Mike Slocombe

PDA Sales Set For Record Year
In spite of pundits’ predictions of a swift demise, the PDA refuses to die with 2005 looking set to be a record year for handheld sales.
A combination of falling prices and extra features like wireless connectivity have invigorated the PDA market, with Gartner reporting 3.6 million units shipped worldwide in the last three months, a 32 percent leap from the same period last year.
This puts the market on track to hit 15 million units shipped by the end of year – a figure that would surpass the previous record of 13.2 million PDAs shipped in 2001.
The study ignored smartphones, such as the Treo 650 and BlackBerry 7100, but included wireless PDAs like the iPAQ 6315 and Nokia 9300.
Research In Motion’s BlackBerry was, not surprisingly, the most popular device, with shipments reaching 840,000 in the second quarter – a hefty growth of 64.7 percent, achieving a sector-leading market share of 23.2 percent.
Palm came in at second place with 17.8 percent, while Dell slipped out of the top five ranking, elbowed out by T-Mobile’s Sidekick II and Pocket PC Phone Edition devices.
HP also suffered falling sales, although both Dell and HP are scheduled to upgrade their product lines in the second half of this year.
The study by analysts Gartner revealed that Windows CE is the favoured operating system for business-minded PDA users, with the underlying software making up 46 percent of worldwide shipments in the second quarter of 2005.
In second place was RIM with 23.2 percent of PDA software shipped, followed by PalmSource’s at 18.8 percent.
“Wireless PDAs are increasingly seen as an adjunct or alternative to notebook computers, while favourable exchange rates have enabled more Europeans to purchase PDAs at an attractive price,” said Gartner analyst Todd Kort.
Like Billy Bunter at a speed eating competition, the Western European PDA market inflated by a massive 94 percent to reach 1.3 million units in the second quarter of 2005.
PDAs are proving a big hit with Europeans, with regional sales accounting for 37 percent of worldwide shipments, up from 25 percent a year ago.
In the States, growth is slower, with shipments totalling 1.4 million units, a mere 1.3 percent increase.
Garner reports that the disappointing US figures are a result of a stagnant market and the continuing decline in Palm PDA sales and aging product lines among Microsoft licensees.
Elsewhere, PDA shipments in Asia/Pacific looked sprightly with a growth of 24.7 percent, totalling around 402,000 units.
These figures chime with a similar handheld report from research firm IDC, although their findings painted a little less rosy future.
Gartner
IDC report
3 August, 2005
Three Quarters of US Homes Have A Computer
New US research claims that Americans are becoming increasingly “digital,” with over three quarters owning computers and many households verily humming with multiple digital electronics products, including cell phones to entertainment devices to cameras.
A recent survey conducted by Opinion Research Corporation’s CARAVAN poll involving 2,000 respondents discovered that three-in-four American adults (76%) own a computer, two-thirds (67%) own a mobile phone and nearly half (47%) are snapping away on digital cameras.
Other digital lifestyle products contributing to the Greenhouse Effect in US homes included digital cameras (47 per cent); video game consoles like XBox, PSP etc (38 per cent); TiVo/digital video recorders (27 per cent); home security systems (19 per cent), and iPods or other MP3 digital players (17 per cent).
The research was commissioned by hard drive manufacturer, Seagate, who were keen to remind users of their role in the digital revolution:
“Technology advances that enable smaller, higher capacity, more stable storage solutions are allowing consumer electronics manufacturers to develop products with greater functionality,” said Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology.
“The convenience, reliability and huge capacity of hard drive storage is enhancing applications as diverse as digital audio players, gaming devices, DVRs, HDTVs, automobiles, cell phones, PDAs, and a host of other products. Ground-breaking storage solutions are helping to drive the adoption of a digital lifestyle.”
3 August, 2005
EasyShare P880, P850: Kodak Announcement
Kodak has announced a new class of ‘advanced digital cameras’ aimed at grabbing a slice of the burgeoning dSLR market.
They won’t be winning any hearts on looks though, with their flagship EasyShare P880 model looking like this “a cross between Bender from Futurama and an ugly tank”.
Despite looking like it’s fallen off the Ugly Tree, the EasyShare P880 serves up an attractive feature set, offering an 8 megapixel sensor, a slew of enthusiast features and an unusually wide angle 24-140mm (35mm equiv) wide-angle f/2.8 – f/4.1 zoom lens made by Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon (try saying that after a few beers).
Multiple shooting modes are provided, including auto, program, aperture and shutter priorities with fully manual and custom modes available and a handy feature letting users dial-in multiple pre-set scene modes.
Reflecting its enthusiast ambitions, the camera offers RAW file support, 16 – 1/4000 second shutter speeds, a live histogram, a 237,000 pixel electronic viewfinder, custom white balance and digital red-eye reduction.
“While serious photographers demand advanced photographic controls, they’re also craving easier-to-use cameras and systems – an area in which Kodak excels,” enthused Greg Westbrook, general manager of digital capture products at Kodak.
“The P-Series breaks new ground by deftly combining high performance and simplicity. Its flagship, the EASYSHARE P880 camera, introduces a new, highly compelling alternative to pricier, bulkier dSLRs.”
The one big advantage that compact digital cameras have over their dSLR counterparts is the ability to capture video footage, and Kodak have been keen to trumpet the camera’s movie making functions.
The P880 can capture VGA video at 30 frames per second (Motion JPEG compression) with zooming and lets users trim, cut, splice and merge clips on the camera and extract individual video frames as 640 x 480 JPEGs at 640 x 480 resolution.
Powered by a high-capacity lithium ion battery, the camera weighs in at 19.6 oz. (556 g) and comes in a reasonably compact package (4.6W x 3.8H x 3.6D in.)
The EasyShare P880 will be available beginning this September priced US$599 (~€486, ~£336).
Looking down the range, Kodak have also announced their 5.3 megapixel EasyShare P850 camera, featuring a 12X, 36 – 432mm (35mm equiv.), f2.8 – f/3.7, Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lens with optical image stabilisation.
Sharing the same video capabilities as its upmarket brother, the 850 offers an advanced, hybrid AF system with 25 selectable points and shutter speeds from 1/2 – 1/1000.
There’s also a hotshoe for extended lighting control, the usual selection of preset scene modes with a live histogram, RAW/TIFF/JPEG support and a lithium ion battery.
The EasyShare P850 will knock out for around US$499 (~€405, ~£280).
Kodak
3 August, 2005
BBC’s Live 8 and Glastonbury Websites Attract Record Traffic
The BBC’s online coverage of Live 8 in July notched up a record volume of Web traffic on their radio and music Websites.
Their online coverage of the global Live 8 event generated a massive 14.6m page impressions during its three-day run, with the Live 8 Wap site for mobile phones also proving a big hit, generating 112,000 page impressions over the same three days.
Music fans unable to join the glorious mud-fest at Glastonbury Festival headed to the BBC’s interactive Website for coverage of the famous festival, with 13.4m page impressions being generated during the fortnight surrounding the festival.
The latest figures for the BBC’s online traffic also show a healthy boost in figures for their sports coverage on the Radio Five Live Website, with 910,841 unique users being recorded during June, compared with 840,019 the same period in 2004.
Curiously, although Five Live Sports Extra managed to increase its page impressions from 1,442,915 in June last year to 1,794,421 for the same period this year, unique users fell from 203,953 to 161,036.
It was mainly good news elsewhere, with Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 1Xtra, Asian Network and BBC 7 all increasing their unique users compared to the same period last year, with only 6 Music – one of our favourites – letting the side down with a disappointing slump from 418,729 to 356,564.
Revolution Magazine
2 August, 2005
Hello! WAP Service Launches
Hellomagazine.com, the online version of the ghastly celebrity magazine Hello!, is expanding its existing SMS and JAVA mobile offer with a new WAP portal.
The HELLO! WAP celebrity news service will allow ~~deeply unfulfilled souls~~ fans of the fascinating world of celebrity to trawl through eight of the very latest celebrity tittle-tattle and photos – updated daily – on their mobile phone, Monday to Friday.
Fans of this depressing vacuous nonsense are invited to check out the HELLO! WAP celebrity news site by texting GO HELLOMAG to 85080.
A bookmark directly linking to the portal will be sent by return, with users able to browse the latest headlines for free.
Punters desperate to discover more about the colour of Jennifer Aniston’s new handbag and the name of Brad Pitt’s pet gerbil will then have to subscribe to read the full fascinating story, for £3 (~US$5.31 ~€4.35) per month.
Tree Elven (what the…?!), hellomagazine.com’s Website editor, squeaked: “We’re pumping out great pix and authoritative news every day on hellomagazine.com – people don’t want to miss the latest titbits just because they’re on the go, so a WAP site is the perfect solution.
Celeb-thirsty fans can check the headlines then go in deeper if they want the full story with photos. We’re really happy to be adding HELLO! WAP to our mobile offer and we’ll soon be beefing it up even more with wallpapers, ringtones and other entertaining stuff.”
We’d rather have our privates gnawed by a gang of rampaging ferrets than have this inane drivel downloading on our phone, but no doubt there’ll be a huge market for it….
Hello! WAP
2 August, 2005
95% of Mobile Users Won’t Download Games
Mobile gaming big boys I-Play have released the results of a study which revealed that only 5% of mobile users have ever downloaded a game
The independent survey examined the (cough) “behaviour barriers” and motives of 2,500 mobile users across the US, UK, Italy, Spain and Germany.
The study discovered that mobile phone newbies were pretty clueless about what their phones could do, with 33% of respondents unsure whether their handset could even play games.
A further 17.5% were uncertain how to download a game while the rest said that the downloading process itself was tedious.
Of all those polled, only a mere 5% of mobile users had ever downloaded and used a mobile game.
David Gosen, COO of I-play was ready with the positive spin, “The mobile games market is essentially only five percent penetrated. The good news is that we now know what’s limiting market growth – the industry must improve accessibility to mobile games and more importantly, educate consumers on how and where to obtain mobile games”.
Curiously, the survey revealed national differences, with 80% of smart Spaniards aware of the capabilities of their handsets compared with to just 60% of Germans.
Pricing was seen as a discouraging factor by 51% of the respondents, with 48 percent in favour of free trail versions and 30% saying that that they would go for a game if a friend recommended it.
Despite the aggressive advertising campaigns run to promote mobile gaming, the industry is still clearly in its infancy, although the potential for growth is seen as enormous, especially with the interest shown in emerging markets like India and China.
Gosen went on to explain that, “virgin downloaders” need more education about the process and more information about the game before they feel comfortable making that first purchase and this is critical. We know we have to de-risk that first download for the end user.
De-risk. Now there’s a good word for buzzword bingo.
iPlay
2 August, 2005
Easynet Offers Services To Onetel
Like Popeye with a mouthful of spinach, broadband providers Easynet have barged BT out of the way to claim a lucrative three-year deal to supply wholesale broadband services to Onetel, Centrica’s telecommunications division.
Reflecting the highly competitive LLU market, Easynet’s deal is claimed to have undercut BT Wholesale’s offering and persuaded Onetel to use Easynet’s local loop to supply broadband services to its customer base.
Easynet’s LLUStream will enable Onetel to immediately provide 8Mb broadband to customers within LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) areas, with the company perfectly placed to roll out super-fast speeds of up to 24mbps after Easynet’s ADSL2+ trials are completed later this year.
Resisting the urge to ring up BT’s head honchos and scream, “loooosers!”, David Rowe, CEO of Easynet, said: “This is an important milestone for the company. Onetel is a key player in the UK telecommunications market and the selection of Easynet is an endorsement of our Local Loop strategy.”
Ian El-Mokadem, Managing Director, Onetel sounded chuffed with the deal: “The partnership with Easynet will allow us to deploy next generation broadband services and benefit from Local Loop Unbundling economics. The market is set to evolve rapidly and we wanted a partner that could demonstrate experience in the local loop, and a willingness to work in a true partnership.
Easynet’s network is one of the largest fibre networks in the UK and has been built around British Waterways’ canal system.
The company boasts 240 “unbundled” exchanges, giving them coverage of around 4.4m homes and 700,000 businesses.
Last month, Easynet announced plans to further extend this program with another 100 exchanges across the UK, providing coverage for 6m homes.
Easynet
Onetel
2 August, 2005
Technorati Mobile Launches
Technorati has launched Technorati Mobile, a stripped-down version of the popular blog search facility designed to be viewed on mobile phones and handheld computers/smartphones.
In case you’re not familiar with the site, Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in what they describe as “the blogosphere”.
Sadly, that’s not some cool, far-distant planet where everyone wears hover-boots, but simply their word for online blogs.
Technorati works by tracking zillions of blogs and building a constantly updated database of blog entries, creating what they like to describe as a “live view of the global conversation of the Web.”
Making it easier for mobile users to access this service seems a smart enough idea, so Technorati Mobile serves up similar options to the main Technorati site, but in a frill-free interface.
The text-only home page offers a search box, a list of the top ten search terms from the past hour and a short listing of Web links under the title, “What’s happening on the Web right now in News, Books and Movies.
Three stories are displayed from each category, with links underneath leading to pages containing aggregated blog comment on the stories.
There’s also the option to get a further ten stories – with associated blog links – by clicking the ‘more’ link in each category.
Although the Technorati Mobile site is designed for mobile users, we mightily warmed to its simple, no-nonsense interface and found it preferable to their Web version.
So much so, in fact, that it’s now replaced their Web version in our PC desktop bookmarks!
Technorati
1 August, 2005
DSC-T5: Sony Cyber-Shot Ultra-Slim Camera Announced
Sony has today announced the latest update to its range of ultra-slim DSC-T digital cameras, the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T5.
Thinner than Kate Moss on a diet, the DSC-T5 features an internal folded-optics 3x optical zoom lens, a five megapixel CCD sensor, a 2.5″ anti-reflective Hybrid LCD monitor and 32 MB of internal memory, with extra storage provided by a Memory Stick Duo slot.
Available from September, the DSC-T5 sports the familiar sliding cover/power switch inherited from the DSC-T1 and comes in a black and silver finish with red, black and champagne gold options becoming available in October.
Sony claims that the camera’s new InfoLithium T series battery will offer an increased battery life of up to 240 shots per charge, with the camera being ready to shoot images in less than a second.
“This is the perfect ‘next’ camera for anyone who doesn’t want to miss a moment, whether out on the town or at family gatherings,” enthused James Neal, director of digital imaging products at Sony Electronics “It’s the most affordable model in our T series and a great value given its enhanced performance.”
There are a slew of pre-set picture-taking modes onboard to help point’n’shooters get the best from the camera, with a “Magnifying Glass” feature allowing macro shooting up to 1cm from an object and a “High Speed Shutter” to catch fast-moving action.
Using an optional Memory Stick PRO Duo card, users can shoot MPEG-VX video with 640×480 pixel resolution at 30 frames per second, with a 1-gigabyte Sony Memory Stick card capable of holding up to 12 minutes of VGA-quality 640 x 480 MPEG video and over 380, 5-megapixel JPEG Fine images.
The Cyber-shot T5 will be available in September for about $350 (~£198~€286).
The announcement comes after Sony has been forced to slash its earnings forecast following a disastrous first quarter, with The Times reporting first quarter net losses of around ¥7.3 billion (~$69.4m ~£39.3m ~€56.8m).
This has resulted in the company dramatically cutting its forecast earnings from ¥80 billion (~$712m ~£403m ~€582m) to ¥10 billion (~$89m ~£50.3m ~€72.8m).
It’s widely reported that the problems were down to a poor performance in Sony’s TV division and falling retail prices of digital cameras.
Sony T5
1 August, 2005
Mobile Gambling: $7.6Bn by 2010 – Informa
Forget mobile gaming – the big money’s in mobile gambling, according a report by Informa Telecoms & Media
The ‘Mobile Gambling’ report predicts that the market for mobile gambling content is going to soar from US$1.2bn (~£0.67bn. ~€0.98bn) of annual revenues in 2005 to US$7.6bn (~£4.30bn, ~€6.21bn) by 2010, with more than 200 million consumers gambling the odds using mobile devices.
There is a joker in the pack however, with the report warning that the growth of the mobile gambling market is dependent upon mobile gambling operators being able to sidefoot legislative, technological and cultural hurdles.
“Mobile gambling is already generating significant revenues, but there is room for sharp growth in the years ahead,” says Stuart Dredge, the report’s author.
“Operators recognise that there is a strong demand for mobile gambling services, and there is no shortage of companies looking to provide them. However, the industry must keep in mind its responsibilities to tackle underage and problem gambling.”
The report looked at the three key types of mobile gambling – sports betting, lotteries and casino-gaming – and predicted that lotteries are going to be the number one form of mobile gambling in the next five years, spurred on by widespread handset support.
With casinos continuing to migrate their games to mobile, the report predicts growing popularity, although sports betting is expected to be a niche sector by comparison, despite bookmakers being keen to launch mobile applications for their customers to bet on the move.
The report sees Europe remaining the largest market for mobile gambling, generating a hefty US$3.2bn of annual revenues by 2010.
Hot on its heels will be the Asia-Pacific market, forecasted to generate US$2.7bn (~£1.52bn, ~€2.20bn) by 2010.
North America emerges as the dark horse, as the size of the market there will be dependant on mobile gambling being legalised in the US and the impact of any restrictions placed upon it.
Even with these caveats, the report still predicts US$979 million (~£553m, ~€800m) of annual revenues for the region by 2010.
Mobile Gambling
1 August, 2005