It was widely reported that the iTunes Phone Rokr from Motorola is finally going to come to light. Cingular wireless is going to have the device ready starting Sep. 9th., 2005.
What’s interesting is that Cingular was initially hesitant to bring to market the iTunes phones, due to concerns that users will be able to bypass the wireless network to download iTunes music directly from desktop PC to their phones. Obviously now that they somehow believe that the adoption of Moto Rokr will enhance customer loyalty and, may eventually lead to customers that do purchase MP3 tunes directly over the wireless network on the phone.
themobileblog.com comments: the barrier to adoption of wireless music download is not so much about device or availability of tunes, but the $2-3 per piece the carriers are planning to charge.
August 30th, 2005
Symbian announced their latest quarterly shipment of about 7.8 million in second quarter of 2005. For the first six months, a total of 14.5 million cell phones have shipped with the Symbian OS.
The numbers looked pretty good. If they can keep up the pace, they can probably reach their first 50 million units per year by end of 2005. Although still less than 10% of the total phone market, but it is by far the market leader in the open-OS system for cell phones.
On the business side, they were able to charge $5.4 per OS shipment, about 20 times cheaper than Microsoft OS. So if they want to reach the microsoft status, they would need ship more than 1 billion units per year. Way to go!
August 18th, 2005
It seems Motorola is doing all the right things in the mobile phone business. Aside from the success it enjoys from Razr phone, its EV-DO phone E815 is also having some good report from Verizon.
There are some good reviews of the Motorola e815 in the cyberspace. This clamshell CDMA phone has all the good features a mid-level cell phone would have: 1.3mega pixel camera, 262k color, large internal memory (40 mg), external memory uses TransFlash, supports MP3 ringtone, uses iTAP predictive text input, its game development environment uses BREW, WAP browser is from OpenWave.
Unlike the high end phones, you can own the Motorola e815 for free.
August 9th, 2005
The J2ME Web Services API (JSR 172) was first introduced almost two years ago, now it seems that JSR 172 has finally gained some traction.
In the past June, Sony Ericsson announed two phones (Sony Ericsson W600 Walkman and S600 mobile phones) that would support JSR 172 (J2ME Web Services API 1.0).
Although themobileblog.com hasn’t heard of or seen any applications being developed based on J2ME Web Services API, the availability of JSR172 could mean a proliferation of new service for both consumer and mobile enterprise markets. However, given the overhead of XML based web services and generally low speed of wireless wide area network, a true wide spread adoption could still be years away.
Links: Sun’s Introduction to J2ME Web Services.
August 1st, 2005
The booming real estate market hasn’t really been associated with cell phones. But that is changing. CellStory.com, announced CellStory for Realty, a new mobile CRM product that realtors can use to post an instant listing from the property itself.
Real estate agents by nature are very mobile. With the proliferation of advanced camera phones these days, it makes sense for agents to use the mobile crm app to snap a few pictures of the property and send them to a server, where a property listing can be automatically generated with pre-selected template. Sounds like a neat idea.
CellStory for Realty will be sold as a subscription service at $49.99 per month, and is currently available on all Symbian Series 60 phones. Support for other cell phones are expected later.
With some 6 million real estate agents in the country, this may be a good sized market opportunity.
July 27th, 2005
