Nokia to Exit Symbian, Low-End Phone Businesses in North America

Nokia plans to stop selling both feature phones and Symbian-based smartphones in the United States and Canada focus exclusively on Windows Phone devices and smart phones. “When we launch Windows Phones we will essentially be out of the Symbian business," Nokia President Chris Weber says. “The reality is if we are not successful with Windows Phone, it doesn’t matter what we do (elsewhere).”

Nokia to Exit Symbian, Low-End Phone Businesses in North America - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD:

Visa Announces Plan to Drive Chip Card and Mobile Payment Adoption

Visa Inc. announced plans to accelerate the migration to EMV contact and contactless chip technology in the United States. EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and VISA, a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or "chip cards") and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.

The importance of the move is that it moves Visa in the direction of "wave" mechanisms rather than "swipe" mechanisms. The change might seem subtle, and in some ways might be viewed that way, but the shift to chip-based authentication means consumers will be able to use either card-based or phone-based "wave" operations rather than "swipe" operations to pay for merchandise.

The adoption of dual-interface chip technology will help prepare the U.S. payment infrastructure for the arrival of near field communications mobile payments by building the necessary infrastructure to accept and process chip transactions that support either a signature or PIN at the point of sale.

Visa says it now is leading the way for the widespread commercial deployment of EMV technology in the U.S. market. That, in turn, is expected to provide a commercial framework to support the acceleration of NFC-based mobile payments.

Visa Announces Plan to Drive Chip Card and Mobile Payment Adoption

Clearwire Debt Indicates Distress

Bonds of Clearwire Corp. are approaching levels consistent with an impending default as partner Sprint Nextel Corp. strikes a capacity deal with competitor LightSquared, Bloomberg says. Standard & Poor’s says Clearwire will run out of cash in 2012.

The unprofitable wireless broadband provider’s bonds have fallen 12 percent this month, the worst performer among junk- rated telecommunications companies in the U.S., Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show. Its notes trade at an average yield of 15.2 percent, compared with 11.8 for CCC rated debt and 20.7 percent for CC, a grade that means a default is expected.

Clearwire Debt Indicates Distress

In U.K., Smart Phone Owners Make More Calls. Why?

Smart phone users in the United Kingdom make calls more often than feature phone users. Some 81 percent of smart phone owners surveyed on behalf of Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, reported using their smart phones to make calls every day, compared to 53 percent of feature phone users.

So one might be tempted to think that there is something about smart phone owners that makes their behavior different. Ofcom suggests a more prosaic answer. The differences in usage can be explained by the different types of contracts smart phone and feature phone owners tend to buy.

Contract phone users make calls significantly more often than pay-as-you-go users overall. This has been confirmed by analyzing the research results, isolating the feature mobile phone users on contracts and comparing them with smart phone users on contracts, says Ofcom.

When looked at that way, call frequency profiles are similar for both, with one exception.

But there are differences between regular and smartphone pay-as-you-go users; Smart phone users on pay-as-you-go service plans also make calls more frequently.

The same pattern holds for use of text messaging. Seventy-nine percent of smart phone owners claim to make and receive SMS texts on their mobile every day, compared to 50 percent of regular phone users. This difference, again, can partly be explained by contract type, with higher numbers of smart phone users being on a contract.

When isolating regular mobile phone users on contracts and comparing them with smart phone users on contracts, their text messaging frequency profiles are very similar. However, there are differences between regular and smart phone casual-use customers.  Smart phone users send and receive significantly higher levels of text messages than feature phone users on similar plans.

U.K. Innovation Rates Accelerate

One easy observation one might make about the latest report from Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, is that the pace of innovation is increasing in the U.K. part of the communications industry.

That has been true in virtually every market over the past couple of decades as well, but the latest U.K. data illustrates the solidity of the trend.

As recently as a few decades ago, a new communications service might have taken 10 years to reach penetration of about 50 percent of households in a market. Read more here.

In the United Kingdom, both mobile phones and multichannel television both took more than a decade to reach 50 percentration, for example. In the last decade, popular and important innovations such as social networks and online TV reached 50 percent penetration within four to five years.

Analysts expect smartphones to reach the same landmark equally quickly as well. Rates of change that fast are hard for larger enterprises of all sorts to cope with, which helps explain why most innovation (not all) comes from smaller firms.

The big recent exception is the impact Apple has had in the mobile markets. In that case, it took a well-heeled, substantial firm to force a big and disruptive market change.

Read more here.

Health Care a Prime Area of M2M Interest

The health vertical is among a relative handful of industry verticals where mobile service providers tend to believe there are important opportunities for revenue growth, particularly in the area of remote telemetry. Though mobile service providers are understandably optimistic about prospects for machine-to-machine communications, health care is interesting because of its large role in many economies, rapidly rising healthcare spending and accompanying pressures to contain costs using technology. 
Read more about Sprint's Health Vertical Perspectives


Frost & Sullivan recently published a whitepaper looking at the strengths and drawbacks of four major mobile device types – smartphones, tablets, push-to-talk communication devices, and machine-to-machine (M2M) remote medical monitoring devices. Each device category is evaluated for application in three environments, including the hospital, physician’s office, and the patient’s home. Read more here.

U.S. Consumers Would Forego Many Things to Keep Their Mobiles

U.S. consumers are willing to give up some of life's greatest pleasures before they will part with their mobile devices and service, a new survey conducted on behalf of TeleNav has found.

Apple iPhone users, for example, were more likely than their Android or BlackBerry counterparts to spend a week without their significant other, exercise or shoes—rather than go a week without their phone.

While 22 percent of all respondents said they would rather give up their toothbrush than their phone for a week, this number jumped to a whopping 40 percent among iPhone users.

Nearly half of all respondents said they sleep with their phone next to them, including 38 percent of feature phone users and 66 percent of smartphone users.

About 55 percent of respondents would be more willing to give up caffeine for a week than their mobile phone, while 63 percent would be more willing to give up chocolate, and 70 percent would be willing to forego alcohol.

One in five respondents are more willing to go shoeless than phoneless for a week.

U.S. Consumers Love Their Mobile Phones