Weekly Mobile Mash-up #4

The hottest mobile industry news of the past week, selected by the ON team!

Mobile Industry News

• Manufacturers announce merger: The two Japanese firms Toshiba and Fujitsu will merge their mobile activity next Autumn. Fujitsu will be the majority shareholder in the new company, which will be now become the second largest handset manufacturer in Japan - http://bit.ly/dd5m5O
• Nokia’s forecast: not so good: Nokia announced profit warnings after disappointing service and product sales. Is this the beginning of the downward spiral for Nokia, which is currently still the largest manufacturer in the world? Bloggers analyzing the situation are being quite critical towards Nokia, saying that Nokia didn’t anticipate the shift in the mobile market towards smartphones enough. Have a look at this Engadget post for more on the subject: http://bit.ly/cuhk46
• Near Field Communication (NFC):
  • The news went unnoticed, but Nokia also announced that all new Nokia smartphones will come with NFC from 2011 - http://bit.ly/ckqdUc
  • Broadcom Corp has made an offer to acquire Innovision, a NFC specialized company - http://bit.ly/8XwNJn
• Instant messaging on mobile:
  • Skype announced that they’ve signed a deal with Symbian and Sony Ericson, and that the software should be available on Sony Ericson’s Vizas, Vizas pro and Satio. The phones are based on Symbian OS. A few weeks ago, Skype’s iPhone application met with huge success, getting over 5 million downloads - http://bit.ly/dtnGB3
  • Windows Live Messenger is available on iPhone from today - http://bit.ly/d4wuBo
• Samsung ranking: Samsung claimed to the French Business newspaper ‘Les Échos’ that it’s currently ranked the third largest mobile phone provider in France. The Korean brand has sold 300,000 Samsung Sepicas since launch 6 months ago, representing 45% of Android handsets in the country - http://bit.ly/b0tj0X
• User experience: Google’s Android team will be focusing on user experience for the next OS release, according to TechCrunch - http://tcrn.ch/bBxsL9
• Yahoo! conquers the far East: Yahoo! is about to launch its first mobile device in Asia, where its mobile services are really popular - http://bit.ly/cXGITV

Mobile statistics and reports

• App store and gold mines: Juniper’s Mobile App Stores – Business Models, Strategies & Market Segmentation 2010-2015 report predicts that revenues from pay-per-download (PPD) apps, value-added services and advertising should go from $10 billion in 2010 to $32 billion in 2015 - http://bit.ly/d5FOT3
• Android vs. iPhone:
  • A comScore study concluded that Android users access their social networks more than iPhone users do (64.9% vs. 64.3%). The difference is not huge, but worth noting - http://bit.ly/bMtnAb
  • On the other hand, a Quantcast study said that Android only accounts for 20% of US mobile web connections whereas iPhone stands for 60% - http://bit.ly/iPhone-mweb
• Mobile commerce on the rise
  • MMA Global published a survey about mobile commerce (m-commerce). The UK is the leading country with 19% of customers who bought something from their mobile in April 2010, followed by Germany (13%) and France (9%). Like many other mobile related services, mobile commerce very popular with the teenage and young adult demographic: 21% of 18-34 year old Brits used a mobile commerce service during April 2010 - http://bit.ly/bXZh9u
  • Retrevo published a study saying that 20% of US customers made purchases on their phones in February 2010 - http://bit.ly/9oBMCU

• We spoke about mobile and sport in last week’s mashup. The Telegraph announced during the IAB Engage for Mobile conference that its World Cup app was downloaded 300,00 times in only 9 days - http://bit.ly/aUyaZd
• Google made public its latest Android stats: most users are running version 2.1, others 1.5 (24.6%) and 1.6 (25%) - http://bit.ly/bVO86S

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