In all things mobile and wireless it has been a year of consolidation, launches, wireless everywhere and some familiar battles between well-known standards and companies. But 2004 was also 12 months where some of us became a little more sophisticated in how we use mobile devices and even the higher-ups learned — sometimes the hard way — that this remains one of tech’s most exciting areas, one that can make a real difference to the bottom line.
Two new top-level domain names moved closer to approval this week, as the body charged with overseeing the Internet’s technical matters moved into negotiations with the companies applying to set up and run the “.mobi” and “.jobs” domains. .Mobi is sponsored by Microsoft, Nokia, and Vodafone Group, who hope to target the domain specifically at mobile content and service providers as well as mobile device manufacturers, vendors and individual companies.
Open registration for dotMP has commenced and a wide spectrum of business and personal users from Europe, America and Asia have registered their .mp domain names and published mobile content on their dotMP sites. “dotMP is all about the creation of unique online identities and publishing Web and mobile content. We expected a diverse group of users but not this much diversity this quickly,” said Gib Bintliff, Saipan DataCom’s President.
Virgin Group chief Richard Branson said he has earmarked $300 million for a cellular phone joint venture in China, the world’s largest mobile market by users. Branson, whose mobile operations resell other carriers’ service under the Virgin brand, aims to have a 50-50 venture with a Chinese partner in operation in 12 to 18 months. “The Chinese market is obviously the fastest-growing market in the world. Virgin will be foolish if it is not a player in the market,” Branson told reporters.
China Mobile Ltd., the world’s biggest carrier by subscribers, said on Tuesday it could spend up to 110 billion yuan ($13.29 billion) to build a nationwide 3G mobile network. The company is expected to start building its network shortly after receiving a 3G licence from the government. Market watchers expect that to happen around the middle of next year. In August, the company said the cost of a 3G network could be about 60 billion yuan in the first two to three years, calling the figure a “preliminary rough estimate”.
In a bid to maintain leadership in the world next-generation mobile phone market, the big 3 mobile handset makers in Korea, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Pantech affiliates, plan to invest more than 3 trillion won (approx. 2.88 billion dollars) combined in development of cutting-edge communication technologies next year. These companies will concentrate on the advanced development of 3G handsets, digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) phones, software applications and user interfaces, industry sources said.
NEC says it will employ additional platforms from Qualcomm and Ericsson Mobile Platforms as part of their new dual-mode, W-CDMA and GSM/GPRS, 3G handset strategy for global business. NEC recently announced a strategic move to jointly develop system LSIs for 3G; with this platform, they plan to offer a wider range of handsets to meet the demands of 3G mobile operators and end users as 3G market expands globally.
Sharp has signed an agreement with the Japanese division of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications [Press Release in Japanese] to collaborate on development of cell-phone handsets based on the Symbian operating system for NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA 3G service in Japan. The two companies plan to share selected hardware while developing 3G phones that will be unique to the Sharp and Sony Ericsson brands.
NEC Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in the development of a Web page analysis engine that realizes ease of viewing of Web pages on a variety of terminals, such as televisions, PDAs, and mobile phones, despite differences in display resolution and screen size.
F-Secure just posted they’ve had “some isolated reports of users who’ve been hit by the new Skulls trojan on their phones.” It has been distributed on some Symbian shareware download sites as “Extended Theme Manager” by “Tee-222”. If you see it, don’t install it on your phone. According to the article “the most obvious symptom of the trojan is that the typical programs on the phone won’t work any more, and that their icons get replaced with a picture of a skull.”
