Global sales of mobile telephones surged a record 35 percent to 156 million units in the second quarter from the same period in 2003, a study published by the US research group Gartner showed. According to the study, more than 300 million handsets were sold between January and June, leading to a full-year sales forecast of at least 620 million units, compared with 520 million in 2003.
Nokia plans to locate its second global 3G equipment manufacturing site in China. By choosing China, Nokia will become the latest in a stream of major mobile telecoms gear makers – including Germany’s Siemens and Canada’s Nortel Networks – to build a 3G manufacturing facility in the country. Nokia already has a 3G research and development centre in Suzhou, the centre employs more than 100 engineers, and is “expanding” its headcount.
Nagoya Municipal Management Subway will make mobile phones based on the Personal Digital Communications (PDC) system and the cdma2000 system inoperative on trains and train platforms in August or September.
Vodafone Holdings K.K. and Vodafone K.K. jointly announce that their respective Boards of Directors today selected Shiro Tsuda to be the next President and Chief Executive Officer and Representative Executive Officer of Vodafone K.K. as of 1 December. [.pdf]. Effective immediately, Shiro Tsuda will act as an Executive Officer for Vodafone Holdings K.K. and Vodafone K.K. until he assumes his position. Shiro Tsuda was formerly Senior Executive Vice President at NTT DoCoMo, Inc.
The latest Mobinet study from A.T. Kearney reports that 41 percent of the world’s wireless phone users expect to be regular or heavy users of data services by 2005. The Index looks at current and planned usage of wireless data services such as mobile email, games, music downloads, photo messaging, and news updates and the strong user demand represents a whopping 200-percent increase over the past year. Have mobile data services finally reached a tipping point?
The Symbian operating system powers many cellular phones, and also supports a wide range of third-party applications—including games. Unfortunately, one popular game turned out to have a “cracked” version that was secretly infected with a Trojan horse. The Mosquito Dialer Trojan infects the popular game Mosquito with code that secretly messages pay-per-call numbers.
