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The BBC reports that Microsoft has developed its first application for Google’s Android platform. Called Tag, the free software uses a handset’s camera to turn it into a mobile barcode reader, enabling barcodes to effectively become coupons that link people to websites, pass on information or give visitors a discount in an online store.

Microsoft’s move may seem odd in light of the fact it has its own mobile platform that is struggling to compete with rivals. Indeed, last month the company announced the planned launch later this year of Windows Phone 7 Series, regarded by analysts as Microsoft’s last opportunity to remain a major player in the mobile operating system space. However, Microsoft has already made the Tag application available on the iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian handsets, as well as, of course, on Windows phones. The BBC report notes that Microsoft’s Android launch is made against a background of greater co-operation among operators on phone software. Last month at least 24 of the world’s largest mobile operators announced an agreement to create an open international applications platform, regarded by many as a move by operators to wrest control of the lucrative apps market away from software firms and phone makers.

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Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US, according to a survey.

It is the third most popular form of news, behind local and national TV stations, the Pew Research Center said.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” it said.

Newspapers in the US and UK have been going through financial difficulties, leading many to examine charging for their news online.

The survey showed that news aggregators such as Google News and AOL were most commonly used, along with the websites of CNN and the BBC.

Changing habits

Sixty-one per cent of readers surveyed said they got their news online on a typical day, compared with 78% from local news channels and 71% from a national TV network such as NBC or cable channels such as CNN or Fox News.

Fifty-four per cent said they listened to radio news programmes at home or in the car.

More than 90% use more than one method to get news, and 57% consult between two and five websites as part of their newsgathering, the survey found.

The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was sold in March
“Americans have become news grazers both on and offline – but within limits,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“They generally don’t have one favourite website but also don’t search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites.”

Regular readers of newspapers – either local ones or national papers such as the New York Times – have dropped to 50%, the survey said.

Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic have been going through difficult times as advertising slows and more readers migrate to the internet.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was among many that closed last year, while the Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle have gone through huge job cuts.

In 2009, the Daily Mail and General Trust cut 1,000 jobs at its regional arm Northcliffe Media, which publishes more than 100 newspapers in England and Wales.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp, also shut down the London Paper and announced that his group of papers will charge for online news.

The group owns the Sun, the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as Fox and Sky brands.

Mr Murdoch has accused firms such as Google of profiting from journalism by generating advertising revenue by linking readers to newspaper articles.

The New York Times will also charge for access to the website by 2011.

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Android and Apple’s iPhone OS were the fastest-growing smartphone platforms in 2009, with sales of the iPhone OS overtaking those of Windows Mobile, research company Gartner said. Symbian and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry still lead the market, it said.

Worldwide sales of smartphones running Symbian totaled 80.9 million in 2009, up from 72.9 million a year earlier. Because total smartphone sales grew faster, to 172.4 million from 139.3 million a year earlier, Symbian’s market share declined to 46.9 percent, Gartner said. Second-place RIM’s market share rose to 19.9 percent from 16.6 percent in 2008.

Apple’s smartphone OS took third place. Apple sold 24.9 million iPhones in 2009, compared to 11.4 million in 2008, taking its share of the market to 14.4 percent.

Microsoft’s smartphone OS dropped to the fourth spot as its market share fell from 11.8 percent to 8.7 percent, and sales dropped by about 1.5 million phones. The launch of a new version, Windows Phones 7 Series, appears to make it a more competitive platform, but as phones based on the rewritten OS won’t show up until late this year, sales will continue to struggle during most of 2010, according to Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Linux, in which Gartner includes LiMo but excludes Android, also continues to struggle in the smartphone market. Its share dropped from 7.6 percent to 4.7 percent in 2009.

Android was only the sixth largest smartphone platform in 2009, with a market share of 3.9 percent. However, that looks likely to change soon. Android phone sales really started to pick up during the fourth quarter. Four million out of a total 6.8 million units were sold during the last three months of 2009. Sixty-nine percent of those were sold in North America, driven by Verizon Wireless’s promotion of the Motorola Droid, Cozza said.

Palm’s WebOS is a newcomer on Gartner’s list in seventh place, with a 0.7 percent market share.

While the smartphone market is booming, total worldwide mobile phone sales of 1.2 billion units were down about 1 percent compared to 2008, according to Gartner.

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Mobile phone operators must now limit how much they charge customers for using the Internet within the European Union, after new rules went into effect Monday.

Customers have until July 1 to set a maximum monthly cost with their network, and those who do not will by default have a euro50 ($68) limit set.

Networks will send a warning when customers use up 80 percent of their allotment. At the limit, they will be cut off.

The European Commission has pressed networks into slashing roaming charges, leading to a 35 percent drop in the average cell phone bill to about euro20 a month, according to EU data.

But until now the cost of online surfing had remained unchanged. The EU office noted that German traveler was billed euro46,000 after watching a TV show in 2009 while roaming online in France, and a British student was charged euro9,000 for a month’s roaming while studying abroad.

By setting a monthly Internet limit, the European Commission hopes that “the tendency for operators will be to bring the price of surfing the Web down,” EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said.

Neelie Kroes, the new EU digital issues commissioner, called the new measure a step in “building customers’ confidence to surf the Internet when traveling in Europe.”

Network operators can now charge each other no more than 1euro per megabyte for downloading. National telecoms regulators are responsible for enforcing the rules with mobile phone operators, and the EU commission will report on the issue by June 2011.

Arlene McCarthy, a British Labourite in the European Parliament who was instrumental in pushing through the roaming legislation, said “European consumers can now determine just how much they’re willing to spend on their mobile while they’re abroad.

“It’s a shame that despite the huge numbers of complaints, mobile operators dragged their feet and we have had to use the full force of the law to get consumers a fair deal on prices,” she added.

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A wireless operator said earlier this week that it successfully embedded GPS hardware into a normal SIM chip, potentially allowing all devises to use location based services.

Wireless operator EMT, the Estonian subsidiary of TeliaSonera, said tests of BlueSky Positioning’s A-GPS technology were successful.

BlueSky Positioning’s GPS silicon is embedded on a SIM card, allowing non-GPS phones to use geo-location services. EMT is the leading operator in Estonia with 47 percent market share.

“Our preliminary test results with A-GPS in-SIM technology have demonstrated compelling accuracy coupled with a fast TTFF (time-to-first-fix), comparable to any commercial A-GPS handsets in the market. A-GPS SIM technology opens up a whole range of possibilities for both EMT and its subscribers,” said Argo Kivilo, R&D Manager at EMT.

“Not only this, but in light of the newly updated EU E112 directive, operators must be able to provide location data on nearly all emergency calls on their network within the next 18 months. BlueSky Positioning’s technology will be essential in ensuring this happens.”

The tests were conducted using both GPRS and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data) for retrieving assistance data in a live 3G network.

EMT tested the SIM card with 13 different phones from low end to high-end.

Another benefit is that USSD can be used concurrently with a voice call.

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Sony Ericsson has launched the Vivaz, a touchscreen 3G cell phone that captures high-definition 720p video, and also snaps photos with an 8.1-megapixel camera that includes face detection and geo-tagging.

The Vivaz features a TV-out for displaying video on an HDTV, YouTube compatibility, aGPS, and Wi-Fi. It measures 4.2 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs just 3.4 ounces, and also includes a 360-by-640-pixel 16:9 touch screen.

The Vivaz is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and tri-band HSDPA (850/1900/2100 MHz) device. It will hit the market sometime in Q1 2010 in “select markets.” If it follows recent high-end Sony Ericsson releases, that means the Vivaz will be available unlocked first, and possibly with AT&T later.

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Apple have announced that more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide. The milestone comes only a few months after it announced hitting 2 billion downloads

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As expected, Google unveiled its own-brand ‘Nexus One’ touchscreen smartphone based on its Android 2.1 operating system. Manufactured by Taiwan’s HTC and powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset and HSPA technology, Google went heavy on the hype during the launch at its Mountain View headquarters in California. “The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call ‘superphones,’ with the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset making it as powerful as your laptop computer of three to four years ago,” claimed Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of Engineering. The Internet giant also claims to be offering “a new way for consumers to purchase an Android mobile phone,” via the creation of its own portal through which people can get the device tied to one of several mobile operators or untethered direct from Google. Nexus One can be bought ‘unlocked’ from the Google web store for US$529, or for US$179 if consumers are prepared to sign up to a two-year contract with T-Mobile USA. Verizon Wireless in the US, and Vodafone’s European operations, plan to support the device from Spring 2010 via the store. Google is only initially taking orders on the store from consumers in the US, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. “In the coming months Google plans on partnering with additional operators, offering consumers access to a broad set of service plans,” noted the company in a statement. “In the future we expect to launch more phones with Android handset partners and to expand the web store to more countries.”

Google’s move is significant as it marks the first time the company has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device. It is being perceived by industry analysts as a way for the company to defend its online advertising empire as more and more people access the Internet using a smartphone. To date Google has worked with handset vendors (such as Motorola, HTC and Samsung) and operators (for example, Verizon) on integrating the Android software platform into the mobile ecosystem. Mario Queiroz, Google vice president for product management, described the unveiling of Nexus One as “the next stage in the evolution of Android”. Mr Queiroz said there were now more than 20 Android phones available from 59 operators in 48 countries. Analysts noted that the device – which resembles the iPhone – may be the strongest competitor yet to Apple’s iconic device. “This is a software company frustrated with making compromises with hardware manufacturers, that has taken the product bull by the horns,” TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington told the BBC. “When combined with Google Voice, there is no phone on the market today that can touch the Nexus One.” Google has also voice-enabled all text boxes on the device, which means that users can put together an e-mail message or tweet by speaking into the phone rather than typing text on the touchscreen.

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Nokia claims that its Ovi Store is experiencing around 1 million application downloads every day, although the Finnish company appears to have bowed to pressure and is set to launch a major revamp of the store next Spring. In an interview with the Financial Times, George Linardos, head of products at Nokia’s media group, said downloads are growing at 100 percent month-over-month and the Ovi suite – which also includes music and mapping services – now has 80 million active users, up from 54 million in August. Meanwhile, Linardos admitted that the Ovi Store had been outpaced by Apple after complaints on stability and reliability and the company is completely redeveloping its store. New features will reportedly include in-application payments, a redesigned user interface that makes apps easier to discover, and faster operation. Longer-term, Ovi Store will include recommendations based on friends’ app purchases and more localised content.

Nokia’s Ovi Store has been heavily criticised since its launch earlier this year. Rival Apple announced in September it had hit the two billion application download milestone only a year after launch. Nokia needs to make the Ovi Store a success; the world’s largest handset vendor is betting on mobile services as a new strategy to help it fight falling margins in the devices space. It is targeting net services sales of EUR2 billion or more in 2011 and wants 300 million active users for its services by the end of that year.

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The Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition, the company’s “most affordable” Nokia Maps loaded, GPS-enabled phone has been unveiled. The estimated retail price will be EUR110 and it should start selling in the second quarter of 2010

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Global 3G connections grew by around 60 million in the third-quarter and now account for 20 percent of total global mobile connections, up from around 18 percent a year ago. According to the forthcoming Quarterly World Review: Q3 2009 by Wireless Intelligence, global 3G connections are now evenly split between CDMA2000- and WCDMA- based technologies, each accounting for around 10 percent of total connections. Total 3G connections grew 28 percent year-on-year to reach 888.8 million.

WCDMA-based connections are growing at a much faster rate than CDMA2000. The report found that combined WCDMA and WCDMA-HSPA connections grew by 58 percent in the year to 3Q09, compared to 8 percent growth for CDMA2000-based connections over the same period. WCDMA-HSPA also recorded the highest net additions in the quarter, adding 25 million to reach 158 million global connections in total, more than doubling its connections base from a year ago.

Asia-Pacific and Western Europe continued to account for the majority of global WCDMA (Family) connections, accounting for 75 percent of the total. The five largest individual operators in this segment were NTT Docomo (Japan), AT&T (USA), SoftBank (Japan) SK Telecom (South Korea) and Vodafone Italy. CDMA2000-based connections were concentrated in the USA and India, which accounted for over 50 percent of the CDMA2000 total. The top five CDMA2000-based operators were Verizon Wireless (USA), Reliance (India), China Telecom (China), Tata Teleservices (India) and Sprint Nextel (USA). TD-SCDMA – the home-grown Chinese 3G standard being deployed by China Mobile – reached 1.7 million connections in 3Q09. China Mobile’s new network was soft-launched a year ago and is currently being rolled out across the country. Rival operators China Unicom and China Telecom are deploying rival 3G networks on different network standards, WCDMA and CDMA2000, respectively.

The study found that total mobile connections reached 4.5 billion by the end of 3Q09 with GSM accounting for 79 percent. The share of GSM connections was down 2 percentage points from a year ago, due primarily to the strong growth in 3G technologies.

Significant milestones in the quarter included the Asia-Pacific region surpassing 2 billion connections after recording year-on-year growth of 22 percent. Growth in the region was driven by the world’s two largest mobile markets – China and India – which grew total connections by 15 percent (to 698 million) and 49 percent (to 472 million), respectively, accounting for over half of the Asia-Pacific total. Asia-Pacific now accounts for 45 percent of total global mobile connections, followed by Western Europe (11 percent), the Americas (11 percent), Eastern Europe (11 percent), Africa (10 percent), USA/Canada (7 percent) and the Middle East (6 percent).

One of the fastest-growing markets in the year to 3Q09 was Rwanda, which grew its connection base by over 120 percent year-on-year. Other major growth markets included Cambodia (up 80 percent year-on-year), Zimbabwe (up 58 percent), Vietnam (up 57 percent) and Sudan (up 57 percent).

New mobile network launches in the quarter included Beeline (Vietnam), Vodafone Qatar (Qatar), 2degrees (New Zealand), Digicel (Nauru), Hello Nepal (Nepal) and I-Tel (Uganda).

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New figures from research firm Canalys found that global smartphone shipments in 3Q09 rose 4 percent year-on-year, slower than the 13 percent annual growth seen last quarter, and held back primarily by a 6 percent fall in EMEA. Shipments in North America were up 5 percent, while the APAC region saw a strong 26 percent rise after several flat quarters. According to the figures, Nokia retained its worldwide lead in smartphones, with a share of 40 percent – slightly up on its year-ago position, but down almost 5 percent sequentially. BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) held onto second place with a largely unchanged (compared to 2Q09) share of 21 percent, while Apple reached a new high of 18 percent share in third place, significantly up from the 14 percent it held in 2Q09 as supply of the iPhone 3GS improved in many countries. HTC retained its fourth-place position with a 5 percent share.

“While growth has undoubtedly slowed, it is still outperforming the overall mobile phone market by some margin, as well as driving data revenue for operators, and smartphones are ushering in a range of changes in user behaviour when it comes to what people actually do on their phones,” commented Canalys senior analyst Pete Cunningham. In terms of smartphone operating system market shares, Symbian’s overall lead shrank as its share fell to 46 percent, ahead of RIM (20.6 percent) and Apple (17.8 percent). Microsoft remained in fourth with its share dipping slightly below last quarter’s previous low of 9 percent. The proportion of smartphones running Google’s Android platform climbed to almost 4 percent, from just under 3 percent in 2Q09.

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The average selling price (ASP) of mobile devices in the US declined by 3 percent year-on-year in the third quarter, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm. The firm said that the ASP for mobile phones in the US fell to US$85, down from US$88 in the year earlier quarter. The decline was attributed to buy-one-get-one (BOGO) offers and other price reductions on smartphones. “Carriers have been heavily promoting the latest advanced handsets, which has spurred recent growth in the smartphone market and an increase in the number of smartphone brands available to consumers,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at The NPD Group. “For example, while there was only one Android device available in the fourth quarter of last year, now there are eight available from three major carriers.” Around 28 percent of handset sales were smartphones last quarter, the firm said.

According to NPD, smartphone price reductions by operators helped push the Blackberry Curve, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 3G to the top of the sales rankings for mobile phones. LG dominated sales of feature phones (ie: phones sold without an operating system) with LG enV3 and LG enV Touch rounding out the top five sellers. Mobile phone accessories sales reached US$2.3 billion in 3Q09, an increase of 12 percent over the prior quarter. “Growing revenue opportunities offered by accessories and service are just two ways that handsets offer revenue potential beyond someone switching carriers,” added Rubin.

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Nokia plans to install Linux software on just one new smartphone next year, Reuters reported yesterday, dampening prospects of a quick makeover of the Finnish group’s struggling product line-up. Nokia started to sell its first Linux phone, the top-of-the-range N900 model, this month. Nokia has traditionally only supported the Symbian operating system.

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Nokia is suing a raft of manufacturers of Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), alleging that they colluded to fix prices. Its targets include rival handset vendors Samsung, LG and Sharp. The Finnish vendor alleges that such companies raised “the price of LCDs above the price that would have prevailed in a competitive market” in the period between January 1996 and December 2006. “Nokia suffered damages as a result… and is entitled to treble damages and injunctive relief to remedy these injuries,” Nokia said in its complaint, reports Dow Jones Newswires. Nokia is suing 11 companies in total; also named in the complaint are AU Optronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Tatung, Seiko Epson, Samsung SDI, Hitachi, Toshiba and Philips Electronics.

The report notes that Nokia’s suit comes as the LCD industry begins to emerge from a long downturn that had led to weak panel prices. The screens are used in mobile phones, personal computers and televisions. However, it is not the first time that the LCD suppliers have been investigated. Nokia’s complaint comes a year after a US Department of Justice inquiry that fined several players – including Sharp, Chunghwa, and LG Display – for price fixing. In other Nokia news today, the Finnish company said it has sold its shares in Venyon – a specialist in Near Field Communications (NFC) – to the German firm, Giesecke & Devrient.

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Hackers have built a virus that attacks Apple’s iPhone by secretly taking control of the devices via an Internet connection, reports Reuters. The virus has been detected in the Netherlands and can only attack iPhones whose users have disabled some pre-installed security features, according to analysts monitoring the progress of the virus.

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Nokia today unveiled two new 3G slider phones, the Nokia 6700 slide and Nokia 7230. The Nokia 6700 slide is available in six colours, pink, red, petrol blue, aluminum, lime and purple. Both devices are expected to become available in the first quarter of 2010, and the retail prices before taxes and subsidies are anticipated to be EUR160 for the Nokia 6700 slide, and EUR100 for the Nokia 7230.

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Nokia says shipments of its high-end mobile computing device, the N900, have begun and it will be available in Europe, the Middle-East, Russia and North America from later this month for around EUR500. The N900 – seen as key for Nokia’s future in the high-end of the market – is the company’s first device running its Linux-based Maemo software.

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Sony Ericsson today unveiled its first Android-powered handset, the Xperia X10 becoming the latest top vendor to back Google’s high-profile operating system (OS). However, the world’s fifth-largest device manufacturer appeared keen to put more focus on the user interface it has built on top of the Android OS, rather than the Google platform itself. The interface – known as the User Experience (UX) platform – will be overlaid on the existing Google Android foundations to provide “unrivalled” integration of social media services such as Facebook and Twitter, according to Sony Ericsson. Support for both Android Market and Sony Ericsson’s Play Now Arena is included. The X10 will go on sale in various global markets from the first quarter of 2010. Pricing details were not revealed. Interestingly, the device runs version 1.6 of Android (despite the unveiling last week of version 2.0) and has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor from US silicon giant Qualcomm.

Sony Ericsson said the X10 will be the first of a family of Android-based phones that it will launch over the next year. Certainly, the company needs to do something dramatic to turn around its fortunes. Reeling from five straight quarterly losses, reports suggest its commitment to Android could see it soon drop allegiance to either Windows Mobile or Symbian.

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Motorola’s unexpected return to profitability in the third quarter may hide continuing troubles at its mobile devices division, but the company is confident the unit is on the road to recovery now that it has begun to unveil its new line up of Android-based smartphones. Overall, the US group reported Q3 earnings of US$12 million despite a 27 percent fall in total revenue to US$5.45 billion. However, it shipped only 13.6 million devices in the three months to the end of September, down 46 percent from the year before, taking its global handset market share to a low of 4.7 percent. The operating loss in Motorola’s handset business was trimmed to US$183 million, from US$840 million a year before, as it cut costs and scrapped some of its most unprofitable handsets. Co-CEO Sanjay Jha noted in a statement that his company has “delivered on our commitment to improve the financial performance of Mobile Devices and to commercially launch two smartphones in time for the fourth-quarter holiday season.” He described the launch of the company’s two new Android-powered handsets – Cliq and Droid – as “important milestones” as Motorola attempts to “begin to address the mobilisation of the Internet and the growing demand for modern smartphones.” Jha added that next year will see the vendor continue to expand its smartphone portfolio and deliver improved financial results. Yesterday Motorola’s stock rose US$0.87, or 11 percent, to US$8.83 in early afternoon trading in New York.

Meanwhile, Motorola’s rival Samsung – the world’s second-largest handset vendor – today said third-quarter profit for the whole South Korean group tripled to a quarterly record as the global economic recovery spurred a rebound in prices. Q3 net income jumped to KRW3.72 trillion (US$3.1 billion) from KRW1.22 trillion a year earlier. Sales rose 29 percent to KRW24.86 trillion. It said it sold 60.2 million handsets in the third quarter, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter.

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