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• 31Oct

  Mobile handset sales growth slows

  Phone news No Comments

  Growth in sales of mobile phones between July and September slowed to the weakest rate since 2002, according to Strategy Analytics.

  The company said 303 million phones were shipped worldwide in the quarter, up 5% on the same period in 2007.

  Nokia remained by far the biggest manufacturer, producing 117.8 million mobile phones.

  Apple overtook Blackberry-maker RIM for the first time to be the sixth biggest handset manufacturer.

  BIGGEST SELLING HANDSET MAKERS
  1, Nokia
  2, Samsung
  3, Sony Ericsson
  4, Motorola
  5, LG Electronics
  6, Apple

  Samsung took the number two spot, selling 51.8 million handsets.

  Strategy Analytics blamed the slow growth on sluggish sales in developing markets such as China, India, Russia and South America.

  It predicts the growth rate will remain at 5% in the final three months of the year with 345 million units sold.

  The figures came on the day that Motorola posted a three-month loss of $397m (£242m), blaming continuing problems in its mobile phone division.

  News reported by The BBC

  

  Tags: Mobile handsets, Mobile phones

• 31Oct

  BT fined after ‘fixing’ MoD calls

  Phone news No Comments

  BT has been forced to pay the Ministry of Defence £1.3m in compensation after some of its staff met call-answering targets by phoning each other.

  The National Audit Office found they fixed figures to help BT avoid fines for not answering calls quickly enough.

  The targets were part of a £3bn Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deal to operate the forces’ telephone system.

  BT has sacked some of the “small number of staff” involved and the call centre concerned no longer operates.

  The company has also paid £1,021,000 in service payments, the £122,000 cost of investigating the fraud and the £197,000 cost of the fake calls.

  The call centre concerned, in Kettering, Northamptonshire, has been taken out of operation.

  The National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, said the discovery showed the need for better monitoring of the way such projects are being run.

  Tory MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons public accounts committee, described the incident as “a real-life Whitehall farce”.

  It says a lot about the MoD’s oversight of its contractors that the department’s systems failed to spot a serious fraud , Edward Leigh, MP

  He said: “It says a lot about the MoD’s oversight of its contractors that the department’s systems failed to spot a serious fraud.

  “BT staff working on the MoD’s PFI telecoms project actually plotted to phone each other in order to beef up their performance statistics for answering calls.

  “It was only later that the department found out it was £1.3m out of pocket and had to recover this from BT.”

  The National Audit Office said the fake calls were not immediately spotted because they did not have enough impact on the phone service to spark an investigation.

  It eventually came to light within BT – which is now required to provide more detailed reporting and undergo regular detailed checks of the integrity of its reporting system.

  Risk alert

  Tim Burr, head of the National Audit Office, said: “Most of the private finance projects in its portfolio of more than 50 have been delivered successfully by the Ministry of Defence.

  “But the department needs to be more alert to the risks that can emerge once the project is up and running, such as inaccurate performance reporting.”

  The Liberal Democrats said the problems encountered with PFIs were a “scandalous” waste of public money.

  Defence spokesman Nick Harvey said: “PFI projects should only be used where they can be clearly proved to provide the best value for money.

  Robust management controls should ensure that there is no recurrence of this fraud, Ministry of Defence spokesman

  “Instead, the MoD appears to be signing up to PFI schemes without thinking, then throwing away millions abandoning them years later.

  “This level of waste is scandalous when our troops are still going without vital equipment and helicopter support in the field.”

  An MoD spokesman said: “The Defence Fixed Networks Integrated Project Team, which is responsible for managing the contract, has reviewed and strengthened their service assurance and management process, with the assistance of external independent advisors.

  “These robust management controls should ensure that there is no recurrence of this fraud.”

  News reported by The BBC

  

  Tags: BT, phone calls, Phone service, phoning

• 19Oct

  N-Series touchscreen ‘available soon’

  Nokia Mobiles, Phone news No Comments

  Nokia has announced that a new touchscreen model of its smartphone range, the N-Series, in the near future.

  The Finnish manufacturer has made the release of the 5800 XpressMusic official but it is thought that by the end of the year, it will have made a touchscreen smartphone.

  Some believe that the new model will be called the N97 and will follow on from the N95 and N96.

  It is thought that it may feature an eight-megapixel camera, which will make it the “flagship device” for Nokia, according to TechRadar.com.

  However, there is some speculation that Nokia will not aim to make a full-spec model available with a touch-screen so soon.

  The reason cited for this is that it may “cannibalise” the appeal fo the N96 which was only released fairly recently.

  It is thought that the new phone will be released at some point towards the end of the year, possibly just after Christmas.

  Devinder Kishore, director of marketing for Nokia India, told Cellpassion: “We will have lots of touchscreen phones coming up.”

  He added that a new N-Series smartphone, which would feature a touchscreen would be available to consumers “very soon”.

  In related news, Nokia has just released the new 8800 Carbon Arte, which uses different materials to create the 8800 Arte mobile phone.

  It is made from carbon fibre, titanium, polished glass and stainless steel. The handset features 3D patterns to replicate the “inherent performance and luster of carbon fibre”, according to TradeArabia.com.

  The mobile phone will also house a 3.2-megapixel camera as well as 4GB of inbuilt memory.

  Reported by Mobile Phones, By Charles Kane

  

  Tags: Mobile phone, Nokia, smartphone

• 19Oct

  Handsets to become crime targets

  Phone news No Comments

  The risk of spam and viruses that attack mobile devices is set to rise, says a report.

  Security experts suggest current risks are small, and that attacks will take the same form as PC spam and scams.

  End-user protection like anti-virus software is not yet mature in the mobile market, so the issue is being addressed by the network operators.

  Mobile users are urged to employ the same safe behaviours familiar from PCs to reduce risks.

  New threat

  The annual Emerging Cyber Threats Report from the Georgia Institute of Technology Information Security Center (GTISC) in the US has identified mobile devices as particularly vulnerable platform.

  It said that as more and more people adopt smartphones, more applications will allow financial and payment infrastructure that employs them, and the availability of such sensitive data will prove to be a draw for cybercriminals.

  The growth of mobile spam and viruses has been reminiscent of the early days of PC spam and scam, says Simeon Coney of Adaptive Mobile, a firm that tracks malware and provides security software for mobile firms.

  “One of common types we see now runs amok on the Symbian platform,” Mr Coney told BBC News. “These viruses work their way through the contact book, sending themselves out to every subscriber who has been called or has called that handset.”

  Mr Coney says that network operators receive 100,000 virus incidences a day, nearly a 50% rise on last year. However, most subscribers are not infected – in part because mobile viruses are comparatively unsophisticated at present.

  “The first generation of these were fairly easy for mobile operators to detect,” Mr Coney said.

  “Just like the first PC viruses came across as screensavers, in the mobile instance they came across as executable files. No-one was ever sending executable files themselves so it was easy to detect and block that.

  “But in the last four months, the majority of viruses we now see are of a new type that either masquerade as an MP3 file, a picture file, or a media file.”

  People should start to exercise that same caution with their mobile devices that they do today on their PC Simeon Coney, Adaptive Mobile

  Adaptive Mobile has identified one particular virus called Beselo that spreads via MMS or by searching for nearby Bluetooth devices – a true “airborne virus”.

  For a typical network operator, they find, the virus is responsible for a rise in spam from 0.5% of traffic to 6% over the last 12 months.

  The simple solution for users, Mr Coney says, is to employ the same behaviours familiar from computing.

  “People should start to exercise that same caution with their mobile devices that they do today on their PC; think twice before running any attachment from someone you don’t know, check your bill on a regular basis, and ensure your Bluetooth connection is not set in discoverable mode.

  Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said statistics it had gathered about mobile viruses suggested there were about 400 in circulation.

  “The growth rate is slowing,” he says. “This is because the mobile vendors are awake and are installing better built-in security in their new phone models.”

  “We haven’t seen much mobile malware that would use exploits to target vulnerabilities on mobile phones to gain access,” he adds. “Almost all of them instead rely on users installing the malware themselves. This could change.”

  ‘Missed opportunity’

  Up to now, mobile security has largely been in the hands of the network operators, who have taken a very pro-active stance to security for their users.

  But the report instead suggests that co-operation between operators, manufacturers and application developers will be necessary.

  The report lauds open-source mobile operating systems like Google’s Android, which will make it easier for application developers to develop robust security.

  The average life-cycle of mobile devices is just two years – compared to 10 years for a PC – so developing security infrastructure for mobiles will happen quickly.

  “Because the mobile communications field is evolving so quickly, it presents a unique opportunity to design security properly – an opportunity we missed with the PC,” says the GTISC’s Patrick Traynor in the report.

  News reported by The BBC

  

  Tags: Mobile phone

• 19Oct

  Phone sex for South American screamers

  Phone news No Comments

  Staff at a nature reserve in Wearside have been using a mobile phone to encourage two South American birds to mate. The Washington Wetland Centre is home to a pair of crested screamers, which use distinctive calls to mark their territory and attract a mate. However, the centre’s birds have shown no interest in mating.

  A recording of a screamer’s call has now been downloaded from the internet onto a phone and is being played to the birds in a bid to get them in the mood. Warden Owen Joiner said: ‘They’re a prehistoric species and this is reflected in the way that they move – everything happens at an incredibly slow pace. Hopefully the recording will spark something in them and then nature will take its course. They are starting to react to the recording, which is very exciting, so we’ll just have to see what happens.’

  News reported by The Observer, Rowan Walker

  

  Tags: Mobile phone, Phone sex

• 19Oct

  AT&T to Discontinue Prepaid Unlimited GoPhone Data Access on November 12th

  Phone news No Comments

  AT&T call center representatives in the GoPhone divison have confirmed to PhoneNews.com that the current $19.99 unlimited GoPhone data option on Pay As You Go service would be discontinued on November 12th, stating that the offering was meant as a trial exercise and that the company is exploring other options for prepaid data offerings.

  Speculation and criticism abounded that the offering has led to abuse of network resources, and that many sites including PhoneNews.com encouraged people to drop more profitable data plans in order to take advantage of the much lower rate, compared to current rates offered as postpaid add-ons.

  PhoneNews.com has been at the forefront of this situation ever since we were the first news organization to break the news on an unlimited prepaid data offering thanks to our savvy readership in May, and combined with our promotion in the Sony Ericsson Z750, made the idea of cheap 3G data access appealing to thousands of people, especially those fortunate to live in markets with full HSPA access, as the $19.99 rate made AT&T the least expensive provider of 3G data in the world.

  Now with the imminent discontinuation of the offering and no other immediate alternatives available, savvy users will once again be left with other more mainstream and expensive options for no contract data access such as Verizon, unless one chooses to take advantage of a longstanding loophole in AT&T’s GoPhone Pick Your Plan Rollover program.

  News reported by phonenews.com

  

  Tags: AT & T, Gophone, Phone news, Sony Ericsson

• 19Oct

  What is a Telephone Call Center?

  Phone services No Comments

  A call center is an office used for the purpose of making and receiving a large volume of telephone calls, many of which in the UK have been transfered overseas to places like India.

  A call centre is operated by for example a company like Visa and other credit card companies to administer incoming product support or to recieve information inquiries from their customers. Many of the large companies use call centres, including telephone companies themselves. For example, companies like Tiscali have moved this srvice over to India.

  Outgoing calls from these centres are made for the purpose of telemarketing, debt collection and other services to their customers. A call centre is often operated through an open workspace where each operator will have a telephone headset and at the work stations they will have a computer for each agent. The telephone headset is connected to a telecom switch to make connections to telephone lines easier. You may have received one of those marketing calls when the line goes dead, this is where the computer has automatically dialed out, but there is no phone operator to take the call when the line connects to you.

  Most of the UK’s major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers and examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks and sales support.

  

  Tags: Telephone call centre, telephone companies

• 19Oct

  Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’

  Phone news No Comments

  Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as “Orwellian”.

  Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

  And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

  But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as “incompatible with a free country”, while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

  Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

  The data can be accessed by the police and security services on request – but the government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive and make it easier for investigators to do their job.

  Information will be kept for two years by law and may be held centrally on a searchable database.

  Without increasing their capacity to store data, the police and security services would have to consider a “massive expansion of surveillance,” Ms Smith said in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research earlier.

  ‘Vital capability’

  She said: “Our ability to intercept communications and obtain communications data is vital to fighting terrorism and combating serious crime, including child sex abuse, murder and drugs trafficking.

  “Communications data – that is, data about calls, such as the location and identity of the caller, not the content of the calls themselves – is used as important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases and in almost all security service operations since 2004.

  “There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online” Jacqui Smith

  “But the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data needs to change too.

  “If it does not we will lose this vital capability that we currently have and that, to a certain extent, we all take for granted.

  “The capability that enabled us to convict Ian Huntley for the Soham murders and that enabled us to achieve the convictions of those responsible for the 21/7 terrorist plots against London.”

  She said the “changes we need to make may require legislation” and there may even have to be legislation “to test what a solution to this problem will look like”.

  There will also be new laws to protect civil liberties, Ms Smith added, and she announced a public consultation starting in the New Year on the plans.

  “I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness,” she told the IPPR.

  ‘Necessity’

  “These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people” Chris Huhne Lib Dem home affairs

  Ms Smith attempted to reassure people that the content of their e-mails and phone conversations would not be stored.

  “There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online.

  “Nor are we going to give local authorities the power to trawl through such a database in the interest of investigating lower level criminality under the spurious cover of counter terrorist legislation.

  “Local authorities do not have the power to listen to your calls now and they never will in future. You would rightly object to proposals of this kind and I would not consider them.

  “What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area – the principles of proportionality and necessity.”

  But the idea of storing phone and e-mail records has provoked concern among experts.

  The government’s own reviewer of anti-terror laws, Lord Carlile, said: “The raw idea of simply handing over all this information to any government, however benign, and sticking it in an electronic warehouse is an awful idea if there are not very strict controls about it.”

  ‘Soft soap’ claim

  Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve, for the Conservatives, said he welcomed Ms Smith’s consultative approach but added her speech “begs mores questions than it answers”.

  “These proposals would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain personal information on individuals,” he said, adding: “The government must present convincing justification for such an exponential increase in the powers of the state.”

  Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: “The government’s Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying.

  “I hope that this consultation is not just a sham exercise to soft-soap an unsuspecting public.”

  He said the government had repeatedly shown it could not be trusted with sensitive data, adding: “There is little reason to think ministers will be any less slapdash with our phone and internet records.

  “Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended.”

  “Our experience of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act suggests these powers will soon be used to spy on people’s children, pets and bins.

  “These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people.”

  News reported by The BBC, 15 October 2008

  

  Tags: Communications, Mobile phone

• 19Oct

  Nokia 3Q Profit Falls 30 Percent

  Phone news No Comments

  Finnish cell phone maker Nokia reported today a 30 percent drop in third-quarter net profit amid falling sales and lower prices for its handsets.

  Nokia said its market share was shrinking, ticking in at just 38 percent in the third quarter from 40 percent in the previous three-month period and from 39 percent in the third quarter of 2007.

  Net profit in July through September plummeted to 1.09 billion euros ($2.7 billion), from 1.56 billion euros a year earlier. Net sales dropped 5 percent to 12.2 billion euros ($16.6 billion), from 12.9 billion euros.

  Last month, Nokia had warned that its market share would drop because of price cuts by competitors, but said it would not change its strategy.

  “We said we would not participate in the aggressive pricing competition in the third quarter and I believe that the decision was correct and will repay us in the long run,” Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said.

  Despite the global financial meltdown, Nokia said it expects sales to increase in the final quarter, with a possible slight gain in market share. It repeated its estimate that the overall industry will grow 10 percent in 2008, reaching 1.26 billion cell phones sold by the end of the year.

  Nokia said it would continue to focus on providing Internet services for its mobile customers, including music, navigation services and games on handsets. This month it launched Comes With Music, which provides millions of tracks for download onto Nokia handsets, and introduced its first touch-screen phone in years, the Nokia 5800, in a challenge to rivals such as Apple’s iPhone.

  News reported by mobiledia.com, 17 October 2008

  

  Tags: Mobile phones, Nokia, phone

• 19Oct

  G1 Phone Review Roundup

  Phone news, Phone services No Comments

  Next week will be the G1 week as the whole of the mobile phone community set their eyes on the release of the much anticipated G1 Android Phone comes into reality. It’s the first Google phone, so everybody is excited. Finally, an iPhone killer has arrived, and so some people say.

  But first things first, the G1 is not really a Google-manufactured phone, like the iPhone is a genuine Apple product. The first G1 mobile handset is actually an HTC mobile phone powered by Google’s Android mobile platform and will be released through T-Mobile network. But since Google is the more popular market brand, it is but fitting that people call the phone the Google Phone. The HTC-Google phone is just the first mobile phone which will have the Android as its OS. Who knows which other mobile phone manufacturers are going to join the bandwagon as soon as they’ve found out how successful or not the first Google Phone would be. The G1 is up for release on October 22. Words on the streets say that there were already 1.5 million pre-orders for the unit. If that figure is true, well the G1 might be on the road to success then.

  While those who have pre-ordered the G1 awaits the shipment on October 22, some lucky tech geeks have already had their first taste of the G1 as early as last week. And the whole week, we’ve seen several of them writing out their initial impression of the Google phone. We’ve rounded some of these reviews of the Google Phone to help you gauge whether the Google phone is worthy of your money, is worthy of the monicker iPhone killer and is worthy of the attention that it is getting right now.

  Om Malik pointed out immediately that the G1 is certainly not an iPhone killer. The G1 lacks the sophistication of the iPhone touch screen features. But nonetheless he also pointed out that the G1 is certainly smartphone which fulfils what a mobile phone should do. Something which the iPhone failed to accomplis.

  CrunchGear’s Peter Ha on the other hand was not very pleased with the Android as an OS and contends with the fact that the Android is still in beta stage. Hence, it is not yet a powerful and robust mobile phone OS. But he nonetheless pointed out that the G1’s hardware would have to be the one to pull off the success factor for the G1.

  The Boy Genius Report wrote a very comprehensive review of the phone and pointed out that users will love the G1 for as long as they what it is. It is not a BlackBerry, nor a Sidekick but an adult Sidekick phone.

  Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani also got her hands on the G1 and said that she will never trade her iPhone for the G1 for reasons such as; the device bulky form factor, T-Mobile’s 3G coverage in her area which renders the G1’s GPS utterly useless, the inability of the phone to handle multiple Google accounts. But she also praised the G1’s fast mobile web browser which is as robust as the iPhone’s Safari browser, the copy and paste functionality which we all missed on the iPhone and customizable keyboard shortcuts.

  Gizmodo also has a comprehensive review of the G1 and declared that it is not a finished product yet. He pointed out that there are only three working Google Apps so far – Gmail, Maps and Calendar. Bottomline is, according to Gizmodo, still depends on users’ preferences. The phone is definitely better than other smartphones available in the market today. Hopefully more Google apps will be ported as well as more third-party apps will be developed.

  Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital thinks that the G1 is a very good first effort and a godsent for people who prefer physical keyboard. He also pointed out the inferiority of the G1’s user interface as copared to the iPhone, particularly the lack of ability to flick between multiple pictures and web pages or to zoom in and zoom out of a photo or web page.

  Suzanne Choney of MSNBC immediately noticed the striking resemblance of the G1 with that of the iPhone particulary the black-slab form factor. But she pointed out that Google has done a good job of making the phone one of the easier-to-maneuver touchscreen smartphones, thanks to the Google Android platform. She thinks that the G1 is not as fluid and simple to use as the iPhone but it will be a popular alternative for those who don’t like the iPhone or AT&T as their wireless carrier.

  Reported by cellphonenews.com, October 18, 2008

  

  Tags: iphone, Mobile phones, phone

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