News

• Smartphones becoming prime platform for app makers

  The smartphone is increasingly becoming the platform of choice for a wide variety of application providers. For example, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, Cisco Systems, MySpace and Yahoo all unveiled tools -- a webconferencing application and two social networks, respectively -- for the growing number of smartphones coming from several vendors.

• Sony Ericsson, Samsung Battle for Megapixel Supremacy

  How many megapixels can you squeeze into a cell phone? On the eve of the big Mobile World Congress wireless telecom trade show here in Barcelona, Spain, the race is on. At pre-show press conferences, Samsung and Sony Ericsson between them unveiled three handsets, each with cameras boasting at least as many megapixels as my current Canon point-and-shoot (a PowerShot SD1100 with 8 megapixels).

• Samsung plans new netbook, smart phones

  Samsung Electronics plans to follow-up its NC10 netbook in the coming few months with a new model and expand its range of smart phones with models based on a number of different operating systems, it said Friday.

• Smartphones key as phone vendors regroup

  The fourth quarter wasn't a good one for the mobile phone manufacturers, and now they are looking to smartphones to save the day.

• Kogan "indefinitely" delays Google Android-based smartphone

  Melbourne-based company Kogan today announced that its Android-based smartphones, the Agora and the Agora Pro, have been "delayed indefinitely". The cancellation, announced on the company's blog, comes only two weeks before the phones were meant to be released.

• New Palm handset and OS coming on Thursday?

  Palm is set to preview this week its latest incarnation of mobile operating system - Nova - in a bid to re-ignite the company as a smartphone leader. Latest developments say that Palm will also release a new device that runs Nova as well. The unveiling is expected during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2009, which starts on Thursday, January 8 in Las Vegas.

• IPhone, economy spur better phones, apps

  Just two years ago, the mobile phone market was pretty ho-hum. You had your candy bar phones and your flip phones. There were BlackBerry devices and Windows Mobile phones. Those phones had calendars and contact lists, and a few other apps that were too annoying to use. Few people ever added any new applications to their phones. Surfing the Web was for emergency use only, since it was slow and ugly.

• Sluggish economy hurts smartphone sales in Q3

  The struggling global economy has taken a toll on worldwide smart phone sales in the third quarter, with sales growth the weakest in four years, according to new data from Gartner Inc.

• Nokia cuts outlook again

  After warning less than a month ago that the worldwide handset market would do worse than expected this year and next, Nokia on Thursday revised down its expectations again.

• Apple winner as smartphone sales slow

  Third-quarter growth in the global smartphone market was its weakest year-on-year since Gartner started tracking the market, but Apple's iPhone stood apart with strong gains.

• Australian first: Kogan unveils Android-based mobile

  Melbourne company Kogan today announced Australia's first mobile phone to ship with Google's Android operating system. The phone is just the second in the world to have the Android OS preinstalled, after T-Mobile launched the G1 in the US in September.

• Businesses see smartphone use rising, survey shows

  Businesses are planning to boost the deployment of smartphones during the next three years, while laptop deployments will slow dramatically, according to survey of 340 companies in the US and Western Europe.

• Nokia: Handset market will shrink next year

  Handset makers collectively will sell fewer mobile phones in 2009 than this year, and sales for 2008 will be lower than previously expected, Nokia warned on Friday.

• Security risks rise as smartphones become smarter

  As wireless devices become more numerous within businesses, their convenience will be counterbalanced by an increasing potential for security problems, according to a Gartner analyst.