Nokia remained the world’s No. 1 maker of mobile phones, including traditional cellphones and smartphones, but its share of the phone market is rapidly shrinking. For the full year of 2011, its global market share was 23.8 percent, down from 28.9 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, Samsung, the No. 2 phone maker, increased its market share to 17.7 percent, up from 17.6 percent the previous year, and Apple’s global market share in 2011 climbed to 5 percent, up from 2.9 percent in 2010. It remains to be seen whether Nokia’s new Lumia smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system will reverse the Finnish phone maker’s decline.

NYT report.

HTC was the first company to make a big bet on Android. It released the G1, the first smartphone running Google’s operating system, in 2007. In the ensuing years, HTC continued to ride Google’s momentum, pumping out some of the most popular Android smartphones, like the Nexus One. The bet paid off: By 2009, HTC became the world’s fourth-largest maker of smartphones, after Nokia, Research in Motion and Apple.

Samsung waited until 2010 to make an aggressive play with Android, when it released its Galaxy S smartphone, which sold 10 million units in 10 months. Samsung rolled out more products under the Galaxy portfolio, including the Galaxy S II phone and the Galaxy Tab tablet. It threw as much as it could against the wall until some things stuck. And if some products were flops, Samsung could afford losses, given its size. For HTC, a smaller manufacturer, failures would be less forgiving.

The LTE / SAE (Long Term Evolution/System Architecture Evolution) Trial Initiative (LSTI) launched in May this year has reported the successful delivery of the first in a series of test results aimed at proving the potential and benefits of LTE, which is being standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a next generation mobile broadband technology.

The Initiative was founded by leading telecommunications companies Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile and Vodafone, and was recently expanded with China Mobile, Huawei, LG Electronics, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Signalion, Telecom Italia and ZTE joining as new members.

As mobile devices become increasingly sophisticated and handle more and more complex multimedia applications, the LTE/SAE technology is designed to give end users wireless access to growing levels of data throughput on the move.3GPP LTE is specified to enable downlink/uplink peak data rates above 100/50 Mbps in initial deployment configurations.

Read the full story in http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/Nov2007/5407.htm

Long the preserve of businessmen in power suits, mobile email is about to hit the masses with one in five email users accessing their accounts wirelessly by 2010, according to Gartner.

Monica Blasso, the firm’s research vice-president, said mobile email had moved beyond the BlackBerry and was increasingly a feature of even low-cost mobile phones, driving consumer adoption.

“By 2012, wireless email products will be fully inter-operable, commoditised and have standard features,” she said. “They will be shipping in larger volumes at greatly reduced prices.”

Today there are less than 20 million wireless email users worldwide, but this will grow to 350 million, or 20 per cent of all email accounts, by 2010, she said.

Blasso added email-enabled phones traditionally lacked consumer-oriented features like cameras, music players, video players and GPS navigation, but this was not the case anymore.

Even the BlackBerry, once chunky and bland, now offers all of the above features in the new BlackBerry 8800 device. Other mobile email devices, like the Motorola MOTO Q 9h, the Palm Treo 750 and the Samsung BlackJack, were all designed with aesthetics, usability and fun features in mind.

The devices, Blasso said, were becoming more personal as the line between personal and professional life blurred.

Robin Simpson, mobile and wireless research director at Gartner Australasia, said mobile email access in Australia would soon be offered for free as part of mobile phone contracts.

“Once email becomes available more or less free of charge by default on your mobile handset, people will gravitate to that rather than just continuing to use SMS,” Simpson said.

He said mobile email uptake in Australia had been held back due to the high access prices charged by carriers, but recent price competition, particularly driven by Hutchison 3 and Virgin Mobile, indicated prices would drop rapidly.

“The interesting thing is that SMS, if you look at it in terms of actual cost for the data, is really expensive, and where we’re heading is you’ll get a free email package when you sign up to your monthly plan,” he said.

Asher Moses
July 27, 2007 – 12:35PM

http://www.theage.com.au/news/mobiles–handhelds/for-sms-the-days-are-numbered/2007/07/27/1185339221496.html

Survey Reveals Important Role Mobile Phones Play in Women’s Lives

“A cell phone does much more than make calls for the Single Mobile Female,” said Randy Smith, vice president of channel marketing for Samsung. “The cell phone is an integral part of the SMF’s life, serving as a pocket-size detective, matchmaker, wing-woman and beyond. It is now officially a girl’s best friend.”

Cellular Singles

* Saved by the bell. More than one out of three SMFs have had a friend call them to interrupt a date (34%).
* So you think you can trust your girlfriend … A whopping 70 percent of females surveyed said they have snooped on their significant other’s cell phone. For example, they have looked through text messages or picked up their phone to see who is calling.
* I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. I can’t hear you. Click! Single mobile females are not only using their cell phones to make calls, but they are using them to avoid calls, too.
* 40 percent of respondents have faked technical difficulties to avoid someone they were not interested in dating.

Powered by ScribeFire.

“T-Mobile is interested in the replacement or displacement of landline minutes,” said Mark Bolger, director of marketing for T-Mobile. Wi-Fi calling “is one of the technologies that will help us deliver on that promise.”

Major phone manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung and Motorola are offering or plan to introduce phones designed for use on both traditional cell and Wi-Fi networks. Samsung said last week that it had begun to sell its dual-mode phone in Italy.

Full story

The GSM Association recently announced that its Emerging Markets Handset program is exceeding expectations: mobile operators in Bangladesh, China, India, and Russia have already purchased 12 million of its Ultra Low Cost Handsets (ULCH). But will the initiative reach the rest of the three billion unconnected peoples in emerging markets? Under current cost models that is unlikely.

The problem is that even at US$30 the ULCH’s price is too high for at least a billion of this population.

The annual gross per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa is just US$371. It is unrealistic to expect people there to spend 10% of their annual income on a mobile phone. So semiconductor vendors, such as Texas Instruments, Freescale, Philips, and Infineon are continuing to reduce the Bill-of-Materials for ULCH even further, heading towards US$20 and US$15 in the next few years.

But will ULCH markets stall before a low enough price is reached? Alan Varghese, Principal Analyst, Wireless, at ABI Research doesn’t think so. “We may see trends similar to those for the conventional handset in the developed world. In the early years, it was purchased primarily to transact business; it was only when prices had dropped that handsets penetrated the mass market.”

Something similar is starting to happen in the developing world. In South Africa, software vendor Sharedphone enables the use of the ULCH as a mobile payphone. Local entrepreneurs buy this phone and sell airtime at the roadside. For such a “service provider,” the $30 price is not prohibitive; it is far cheaper than setting up a conventional payphone.

Because per-minute call charges are high, most calls are short and businesslike: Where can I get the best price? Is my order ready? Meet me tomorrow. The “mobile payphone” is facilitating commerce even in regions otherwise lacking in high technology.

What does this mean to handset vendors such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, and LG Electronics?

Varghese says, “They have to think about how they can further enable varied uses such as the ‘mobile payphone.’ They could add value, for example, with software to manage the whole transaction: making the call, presenting the consumer with a summary of call-times and charges, and keeping track of repeat customers in order to offer discounts.”