Thanks to blackberrysync.com for spotting this.  RIM have seemingly, and exclusively(?), launched their latest desktop software through Vodafone Germany. 

As of today, Monday the 28^th of July, BlackBerry’s users will have little luck finding this on BB’s US or UK sites.  In fact though 4.5 is available from the US, only 4.3 is available from European (English) website.

This smacks of a little disorganisation but, as noted by BBSync, at least this heralds the release of the BlackBerry Bold.  The second half of 2008 is sizing up to be quite a fight now that 3 are offering the Nokia E71 free of charge on low end tariffs (negotiate hard), and Apple will hopefully release further business enhancements within the iPhone 3G 2.1 firmware update.

iPhone 3G feature wish for the day –

Why can’t the iPhone new message tone be changed?  Who can hear or feel a single beep & vibration in a noisy bar?

Thanks to intomobile.com for the latest Nokia Tube images.  I’m still wiping the tears of laughter away.

Can this really be Nokia’s answer to the iPhone or just a quick cludge to get a touch user interface into the market?  Whilst their 7710 was not ideal, at least it had an amazing amount of functionality and potential, and Opera Mini is a dream to use on it. 

Yet the Nokia Tube, allegedly to be released for the Christmas push, lacks any of the sophisticated look of the Apple iPhone; I’m sure I saw the menu on Alcatel’s One Touch Com of 1998.  This is not how Nokia should be fighting back. 

Hopefully the images are faked, but if not 2009 will not be a happy time for 2008’s biggest handset manufacturer. 

iPhone 3G feature wish for the day –

Come on Apple, my Siemens S1 Marathon can forward text messages.  A FOURTEEN year old handset has a function that was thought of before SMS was a glimmer of a pre pay eye so why the blazes has the iPhone 3G not got it!

What is Nokia thinking off?  Many of their largest and important customers use BlackBerry’s BES as part of their mobile security strategy.  Of course not all employees want a BlackBerry handset so have, until now, been able to be provided a Nokia or Sony Ericsson handset with BlackBerry’s Connect client.  This made the comp. secretary happy, IT happy and the user happy.

On top of that, at least BB Connect allowed access to GroupWise and Lotus Notes.

This agreement being bust, will mean that many companies will have to give the latest E71 two fingers as they will have no incentive to buy Intellisync in addition to their existing BES.

Come on Nokia, smell the coffee!

iPhone 3G feature wish for the day –

So you have an iPhone app that needs to access Safari, your taken to the web page then want to go back.  Without using the home button and restarting the original application, precisely how does the user do that?  They can’t.  Multi tasking, huh, dream on.

Having lost UK customers and voice revenue in their last quarter results Vodafone should be looking at ways to stop this slide.  Someone has other ideas.

Considering that a significant amount of their growth is due to pre-pay and easy access to top ups, Vodafone should be encouraging retailers to push the Vodafone brand in every corner shop.  Unfortunately Vodafone has decided to reduce retailer commission by 1%, which is a significant amount to a small outlet.

So retailers are fighting back and boycotting Vodafone top ups in a succession of two day strikes, and potentially much longer. 

This will particularly hit the younger user, the very people that Vodafone need in the future. 

iPhone 3G feature wish for the day –

With Kodak photo kiosks in many supermarkets it would seem sensible that you could print your iPhone pictures just by sending them by Bluetooth.  ‘Fraid not as Apple have not enabled Bluetooth Object Push.

I would have believed that by now that mobile broadband is pretty much done and dusted. 

For the last year or so there has been an exponential rise in the use of laptops with dongles, and in many cases mobile networks replacing fixed broadband.  This is especially true as CPW and PC World are selling free (if that’s the word) laptops to students and small businesses.

There are loads of deals available, but what surprised me is that only Three are offering pay as you go mobile broadband.  So as was the case yesterday, up and down Kensington High Street no other network would offer an occasional visitor to the UK anything other than a normal contract, or monthly rolling contract (which is useless as you have to give a month’s notice; what do you do sign up then terminate on the same day!). 

So as Three was the only option, we checked the Three signal and low and behold, very low in-fact, only GPRS is supported, this in the centre of London!  So O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile you lost a customer, and Three lost one because of it’s lousy signal.

iPhone 3G feature wish for the day –

Battery life is appalling (6-8 hours max), as bad as Three’s A925 handset of a few years ago.  At least with that one you could swap batteries.  I only hope the rumour of a bigger battery is true as battery life trumps weight any day.

The markets were tough on Vodafone yesterday with its shares falling by almost 14%.

Whilst group revenue is up by 19.1%, this is mostly by acquisition, exchange rate fluctuations and increasing data sales rather than organic growth.  This left Vodafone with the tricky task of reducing city expectations for the near term. 

Vodafone are predicting tougher times ahead as the credit crunch and rising bills hits consumer spending, especially in its more traditional markets.  Market saturation is yet another problem as all the networks can do now is to churn each others connections, neither gaining nor loosing customers, but at a very high cost just to remain static.

As the EU squeezes further revenue out of Vodafone’s European business, the only way for them to grow is in under developed nations.  Expect Vodafone to buy more marginal African, Asian and South American network operators over the next couple of years.

iPhone feature wish for the day –

Tough luck if you want to find that vital email with the iPhone.  Other mobile email systems enable searches of the thousands of emails in your Exchange inbox (if your disorganised) or in your folders.  Why can’t the iPhone?

Thanks to Ewan of SMS Text News who pottered along to the launch of Three’s new handset range for the second half of the year.

Three have had a very poor range of handsets for consumer and business users for what seems to be a year now.  The E65 and N73 are still listed on their X-Series micro site, and their latest phone for business users is the TyTN II, at least a year old now! 

Thankfully this is all about to change.  Delights such as the Sony Ericsson Xperia, BlackBerry Bold, Skype Phone V2,  and Nokia E71 are heading our way, plus the less than delightful Nokia N96 (no Xenon flash on a multimedia flagship phone!) and Samsung’s Tocco.

Having had a Three contract myself for the last four years, there was little to inspire me to upgrade.  Perhaps I can be persuaded, though If launch dates are missed I fear it will be adieus Three, hello iPhone 3G.

iPhone feature wish for the day –

Using Dataviz, when replying or forwarding Exchange email Outlook’s inbox will show the reply/forward indicator, why can’t the iPhone do the same?

According to the GSA Secretariat, HSDPA upgrades have been made to over 200 3G networks across the world. 

Offering up to 7.2Mbps download speeds (ok theoretical speed), all forms of HSPA networks be they slower or faster are rapidly replacing fixed broadband as the price drops and flexibility increases. 

Increasingly households are replacing desktops with laptops and using cheap dongles as their main means of internet connection. 

So why pay BT for the privilege of a telephone line when it is rarely used (mobile & Skype replaces calls) and the broadband speeds BT supplies are often slower than HSDPA anyway?

Good news for mere mortals, those not carrying an iPhone, Opera have released their Beta Opera browser for Microsoft Mobile.

Considering the truly appalling Microsoft Mobile Explorer, the Opera browser is well up to the standards set by Opera Mini and the iPhones’ Safari browsers. 

Being a Beta version there are a few bugs to be expected, but pages are rendered well, and quickly, and it is very intuitive to use. 

Trouble is that none of the garnishing offered by Opera, cheap data packages, and designer led handsets from HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and many others, can make the Microsoft platform look anything other than antiquated.

After Friday’s manic queues and O2, CPW and iTunes failures, the shiny white gloss of the launch has gone a little yellow.

But what of the device itself?  Was it worth the wait?

Many of the iPhone 3G were sold to pre-existing owners, but I borrowed a friend’s (he’s porting his number) and used it for a couple of days.  So as a newbie to both Apple and iPhone here are my opinions.

First off the screen is fantastic, making every other mobile device look like an old black and white TV.  The UI only takes just a few moments to get used to, which is good, but mainly because there is so little in it.  Settings are minimal, functions are missing all over the place (SMS forwarding, SMS delivery reports, assigning a new tone to mail received…).  GPS also appears very insensitive.  Of course the camera is also a bête noir with some users (no flash or video!).

On the upside, Exchange Push email works faster than many other devices, and YouTube is just plain brilliant.  Plus there are some seriously useful free of charge applications available. 

However all the good stuff means that it will be used much more reducing battery life to an unacceptable extent.  Invariably there will be a big market for piggy back batteries to keep it going for over a day.  This in itself is a good indicator for Apple.

I can’t help thinking that the iPhone technology is still very much in development, but the simplicity of the device, usable applications and specialised web sites will encourage more users and developers, making the next iPhone an even greater success.

When the original iPhone was launched there were high expectations of queues and shortages.  In reality the only queue appeared to be outside the Apple store in Regent Street.

iPhone 3G is another matter.  Passing through a town centre at 7:45 this morning for a breakfast meetingka, queues had already formed outside both O2 and CPW.  Coming back 2 hours later and the O2 store had sold out, and still people were trying to buy. 

The iPhone 3G is truly a marketing success story.  Build up anticipation, go short of stock on-line and then drive users mad with human pinball – I’m sure Oxford Street must have seen the hordes bouncing between stores for stock.

Typically though the O2 credit system collapsed!  Pesky customers.

With queues forming all over the world, and a sell out on O2 and Carphone Warehouse web sites, the iPhone 3G is already a tremendous success.  The images from Japan, courtesy of akihabaranews.com, all show blacked out eyes of those queuing, out of embarrassment perhaps? 

With the vast number iPhones being sold there is going to be much more toxic scrap floating around.  According to a Nokia survey of 6,500 people, only 3% of us bother to recycle their handsets, 4% throw theirs  into landfill, leaving an astonishing 93% storing them in drawers, garages or passing the duds on to family.

At some point the disposal of these billions of handsets must be dealt with, but the pace of technological change and, especially, fashion, means that a solution must be found, and urgently.

Trust Apple competitors to try to rain on the iPhone 3G devotees waiting patiently in line.  I suppose they are getting their own back for taking away the industries kudos at MWC 2008.

Whilst Nokia are keeping a low profile, some one has sneaked out a few photos, via blackberrysync.com, of BlackBerry’s touch screen phone, Thunder.  Purely coincidental timing of course!  But wait, another rumour has it that the Thunder is still in late alpha development so won’t be available any time soon.  Now there’s a surprise!

Microsoft on the other hand decided to have a crack at Apple’s Mobile Me by announcing their own hosted service.  Not only is this opportunistic, but all the other Microsoft Exchange hosting companies must be seething at Microsoft’s misfired disruption ploy. 

Of course, this being Wednesday, a new virus has been found for Symbian, the Isexplayer malware.  Though of course to be infected you have to install the sis file and ignore all the warnings that it is an untrusted application and has no security signature etc.  Not much of a virus then.

So only another day and a bit to iPhone splendour…

If you’re desperate for an iPhone 3G, didn’t crash into the O2 web site on Monday, live in the sticks and have a hangover, you have another 1 hour of snooze time on Friday morning.

Whilst the queues in London will be moving at 8.02, elsewhere bleary eyed O2 staff will be opening stores at 9am for the inundation of iPhone punters.  This leaves our city friends with 58 minutes of prime iPhone lording. 

But wait.  If the O2 web site was overloaded on Monday, will they be able to cope on Friday?  Best guess is no, so take a friend to ferry the Starbucks whilst you wait for the interminable credit check to complete.  Remember your credit/debit card.

Recent research by Vodafone tells us that a tenth of businesses expect a response to an email within 30 minutes.

Was it only 25 years ago that the best response most of us had was three days snail mail?  Although of course we did have the wonder of modern communication, the telex, and its recalcitrant operator.

Then in the early 90’s, after the umpteenth postal strike, fax took over as the ‘instant’ communication of choice, though still the secretary had to type it out, unless you had the wonders of fax mail.

But now two hours is evidently the expected norm allowed for a response.  So thinking on your feet with mobile email is a necessity, but at what cost.  Sometimes the best response requires mulling over, but now we can only expect second best.  

From today, prospective Apple iPhone 3G junkies, me included, are invited to sign up for their new shiny plastic toy.

O2 sent the emails out first thing this morning, and their web site shop promptly expired under the load.  Try, try and try again the iPhone of marketing dreams could be chosen, but when it came to pay, you were requested to wait a minute and then the web page fell back to the start. 

No purchase.  But be warned, O2’s cookies have captured your attempt and if your not careful you could end up buying not one but 4,5,6 or however many iPhone ‘attempts’ you made. 

Now that would make for a surprise delivery on Friday, and more surprising bill.

Nokia’s recent launch of free push email sounds, on the face of it, another strategic drive into the mobile services space.   However Nokia only support ten handsets so far, and only Symbian at that.

Emoze on the other hand has supplied a similar service for the last few years and built a firm user base, recently expanded to encompass the SME sector.  Nokia’s move could have made their business vulnerable, but Emoze has a great card up their sleeve.

From next month Emoze will support Java enabled handsets, not just Symbian or Windows Mobile.  Users will be able to choose from 100’s of handsets and still receive push email. 

Perhaps Nokia should have bought Emoze?

If my recent experience is anything to go by, Tom Alexander, Orange’s CEO, will have to accelerate changes in his organisation if he wants to retain small business users.

A small business decided to properly deploy Exchange in Microsoft’s SBS2003 server to get ‘proper’ mobile access to its email.  For a year now it has had two BlackBerry’s, one on T-Mobile and another on Orange, both receiving email using BlackBerry’s internet service.

To get each on to BlackBerry’s professional service was a vastly different experience.  One 5 minute phone call to T-Mobile had their BlackBerry on to BB Professional at an extra £5 a month, plus a free user licence.  No problems here.

A call to Orange however could not be handled by the first, second or third agent.  The owner was then told to call a number which turned out to be the first one called.  He tried again, only to be told that they had never heard of BlackBerry Professional, and that his contract would need to be turned into a business account at an additional £35 a month.

In three months Orange will lose his business to T-Mobile. 

Thursday is, of course, the new Friday, though if you want a new iPhone 3G for the weekend, don’t over imbibe on Thursday the 10^th.

According to a report in the Register O2 will allow customers to walk out with a new shiny plastic iPhone 3G from 7am on Friday the 11^th.  For those of us celebrating Thursday, it would be doubtful we would be alert enough to sign a new iPhone contract.

Better still, have a party outside O2 in the queue so at least you can say that the drinks were keeping you warm.

It seems UIQ is heading for the technology dumpster.  Nokia’s purchase of Symbian Ltd will streamline the whole product line so that by 2010 S60, in a number of guises, will dominate the smarter products of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola (if it’s still here) and LG. 

Observers are already making claims that this is in response to Android, though the Symbian partners deny this.  Yet whilst Symbian has in excess of 200 million devices in the wild, and growing, Android has none, and seemingly delayed its first device until next year. 

Motorola also announced a couple of new Linux handsets, but with very limited market appeal. 

My opinion is that Symbian’s move is against Microsoft not Android.  MS have stated a number of times that they are driving down the cost of Windows Mobile, and by so doing the next release, Mobile 7, will be in a position to directly compete in the mass consumer market. 

Fortunately for Symbian’s partners, especially Nokia, MS product has so far been poorly received except in some corporate applications and first adopters.  Nokia will therefore try to suppress any acceleration of Microsoft in their market place. 

Nokia as a hardware supplier can offer an OS free of charge, Microsoft as a software supplier can not.  So Symbian, a working OS, will attract more hardware manufacturers, and therefore more developers. 

Very sweet.

A number of blog sites have reported the throttling of the Sony Ericsson P5 (Paris) before it even came to market.

Allegedly poor previews of the uber smartphone, and late entry to market, led SE to decide that the P5 would be too little and too late to make an impression.

I would beg to differ.  In form factor and specification it would have had few peers.  Few other smartphones would offer the combination of features, high speed data, touch screen and alpha/numeric keyboard. 

Apple relies solely on the touch screen, HTC devices lack the convenient dial pad and feature set combo, BlackBerry and Nokia lack a touch screen.  The nearest equivalent is the Palm 750 but that lacks WiFi and GPS and has a low rent camera!

Has SE got a back up P plan or is the Xperia their future?

Oodles of years ago when working for Reuters, our reporters lugged around Saturn T earth stations.  As impressive as their name, each came in several attractive shiny boxes, weighed as much as the alcohol content of a journalist’s lunch, and powered by a handy Land Rover.  We are talking bigggg battery drain.

Analogue mobiles were little better of course, patchy coverage and hernia inducing batteries which left knees badly bruised as the handset swung from gibbon like arms.

So Iridium was a great idea.  Send all your base stations up into LEO (low earth orbit), add digital signalling and a low(ish) power requirement, and every globe trotting business suit would buy one. 

Didn’t work out of course.  The Motorola technology, after a quite a few tweaks, works, but GSM spoilt the American plan for world domination.  Qualcomm added to that failure.

Unlike other sat phones, Iridium can be used anywhere (except in buildings or caves) in the world, I have even had one working at the North Pole. 

Yet for all the billions of dollars spent on technology perfection, only a few tens of thousands still use it instead of the expected millions, and I bet Motorola are heaving a big sigh of relief having recently disposed of their Iridium liability.

Now all Moto need to do is sort out their mobile division (impending doom seems likely) and WiMax (LTE will rain on that parade) leaving Motorola with precisely what?  They do make exceedingly good chips.

In the late 90’s visiting network apparatchiks to Nokia would be shown some of the blue sky mobile services, such as WAP, SMS ringtones, interactive services and the like. 

One of the knocked up concepts that got a little more attention involved a demo of two way video calls using low resolution cameras linked into painfully slow WiFi enabled laptops.  A bit basic but got the idea across.

Now a decade later and who uses video calling?  Too expensive is one reason, but all the jokes made then, with the way we look first thing in the morning, were actually true.  Few want to see stubble, mad hair or worse at breakfast, or be caught lying to the boss. 

Instead we float away in quiet ignorance of each others foibles, and so the great hope of 3G video calling fades.  Until Apple makes it sexy of course.  2009 anyone?

Sony Ericsson joined the handset party on Tuesday with a number of ho hum mobiles and one interesting one.  Whereas the iPhone has only 2 little megapixels, SE announced that their new C905 Cybershot would have a camera replacing 8 lovely megapixels, Xenon flash, tri band HSPA, and WiFi.  Feature phone heaven.

But what of SE’s UIQ range.  We are still waiting for the P5 or Paris, whatever.  We’ve seen the pictures, read much of the specification, but still no announcement. 

Please SE don’t make the same mistake as with the P990i, so late that it was an antique when it came to market.

After the hoopla of the Apple iPhone 3G Nokia have powered back into the business market with the E66 and E71, two feature rich replacements for the E65 and E61i.

With HSPA, autofocus video capable camera, GPS and no doubt free of charge with a network contract, mean that they are ideally suited for the business market, something the iPhone still has to prove.

Unfortunately a new Nokia is just met with a shrug of the shoulders whilst a new, less capable, iPhone is the event of the year.

Nokia desperately needs to get their imaginative juices flowing again.

With camera phones having become indispensible and social networking migrating to the mobile, the combination of the two is now having some embarrassing side effects.

The naked pictures that a student in Ohio took of her self using her camera phone were sent, by a thief, to all her friends and relations listed under her contacts.  He also used the Facebook facility in the mobile to upload the images to her profile. 

One can only imagine how mortified she must have been.  This type of embarrassment will become common as mobiles are targeted by vindictive ex partners and thieves.

After torturing the audience for 90 minutes Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated 3G iPhone, naturally called the iPhone 3G.

The good news came in the shape of tri-band HSPA connectivity and a number of useful ergonomic tweeks.  The bad news is the lack of an improved camera, flash, video, A2DP, multi tasking, or interchangeable battery.  It still has the air of the old PalmOne 600 about it.

This was an opportunity to wow the world like they did last year, yet instead of taking the opportunity to leap ahead Apple are merely keeping pace.

Samsung obviously could not resist crashing Apple’s party.  With a very strong technical specification Samsung’s i900 Omnia handset will be directly competing with whatever Steve Jobs reveals later today.

On paper the Omnia, Xperia, Touch Pro should kick the iPhone 2 into touch.  Unfortunately their iPhone killers all use Microsoft Windows Mobile Pro 6.1 which can, beneath the surface gloss, trace its inheritance to before Windows Mobile 2003.

The iPhone 2 will, I hope, meet both consumer and business expectations for a subsidised, feature rich (HSPA, GPS, high res camera) and open platform using a much enhanced OS. 

We are just moments away from what could define a new era in mobile telecoms.

Tom Alexander, ex Virgin Mobile, has one of the biggest challenges of any boss in the mobile industry (apart from Motorola!).  Orange desperately needs to rediscover its purpose which it lost when overpowered by state run France Telecom. 

Mired in FT’s financial quagmire, all the innovation that Hans Snook and his team brought to mobile in the 90’s was sucked out, leaving nothing more than a mobile voice company.

Tom Alexander, according to Mobile Europe, is playing catch up by placing greater emphasis on customer service which has been poor, and will bring mobile data back in focus; something that Orange led in the late 90’s (remember HSCSD?). 

Yet more needs to be done, where are the big ideas, energy, enthusiasm and technical innovation that abounded 8 years ago?

The rise of mobile continues with the sale of nearly 295million handsets in the first quarter of 2008, up 13.6% from Q1 2007.  Considering the amount of resources it takes to manufacture and distribute a handset that’s an awful lot of CO2 that’s been released.

The continuing freefall of Motorola is shown by a staggering drop of 8.2% in their market share with a fall of 37% in shipments.  At least Sony Ericsson sold more handsets than 2007 in spite of problems launching new products.

Naturally iPhone sales declined last quarter but next week’s expected iPhone 3G will surely increase their market share.

Source: Gartner

To read that Vodafone investigated their most senior directors and non-execs comes as a bit of surprise considering the outrage caused from the 2005 HP scandal (The Register ).

Oblivious to the potential damage, Vodafone (according to the Mail on Sunday) proceeded to spy on both Chairman Lord MacLaurin and CEO Sir Chris Gent, without doubt two of the most respected business leaders in the world.

Sarin’s cohorts evidently decided that corporate politics were above corporate probity and trawled far and wide for damaging information on the other directors, including Penny Hughes a non exec director and former president of Coca Cola.  You couldn’t make this up.

Now that Vodafone are becoming a pseudo bank and holding extremely personal information with the acquisition of Zyb, can corporate and consumer alike really trust that Vodafone won't abuse their power?

It seemed to be good news all round when, on the 1^st of May, Vodafone announced that 500MB of data was being bundled into their tariffs, completely free of charge. Vodafone Press Release

So being a cynic, on the 2^nd of May I contacted Vodafone who confirmed that all existing contract customers were being upgraded automatically, and they would no longer be billed £7.50 for 120MB.  Unfortunately that was rubbish!

Last week Vodafone’s on-line billing system was malfunctioning and when it came back on-line I discovered that Vodafone are charging customers £7.50 for 500MB. 

Being charitable, I assume the call centre staff had been misinformed and the promotional SMS they sent out was in error.  What ever the reason, check your bill and contact Vodafone to change tariff if you don’t want to waste £90 a year.

A recent J D Power survey shows a near 4 times increase in the proportion of smartphones sales over 2007, from 1.7% to 6.3%.  This can only improve as and when the 3G iPhone and Treo 850 are launched, and the BlackBerry Bold is finally in shops.  Also Nokia’s avowed intention to release new multi band HSPA handsets will further increase customer choice.

Though unfortunately for Nokia customer satisfaction in their products is well below Sony Ericsson, let alone Motorola.

Interestingly the American love affair with flip phones has deepened to 74% of total sales, a phenomenal rise of 24% since 2006. 

Source: J D Power

I have stayed with Vodafone since the early 90’s because of call quality and coverage, but nothing infuriates me more than Vodafone’s torturous tariffs and billing. 

As Ewan from SMS Text News pointed out, Vodafone are incapable of adapting their tariffs to how people may actually use their handsets.  Ewan has just been caught out on Vodafone’s outrageous data pricing and a colleague of mine was overcharged by over £500 because the nature of a data session was not stated.  Why is it impossible for Voda’ to send a warning message if the inclusive allowance is likely to be breached, or at least if going over a set cost.  I assume that is why Vodafone’s data revenue is up 52%.

Even looking at the on-line bill is pointless as to quote them:  “We're making improvements to our web site, which means this part of the site will be down for a short while.”  This has been the case for at least the last two days now.  Most users will therefore have only the vaguest of ideas as to how they are spending their money.

These problems, and the practice of obscuring tariff limitations, will need addressing if Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s new CEO, intends to encourage customer loyalty in the tough times ahead.

Source: SMS Text News

A decade ago a US conference speaker discussed how journalists may be able to file stories via their mobiles, whilst the European journalists were writing this story on their PDAs and sending it via their mobile phones!

Now a recent survey conducted by M:Metrics finds that Americans access the internet over their mobiles far more than the Brits.  A variety of reasons are given, such as flat rate data charges, a prevalence of QWERTY keyboard mobiles and a dedication to Facebook and eBay. 

The flip side is our love of video, music and SMS, all considerably more than the States.  This is the where Nokia will excel.

Source: M:Metrics

When Ovi was announced last year, the European network operators were as one in their objections to Nokia playing in their backyard.  Nokia’s brand has dominated handsets for over a decade, yet had always been forestalled from providing value added services.

Now according to Nokia and Reuters, both Orange and T-Mobile have capitulated.  They will now use Ovi, or a branded variant, and it will only be a matter of time before other networks follow.

In another decade mobile will be about synergy of products and services from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia, with the networks continuing to decline into bit pipes.

Source:  Reuters  & Nokia