Tonethephone

Nokia signs Sony BMG to Comes with Music

I trotted down to London's Covent Garden to hear Nokia announce that it has definitely done the deal with Sony BMG to participate in its 'Comes with Music' offering. I also discovered 'Say and Play'.

MWC: Everybody keeps writing Motorola off

Rating: Alcatel says the Chinese are coming

Talk about kicking a man when he’s down, a favourite pastime @ MWC is predicting the imminent demise of Motorola’s handset division. Today it was the turn of Dr Fei Liu, CEO with Alcatel/TCL.
He reckons that a Chinese manufacturer will soon join the Top Five handset vendors and singled out Motorola in particular as being a likely loser.

MWC: Sony Ericsson’s G-700 is a Touch-screen for everyone

Rating: The personal organiser phone is back

I was chatting to Martin Winkler @ the MWC show yesterday about the UIQ driven G-700 which Sony Ericsson has just launched. His take on this handset is “Who said that a touch-screen phone must be for business.

MWC: HSDPA modem. Everybody should have one

Rating: Brought GoMo News to you from literally anywhere

I really should give a shameless plug  to the Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem which has provided me with access when all other modes of communication have struggled. It’s been kindly loaned to me by the GSMA and Vodafone Spain.

More mixed messages over the iPhone

The established cellular industry's ambiguous attitude to Apple's infamous iPhone has just been exemplified by remarks made by a Dutch mobile operator, KPN's Ad Scheepbouwer. He described the device as "pretty useless", then went on to say that he wasn't averse to selling it in the Netherlands where Apple has yet to select a unique partner.

Scheepbouwer was, of course, referring to the iPhone's impact in the German market where T-Mobile has apparently sold a mere 70, 000 units.
That compares to around 700,000 new subscribers which KPN's E-Plus German network signed up in the last quarter. It also compares to the 20,000 or so iPhones per day which Apple claims to be selling globally.

The perils of SIM swapping @ Xmas

 Elsewhere I've just recounted the sad tale of a British woman given a spanking new Sony Ericsson Walkman handset by her son for Xmas. And it didn't work properly.
I eventually managed to get to the bottom of the problem for the pair. The answer was simple. Her SIM card wasn't correctly provisioned for data.
I don't think this will prove to be an isolated incident because it resulted from a very common practice. That is, a recipient removing the SIM which came with the new pre-paid handset and inserting an old existing SIM instead.

MIDs and PMPs pose threat to smartphones

I normally take Intel's predictions with a large pinch of salt mainly because the company's blatant motivation in any announcement is just to sell more of its processors. But there just might be some substance in its claim for discovering a new device category – MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).

What made me change my mind about MIDs was reading a new SDK release from browser vendor, Opera, which cited one of its best customers – Archos. This company offers its customers a Portable Media Player or PMP which looks very suspiciously like a MID to me.

Driving instructors for smartphones required

I ran into Richard last night who proudly displayed his latest toy – a Nokia E90 Communicator. He's a long time user – having owned the original HSSCD version from Orange.

Now he's on O2 and can't get his GPS or push email working. But he was prepared to pay for lessons. The closest analogy I could come up with, was paying a driving instructor to teach you how to get the most out of a new sports car.

Googling is no different - whatever the handset

I obviously caused a stir at 3 UK's Maidenhead HQ with my comments made about trying desperately to find the latest news on Lewis Hamilton via an X-Series Nokia handset versus an iPhone. And abandoning the process after 12 minutes.

So much so that I received a missive from Mike Stead, project manager for global technology strategy with  Hutchison Whampoa.
The point I was trying to make is that intelligent personalisation of 3's portal had let me down.

Mobile industry welcomes iPhone SDK concession

Rating: The iPhone wasn't a smartphone, it was a featurephone until now

by Tony Dennis

Having seen the recent announcement from his grace, Duke Jobs of Cupertino, that there will finally be some kind of SDK for both the Apple  iPhone and iPod by February 2008, I decided to phone around for industry reactions. Actually, Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO with Synchronica predicted this move. Last week he said, "We believe that the mobile industry is moving away from proprietary protocols and that the iPhone will become more open."

Today he positively welcomed Apple's change of heart describing the iPhone as the only featurephone that thought it was a smartphone. Brinkschulte also guessed that either technical difficulties or time-to-market considerations had held Apple back originally.