Posts Tagged ‘operating system’
Mobile: NTT DoCoMo planning investments in Asian carriers to sustain its growth
July 10th, 2009 | 
Author: DoCoMo’s recent foreign investments include a 26 percent stake in Tata Teleservices, India’s sixth-largest mobile operator, a 30 percent stake in telecom operator Axiata’s Bangladesh unit, and a 16.5 percent stake in Malaysian operator U-Mobile.
“Our main target is Asia, and there are some other (promising) countries there. We are in contact (with carriers in those countries),” NTT DoCoMo Chief Executive Ryuji Yamada told Reuters in an interview on Thursday without elaborating.
DoCoMo is also seeking technological cooperation, rather than capital ties, with Chinese mobile operators such as China Mobile and China Unicom, Yamada said.
“Those are real giants and buying a stake of only a few percent could cost us several hundred billion yen (several billion dollars), and acquiring such stakes would not make much business sense for us,” Yamada said.
In a bid to enhance the appeal of its cell phone lineup and better compete with rivals KDDI Corp and Softbank Corp, DoCoMo on Friday plans to launch the first handset in Japan using Google Inc’s Android operating system.
On top of the smartphone made by Taiwan’s HTC Corp, DoCoMo is considering adding some more Android phones to its handset lineup by early next year, Yamada said.
Yamada added that he has also not given up on the possibility of offering Apple Inc’s iPhone to its subscribers.
In Japan, Softbank is the only carrier that offers the popular handsets at the moment.
Softbank, Japan’s third-largest mobile carrier, outran its bigger rivals in winning new signups minus cancellations for the 26th straight month in June, helped by the popularity of iPhones as well as an aggressive ad campaign and low-cost price plans.
Following Yamada’s comments, shares in NTT DoCoMo closed down 1 percent at 140,600 yen, outperforming the benchmark Nikkei average, which fell 1.4 percent.
Posted in Communications | 
Tags: ad campaign, amp, apple, blog, blogs, business, business sense, car, cell phone, docomo, google, handsets, htc, iphone, Mobile, mobile carriers, mobile operators, ntt docomo, operating system, reuters, smartphone, system, t mobile, Wireless | 
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Mobile Handsets: Nokia denies utterly rumours it will make an Android-based device
The report, carried in The Guardian, took a cue from “industry insiders” to predict the launch of a touch-screen Android device at Nokia World in September. When contacted by ZDNet UK later Monday morning, a Nokia representative issued an “outright denial” of the piece.
“There is no truth to this story whatsoever,” a statement from the company read. “It is a well-known fact that Symbian is our platform of choice for smartphones.”
Going for Android would certainly have been a surprising move for Nokia, given the time and money it has put into opening up Symbian. Nokia’s operating system (since it bought out Symbian’s other stakeholders last year) is likely to reappear in its new, open-source guise next year.
Nokia also has another open-source mobile platform in Maemo, which it is actively promoting as part of its Intel partnership.
Meanwhile, fairly realistic-looking images have been leaked of Sony Ericsson’s Android phone, currently code-named “Rachael.” The device appears to be part of SE’s high-end Xperia line and is said to run on Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor.
Posted in Communications |
Tags: blog, blogs, car, handsets, Mobile, mobile platform, money, nokia, operating system, qualcomm, smartphone, sony, sony ericsson, symbian, system, time and money, world |
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South Korea – opening the market for handsets
Adopting Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability, which has prevented many foreign cellphone makers from selling their products in the Korean market, will no longer be mandatory, starting April 2009. As a result, global bestsellers, such as Apple’s iPhone of the U.S. and RIM’s BlackBerry of Canada, and Nokia’s budget phones of Finland, will likely hit the Korean market.
WIPI is a Korean mobile device platform for wireless internet content, including games. To advance into the Korean market, foreign cellphone makers are required to support WIPI, whose standard is different from international platforms, in their handsets. They have criticized the requirement, citing the small size of the Korean market and high development costs.
In a session on Wednesday, the Korea Communications Commission decided to lift the requirement, while saying it will no longer be mandatory for domestic mobile phone service providers to adopt WIPI from April 2009.
Since April 2005, the government has made it mandatory to include WIPI, which was set by the Telecommunications Technology Association. The commission said, “When the WIPI requirement was first set, the government intended to protect and foster the domestic software industry related to wireless internet by using WIPI. But the latest global market trend is a universal mobile operating system, focusing on smartphones.”
The mobile industry predicts that foreign products will hit the domestic market, which is led by Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, in earnest next spring.
Posted in Communications |
Tags: apple, BlackBerry, budget, Communications, communications commission, game, Games, handsets, Internet, iphone, Mobile, mobile device, mobile industry, mobile phone, nokia, operating system, rim, samsung, service providers, smartphone, Software, system, Technology, Wireless |
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Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda Drives Issue
Did you recently acquired one of Seagate’s high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives and have experienced some freezing problems with it? Then you will probably be happy to know that the company has just acknowledged these issues, and has released a firmware update for its high-capacity hard disk drives. Released statement said that Seagate informs users who aren’t yet aware of the issue that they can resort to the company’s technical support department, where they will be advised as to the appropriate solution.
There is a number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experience pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. What is rather disappointing, aside from the idea of buying a high-capacity hard drive that is likely to cause problems, is that the solution offered for the problem is not a standard one, as it?s the users who have to call or email the company’s tech support in order to receive the necessary firmware fix. The story doesn’t end here, as a number of users on Seagate’s user forums are already complaining that the new firmware fix is actually slowing their hard disk drives.
Posted in Technology |
Tags: application, blog, blogs, email, Free, Mac, operating system, Operating Systems, pda, system, technical support |
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Adobe frees mobile flash: It’s about time
–The next version of the mobile Flash runtime will be free of license fees. Adobe also confirmed that the mobile version of the Air runtime will be free.
–Adobe changed its licensing terms and released additional technical information that will make it easier for companies to create their own Flash-compatible products.
–The company announced a new consortium called Open Screen supporting the more open versions of Flash and Air. Members of the new group include the five leading handset companies, three mobile operators (including NTT DoCoMo and Verizon), technology vendors (including Intel, Cisco, and Qualcomm), and content companies (BBC, MTV, and NBC Universal). Google, Apple, and Microsoft are not members. It’s not clear to me what the consortium members have actually agreed to do. My guess is it’s mostly a political group.
Adobe said that the idea behind the announcements is to create a single consistent platform that lets developers create an application or piece of content once and run it across various types of devices and operating systems. That idea is very appealing to developers and content companies today. It was equally appealing two years ago, when then-CEO of Adobe Bruce Chizen made the exact same promise (link):
If we execute appropriately we will be the engagement platform, or the layer, on top of anything that has an LCD display, any computing device — everything from a refrigerator to an automobile to a video game to a computer to a mobile phone.
If Adobe had made the Open Screen announcement two years ago, I think it could have caught Microsoft completely flat-footed, and Adobe might have been in a very powerful position by now. But by waiting two years, Adobe gave Microsoft advance warning and plenty of runway room to react — so much so that ArsTechnica today called Adobe’s announcement a reaction to Microsoft Silverlight (link).
Also, the most important changes appear to apply to the next version of mobile Flash and the upcoming mobile version of Air — meaning this was in part a vaporware announcement. Even when the new runtime software ships, it will take a long time to get it integrated into mobile phones. So once again, Microsoft has a long runway to maneuver on.
Still, the changes Adobe made are very useful. There’s no way Flash could have become ubiquitous in the mobile world while Adobe was still charging fees for it. The changes to the Flash license terms remove one of the biggest objections I’ve seen to Flash from open source advocates (link). The Flash community seems excited (link, link). And the list of supporters is impressive. Looking through the obligatory quotes attached to the Adobe release, two things stand out:
–Adobe got direct mentions of Air from ARM, Intel, SonyEricsson, Verizon, and Nokia (although Nokia promised only to explore Air, while it’s on the record promising to bundle Silverlight mobile).
–The inclusion of NBC Universal in the announcement will have Adobe people chuckling because Microsoft signed up NBC to stream the Olympics online using Silverlight. So NBC is warning Microsoft not to take it for granted, and Adobe gets to stick its tongue out.
What does it all mean?
Nothing much in the short term. As I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a vaporware announcement (other than the license changes). Some people are speculating that this will put pressure on Apple to make Flash available on the iPhone (link). That’s possible, if Apple’s real concern was that they didn’t like Flash Lite. Now they can port full Flash, or someone else can do it. But if Apple is in reality unwilling to let anyone else’s platform run on the iPhone then we’ll see other objections to Flash emerge.
The marketing competition to control the future of web apps is continuing to heat up. Microsoft is trying to take the whole thing proprietary by creating a comprehensive architecture, Adobe is trying to drive its own platform, Sun is trying to re-energize Java, Google is making its own moves, and so on (link). Plus, of course, most web app developers today are happy with what they’re using now and have little interest in switching to any of the new architectures (check out the dandy commentary by Joel Spolsky here).
It’s an enormously complex situation, and it’s going to take months, if not years, before we can start to see who’s winning and who is losing. Rubicon is working on a white paper that will try to clarify the situation a bit. I’ll let you know when it’s published.
In the meantime, enjoy the marketing fireworks. The intense competition is forcing companies to innovate faster and open up their products, as Adobe did today. I think that process is good for just about everyone in the industry.
Copyright 2008 Michael Mace.
Posted in Flash, Phones |
Tags: apple, apps, ash, bbc, blog, developers, docomo, free adobe, game, google, iphone, lcd display, Mac, microsoft, microsoft silverlight, mobile operators, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobile version, mobile world, mtv, ngage, nokia, ntt docomo, olympics, online, operating system, qualcomm, silverlight, sony, sonyericsson, system, t mobile, Technology, technology vendors, vaporware, video game, web applications platform, Windows |
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