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Monday, April 23, 2012

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...

Now to the rest of the news, where there was more than a little déjà vu.

A new ad-funded virtual mobile network launched in the UK. Three years after Blyk moved away from running its UK MVNO, Ovivo Mobile has opened for pre-registrations. Good luck to CEO Dariush Zand and the rest of the company.

Meanwhile Barclaycard announced a stick-on NFC credit card for ‘mobile’ payments. It’ll turn any phone into a mobile wallet – which sounds a bit like the BOKU service we reported in February – but, unlike BOKU, there’s no software involved so it’ll turn pretty much anything into a mobile wallet. Cue much hilarity in the tech community.

In other instances of history repeating itself, Everything Everywhere announced plans to combine some of its Orange and T-Mobile shops into ‘Everything Everywhere’ stores while Motorola followed in the footsteps of HTC by preparing to close its cloud-based file storage.

Growth was reported in mobile advertising (hooray!) and mobile malware infections (boo!), with research also anticipating a dramatic increase in 4G mobile device shipments and mobile payment adoption.

In fact, it’s research I’ll end with. A study published by Everything Everywhere showed that 74% of British adults wanted to bring 4G technology to the country as soon as possible. However, it wasn’t faster mobile phone connections that most respondents looked forward to. It was the UK catching up with other countries and staying competitive.

Based on this, you could almost argue the UK government should subsidise the forthcoming UK 4G spectrum auction in order to help the economy. Perhaps someone at one of the networks would like to suggest that?

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. More details about advertising and sponsorship opportunities are available on the About us section of our website.
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Opinion Articles

India caps mobile text messages

Anjana Pasricha from voanews.com writes:

India’s millions of mobile phone subscribers have won relief from a growing nuisance on the subcontinent - unsolicited text messages. The crackdown by regulators targets the world’s fastest-growing mobile phone market.

From remote villages to crowded metros, the number of mobile phones in India has grown exponentially to more than 850 million in just over a decade.

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Last week at The Fonecast: 3rd October 2011

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s time for my summary of last week’s mobile industry news… and what a week it’s been. Not just for me – I made my first-ever visit to Over The Air on Friday – but for the world of mobile devices.

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I'm no developer - but I still fell in love with Over The Air

Mark Bridge writes:

The text message just said "Yellow Citroën hatchback".  At least the diaeresis on the ë was in the right place. It meant the stranger who was giving me a lift from the station was probably an urbane French speaker. Either that, or they had surprisingly good predictive text on their phone. The third possibility - a serial killer with an old Sagem - hadn't crossed my mind yet.

It was at this point I realised I'd already fallen for Over The Air, a unique event aimed at mobile developers. Throwing caution to the wind, I'd arranged a lift there via Twitter with a mysterious developer I'd never met. Or spoken to.

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The Amazon Android tablet and the Apple iPhone 5

Mark Bridge writes:

I’m not a big fan of reporting on rumours - I’d rather wait until the real thing happens - but I thought these two stories were too big and too well-defined to ignore completely.

Firstly, it looks as though Amazon will be announcing an Android-powered tablet tomorrow. Called the Kindle Fire, it probably won’t be a direct replacement for the Kindle e-book reader but an alternative. Most commentators suggest we should expect a 7-inch colour screen, a focus on cloud-based services and a pretty heavily customised version of Android.

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Are smartphones endangering security?

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of IP security specialists Wick Hill Group, writes:

Smartphones are spreading throughout the business world. Their use is growing across organisations and at all levels.

According to Gartner, sales of mobile devices in the second quarter of 2011 grew 16.5% year-on-year. Smartphone sales grew 74% year-on-year and accounted for 25% of overall sales in the second quarter of 2011, up from 17% in the second quarter of 2010.

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