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Sharp To Sell Phones in China

By Kate CrowleycloseAuthor: Kate Crowley Name: Kate Crowley
Email: talk@omio.com
Site: http://www.omio.com
About: Kate's interest in mobile phones began when she realised she was supernaturally adept at Snake 2. She was less good at Battleships and, frankly, we shouldn't even mention Pipes.See Authors Posts (212)

Sharp Corp. will launch its mobile phone range in China before the Beijing Olympics are scheduled to start. It will target the high-end buyers in China’s massive market. Kyocera Corp. has withdrawn from the Chinese market this month, which would leave Sharp as the only Japanese company selling handsets in China. So far, Sony is the only Japanese company to succeed in the mobile phone market overseas.

China’s mobile phone market is currently dominated by Nokia, followed by Samsung and Motorola. The three manufacturers account for more than 60% of market share.

The high-tech handset market is growing in China, with people prepared to pay more for phones with swanky features, particularly digital cameras. On Friday Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama said: “People want a nice screen especially for the Olympics”. Expect the Chinese market to be flooded with “nice screen” handsets soon.

Source: Financial Times

Meizu MiniOne’s UI Updated

By Kate CrowleycloseAuthor: Kate Crowley Name: Kate Crowley
Email: talk@omio.com
Site: http://www.omio.com
About: Kate's interest in mobile phones began when she realised she was supernaturally adept at Snake 2. She was less good at Battleships and, frankly, we shouldn't even mention Pipes.See Authors Posts (212)

The Chinese Meizu M8 (known colloquially as the ‘MiniOne’) received a lot of hype, not least because its design was very similar to another, very popular, handset. The UI has been updated however, and it’s no longer just another iPhone knock off. You can see examples of the updated UI at the bottom of this post.

Moving away from the iPhone controversy, the M8 is a nice little phone, and it has some impressive features. It runs Windows Mobile 6, sports a 720 x 480 pixel 3.4” touchscreen, supports Quicktime and WMV, and has a TV-out socket. It’s also much cheaper than the iPhone, at less than £200 for the 8GB version. It has some of the iPhone’s negative points too; it currently lacks 3G. However, we can expect the 3G version this year.

Source: Gizmodo

Squaring The Merkel

By MattyBcloseAuthor: MattyB Name: Matt Bortone
Email: matt.barr@trafficbroker.co.uk
Site: http://www.omio.com
About: I've been a fan of mobile phones...since the beginning. Being a poor sharecropper's son, I'm less gadget-obsessed than some of our reporters who seem to have developed an unhealthy attachment to the idea of the HTC Diamond. Instead, I'm interested in the way mobiles have changed our lives at work, at home and anywhere else that people cooler than me go.See Authors Posts (60)

You might not expect the average Briton to know the name Angela Merkel, the first female chancellor of Germany, especially since 1 in 4 think that Winston Churchill is a fictional character. And normally a simple Wikipedia search is enough to fill in those mental gaps - but what if you know the face and not the name.

Mobile technology and image search fit together naturally, with Vodafone Germany leading the way. The new service ‘Otello’ allows users to take photographs on their phones and submit them via MMS messages to a central database that hopes to identify the mystery person.

The aforementioned Mrs Merkel tested this new technology at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover. And despite being the most famous woman in the country, it didn’t recognise her. But there’s still time for it to become another handy spying tool that we love to talk about.

Source:Reuters

iPhone Pulls a Cromwell in Ireland

By Kate CrowleycloseAuthor: Kate Crowley Name: Kate Crowley
Email: talk@omio.com
Site: http://www.omio.com
About: Kate's interest in mobile phones began when she realised she was supernaturally adept at Snake 2. She was less good at Battleships and, frankly, we shouldn't even mention Pipes.See Authors Posts (212)

The Irish are going to get the iPhone. Prices are €399 (£306) for the 8GB model and €499 (£383) for the 16GB version. UK prices are £269 and £329 respectively. Ireland is going to be an expensive place for Apple fans.

The tariffs will also offer a lot less than their UK counterparts.

Contracts start at €45 (£35) for just 175 minutes of free talktime. Prices rise to €100 for 700 minutes of talktime and 250 texts. In the UK, the entry-level £35 tariff gives users 600 minutes of talktime and 500 texts. The equivalent £75 tariff offers a massive 3,000 minutes of talktime and 500 texts. The Irish will also have a data download cap of 1GB, whereas in the UK downloads are unlimited.

What are Apple and O2 playing at? For the same price, the Irish will be receiving about four times less in texts and free minutes.

Source: O2 Ireland

Over One Billion Mobile Phones Sold in 2007

By Kate CrowleycloseAuthor: Kate Crowley Name: Kate Crowley
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About: Kate's interest in mobile phones began when she realised she was supernaturally adept at Snake 2. She was less good at Battleships and, frankly, we shouldn't even mention Pipes.See Authors Posts (212)

Worldwide, over one billion phones were sold in 2007. Since growth is expected in Asia and other developing markets, it’s likely that 2008 sales will surpass the previous year’s.

According to figures from Gartner, sales of mobile phones surpassed 1.15 billion units in 2007. This is a 16% increase from 2006’s sales, which stood at 999 million units.

Nokia is still the big daddy of mobile phone manufacturers. It sold 435 million handsets in 2007, giving it a 37.8% control of the global market. For the first time ever, Nokia accounted for 40% of all handset sales in the fourth quarter.

The pecking order of manufacturers after Nokia goes Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG. Every company except Motorola increased its market share. Motorola’s share was 14.3% for the full year, down from 21.1% in 2006. Samsung’s market share increased from 11.8% to 13.4%.

It’s interesting to note that, while Nokia’s market share is around 40% in most markets, in North America it’s closer to 10%. Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner reckons that 2008 could be even better for Nokia since there is so much scope for it to improve its share. She also thinks that Windows Mobile could be Sony Ericsson’s golden goose.

How will Motorola improve its failing fortunes? There are rumours that they might be selling their mobile phone division, perhaps to a Chinese company such as ZTE.

Source: Mobile Crunch