October 2006

Mobile Phone Sales Set To Hit One Billion For 2006
Global mobile shipments are set to hit one billion this year for the first time.
According to researchers IDC, a total of 254.9 million units were shipped in the third quarter of 2006, up 7.9 per cent from the previous quarter and a hefty leap of 21 per cent from the same quarter in 2005.
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker saw record performances from all top five top industry vendors during the first three quarters of 2006.
“Shipping nearly a billion units in a single year is a significant milestone, but just as important is the journey it takes to get there,” mused Ramon Llamas, research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.
“Emerging markets have presented tremendous opportunity for vendors to provide users with their first handsets, and some users may already be looking to upgrade to another phone. Similarly, replacement handsets are a popular option for those in mature markets, especially as new features such as music have gained momentum,” he added.
Ryan Reith, research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker noted that, “the strong growth in the third quarter was very comparable to the growth we saw in 3Q05, as the trend of vendors and carriers working to prep for the holiday season begins.”
“Handsets that provide music functionality are now very visible in the industry. Mature markets are at a point where it is worthwhile for the carriers to launch these devices with strong marketing campaigns behind them, knowing that consumers are willing and ready to use their device as a music player as well as a phone,” Reith added.
The big boys break records
Nokia turned in another superlative performance, exceeding expectations and setting a new industry record by shipping 88.5 million units in the third quarter, cruising past its previous record by 4.8 million units, with the telecoms giant reporting double digit growth in the Far East, Europe, US and Chinese markets.
Records were also broken at second-placed Motorola, who enjoyed their sixth straight quarter notching up growth of around 40 per cent or better, helped on by the success of their RAZR phone.
Samsung managed to shift thirty million units in a quarter for the first time, while the number four vendor, Sony Ericsson notched up a healthy twenty million units.
IDC
25 October, 2006
Samsung Launches Upgraded Q1 Ultramobile PCs
With ne’er a parp on their usual raucous PR trumpet, Samsung have quietly shuffled out two updates to its Q1 ultra mobile Origami PC range.
Samsung’s Origami machines run a tablet version of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and look to fill a niche in the market for between laptop PCs and PDAs.
Sporting a 7in LCD monitor with touchscreen functionality, the Origami measures up at around half the size of a regular laptop PC, but still offers full-fat functionality, with users able to surf the web, play games, watch movies, listen to music and make notes
Weighing 1.7 pounds, it’s light enough to carry around for a few hours which is a good thing because that’s when the battery will conk out (battery life is measured at a rather disappointing three hours.)
The updated Q1-Pentium comes with a 60 GB hard disk and 1 GB RAM, and substitutes a nippier Intel Pentium M 723 1GHz processor for the original Celeron M 900MHz processor.
The other new model – the Q1b – uses a cheaper Via Technologies’ C7 1GHz processor, and is fitted with a 40 GB hard disk and 512 MB RAM.
Samsung said in a statement that these new PCs are available in some European and Asian countries and in the U.S – we spotted one site advertising the Q1-Pentium for $1,250 and the Q1b $900.
Samsung Q1
24 October, 2006
Firefox 2.0 Launches Today
The final version of the Firefox 2.0 browser is expected to be released into the wild today.
Our browser of choice for some time now, the update to the open source browser includes onboard anti-phishing controls, built-in RSS and XML feed-viewing capabilities, and a new inline spell checker.
Firefox is developed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, and a spokeswoman commented that the final version was substantially the same as the final beta, with the program scheduled for free download sometime this afternoon.
The release comes days after Microsoft launched their catch-up Internet Explorer 7 upgrade, which saw the program finally introduce tabbed browsing – something that Firefox users have been enjoying for years.
Firefox 2.0 also features a new “close” button on its tabs – with links opening in tabs by default – and a handy Session Restore feature restoring windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session, with the ability to restore previous sessions after a system crash.
“If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those web pages and content is pretty disruptive,” commented Mozilla VP of products Christopher Beard. Ain’t that the truth, Chris!
An enhanced search feature will offer search term suggestions for punters using the integrated text box to search Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com, with a new search engine manager making it easier to add, remove and re-order your fave engines.
Although Firefox has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and made a real impact on Microsoft’s near-monopoly of the browser market, recent figures from OneStat.com reveal that global usage of the browser slumped 1.44 per cent from July, and now stands at 11.49 per cent.
Internet Explorer still rules the global roost with 85.85 per cent of the market, increasing 2.8 per cent since July while, global usage of the Mac-only Safari browser is just 1.61 per cent, down 0.23 per cent from July.
Firefox 2.0 release notes
24 October, 2006
Scrybe Online Organiser: A Google Calendar Buster?
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube.
Calendar app
The slick Web 2.0 interface lets users drill down through calendar dates, with the context sensitive display intelligently expanding and contracting to display the required information.
Boasting sharing and collaborative tools, the program handles multiple time-zones beautifully with a polished interface and a neat feature which ran alternate time zones alongside diary pages.
According to the video demonstration, users will be able to seamlessly import popular document formats like Word, Excel and Acrobat, with lists cut and pasted from Excel automatically being converted into a ‘To Do’ list. Very neat.
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane.
Offline, Online…
What’s unique about Scrybe is its ability to let you work on your organiser while you’re offline, with any changes synching to your online account once you’re connected again – great for getting work done on a plane journey.
When it comes to syncing all this information with portable devices, Scrybe has gone for the oldest format of them all: paper.
It a rather daring (some may reckless) move, the program appears to forgo all thoughts of trying to sync to Palms, PDAs and smartphones and offers PaperSync – a series of clever, foldable templates that can be printed out, folded and tucked into your back pocket.
What we think so far
So far, we’re very impressed with the interface, the offline functionality and the ambitious re-jigging of the calendar app, although the seeming lack of proper phone/PDA integration looks to be a potential Achilles’ heel.
It may be great having your week’s agenda folded up in your back pocket, but any notes you make are going to have to be manually added back into your PC at the end of the day. And where’s the email integration?
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon.
Mind you, if it looks and runs as well in the real world as it does in their promo video, Google’s usability and interface team may be sent back into the lab for some hasty overtime.
Scrybe
24 October, 2006
UK Consumers Spend More For Internet Goods
UK Internet shoppers are spending up to 50 per cent more on electrical goods than they would on the High Street, according to new research.
A new study by market research firm GFK found that the average price spent on like-for-like products was higher on the Internet because tech-savvy surfers were shelling out for higher specified products.
For example, the research firm found that average price of an LCD TV bought on the Internet was a hefty £867 – 32 per cent higher than the average High Street spend of £657.
In the massively lucrative consumer durables market – worth an eye-watering $42bn – the Internet has doubled its share from four to eight per cent of overall sales, giving online shops a whopping £3.36bn share.
Not surprisingly, popular consumer products like hard drives and mp3 players have been big movers, but GFK also noted that consumers are increasingly shelling out for more diverse products online, such as bread makers and dishwashers.
James Randall, commercial director at GFK, said: “Over the last 12 months the internet fulfilled its hype for retailing. What is particularly interesting is how consumers’ buying behaviour differs on the internet. It is not surprising that internet shoppers are more technically savvy than the norm.”
“However, what is interesting is that, as they are early adopters, when they buy products they usually spend more money on the internet as they buy the latest, higher specification items,” he added.
GFK
24 October, 2006
US Scouts Offered Respect Copyright Merit Patch
Coming straight from the you-must-be-having-a-laugh folder, news reaches us that the Los Angeles Scout group is introducing a new merit award — the Respecting Copyright Patch. We kid you not.
The MPAA, the film industry trade body, has been instrumental in the development of the structure of the programme. To be awarded the badge, the young scouts will need to learn the basics of copyright law, five ways of identify copyright material and three ways that copyright material can be ‘stolen’.
I know, I know, it just sounds like one big fun-fest doesn”t it, but the fun doesn’t end there for those lucky kids. There is also a compulsory activity with a choice between either visiting a film studio to witness the number of people that are involved with the production of films (therefore helping them understand how many people would be affected if the whole thing closed down), or to create a public service announcement warning of the risks of ‘copyright theft.’
“We have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America told the press.
As veteran copyleft campaigner Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing asked, how balanced will the tutoring of this patch be? Will the young and clearly impressionable scouts also be told about subjects such as Creative Commons?
There are 52,000 scouts in the LA area, many who have family members involved in some way with the creation of films, which is bound to help in its uptake of the patch. It is understood that the MPAA hope to take this ‘opportunity’ to a wider audience. Their plan? Expansion to the rest of California early next year, then to America as a whole.
The patch that they would earn, which is rather tacky to say the least, shows a (c) copyright symbol in the centre, with the left side displaying a CD and to the right, a film reel.
Just how many other industries are given the opportunity to spread their message through the American Scouts is unclear. To us it sound like a worrying trend.
23 October, 2006
European Mobile Users *Heart* The Web, US Not So Keen
European mobile phone users are far more likely to use their handsets to access the web than their US counterparts, according to a new comScore Networks study.
The comScore Mobile Tracking Study revealed significant differences between Europeans and Americans, with 29 percent of Europeans regularly getting online with their mobile phones compared to just 19 percent in the U.S
Breaking the European figures down, over a third (34 per cent) of Germans and Italians use their phones to access the web, followed by France with 28 percent, Spain with 26 percent and the UK with 24 percent, compared to just 19 percent for the USA.
The comScore Mobile Tracking Study also showed that geezers are more likely to access the Web from their mobile phones than women (probably looking for football scores, pubs and pr0n).
Nokia proved to be the most popular phone in Europe for accessing the web, bagging a market share ranging from 50 percent in Italy to 22 percent in France.
In the States, Motorola pushed ahead with 26 percent of the market compared to second-placed Nokia’s 17 percent share.
Portal sites were the most popular destinations for mobile surfers, with Google, Yahoo! and MSN leading the way, with branded Web sites set up by the phone operators, such as Vodafone, o2 and T-Mobile also proving a hit.
“Three-quarters of American mobile Web surfers access content from the leading online portals such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN compared to only thirty percent of Europeans,” observed Bob Ivins, the big cheese of comScore Europe.
“In Europe, the mobile Internet appears to mirror the dynamics of the fixed Internet,” said Ivins.
“Google remains strong but the other U.S.-based portals achieve much lower penetration, facing stiff competition from local competitors – in this case the mobile providers – who have the structural advantage of a degree of control over the access point and interface from the mobile phone,” he added.
comScore
23 October, 2006
Microsoft Smartphone Userbase Hits Six Million
As the smartphone market continues to explode, Microsoft has revealed its bullish ambitions to keep on doubling sales, year on year.
Last year’s total of six million mobile phones running Microsoft Windows software represented a 100 per cent increase on the previous year, and according to the head of Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices division, the company are hell bent on shifting even more.
“We want to make 100 percent again this year and to grow further at this rate in coming years,” he told the German Euro am Sonntag newspaper.
According to research firm Canalys, worldwide shipments of smart mobile devices rose by 55 percent year-on-year in Q2 2006, with the Symbian operating system remaining the most popular with a 67 per cent market share.
Although Microsoft is in second place, it lags a considerable distance behind with just 15 per cent of the market, followed by Research In Motion (Blackberry) on 6 per cent.
It looks like the smartphone market is going to heat up in coming months too, with Research In Motion’s new Pearl smartphone offering a camera and music functions.
RIM’s co-Chief Executive Mike Lazaridis were also hoping to double their users ever year, adding that the market for mobile emails was, “huge, and we’re just at the beginning.”
Elsewhere, Palm’s eagerly awaited new Treo 680 looks set to be hitting the UK by the end of November, after computer retailer Expansys announced that they expected unlocked models to be in stock by the end of November.
We’re not sure if they’ll be getting the full range of funky colours, but we’ll be pwning that natty Orange Treo as soon as we can get our hands on it.
23 October, 2006
EW-700 WiFiFone Announced By Samsung
Currently causing something of a stir on the floor of the Korea Electronics Show is the WiFiFone EW-700, a Wi-Fi-enabled VoIP smartphone running Windows Mobile.
The all-black phone is a collaboration between Samsung and Korean, big-name cordless phone maker Eidicom, and sports a slightly unusual keypad layout, with navigation controls sat in the left hand corner of the handset and the phone keys shunted to the right.
This leaves the ‘call’ and ‘answer’ buttons in the bottom left hand corner of the handset which seems far from ideal to us.
The EW-700, looks a fairly plain, clunky beast too – in fact the photos we’ve seen have something of a pre-production air to them – but it’s not short of features.
The phone offers Samsung’s latest “Post-PC mobile multimedia processor”, an “embedded OS/Device driver,” web browser, Instant Messaging and an MP3 and video player keeping customers entertained. We figure there must be some kind of memory card expansion available, but seeing as all the pics released so far only show the front of the camera, we can’t be sure.
We’re yet to get full specs either, but the screen looks like a 320 x 240 pixels jobbie to us, and there’s also a 2-megapixel camera with camcorder function onboard, a voice recorder, hardware MPEG engine offering full frame video and Wi-Fi and infrared connectivity.
As for pricing and availability, we haven’t the foggiest right now.
[From Aving USA]
23 October, 2006
Google Maps For Palm Treo Review (95%)
Although it was announced as part of the forthcoming Palm Treo 680 smartphone package, Google has already made its Google Maps application available for free download.
Described by Google as being, “months in the making,” the company describes the 425k download as “the fastest, slickest version yet” of their mobile-optimised Google Maps application, offering real-time traffic reports, detailed directions, integrated search results (search for cafes/bars etc and get addresses and the option to call them with one click), fast downloading detailed, draggable maps and even satellite imagery.
Installation
Installing the Google Maps was easy enough, we just pointed our Treo browser to google.com/gmm and downloaded the program over the air. Users can also download the program from to their PC from http://www.google.com/gmm/treo and then hotsync the file over to their handheld in the usual way.
We ran Google Maps from our SD card with no problems.
Looking up locations
Loading up the program, we were prompted to type in an address (or ZIP code, postal address, latitude and longitude, intersection etc) and we were astonished by the speed that the map appeared on screen – even though we were connecting via GPRS. This baby is fast!
The maps download as small, separate tiles, so only new segments need to be downloaded as you were scroll across pages using the Treo’s five-way controller, or by dragging the map across the screen.
Overlaid, opaque zoom in/out buttons let you decide the level of detail, and a ‘find nearby business’ menu gives you the option to search for local hotels, cafes, bars etc with the results appearing onscreen as numbered markers.
Clicking on an icon provides more address information and a button to phone them up, as well the ability to get turn by turn driving directions to and from any given point.
Best of all, downloaded maps are stored locally, so you can look up the area you’re visiting and have the map ready for viewing – even if you can’t connect to the web.
A minor niggle is that there’s no option to store downloaded data on to the Treo’s memory card, so stored maps burn up precious internal memory, but you can at least chose to delete all data on program exit.
Traffic updates
With Google Maps you can call up comprehensive information on traffic conditions in more than 30 U.S. major metropolitan areas (with partial information available for other states) with the driving directions offering traffic estimates to avoid congestion.
Highway traffic speeds are represented by different colour overlays (green for traffic flowing at over 50mph, Yellow for 26-50mph etc), and you can download satellite maps for onscreen maps.
You can search and view UK locations, but there’s currently no local business or traffic information available, although Google says it’s working to increase availability.
Conclusion
Google Maps is a truly remarkable product that adds near GPS-like functionality to the entire range of modern Palm OS Treos (700p, 680, 650 and even the venerable Treo 600 smartphone) – and all for nothing!
Of course, it won’t be able to tell you where you are, but so long as you can find a street sign, you’ll be able to nail your location, download local maps, locate and call up nearby shops, businesses and bars and even get traffic updates and satellite images.
It’s easily one of the best products we’ve ever reviewed for a Palm phone – any smartphone, in fact – and it’s a ‘must have’ application for map fans, travellers, amblers and business users alike. And it’s free, Goddammit!
Features: 90%
Ease of use: 90%
Value For Money: 95%
Overall: 95%
20 October, 2006