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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Last week at The Fonecast: 13th February 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s not been a good week for Nokia staff, with 4000 of them likely to lose their jobs from factories in Finland, Hungary and Mexico. The company says it’s moving device assembly to Asia, where it’ll be closer to component manufacturers. The three scaled-down factories will remain open with a new focus on smartphone customisation.

A cheerier note came from O2 UK, which asked head office staff to test its flexible working arrangements on Wednesday. Around 3,000 people didn’t turn up for work, leaving the security guards to race around the empty offices in swivel chairs. Or something like that.

We’re still in quarterly results season; last week’s figures came from HTC, Vodafone and Virgin Media. The latter revealed that its ‘pay monthly’ mobile users had overtaken the number of prepay customers for the first time.

Talking of contracts, Phones 4u launched a new scheme to let customers upgrade every six months. It’s called JUMP – Just Upgrade My Phone – and splits the traditional monthly contract into separate network and phone contracts. JUMP has been running in around 100 shops as a trial since last May.

And while we’re on the subject of upgrades, Cellebrite – the company whose kit disappoints Yoda by transferring contact details between different models of mobile phone – has recently enhanced its touch-screen tablet with a diagnostic option. It’s designed to help in-store staff differentiate between faulty phones and confused customers.

A different kind of problem befell Google, when a flaw in its US mobile payment service was discovered. Rather took the shine off its Chrome mobile browser announcement from earlier in the week. Problems too for satellite phone owners, who learned that their calls could – theoretically, at least – be hacked.

Mind you, GSM calls have been open to hackers for a while... and that’s hardly dented sales, has it?

Why not start your week with a reminder of the latest mobile headlines?  Simply register at TheFonecast.com by clicking the link at the top right-hand corner of our home page and we’ll send you this weekly news summary by email.

The Fonecast is sponsored by 51Degrees.mobi. You’ll find more about advertising and sponsorship opportunities on the About us section of our website.

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Opinion Articles

Everything Everywhere, Orange and T-Mobile: how much longer for three brands?

Mark Bridge writes:

This story starts with Mercury One2One and Orange. They were acquired by Deutsche Telekom (which changed One2One’s name to T-Mobile) and France Telecom. Next, Everything Everywhere was created to run the T-Mobile and Orange brands in the UK.

Author: The Fonecast
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Multiplayer Computer Games are Big Business for Small Devices

Greg Flakus of voanews.com writes:

Millions of people are addicted to playing games on mobile devices, with rivals and teammates spread around the world. A company in Austin, Texas has developed such a game, known as a mobile multiplayer online game, for the Apple iPhone and iPad, basing it on a pen-and-paper game that was popular in the 1970s called Traveller.

Author: The Fonecast
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Last week at The Fonecast: 30th April 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

Last week mobile phones and health were back in the headlines together, rather like love & marriage or salt and vinegar. The news is pretty much as we’ve heard before; this time it’s the UK Health Protection Agency’s independent Advisory Group on Non-Ionising Radiation telling us there’s no convincing evidence that mobile phone technologies cause adverse effects on human health – but longer-term research is still needed.

Author: The Fonecast
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Big headlines for Three UK... but no big changes

Mark Bridge writes:

The headlines sound pretty dramatic. “Three exits business market”. “Three parts company with Phones 4u”. It sounds like the 3G network operator is cutting back and reorganising. But let's look a little closer.

Author: The Fonecast
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Last week at The Fonecast: 23rd April 2012

Mark Bridge writes:

We’ve had a few sets of quarterly results in the past week. Let me summarise as best I can.

Qualcomm: doing very well, thank you.
Microsoft: pretty decent, although no-one’s talking much about phones.
Intel: not as good as before, although better than expected.
Nokia: sorry, we’ve lost a billion Euro. Well, we did warn you...

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A month of mobile: O2 counts on 3, Microsoft counts to 10 and Apple counts its profits

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