see, it’s Mobile World Congress in a fortnight’s time. Which is when the great and the good of the mobile industry – along with their mates and hangers-on – head for Barcelona. Microsoft will be there. They’re holding a press briefing on Monday afternoon. And there’s a lot of talk about Windows Mobile 7 being (unofficially) on the agenda. But where’s the evidence?

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