Mobile Stew

ntl:Telewest have finally reached agreement with Virgin Mobile over the
terms of a takeover offer, which values the mobile operator at £962.4m
($1.62bn), together with an agreement to re-brand all consumer operations with the Virgin brand in the future.  The combined company will have revenues of over £3.9bn which will put it on a par with Sky and Vodafone UK.

The new company, Virgin Broadband(??) will be the first company in the UK to offer quadruple play to customers - Broadband, TV, fixed and mobile telephony.  I really think that fourplay combined with the Virgin brand will reshape the way consumers think about communications and entertainment.  Telewest had great success with its tripleplay (TV, broadband and mobile) '3 for £30' campaign.  Imagine how successful a strong fourplay offer will be, ...

In the UK nearly 7% of all chart music bought this year has been
downloaded through a mobile service, according to the Official UK
Charts Company (OCC)  .That represents nearly 70,000 chart singles bought every week by people on the move.

I find this astounding and I think it proves that Nokia's assertion that its handsets will soon prove a threat to the Apple iPod's dominance may prove true.  I wonder how Apple will counter the threat of mobiles, particularly as many people pay nothing or very little for their handsets - why would you buy an iPod when your 'free' phone works just as well?

It's almost here.  The Nokia N80 will be available from Vodafone UK on April 20th.  I can't wait to get this phone as I'm certain I will be able to find a way to make VoIP calls using the Wi-Fi.  I also think it will be my last phone upgrade for a while as the phone's form factor is just right to fit in my pocket, without it being so small that I keep dropping the phone or sacrifice screen size for browsing.

One of my mate's is going for the N91 instead which previously was the phone I was waiting for, so I'll be able to do a comparison of the two when they come out.

A new SMS encryption service is now available.  The service has been developed by CircleTech, s.r.o., a Czech software corporation. The Java (J2ME) application, which can run on majority of current mobile phones, uses encryption standard AES and user-derived keys to securely encrypt the SMS communication between parties which use it.

SMS 007 has been available for Czech customers for almost 5 months, but only very recently has entered the international market. The main distributor for Europe is Nokia Softwaremarket.

Besides encryption of the messages, SMS 007 has also other security features like a hidden contact list, which cannot be seen from the outside without knowledge of the main password - therefore, if someone steals your phone or just gets it in their hands for a while, he/she still cannot ...

Skype and 3 launched 3G data card, which enables subscribers to make cheaper VoIP calls.

Currently the card is priced at £ 39.99 and is bundled with the special
starter pack provided by skype which includes Skype software, a Skype
headset and a Skype starter voucher.

Users hoping to get the card at the cheapest price - £ 39.99 will have to opt
for the Web and Office 512 package priced at £45 per month. However users will
get half a Gb of data bundled in each month.



READ MORE HERE

Vodafone plan to extend it's HSDPA trial in April beyond it's home town to 100 business users who will be testing Vodafone UK'sHSDPA-enabled Mobile ConnectCards for PCs across central and greater London.

Voda’s version of HSDPA can run at up to 1.8Mbps standard – almostfour times faster than base level home broadband speeds, with 384kbps upstream.

It's a pity that they are only trialling this service with business users and not consumers as I would have liked to see what high-speed services they had to offer.  Years ago, when I was at Voda I worked on the 'Next Generation Consumer Proposition' project which created Voda's Content Roadmap for 3G and beyond.  It would have been interesting to see which if more of the services we predicted would ...

This week, Sony Ericsson has signed a deal with Google, which enablesSony Ericsson to integrate Google's Blogger.com and Google Web Searchfeatures on all of its future mobile phones.

This meansblogger.com account holder with the new Sony Ericsson phone can writeand post content to his blog on the move using the bundles software. Soyou can post content to your blog even on a vacation, travel or awayfrom a computer. This is the first any mobile handsent manfacturerporviding this kind of features related to blogging. This shows howpopular is blogging in the present internet era and it looks likesurely this is going to be a hit feature.

READ MORE HERE

Vodafone is set to launch its own brand of handsets after signing a five-year deal with China's Huawei Technologies.  I'm surprised that Vodafone hadn't done this already.  I don't think we will be seeing cutting-edge smartphones, but rather good value mass-market phones.

This could have a major impact on the sales of Nokia, Sony Ericsson etc if Vodafone try to dominate the middle of the market.

I guess it had to happen sometime - I'm kind of surprised it's taken so long, given that it is estimated that up to 40% of premium mobile content is for adult services 'to go'.

3OOOH in Spain have just launched the first adult video chat service where customers can dial a premium number for a chat with 'Sexy Susie'.  Within the call both participants can see each other, although I'm sure there an option will soon be added for the caller to withhold their image.

More:  Moobile





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I passed by a Vodafone store today which had a poster advertising Sky TV packages for mobile phones from £5pm, which struck me as a very good deal if you wanted to watch Sky on the cheap.

Well, this may prove to a be a false economy as apparently you will need a TV licence to watch TV on your mobile in the UK or risk getting a £1000 fine and potentially imprisonment.

Most people already have a TV licence in the UK so this isn't a problem, but every year apparently 200,000 people are caught watching TV without a licence.