The news is coming out of 3GSM thick and fast. To keep up we’re planning to report is a slightly different way. When we see a press release that we thinks of interest to you, Dear Reader, we’ll put it up in full, with a brief comment at the top. Normal service will be resumed post 3GSM.
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What a coincidence, we’ve been wondering what’s happened to T9, the method that dominates the fast input of text into a ‘normal’ mobile numeric keypad. We thought that the founders must be sitting on a desert island somewhere, having bought it, living the life of Riley.
Well Tegic, who sell T9, is owned by AOL these days and they’re announcing the integration of their follow-on product, XT9, onto Samsung mobile phones.
XT9 been around since October 2005, but it’s the first time we’ve heard of it. and it appears that they’re making a splash at 3GSM. XT9 has expanded to encompass hard and soft QWERTY keyboard with handwriting recognition capabilities using a stylus as well.
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Samsung to Integrate XT9 Mobile Interface to Drive
New XT9 Debuts at 3GSM World Congress
3GSM World Congress (Barcelona, Spain) – February 13, 2006 – Tegic, a division of AOL, today announced that Samsung Electronics plans to be the first handset maker to integrate the XT9 Mobile Interface (formerly T9 Mobile Suite), a first of its kind, multi-modal user interface, into new handsets.
The XT9™ Mobile Interface, which launched in October 2005, seamlessly integrates popular T9® software for the phone keypad, as well as hard and soft QWERTY keyboard, with handwriting recognition capabilities using a stylus.
This pioneering user interface is designed to enable users to easily toggle between messaging modes, as well as numbers, letters, symbols and languages, and also allows for auto-accenting of words, a benefit for users of many European languages, including French, Spanish and Italian.
“Samsung is a long-standing partner for Tegic so we are pleased to work closely to integrate XT9 into a series of new devices,” said Bill Schwebel, president, Tegic Communications. “We share a common goal, which is to open up new revenue streams for handset makers and operators as voice revenues decline. Our new multi-modal user interface will help realize this potential.”
Today, Tegic also announced new XT9 Mobile Interface features. By making it simpler to type words and phrases, XT9 makes it easier to enjoy popular content and wireless services, driving widespread consumer adoption of mobile web browsing, search and messaging. This new product upgrade adds the following new features:
- Next Letter Prediction: When entering letters by scrolling through an alphabet (up-and-down or side-to-side), XT9 predicts the user’s next letter based on previous letters entered. For example, if a user inputs “l-o-v,” then XT9 will present the next letter as “e” for the word “love” rather than have the user scroll through the alphabet from “v” to “e.”
- * Regional Error Correction: For users of hard QWERTY keyboards (e.g., chiclet), XT9 helps ensure a better messaging experience by compensating for users tapping incorrect keys on the keyboard. For example, if a users inadvertently types in “m-o-o-b,” XT9 will present “moon” since the “b” is just one key away from the “n,” and the word “moon” is a more likely choice.
For handset makers, XT9 can help speed time-to-market for new mobile devices. Further, this new user interface makes it easier for consumers to access mobile content and services, enabling users to take advantage of all their phone has to offer. Samsung plans to integrate XT9’s full and reduced QWERTY capabilities into new devices to ship later this year.
The XT9 Mobile Interface is currently available in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Additional Latin- and script-based languages are also available upon request. Later this year, Tegic plans to release XT9 2.0, which will include advanced speech recognition capabilities, as well as Chinese handwriting recognition.
Anyone who’s anyone in the 3GSM world will be hot footing it to the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, which starts tomorrow.
The mobile phone industry is desperate to come up with mass market services to entice consumers to use 3G networks, but they’ve got their work cut out, with a recent survey finding that almost 80 per cent of UK users said that mobile services are getting too complicated.
BT are also going to be at the show and are expected to launch their new broadcast digital TV to mobile service, 
According to a new report, future growth in the Japanese mobile market is to be focused on the only market segment yet to reach 100% saturation: the under 14s and over 55s.
The biggest growth, however, comes from the 55-65 age group, with 1.62 million new customers expected in 2006.
Blended ARPU is expected to continue sliding from $58 pcm in 2005 to $57 pcm by 2007 but this should be compensated by data ARPU which is predicted to rise from $15 pcm to $17 pcm over the same period, thanks to the growth of content market. 
Keen to further expand their vice-like grip on the portable digital music market, Apple have unveiled a cut-down 1GB version of their turbo box-shifting iPod Nano player.
The new 1GB Nano can hold up to 240 songs or 15,000 photographs and comes with all the usual Nano features, including the colour display and docking connector.
As Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, put it: “Apple is selling a $69 MP3 player with the best software. How do you compete with that? It’s tough.”
The iPod range continues to be an outrageously successful money spinner for Apple, with around 32 million iPods shifted last year, including 14 million during the holiday season.
Sony has announced the new VAIO VA1 Series, a wireless home entertainment desktop computer.
High definition audio is provided by Sony’s Direct Stream Digital (DSD), a technology developed by Sony in conjunction with Philips.
Sony Ericsson have announced their new M600 handset, a tri-band (900/1800/1900 plus UMTS 2100 for 3G data outside the US) jobbie, with Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3.0 operating systems. 
Touted as a “fully-specified email tool and mobile phone”, the handset offers true multitasking, so a user can, for example, browse the Internet while chatting away on the phone.
For road warriors and shuffling suits, there’s the facility to read and edit PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents and Adobe PDF files on the move, with the popular Opera 8 browser provided for surfing the Internet.
In line with its business focus, there’s no built in camera, and Wi-Fi is an unfortunate omission too.
If you’ve owned a few digital cameras or PDAs and switched brands a couple of times over the years, you’ll probably already have a formidable collection of non-compatible memory cards wasting away in your drawer.
Much as we hate to give any kudos to yet another memory card format, that’s a mighty impressive capacity and offers enough storage space to turn mobile phones into fully fledged, iPod-worrying MP3 players.
Although cameras are considered to be an essential part of modern mobile phones, a new study has revealed that only a tiny percentage of camera phone snaps are actually being stored or sent.
“However, once they start using their new phones, they are turned off by perceived poor picture quality, slow network speeds, and the difficulty of creating and sending pictures. Our survey found that very few pictures actually make their way out of the handset to be shared with others,” he commented.
After seeing the dire quality of the pictures taken with our 
Consumers wanting to be able to take and send decent quality photos are hit by a double whammy: camera phones capable of taking high quality phones aren’t cheap, and the higher resolution files they create end up costing a bomb in network carrier costs. Best solution? Take along a ‘real’ camera and email it when you get home.