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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

Review: BeeWi BBS020 solar-powered hands-free Bluetooth car kit

Mark Bridge writes:

Persuading mobile phone users not to hold their phone when they’re driving should be a simple task. It’s dangerous, it’s against the law and the penalties include a fine plus points on your licence.

But even then, there’s often an excuse about convenience and usability. Some people don’t like wearing headsets, some don’t like wires and some simply forget to charge the batteries.

That’s why a new hands-free Bluetooth loudspeaker from French company BeeWi caught my eye.

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The simple case of the disguised iPhone 4

Mark Bridge writes:

I remember the launch of Carweek back in the 1990s. It was a motoring magazine produced as a weekly glossy newspaper; a novel format, although one that probably led to its demise. 'Spy shots' of prototype cars seemed then – as now – to be much sought-after, despite them often not showing much resemblance to the finished product. Indeed, I often wondered how you could possibly road-test the handling of a new car when it was covered with unflattering body parts that served to disguise its shape.

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Maria Sharapova and the 'geek porn' of unboxing

Mark Bridge writes:

'Unboxing' is - or was - the new geek porn. We know this because The Register told us so in 2006, when the practice of video recording the unpacking of new consumer electronics products started to become popular. Just over two years later The Independent tried to tell us that unboxing was still the new geek porn but, by then, conventional porn had probably returned to... er... pole position.

Why do I mention this?  Well, Sony Ericsson has just published its own unboxing video featuring tennis player, model, charity worker and Sony Ericsson brand ambassador Maria Sharapova.

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Scaremongering news stories? There's an app for that

Mark Bridge writes:

Here’s a news headline that caught my eye.

Shotgun certificate up for renewal?  There's an app for that

Or, if you prefer…

Police to allow gun users renew licences with iPhone app

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Mobile payments: solutions get dumber while cards get smarter?

Mark Bridge writes:

Last week I spotted a couple of mobile-related news stories that involved payment company MasterCard. One came from CPI Card Group, which had introduced a “next-generation, MasterCard-approved payment tag” (a.k.a. 'sticker') that enabled “any mobile device to be used to make payments anywhere using the worldwide contactless MasterCard PayPass standard” (by sticking it on the back).

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