One Mobile Ring
Orange UK has announced plans to launch high definition voice services in 2010. HD Voice calls will be carried on its 3G network using improved speech encoding, allowing customers to experience better voice call quality.
As the physical and digital words become ever more closely meshed together, here’s an interesting concept video from Nokia’s mixed reality experience team. It demonstrates the potential use of near-eye display glasses, gaze tracking and a haptic wristband for gesture control (a bit like a Wii controller).
This week Scandinavian giant TeliaSonera launched the worlds first publicly available 4G in Norway and Sweden. For now, capital dwellers in Oslo and Stockholm have to manually swap Samsung dongles to switch up to 4G, but TS are promising free upgrades to early adopters when dual devices come out.
Apple (and others) take a bite out of MicrosoftFierceDeveloper, a web site for mobile application developers has published statistics from comScore, a market research pundit. The stats purport to show market share, but really show current users in a market increasing over time.
Environmental stories are big news this week as the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen draws to an end. Sony Ericsson boosts its GreenHeart portfolio by announcing the Hazel and Elm models, due to arrive in the new year.
Virgin group launch their first UK venture for three years, a partnership with Sutherland Global Services to help consumers get more from their PC’s, broadband and phones.
Ofcom this week provided a snapshot of digital take up in 12 major economies, plus the rapidly expanding markets of Brazil, India, Russia and China. It ranks UK customers as third in the world for time spent chatting on the phone and second for texting.
The Chat 3G is INQ’s third phone and big brother to the Mini 3G. Apparently, size is important because the Chat is made from the same materials, but is much more substantial than the Mini. It feels like a solid and superior product.
Virgin Media become the latest provider to attempt to lasso all your social networking needs and coral them within its own brand application, according to Mobile News. Get Social is their new product, and it follows follows the same approach as Vodafone’s heavily advertised 360 service by collecting community information in one place. Get Social wrangles from Twitter, facebook, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and virginmedia.com.
Androids march continues
Acer is a Taiwanese manufacturer that recently overtook Dell to become the world’s second-largest seller of PC’s (behind Hewlett-Packard). CEO Gianfranco Lanci has the stated goal of being one of the top five smartphone suppliers by 2014.