iPAQ Glisten Mobile Phone From HP And AT&T

Hewlett-Packard Development Company and AT&T Inc have announced the launch of a new mobile / cell phone in the market. The device is called iPAQ Glisten, and is available for USD 229.99. AT&T is offering a USD 50 promotion card with a two-year agreement along with this device.

iPAQ Glisten is built on 3G technology and runs on Windows Mobile 6.5 OS. It has a 2.5″ diagonal touchscreen that is built on touch-enabled AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) technology, and a 5-way directional QWERTY keypad. The machine comes with 256 MB SDRAM / 512 MB Flash. The device syncs with any desktop using softwares such as Active Sync or Microsoft Exchange. Users can browse through the web using Internet Explorer Mobile 6, and leverage the telecom infrastructure of AT&T in the background, and a dedicated on/off button gives them instant access to over 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots. For select smartphone data plans, this access comes free. The device comes with Microsoft Office’s Mobile version, so apps such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint can be used as easily as on a desktop.

Read about the latest entrant in the mobile telephony world, here.

Blackberry Smartphone To Get WiFi

London, UK-headquartered British Telecom has announced the integration between Blackberry’s Mobile Voice System (MVS) technology with its communications platform, in order to provide a new feature to Blackberry Smartphone customers: Wireless connectivity.

The significance of this integration and consequent wireless connectivity is that this phone’s users can now leverage existing Wi-Fi networks present in the office for handling voice calls. The phone’s users can seamlessly switch between Wi-Fi and cellular networks even when they are in the midst of a call. This immediately reduces their telephone bill accrued from cellular networks.

Access to contacts, calls, apps, emails, etc can be had while the phone is operating on Wi-Fi, just as conveniently as it could be on cellular networks. A single voicemail box means that phone users need not keep on dialing into multiple voicemail boxes to listen to all their messages.

BT has come out with a plan known as “One Plan Plus”, which companies can subscribe to, and through which intra-company calls can be made – including mobile phone calls – without incurring any call-forwarding charges.

BT’s technology is based on Cisco’s Unified Communication Series 500 platform.
Read more about the latest in mobile telephony from British Telecom, here.

Samsung Is Numero Uno In Mobile Phone Sales In USA

The third quarter of 2008 saw Samsung notching up a top-of-the-rung position in the market for mobile phones in the USA, by grabbing 22.4% share of the pie. Their aggressive marketing strategy dislodged Motorola which had been the vendor of choice up until now for the US customers.

This result is all the more remarkable considering that, just a year ago, Samsung was struggling with a market share of around 18% in comparison to Motorola’s nearly 36%. The latter’s share has shown a consistent dip over the past few quarters.

A key motivator behind this performance has been Samsung’s focused strategic tie up with two major carriers, AT&T and Verizon, who are respectively number one and two in the US market, besides the other carriers. This, coupled with the varied bundles of offerings to customers at different price points appears to have wooed customers towards preferring Samsung over the other players.

Another interesting feature of the market survey, conducted by Strategic Analysts, is that mobile phone shipments have behaved contrary to the overall economic sentiment by clocking a 6% annual rise, reaching 47 million units in the third quarter of 2008 alone.

Read more results from the survey here.

Motorola’s Latest Mobile Phone MOTOZINE ZN5 Launched

Schaumberg, Illinois-headquartered Motorola has announced the launch of its latest mobile phone offering – the MOTOZINE ZN5 – in the USA; this high-end camera phone will be sold exclusively by T-Mobile USA.

Weighing 114gms, the ZN5 measures 5.05cm by 11.8cm by 1.2cm thickness. With average usage and under optimum network conditions, the device has a talk time of between 349 and 574 minutes. The phone operates in the GSM 850/900/1800/1900 bands, with EDGE Class 12 and GPRS Class 12 modes.

The ZN5 is touted as the “first mobile phone to combine Motorola’s ModeShift technology and KODAK Imaging Technology.” Simply slide open the lens cover, and the mobile phone metamorphoses into a high-end, 5-megapixel camera, complete with a shutter button, Xenon flash, viewer, autofocus, optimized settings for low-light environments and red-eye reduction, multiple image capture modes (such as multi-shot and panorama), an included 1 Gb memory card to store for posterity those memorable images… excuse me, are we talking here about a mobile phone, or a camera?

Once you have clicked those photos, upload them to the KODAK Gallery (at http://www.kodakgallery.com), and share them with the rest of the world. Plus, photos can be transferred to the computer via the USB, viewed on a TV in slideshow format (a TV output/AV cable is provided in the kit), or simply transferred over Bluetooth. Kodak has also offered to provide 50 free prints to customers who purchase a ZN5 from T-Mobile and use their KODAK Gallery for image upload.

Read more about the product here.

T-Mobile G1 Launch On October 22

Bellevue, Washington-based T-Mobile has been very aggressive in the mobile cell phone space of late. Close on the heels of the first-ever launch in the US of the Research-in-Motion (RIM) BlackBerry flip phone on October 13, the countdown at the company’s headquarters is on now

 for the first-ever release of the much-hyped G1 phone on October 22, 2008.

Competing head-on with Apple’s iPhone, the G1 phone is based on Google’s Android operating system, and as per a contract between Google and T-mobile, the Android will be available only on T-mobile’s products for the time being. The cell phone has touch-screen functionality for making quick phone calls and quick icon-selecting and usage, as well as a QWERTY keyboard for email message-typing, so customers can get the best of both the worlds.

The product is priced at US 179 for the base version, and has two data plan options of USD 25 and USD 35 per month – the latter package allows unlimited messaging. Within a month of its US launch, T-Mobile’s managers will roll out the product in UK and Europe.

G1 runs on both 3G, EDGE’s 2.5 networks as well as on Wi-Fi. The G1 mobile has all standard Google Apps built into it; so you can expect nifty tools such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search, Calendar, YouTube built into the operating system itself. Users can surf the internet using a browser known as WebKit, whose features are similar to the desktop Chrome.

 Learn more about T-Mobile’s launch of G1.