Evolution of the Cell Phone

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iPhone in over 10 countries

Orange today announced that "later this year" they will make the Apple iPhone available in more than ten countries including Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange's African markets.

Orange seem to save their words even better than Vodafone. Recently Vodafone announced the future iPhone availability in ten countries in only two sentences.

The Orange PR team obviously outdoes them since today they managed to stuff more than ten countries on their future availability list in only ONE sentence. Well, that's an achievement that should be worth the four years spent at the PR school.



Summing it up, it seems the highly rumored 3G iPhone will have almost entire world covered. But did you notice that Spain is still not on the list. We bet O2 is going to snatch that deal along with several other countries.

Confirmed expected iPhone coverage (besides USA and Canada):
Europe:

Austria - Orange, T-Mobile
Belgium - Orange
Czech Republic - Vodafone
France - Orange (already available)
Germany - T-Mobile (already available)
Greece - Vodafone
Ireland - O2 (already available)
Italy - Vodafone, Telecom Italia
Poland - Orange
Portugal - Orange, Vodafone
Romania - Orange
Slovakia - Orange
Switzerland - Orange, Swisscom
Turkey - Vodafone
UK - O2 (already available)
Other countries and regions:

Africa - Orange, Vodafone
Australia - Vodafone, SingTel (Optus)
Dominican Republic - Orange
India - Vodafone
Jordan - Orange
Latin America - America Movil (Claro)
New Zealand - Vodafone
Some carriers obviously overlap, so this year might just bring the end of the exclusivity battle for the iPhone and carriers will share the iPhone market. And usually good competiton means better price tags.

Samsung F480

Today Samsung officially announced their newest touchscreen phone - the Samsung F480 or otherwise known as Samsung TouchWiz. Yeah, we know that it was announced in Barcelona back in February but there is some news in this second announcement too.

For a start the Samsung F480 will be sold under different names in different regions. For example in the UK the F480 is going to be sold as Samsung Tocco.


Samsung F480

Samsung also revealed the details about the battery of the handset - 1000 mAh of capacity, 3 hours of talk time and 300 hours of stand-by time. The dimensions have also been slightly updated to 98.4 x 55 x 11.6 mm and the weight has been fixed at 100.6 grams.

Also this second announcement hints of the fact that Samsung F480 is about to hit the shelves in the nearest future. In fact some online retailers are already accepting pre-orders. The rates are however rather high, starting at about 600-700 US dollars.


Samsung F480 lifestyle photos

In case you need a quick memory refresh here are the most important features of Samsung F480. It is tri-band phone with HSDPA 7.2Mbps support, and an ample 2.8" touchscreen QVGA display. The camera counts the impressive 5 megapixels and comes with autofocus, power LED flash, image and video stabilization.

Of course, there is audio and video player with multiple file format support, as well as FM Radio with RDS. The impressive TouchWiz user interface and navigation are the final ingredients for making the classy performer.

Opera Mobile 9.5 to compete with iPhone's Safari browser?

We've spotted a live video preview of the latest Opera Mobile 9.5 - a fast and feature-rich web browser for mobile devices that strives to snatch the iPhone's Safari browser title for best mobile browsing experience (for the record, we've just made up this title, ok?).



You can watch the live preview by Matthew Miller from ZDNet and judge for yourselves but it's worth pointing some of the highlights.

Opera seem to have done some great work on their Presto rendering engine - the web browser is fast and it offers pretty much the same fluid-like panning and scrolling as Apple iPhone. But you've got to remember that this demo is running on the HTC Advantage which not only packs a VGA resolution display but also has a fast 624MHz CPU and a dedicated ATi graphics chip.



Now as far as navigation is concerned you will notice the "double-tap-to-zoom-in-a-paragraph" trick that is also used by the iPhone's Safari web browser. But you might also notice that the use of the Opera Mobile 9.5 relies heavily on the use of a stylus, a tool that the GSMarena team is not really fond of.

Yet the Opera Mobile 9.5 offers so much more than the iPhone Safari - automatic fullscreen mode, copy and paste, sending hyperlinks to other people, saving images and downloading files. It can even store pages for offline viewing.



Overall the new Opera Mobile 9.5 sounds like a killer deal for Windows Mobile users who have been plagued by the inadequate Explorer Mobile browser way too long. We are so looking forward to getting our hands on that browser and testing it for ourselves.

By the way, in case you are interested, you can also check out the official Opera Mobile 9.5 walkthrough created by the Opera team themselves. It's funny how their presentation setup and even studio lighting resembles the Apple iPhone demos. Enjoy!

Latest news extracts about GPS and wireless technologies

Why GPS and GSM news brought together?

What do they have in common? The only common factor is that both use HF radio signals for their operation. But there is more. Already today GPS is getting incorporated in GSMs(Europe), cell phones(USA) and mobile phones(UK) and this development is accelerating in a great pace. In only a couple of years (almost) all GSMs will have a GPS receiver incorporated. And not the poor performing GPS receivers as we know them now from our handheld devices. No, the GSM/GPS combinations must be able to locate themselves under the most difficult circumstances i.e. indoors, in parking garages, in urban canyons, in large buildings etc.

The market for these GPS receivers is so huge, compared to the market for handheld GPS receivers (a factor 200 or so), that every manufacturer will put all on all to make this a success.

We already knew the Global Locate A-GPS chip-set with over 20,000 hardware correlators integrated. This means that the hardware does a lot of the computational work. Acquires satellites with signals below -158dBm at a 100 times lower power consumption. Time-to-first-fix as low as 250 msec.

And SiRF sells its third generation SiRFStarIII chipset with the equivalent of more than 200,000 correlators. Weak GPS signals (up to -159dBm) can be processed and with that indoor GPS exists already. The SiRFSoft GPS architecture is portable to the market leading platforms such as Intel XScale and OMAPI. This means that the system can be incorporated in GSMs, cell phones, Smartphones, PDAs and other wireless handheld devices.


End September 2006 u-blox AG announced the u-blox 5 family of GPS and Galileo-ready single chips and chipsets featuring an acquisition performance of under 1 second. The new chips also feature SuperSense -160 dBm acquisition and tracking sensitivity, power needs of less than 50 mW and a footprint smaller than 100 mm2, making u-blox 5 receivers ideal for PDAs, personal navigation devices, cameras, cell phones, media players and other battery-operated portable devices. u-blox 5's ultra-fast acquisition time is due to its 50-channel architecture with over 1 million correlators and separate acquisition and tracking engines, capable of massively parallel searches.


Hundreds of millions of people will permanently carry a high performance GPS receiver with them, wherever they go. GPS and GSM go together.

3 Billion GSM Connections On The Mobile Planet – Reports The GSMA

16th April 2008, London, UK: The GSMA, the global trade group for the mobile industry, today announced that total connections to GSM mobile communications networks have now passed the 3 Billion mark globally. The third billion landmark has been reached just four years after the GSM industry surpassed its first billion, and just two years from the second billionth connection.

The 3 Billion landmark has been surpassed just 17 years after the first GSM network launch in 1991. Today more than 700 mobile operators across 218 countries and territories of the world are adding new connections at the rate of 15 per second, or 1.3 million per day.

The world’s biggest GSM markets today are China (509 million), which is growing at a rate of more than 7 million new connections a month and accounts for 14% of the third billion growth; India (193 million), growing at 6 million per month accounts for 12% of the third billion growth, Russia (178 million) and Brazil (93 million) which both contributed 4% of the third billion growth.

“The growth of mobile communications continues to soar, not least in emerging markets, which are responsible for 85 percent of new connections today,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Board Member of the GSMA. “One cannot underestimate the importance of mobile as a vital communications tool, connecting so many people, often for the first time in their lives.

“Against that backdrop, the roll-out of Mobile Broadband services, offering high speed internet and rich media access is well underway and available in more than 73 countries today,” added Conway. “Mobile Broadband hails the next era for our vast eco-system, one that is delivering remarkable social and economic benefits to people, businesses and economies throughout the world.”

The news comes as the GSMA today premiers a special documentary film Mobile Planet, exploring the social and economic value of mobile communications across 20 countries of the world. Produced in partnership with TelecomTV, the film features a host of locations from Japan to Rwanda, South Africa to Chile, where mobile is enhancing lives and changing the face of societies. The film will be shown for the first time in full at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London tonight.


About the GSMA:

The GSM Association (GSMA) is the global trade association representing more than 700 GSM mobile phone operators across 218 countries and territories of the world. In addition, more than 200 manufacturers and suppliers support the Association's initiatives as key partners.

The primary goals of the GSMA are to ensure mobile phones and wireless services work globally and are easily accessible, enhancing their value to individual customers and national economies, while creating new business opportunities for operators and their suppliers. The Association's members represent more than 3 billion GSM and 3GSM connections - over 86% of the world's mobile phone connections.

Seventy Million More Africans Now Connected To GSM Networks

GSM coverage extended by an area the size of France in just 12 months

13th May 2008, Cairo, Egypt: -- The GSMA, the global trade body for the mobile industry, announced today that the number of mobile connections in Africa has risen 70 million in the past 12 months to 282 million. Mobile operators have ramped up investment in the region extending GSM coverage to reach an additional 550,000 square kilometres occupied by 46 million people. The broadening coverage and the falling cost of mobile communications is enabling tens of millions of Africans to become connected for the first time in their lives. Africa has only 35 million fixed-lines.

"Africa's mobile industry is delivering on its promise to blanket the continent's inhabitants with coverage giving tens of thousands of rural communities their first opportunity to realise the substantial social and economic benefits of mobile communications," said Tom Phillips, Chief Government & Regulatory Affairs Officer of the GSMA, speaking at the ITU Telecom Africa event in Cairo. "However, over 300 million rural Africans do not yet have mobile coverage. They live in an area the size of China, India and the USA combined. Developing sustainable business models to serve these communities is a great challenge, which requires the mobile industry and African governments to work together."

At the ITU’s Connect Africa summit in Kigali in October, the GSMA announced that mobile operators plan to invest more than $50 billion in sub-Saharan Africa over the next five years to provide more than 90% of the population with mobile coverage. To realise the full social and economic benefits of this investment, African governments need to ensure that sufficient spectrum is available, particularly for mobile broadband services. Governments also need to tackle mobile-specific taxes, high license fees, international gateway monopolies and other regulatory bottlenecks that constrain the competitiveness of African business.

Supporting quotes:

"With capital expenditure investment levels reaching over US $2 billion in 2007, MTN is one of the most significant investors in many markets in which it operates. Approved capital expenditure investment for 2008 is almost twice that amount," said Phuthuma Nhleko, MTN Group President and CEO.

"We have created a new subsidiary "Telecel Globe" which will reinvest in Africa's smaller countries. Telecel Globe will be fully staffed on its own. Orascom Telecom will only support its procurement power and commercial know how. We call on African governments to reduce the taxation and regulatory burden on mobile users so we can maximise the positive impact of this investment," said Naguib Sawiris, Chairman and CEO, Orascom Telecom.

"Around 75% of the population is covered in most African countries where Orange operates and we intend to reach 90% coverage with the same level of quality by 2010 to serve untapped areas," said Marc Rennard, Executive Vice President, Orange - France Telecom Group.

"In 2007 alone, our capital expenditure additions in our Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Lesotho operations totalled R1.6 billion. This investment includes building high-speed data networks in most of these countries," said Alan Knott-Craig, CEO of Vodacom Group.

"Zain will build its own fibre capacity backbones, where necessary, to speed up delivery and increase affordability of telecom services. Zain believes that such investments across sub-Saharan Africa will also have a positive economic and social impact," said Dr. Saad Al Barrak, CEO of Zain Group.

About the GSMA:

The GSM Association (GSMA) is the global trade association representing more than 750 GSM mobile phone operators across 218 countries and territories of the world. The Association's members represent more than 3 billion GSM and 3GSM connections - over 86% of the world's mobile phone connections. In addition, more than 200 manufacturers and suppliers support the Association's initiatives as key partners.

The primary goals of the GSMA are to ensure mobile phones and wireless services work globally and are easily accessible, enhancing their value to individual customers and national economies, while creating new business opportunities for operators and their suppliers.