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Day two of MWC – Smartphones built on HTML 5…

Telefónica and Mozilla pioneer smartphones built on HTML 5

Telecoms giant Telefónica Digital has forged an alliance with Mozilla to pioneer a new genre of smartphone based on completely open standards. The HTML 5-driven phones will allow app creators to access core phone APIs.

This morning at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Telefónica and Mozilla demonstrated a new phone architecture that relies entirely on web-based HTML 5 applications and run via the Firefox Web browser.

The smartphone demonstrated this morning, which uses a Qualcomm chip, was engineered via Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project.

Telefónica’s Carlos Domingo explained that the use of Firefox and HTML 5 means it is possible to remove much of the middleware and other software on the device, making apps faster to run and bringing down the cost of the device.

Domingo said there are no proprietary APIs in the device architecture at all, making it a truly open web standards phone that presents exciting new opportunities for app creators.

“We want everything on this device to be done with HTML 5,” Domingo said.

Demonstrating the smartphone, Domingo said everything about the device – including sensors, accelerometer, compass, NFC – can be written in Javascript.

“HTML 5 can make a leap to a full platform for mobile. We don’t want just a special OS, we want a whole category of web operating systems to emerge.”

Domingo said the project has sparked the interest of Adobe and, intriguingly, Facebook, which would like to bring social networking to life via smartphones in emerging economies.

“We are very conscious of markets like Latin America, where smartphone penetration is very low.

“We are taking the software stack developed with Mozilla to develop low-end devices with smartphone capabilities and bring smartphones to the masses.”

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich said the key is to deliver advanced web technologies that eliminate roadblocks for users and developers. Crucially, he said, it would allow an app economy to emerge outside of walled gardens or controlled ecosystems.

“Apps will become like other web content, easy to commoditise and hyper-linkable.

February 28th 2012 | Read the rest of this article »

Vodafone and Visa

Vodafone and Visa in world’s largest mobile payments agreement

Customers in the UK and four other European countries will be able to make mobile payments using their smartphones from the coming financial year

Vodafone and Visa has entered into a global partnership to enable customers to pay for goods and services using their mobile phones.

The companies will develop a Vodafone-branded proposition that will be offered to consumers across Vodafone’s 398 million customer base in more than 30 countries across five continents. It will be enabled by Visa’s payment network, product suite and brand.

The Vodafone mobile payment proposition will be based on the Visa prepaid account and offered to consumers in partnerships with Visa Issuers.

Users of the Vodafone stored value account will be able to make purchases at the point-of-sale using NFC enabled smartphones equipped with Visa’s mobile payment technology, payWave for mobile.

To make a transaction, they can wave their smartphone in front of a payment terminal and make purchases such as bus and train tickets, newspapers and magazines.

Consumers will also be able to make high-value purchases securely using a passcode.

The service will initially be launched in the UK, Germany, Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands in the coming financial year, with other countries within Vodafone’s global portfolio to follow.

In addition to the Vodafone-branded stored value account inside the mobile wallet, the two companies will work together to enable Visa Issuers for mobile payments globally.

The platform will be open to all partners of all relevant industries, including financial institutions, retailers, transport and utility companies to host their services within a new Vodafone mobile wallet.

Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said: “The Vodafone mobile wallet represents the next stage of the smartphone revolution.

“It offers our customers the speed, simplicity and convenience of managing their everyday transactions with a single wave or tap of their smartphone, using innovative and reliable services developed by Vodafone and Visa – technology and providers they can trust.

“Our mobile wallet will be open to any service provider and we are committed to enable all partners to provide our joint customers the richest service portfolio possible.”

Source mobile news

February 28th 2012 | Read the rest of this article »

NEW Lumia 900 hits the UK?

Nokia Lumia 900 coming to the UK this spring

The Lumia 900 is heading for the UK, Nokia announced at Mobile World Congress this morning.

The 900, which has been in the US for a while, is LTE-enabled for faster browsing, but will also be coming to countries like Blighty where 4G isn’t yet active in a ‘DC-HSPA’ variant. That means it’ll run smoothly on our boring old 3G network.It’s part of Nokia’s Lumia range, so runs the Windows Phone operating system. It has a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display, on which to show off those tiles that you use to navigate Windows Phone.

Inside is a 1.4GHz processor, just like the Lumia 800, and, also like the 800, it features an 8-megapixel camera on the back. The only real difference between the two is the screen size, with the 900 bumping up to 4.3 inches over the 800′s 3.7. And the fact the 900 has a 1-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.

But Nokia must have faith in the Lumia range to launch the 900 in the UK, especially considering how similar it is to the 800. It’ll be out in Q2, which means April or thereabouts, for £405.

We’ve been expecting the 900 for a while now, after it popped up for pre-order on Play.com. It promptly disappeared from the site, with all parties concerned effectively coughing into their hands and saying, “You weren’t supposed to see that.” Previously, it also made an appearance on the Carphone Warehouse site, with the release date given as June.

The Lumia 900 also leaked in a promo video that Nokia accidentally made public, instead of keeping it for its intended audience of developers. Doh.

Earlier, Nokia announced a Symbian-powered handset that totes a 41-megapixel camera. Which sounds insane. It also announced the baby of the Lumia family, the 610, will be coming to the UK in April. So good news if you fancy a similar handset to the 900, but don’t want to spend a fortune.

February 27th 2012 | Read the rest of this article »

Mobile World Congress Updates – Day one

Nokia announces PureView 808 with a 41 MP sensor

Today at the MWC2012′s press event Nokia brought the PureView teaser to a 41 megapixel end, announcing the Symbian Belle-running Nokia PureView 808.

The Nokia 808 PureView uses a 41 MP sensor, which captures image data from seven adjacent pixels and condenses it into one, resulting in stills at around 5 MP resolution with amazing detail and low noise levels. The optics are Carl Zeiss and there’s Xenon flash and a LED one acting as a video light.

Technically the sensor is able to capture 3 MP, 5 MP, 8 MP, 38 MP at 4:3 aspect ratio and 2 MP, 5 MP [Default], 8 MP, 34 MP at 16:9.

Video recording goes as high as FullHD 1080p at 30 fps and there’s also 720p@30fps. Video is encoded in H264 and supports stereo sound recording. The large image sensor allows 4x zoom in 1080p and 6x in 720p.


Nokia 808 PureView

The Nokia 808 PureView has a single-core 1.3 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM and runs on Symbian Belle. The display is a 16:9 4″ AMOLED of nHD (640 x 360) resolution covered with curved Gorilla Glass.

Inside there’s NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, USB on the go and 16 GB of onboard storage.

The Nokia 808 PureView should arrive on the shelves around May 2012.

February 27th 2012 | Read the rest of this article »

Nokia – Biggest Windows Phone Vendor

Nokia Biggest Windows Phone Vendor in Q4

Nokia shipped 900,000 Windows Phones during the fourth quarter, which was enough to become the world’s number one Microsoft smartphone vendor, market research company Strategy Analytics said on Friday.


Microsoft’s smartphone shipments remain tiny, but they are showing tentative signs of growth, according to Strategy Analytics. Global smartphone shipments using Windows Phone grew 36 percent sequentially to reach 2.7 million units during the last three months of 2011.

In comparison, Apple sold 37 million iPhones to become the biggest smartphone vendor in the world during the fourth quarter. Nokia overtook HTC and others to become with the biggest Windows Phone vendor with a 33 percent market share, Alex Spektor, associate director at Strategy Analytics, said. Nokia hasn’t detailed the overall number of Windows Phone smartphones it has shipped. When reporting its quarterly figures on January 26, the company only said it had “sold well over 1 million Lumia devices to date.”

The struggling phone maker is by no means out of the woods yet, but capturing top spot in the Microsoft smartphone ecosystem is an encouraging baby-step forward, according to Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics.


As the distribution of the Lumia smartphones ramps up, Nokia is still dependent on the sales of Symbian-based smartphones. But sales of phones based on that platform are dropping faster than expected, Nokia said when reporting its fourth-quarter numbers.

That highlights the need for Nokia to move even faster to Windows Phone, Francisco Jeronimo, research manager at IDC, said. Next week, Nokia is in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. On Monday, the company is expected to launch at least one model based on Microsoft’s mobile OS, possibly more, according to Mawston. It has been about one year since Nokia announced its Windows Phone push, and Mawston also wants CEO Stephen Elop to provide an update on how work is progressing on services
that will help differentiate it from the competition, he said.

So make sure you keep an eye on our twitter feed @CCSMobile as we will be reporting back all the news on Nokia and Microsoft from the Mobile World Congress!

Have a great weekend guys.

Nicole.

February 24th 2012 | Read the rest of this article »

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