Smartphones key as phone vendors regroup
The fourth quarter wasn't a good one for the mobile phone manufacturers, and now they are looking to smartphones to save the day.
The fourth quarter wasn't a good one for the mobile phone manufacturers, and now they are looking to smartphones to save the day.
HTC today announced the launch of its latest smartphone in Australia, the Touch HD.
Melbourne-based company Kogan today announced that its Android-based smartphones, the Agora and the Agora Pro, have been "delayed indefinitely". The cancellation, announced on the company's blog, comes only two weeks before the phones were meant to be released.
Palm is set to preview this week its latest incarnation of mobile operating system - Nova - in a bid to re-ignite the company as a smartphone leader. Latest developments say that Palm will also release a new device that runs Nova as well. The unveiling is expected during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2009, which starts on Thursday, January 8 in Las Vegas.
Just two years ago, the mobile phone market was pretty ho-hum. You had your candy bar phones and your flip phones. There were BlackBerry devices and Windows Mobile phones. Those phones had calendars and contact lists, and a few other apps that were too annoying to use. Few people ever added any new applications to their phones. Surfing the Web was for emergency use only, since it was slow and ugly.
The struggling global economy has taken a toll on worldwide smart phone sales in the third quarter, with sales growth the weakest in four years, according to new data from <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/inform.do?command=search&searchTerms=Gartner+Inc.">Gartner Inc.</a>
After warning less than a month ago that the worldwide handset market would do worse than expected this year and next, Nokia on Thursday revised down its expectations again.
Third-quarter growth in the global smartphone market was its weakest year-on-year since Gartner started tracking the market, but Apple's iPhone stood apart with strong gains.
Melbourne company Kogan today announced Australia's first mobile phone to ship with Google's Android operating system. The phone is just the second in the world to have the Android OS preinstalled, after T-Mobile launched the G1 in the US in September.
Businesses are planning to boost the deployment of smartphones during the next three years, while laptop deployments will slow dramatically, according to survey of 340 companies in the US and Western Europe.
Handset makers collectively will sell fewer mobile phones in 2009 than this year, and sales for 2008 will be lower than previously expected, Nokia warned on Friday.
As wireless devices become more numerous within businesses, their convenience will be counterbalanced by an increasing potential for security problems, according to a Gartner analyst.
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By Kalyan Madala, CTO, IBM ASEANZK