Americans: gaze upon your neighbors around you if you want to see what a healthy GSM ecosystem looks like. Okay, we’re sure many of our Canadian friends would disagree that the Rogers / Bell / Telus oligopoly is anything close to “healthy,” but nonetheless, we’re still envious of the fully-unlocked option Apple is offering for all iPhones in the online store — just like the UK — along with a promise that a “reduced initial price with a contract directly from your wireless carrier” if you’re still interested in getting tied up in a contract. That’s a lot closer to the European phone sales model, and it’s a model American carriers have never even come close to touching. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to get back to refreshing our connection to this utterly dead upgrade eligibility server.

Most smart-phones’ retail prices (before operator subsidies) are around $500-$600. Not all of the difference is profit. There are many other costs, such as research, design, marketing and patent fees, as well as the retailer’s own costs. But the big gap between the cost of building a smart-phone and its price in the shops should widen further as ever more previously discrete components are packed on to a single main microchip. Howard Curtis of UBM TechInsights predicts that as software and mobile services come to represent more of a smart-phone’s overall value, this too will widen the gap between manufacturing costs and selling prices. “

“Microsoft Research has found a novel way of beating the deplorably slow speeds of mobile broadband, by combining several phones together to make one high-speed hotspot. Dubbed Cool-Tether, the system harnesses the mobile data connection of multiple mobile handsets to build an on-the-fly Wi-Fi hotspot. ‘To address the challenges of energy efficiency, Cool-Tether carefully optimises the energy drain of the WAN (GPRS/EDGE/3G) and Wi-Fi radios on smartphones,’ Microsoft’s research paper claims. ‘We prototype Cool-Tether on smartphones and, experimentally, demonstrate savings in energy consumption between 38%-71% compared to prior energy-agnostic solutions.’”

“If you buy a smartphone through Verizon, be prepared for an increase in the early termination fee. Verizon is doubling the phone-subsidy to $350. What’s more, is that Verizon also actively charges customers for accidental data transmissions of as little as 0.02kb. ‘They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. [...] The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.’”

Simon Avery

Globe and Mail Update Last updated on Tuesday, Oct. 06, 2009 10:00AM EDT

BCE Inc.’s BCE-T Bell Canada and Telus Corp. T-T will begin selling the iPhone next month, breaking the stranglehold on the iconic device that rival Rogers Communications Inc. has held for more than a year.

The country’s two largest incumbent telecom companies, under pressure to re-ignite growth as new wireless competitors begin operations this year, are banking on Apple Inc.’s ground-breaking smart phone to help them sign up bigger-spending customers and shift the balance of power in Canada’s mobile market.

One of the most common technologies for watching video on a computer will soon be available for most smartphones.

Flash software is used to deliver around 75% of online video and is the key technology that underpins websites such as YouTube and Google Video.

Until now, many smartphones and netbooks have used a “light” version of the program, because of the limited processing power of the devices.

The new software is intended to work as well on a smartphone as a desktop PC.

Adobe, the maker of Flash, said it should be available on most higher-end handsets by 2010, although Apple’s iPhone would continue not to use the software.

“The sort of rich apps we now see being delivered on PCs will now be coming to the phone,” Ben Wood, director of mobile research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told BBC News.

“You’ll be able to access a lot of the cool stuff that web designers are coming up with.”

Our amateur sleuthing skills tell us there might be a tiny bit of excitement about this N900 device. With the Maemo 5 environment already measured up, it’s the turn of the hardware to get exhaustively previewed. The My Symbian team took a look at a prototype unit and were immediately impressed by the 800 x 480 display and relatively compact dimensions for such a loaded phone. The resistive touchscreen was on par with the N97, though it picked up scratches too easily for their liking ( a screen protector is recommended), while the keyboard was deemed small but still a major improvement over the N97′s. Internals rated well, with the 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and “superb” video recording grabbing plaudits. Perplexingly, there was only 256MB allocated to application installs (see image after the break), which can be altered by those with Linux knowhow, but this may draw plenty of ire from mainstream, app-hungry consumers, considering the device is capable of holding 48GB of total memory. On the outside, the camera cover was found to scratch the case around the lens (but not the lens itself like on some N97 units) while sliding, and removing the stylus from its slot revealed some bare electronics, both of which rather undermined the overall feel of a well-built device. They did find connectivity on the device a pretty dreamy and trouble-free affair, but we’re still only scratching the surface here — hit up the read link for the whole enchilada.

Earlier this year, we launched Google Sync which allows you to synchronize your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with your iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 devices. Today, we’re adding Gmail support to Google Sync for iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile devices.

Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone. Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Sync works with your phone’s native email application so there’s no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.

By Soulskill on careful-with-that-light-of-day

inject_hotmail.com writes “Internet and law genius Michael Geist writes about some shenanigans by the cell phone carriers and the Canadian government in his column in The Star. Canadian taxpayers funded a ‘Cell Phone Cost Calculator’ so that the average person could theoretically wade through the disjointed and incongruent package offerings. The calculator wound up being yanked a couple weeks before launch. Geist suggests that the major cell carriers lobbied the appropriate public officials to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general public could make sense out of pricing and fees. Geist continues, ‘Sensing that [Tony] Clement (Industry Minister) was facing pressure to block the calculator, Canadian consumer groups wrote to the minister, urging him to stick with it.’ Moving forward, Michael makes a novel suggestion, one that would show an immense level of understanding by the government: ‘With public dollars having funded the mothballed project, the government should now consider releasing the calculator’s source code and enable other groups to pick up where the OCA (Office of Consumer Affairs) left off.’”

HELSINKI (Reuters) – The world’s largest handset maker, Nokia (NOK1V.HE) unveiled on Thursday its first phone running on Linux software, aiming at improving its offering at the top end of the market.

The focus of cell phone business has shifted to services and software following Apple (AAPL.O) and Google’s (GOOG.O) entrances to the market in the last two years.

Nokia also unveiled a new Solutions business unit, which aims to better tie together its phone operations and new mobile Internet services offering.
The Finnish firm has been looking for business opportunities from offering services like music downloads or games to cell phone users as the handset market itself is maturing, but so far its offerings have gained limited traction.