T-Mobile Wireless Promotion:

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The T-Mobile Nokia 5300 XpressMusic retails at $179.99, after web-only discount, it is free!

View full details here

MySpace, Sprint land mobile partnership

U.S. wireless operator Sprint Nextel Corp will make it easier for its cell phone customers to link to a free version of online social network MySpace.

Instead of typing the entire address, cell phone users will be able to connect to News Corp's service by clicking a link, the companies said in a joint statement.

The deal will also include links to News Corp's other Internet properties, including FOXSports.com and IGN.

AT&T Buys Edge Wireless

AT&T has agreed to acquire Edge Wireless, a regional GSM carrier in the Pacific Northwest. AT&T already owns a minority stake in the company, and will buy out the remaining 64.3% of the firm for an undisclosed amount. It will add Edge's 172,000 existing customers to its own subscriber base and will be able to offer better in-network roaming in the areas covered by Edge.

50 Largest Wired Telecommunications Carriers in the US Hold 90 Percent of the Market

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c75591) has announced the addition of First Research's new report: Wired Telecommunications Carriers - Industry Profile to their offering.

Brief Excerpt from Industry Overview Chapter:

In the US, about 5,000 companies provide wired telecommunication services, with total annual revenue over $200 billion. Large companies include AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest. The industry is highly concentrated: the 50 largest companies hold 90 percent of the market.

The industry includes local service carriers (annual revenues about $130 billion); long-distance carriers (about $70 billion); pay phone operators; pre-paid card providers; and telecommunication resellers.

Read full report here.

12th Annual Mobility World Congress Showcases Asian Wireless Market

With a mobile video market on track to be worth US$3.1 billion by 2010, according to the analyst firm In-Stat, the Asia-Pacific region remains a global leader in pioneering and adopting wireless technologies, applications and services. The 12^th annual Mobility World Congress – held Dec. 3-6 in Hong Kong – provides a unique, concise opportunity to learn from and network with leaders and innovators in the Asian wireless market.

Each year, the Mobility World Congress features keynote addresses from C-level executives throughout China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, with more than 40 CEO speakers at the 2006 event. This year’s event has more than 150 confirmed speakers from 40 countries. Keynote and track speakers include executives from Alcatel-Lucent, China Mobile Peoples Telephone, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, Ericsson, Far EasTone Telecommunications, KDDI, KTF, Motorola Samsung, SK Telecom, the TD-SCDMA Forum and other major companies that are key players in China and the rest of the Asian mobile market.

Mobility World Congress is considered Asia's premier congress for the mobile and wireless industries, based on attendance – typically more than 1,500 conference delegates, speakers and members of the international press – and the breadth and depth of its tracks. This year’s event features two afternoons of keynote addresses focused on mobile and entertainment and next-generation services. The conference also includes six congress tracks on mobile broadband deployments, emerging business models, wireless devices, network evolution, next-generation services and emerging market opportunities.

Continue reading 12th Annual Mobility World Congress Showcases Asian Wireless Market

Nokia Siemens Launches Low-energy Base Stations

Most of the energy in a typical telecommunication network is consumed by the wireless network's base station site. In response to this, Nokia Siemens Networks says that it is announcing offerings that dramatically improve the energy efficiency of its wireless networks, particularly the base stations and base station sites.

"The Energy Efficiency solution makes good green business sense," said Ari Lehtoranta, head of the Radio Access business unit at Nokia Siemens Networks. "By bringing state-of-the art products and software together with our Services portfolio for operators, we can reduce adverse environmental impact while also generating considerable cost savings for our operator customers."

The four main elements of the solution are:

• Minimizing the number of base station sites;
• Minimizing the need for air conditioning to cool the sites;
• Using the latest base station technology;
• Deploying software features that optimize the use of radio access for wireless communications.

Nokia Siemens Networks says that the energy consumption of a base station site can be reduced by up to 70 percent with its Energy Efficiency solution.

Read full story here

Nokia Ad Business to Power Mobile Advertising for Handmark

Nokia Ad Business today announced it is working with Handmark, a leader in mobile media, to provide an end-to-end mobile advertising solution for its Pocket Express mobile data application. As part of its turnkey mobile advertising services, Nokia will provide ad serving, participate in media sales, and offer additional mobile solutions for advertisers.

Nokia Ad Business was formed when Nokia acquired mobile advertising leader Enpocket on Oct. 5, 2007. This acquisition enables advertisers to reach more than 100 million mobile consumers. By collaborating with Nokia Ad Business, Handmark will leverage the Nokia Ad Platform to serve ads in its Pocket Express mobile service, reaching millions of mobile professionals.

"Pocket Express is largely comprised of high income business professionals -a very desirable audience for advertisers," said Douglas Edwards, Handmark co-founder and CMO. "With the help of Nokia Ad Business, we are able to offer advertisers a unique opportunity to reach this attractive demographic on their most personal device."

The program will launch early next year, and will serve as a new revenue stream for Handmark.

"We are pleased to work with high quality mobile content publishers like Handmark," said Vice President and Head of Nokia Ad Business Mike Baker. "Nokia's vision for mobile advertising is to build an open advertising marketplace that is brand safe. Handmark is a great addition to our media offering."

Google Has Even Bigger Plans for Mobile Phones

Google Inc. made a big splash last week with its new software for cellphones. But that's far from the limit of the Internet giant's wireless ambitions -- which could include running its own mobile network.

The company is gearing up to make a serious run at buying wireless spectrum, a chunk of the airwaves that can be used to provide mobile phone and Internet services, in a Federal Communications Commission auction in January. Google is prepared to bid on its own without any partners, say people familiar with the matter. It is working out a plan to finance its bid, which could run $4.6 billion or higher, that would rely on its own cash and possibly some borrowed money.

Google, meanwhile, already is running a test version of an advanced wireless network at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, gaining operating experience that could come in handy if it wins the spectrum and decides to run a full-scale national mobile carrier, according to people familiar with the matter.

Read full story here.

ASUS P527 Phone

GPS navigation is not one of those things most users consider to be crucial in a PDA-phone, at least not in the same way as features like W-Fi and Bluetooth are. But even though most consider it to be a bonus rather than a requirement, it is surprisingly found in quite a few entry-level devices even when high-end ones give it a miss.

Examples will be devices from Mitac and E-Ten, companies which tend to put a GPS chip into every handset they sell, even the 2.5G ones. Another of these manufacturers is Asus, and a good example is its upcoming P527 handheld.

Like the Asus P525 before it, the P527 comes with a numeric keypad. This makes it easier to punch in phone numbers for dialing and even for keying in text compared to writing on the screen. It also eases in users switching over from regular mobile phones as most of those have numeric keypads as well.

As mentioned earlier, the P527 will come with GPS for navigation. This utilizes the SiRFstar III chip, that we've generally had good experiences with in other devices like the Dopod U1000 and Mitac Mio A501.

Like many other Windows Mobile PDA-phones, the P527 comes with quite a few wireless connectivity features. Granted, it's doesn't have HSDPA or 3G, but all others like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are available. A bonus is the inclusion of an FM tuner.

Other notable features of the P527 are a 2-megapixel autofocus camera, a microSD slot with support for SDHC cards, and a 2.6-inch QVGA display. It is also reasonably compact with a thickness of 15.4mm and weight of 125g.

The Asus P527 will be available in Hong Kong and Taiwan at the end of November. Thereafter, it will be sold in Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, India and Turkey.

NTT America to Speak at Mobile Internet World

NTT America, a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, today announced the company will join with other leaders in the emerging mobile internet ecosystem in a comprehensive, lively, and thought-provoking discussion exploring today's most important mobile issues and trends at the Mobile Internet World Conference & Expo, November 13th - 15th at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA. NTT Communications Global IP Network, a Tier 1 IP backbone, interconnects four continents with high-performance IPv4 and IPv6 capability. IP architectures are becoming critical elements in the delivery of ubiquitous mobile broadband services.

Director of Product Engineering for NTT America, Cody Christman, will present in the Mobile Broadband & Technology Track on the panel, "Optimum Network Architectures for Personal Broadband," on Wednesday, November 14 at 3:45 p.m. ET. Joining Christman on the panel: Brian Ponte of ArrayComm, Kurt Dobbins of Ellacoya and Jim Orr of Fujitsu. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Philip Marshall, vice president of the Yankee Group's Enabling Technologies- Telco group. The panel will investigate the salient characteristics of all-IP networks, legacy to all-IP migration challenges, and the roles of various access technologies in the context of current and emerging mobile Internet technology standards.

"The economics of traditional voice centric mobile networks cannot profitably support high bandwidth data services and thus IP architectures are becoming critical elements in the delivery of ubiquitous mobile broadband services," said Christman. "To stay on top of the game, NTT Communications Global IP Network, a Tier 1 IP backbone which interconnects four continents with high-performance IPv4 and IPv6 capability, has continuously been upgraded to accommodate such development."

Google lays out mobile strategy

It started with Apple, but here comes Google.

In the second major announcement this year by a Silicon Valley stalwart that aims to shake up the way people use mobile phones, Google Inc. officially announced Monday a sweeping plan to encourage a new breed of software development designed to make it easier to surf the Internet from a cell phone.

But Google's not going at it alone. It is working with a newly created global coalition of companies, called the Open Handset Alliance, that includes phonemaker Motorola Inc. and wireless carriers Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. And unlike Apple's iPhone, sold exclusively in the U.S. by AT&T Inc., the Google software platform could be available on countless phones and sold through multiple carriers.

Google is not introducing its own phone - one has been rumored - but a suite of software that can be used on phones starting in the second half of next year. Besides Motorola, other phonemakers participating so far include Samsung, LG Electronics and HTC.

Google's software platform, called Android, runs on open-source code, so any software developer can create a program for it. The idea is to encourage innovation, and thus improve the chances of developing an advanced mobile phone capable of enticing more people to use Web tools on their phones. It also creates new competition for handsets that use Microsoft's operating system for phones as well as Apple's iPhone.

'In order to get a tremendous new mobile phone experience, you need to attract' people who haven't had access to the mobile platform before, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a conference call Monday. 'And that's software developers. This is a developer announcement. You can now build the great things you've done on the Internet' on a mobile phone.

Read full story here

Everything Wireless

The term wireless is normally used to refer to any type of electrical or electronic operation which is accomplished without the use of a "hard wired" connection. Wireless communication is the transfer of information over a distance without the use of electrical conductors or "wires". The distances involved may be short (a few meters as in television remote control) or very long (thousands or even millions of kilometers for radio communications). When the context is clear the term is often simply shortened to "wireless". Wireless communications is generally considered to be a branch of telecommunications.

IT. It encompasses cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless networking. Other examples of wireless technology include GPS units, garage door openers and or garage doors, wireless computer mice and keyboards, satellite television and cordless telephones.

Wireless communication may be via:

• radio frequency communication,
• microwave communication, for example long-range line-of-sight via highly directional antennas, or short-range communication, or
• infrared (IR) short-range communication, for example from remote controls or via IRDA,

Applications may involve point-to-point communication, point-to-multipoint communication, broadcasting , cellular networks and other wireless networks.