mobile

Smartphones increase average price of handsets

Cell phone subscribers in the U.S. are spending more on their wireless handsets, another sign that the smartphone revolution has arrived.

On average cell phone subscribers are spending about $101 on new devices. This is $9 more than they spent on handsets just six months ago, according to a J.D. Power and Associates survey released Thursday. This is the first substantial increase in the average sale price of mobile devices in two years, the consumer survey company said.

What's driving this price jump? Smartphones and other feature-packed phones. Devices, such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry and … Read more

HTC Touch Diamond gets a keyboard

The Touch Diamond hasn't even gone on sale in most countries and already, another new version has been announced. T-Mobile Germany launched three new MDA phones (its name for the HTC devices) and one of them is the MDA Vario IV, which is the rumored HTC Raphael. The other two are variants of the Diamond and Advantage.

This PDA-phone is largely similar to the HTC Touch Diamond but comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard like the TyTN II. According to Netherlands-based site Mobile Phone Helpdesk, the Vario IV has all the features of the Diamond but comes with 256MB … Read more

More on Google Gears for mobile devices

Google's Gears platform is still fairly young as far as Web tools go. A year after its launch (today is the one-year anniversary) it's still found only in a handful of Web apps. Its real power is for mobile users, laptop road warriors and, in the case of mobile phones, for people who are in and out of range of cellular data networks. That is, as long as developers spend the time to build Gears into their sites.

At the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Charles Wiles and Andrei Popescu, who work on the Google Gears … Read more

ComScore scores M:Metrics for $44.3 million

Online number-crunching firm ComScore announced Wednesday that it has acquired M:Metrics, a mobile usage statistics company, for $44.3 million in cash and a handful of common stock options.

The reason for the purchase is pretty obvious: as mobile phones make up a bigger and bigger chunk of digital consumption, ComScore wants to be able to provide the relevant statistics to businesses and advertisers. M:Metrics operates mobile phone usage survey MobiLens, mobile ad statistic tabulator M:Ad, and mobile Web monitoring product MeterDirect. ComScore currently has about 950 clients, the company said, and M:Metrics has more than … Read more

Finding Google's way in mobile

Fabrizio takes Google to task for its "Johnny One Note" approach to mobile: To the man with a hammer (Browser-based advertising model), everything looks like a nail (Browser). But he also points to how Google can extend its desktop web search dominance to mobile:

...[F]or Google to dominate in mobile, they have to find a way to dominate in messaging (not in browsing). Gmail is not the way....The Google of Mobile will come from mobile messaging [SMS, texting, email, IM, social communications], ad-based.

I wonder....Given that we are preconditioned to pay for services on our mobile devices, couldn't Google also explore a baked-in monthly subscription fee that the carrier embeds in one's wireless plan? Something that users pay for in the same way we pay scads of taxes each month without knowing precisely why?

Perhaps. But as the desktop has shown, given the choice between a good enough free service and a packaged and paid-for service, good enough and free is going to win out.… Read more

If it talks like a duck, it might be this voice changer

Given how awful cell phone reception is in our area, it's doubtful that anyone would need a voice changer when conversations often sound like they're under water as it is. But outfits like Spyville never saw a situation that couldn't be subjected to some form of amateur espionage.

That must be why they thought up the Cell Phone Voice Changer, which is pretty much self-explanatory. We do admit that the choice of disguises did catch us off guard: "a duck, child, old man, or a robot," as related by OhGizmo.

What's most amusing about … Read more

Windows 7, Windows Mobile on PDC docket

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Tuesday's quick Windows 7 demo at the D6 conference here was nice, although developers who really want to get a feel for the new operating system will probably need to wait until October.

Windows 7 and its multitouch interface will be a key topic at the Professional Developers Conference, which is set for October in Los Angeles. The PDC hasn't been held since 2005 when Vista was still in development. Microsoft also plans use the conference to show where it's headed in mobile, which probably means a look at Windows Mobile 7, although the company … Read more

Microsoft exec predicts big growth for Windows Mobile

Microsoft sees big growth for its Windows Mobile operating system.

A Microsoft executive in Asia told Reuters on Tuesday that sales will increase at least 50 percent over the next year as demand for smartphones picks up.

Eddie Wu, the software company's managing director of OEM embedded devices in Asia, said the company expects to sell 20 million "units" of its software in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, which ends in June, according to the article. And the company expects to grow at least 50 percent annually over the next two years, he added. Microsoft sold more than … Read more

Whrrl parent company nets $15 million in funding

Location-based social networking might be a clogged market, but it's still hot: Pelago, the parent company of mobile service Whrrl, is set to announce that the company has pulled in a $15 million Series B financing round. It'll be used for "strategic technology investments," as well as partnerships, which are crucial for mobile services that have to deal with cell carriers. Whrrl also hopes to expand across North America and into overseas markets.

The new cash comes from lead investor Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile Venture Fund, with contributions from Reliance Technology Ventures and DAG Ventures. Previous … Read more