Blackberry pickings fewer?

RIM, the Canadian company that makes the Blackberry mobile email device, is expecting to sell about 3% fewer Blackberries in the fourth quarter than it previously predicted, reports Computer Business Review. Instead of 825,000 it is now expecting to sell 775,000.

This is partly due to product launch delays. But the company still expects to meet its revenue forecasts for the fourth quarter, and for the third quarter when unit sales are likely to be about 8% lower than previously forecast. Before the delays, third quarter sales were expected to come in at 680,000 to 710,000.
http://www.cbronline.com/

Record quarter for mobile phone sales

Mobile phone sales reached record levels in the third quarter of 2005, totaling 205.4 million units worldwide, according to research firm Gartner. This is a 22% rise over the third quarter of 2004, and the biggest quarter on record since 2001, reports Digital Media Asia. Gartner is expecting a strong fourth quarter and predicts that worldwide mobile handset sales will reach 810 million units by the end of 2005.

It was a good quarter for both Nokia – which made inroads into the Code division multiple access (CDMA) market by offering five handsets – and Motorola. Up to the end of September, Motorola sold 12 million of its sleek, slim RAZR phones.
http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/

Roaming from mobile to Wi-Fi

Irish wireless technology developer Cicero Networks says it has achieved seamless roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi wireless networks. This would enable a mobile phone call to turn into a cheaper voice-over Wi-Fi call once the user was near a Wi-Fi network.

The Dublin-based developer has released a Call Continuity server, which works in conjunction with its CiceroPhone software on handsets. It has begun demonstrating the technology on the Qtek 8310 and 8300 Windows Mobile smartphones from handset maker HTC.
http://www.cbronline.com/

Wind-up laptop aims to narrow digital divide

A prototype of a $100 wind-up laptop was demonstrated at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, reports the BBC.

The lime green laptops shown at the summit in Tunis are aimed at children in the developing world but have many innovative features that could appeal to adults. They have an AC adaptor that doubles as a carrying strap and flash memory - which is a more robust form of storage than a hard drive. They also have very low power consumption.

Governments in the developing world can offer the laptops to their schoolchildren if they commit to buying a million machines for around $100 each.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4445060.stm

Mobile show line up

Keynote speakers at the next big European mobile bash, the 3GSM World Congress, will include the following company bosses:

Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group
Antonio Viana-Baptista, Telefónica Móviles
Sanjiv Ahuja of Orange
Peter Erskine, 02
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
Bill Roedy, MTV
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia (CEO elect)
Carl-Henric Svanberg, Ericsson
Ed Zander, Motorola
Mun Hwa Park, LG Electronics Mobile Communications

The exhibition and seminar programme is expected to attract more than 40,000 telecoms executives, including over 6,000 CEOs, according to the organisers, Informa and the GSM Association.

The event, which sees mobile executives networking into the small hours, will be held in Barcelona for the first time from 13-16 February. The gossip this year is likely to be about whether the show retains its unique character after its transfer from Cannes.

Though overpriced, and with the world’s laziest taxi drivers, Cannes has a certain louche charm and some good late-night bars. But it simply did not have enough space for all the companies that wanted to exhibit there.
http://www.3gsmworldcongress.com/

Alcatel to develop Mobile TV ecosystem
Alcatel has created a Mobile TV unit, Alcatel Mobile Broadcast. It will be headed by Olivier Coste, who was previously responsible for developing the company’s satellite activities. The French telecoms equipment company says that there is “significant consumer appetite for Mobile TV” over third-generation mobile.

But it adds that while current mobile networks enable the distribution of numerous TV channels, they have limitations in terms of global coverage and in the number of users that can receive these channels in the same cell. It intends to develop a mobile TV infrastructure or ecosystem and to sell it to mobile operators and broadcasters.

Fueling longer mobile battery life
Motorola, the US mobile handset maker, has made an undisclosed investment in Tekion, a fuel cell company, according to the ExtremeTech website.

Tekion’s fuel cells are powered using formic acid (the same substance ants use to protect their nests), because it is not flammable like other alternatives such as methanol, and because it has a high energy density, enabling a lot of power to be packed into a small amount of fuel.

Fuel cells are carbon neutral and provide an instant recharge – just top up the cell with extra fuel and you get instant, new battery life. No plugging in a charger and having to wait. They produce electricity when oxygen enters the cell and they react to it.

Tekion has already demonstrated its technology on a Nokia phone. It is developing a hybrid product with both a lithium ion battery (as commonly found in mobile phones) and a fuel cell for the satellite phone market.

The company did not say exactly what it was doing for Motorola but said funding from the company would be used to commercialise the technology in time for a planned 2007 launch. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1884404,00.asp

Sidekick that won’t be sidelined
Danger's Sidekick II, which looks like a funky little hand-held computer, “is being introduced into all [our] stores in time for the seasonally important Christmas period,” mobile operator T-Mobile said on Wednesday as it announced UK third-quarter results. Many of its stores are expected to have the Sidekick – which competes against the Blackberry email device – from next week.

California-based Danger’s product can be used to access T-Mobile's web’n’walk service. This service makes it easy to connect to the internet on the move without having to look at only those websites that have been optimised for mobile.

At its web’n’walk launch earlier this year, T-Mobile tried to introduce the Sidekick in a low-key way alongside other mobile devices for web’n’walk, including a personal-organiser based mobile and a Nokia phone. But the Sidekick still hogged much of the interest.

T-Mobile said it gained 259,000 UK customers in the third quarter, taking its total – including Virgin Mobile customers which use its mobile network – to 16.3 million. It said blended average revenue per user (Arpu) is stable at £20, with non-voice revenue accounting for 19% of Arpu.

The company said it would invest £1.5bn in the UK, spread over 2006 and 2007, to increase its market share. It will more than double its retail stores to 300, creating 1,100 news jobs, a spokesman said.
http://www.t-mobile.net/

India mobile take up reaches new high
India added 2.11 million new mobile users in October, the biggest number in a single month, according to the Cellular Operators' Association.

Take up has been boosted by the slow spread of fixed-line telecoms and India now has nearly 53 million Global System for Mobile users. It added 1.96 million in September.
http://coai.in/archives_statistics_2005_q4.htm

Adobe tips ebooks at World Business Forum
"It's a lot of fun to go round the world and see how technology is changing behaviour, but it is still hard to get a cellphone connection in the heart of Silicon Valley," according to Bruce Chizen, head of US software company Adobe, who was speaking at the World Business Forum in Frankfurt on November 3.

He is tipping ebooks as a technology to watch for the future and says he's seen mobile devices in Japan that store many books but are quite book-like. He reckons a price point of about $199 is about right and says the company has embarked on a new ebook experiment.

The WBF, a conference geared towards senior business leaders, also featured many other luminaries including Jack Welch, former boss of GE, and William Ury, a Harvard law professor who had a lot of useful tips for those involved in negotiations.

Ury said: "Even though we think of negotiating as talking, it is more about listening. You appoint a spokesman for the team, but how often do you appoint a listener?

"Often the other side offers a concession, or appears to, but you don't hear it because you are focusing on what you are trying to say."

He also quoted Henry Kissinger - another of the event's speakers - who once said: "The most important rule of diplomacy is to have talks when you don't need to have talks - so you're better prepared when you do."

But Professor Ury's biggest tip was to see the negotiation process as a co-operative search for mutual gain. "Sometimes when we engage, we make decisions entirely contrary to our interests," he said.