Consumer handset trends

Consumers are more aware of handset branding, 19 % up from 11% in 2004. Other factors that influence the initial selection process are price/promotion (29 percent) and retail location (12 percent). Carriers have to strike a balance of promoting service plans & latest models.

BREW continues to grow in China

Qualcomm & China Unicom announced 3.4 millions users have downloaded >43M BREW apps. The number of apps grow from 300 in 05 to 600 in 06. Currently, there are 130 BREW handset models & 1100 BREW app available.

200M handsets have AGPS.

Qualcomm announced that there are total of 200 millions handsets shipped over the past few years.

"We are seeing that the ecosystem for location services is now largely established, which -- combined with the ever-growing number of GPS-enabled handsets -- will drive location services to being a mainstream cellular services component and revenue source,"

The gpsOne solution is part of the Launchpad(TM) suite, which also includes integrated multimedia engines to offer application developers the ability to leverage advanced graphics, video and audio capabilities that further enhance a location application.

3Q Global phone market

Nokia (36%),
Motorola (23.3%),
Samsung (12.5%),
Sony Ericsson (8.1%),
LG (6.7%)
-- all increased market share at the expense of the smaller handset vendors.

Motorola, Nokia & LG 3Q result

Both Motorola & Nokia sales up but profits drop

* Moto
"During the quarter, GSM infrastructure sales in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region were weaker than anticipated due to customer delays in capital spending," said Ed Zander, Motorola's chairman and CEO, in a prepared statement. Zander also pointed to lower sales of iDEN mobile devices as cause for the profit dip. MOTO shipped totaled 53.7 million at the end of the period, bumping the company's global handset market share to 22.4 percent.

* Nokia

Nokia experienced a surge in revenue, thanks to the company's global handset push as well as its multimedia and enterprise units. Profit, however, dipped 4.1 percent during the third quarter.

Sales for the quarter were up 20 percent, with its multimedia and enterprise units reporting sales growth of 45 percent and 27 percent, respectively. During the quarter, Nokia shipped 88.5 million phones, up from 66.6 million units in the same period a year ago.

Nokia calculates that its global market share of the handset market stood at 36 percent at the end of the quarter, up from 33 percent a year earlier. Strong performances in Latin America, China and Asia-Pacific helped increase Nokia's share, the company said.

*LG

LG mobile phone sales came in at 16.5 million in 3Q, up from 15.3 million in the previous quarter. LG shipped 10.5 million CDMA handsets, 5.6 million GSMs and 0.5 million WCDMAs. The LG Chocolate phone to ship 6 million units before the end of the year. The handset made its debut in Europe in May, and followed with a U.S. launch in August.

Nokia sees India & Russia as goldmines

"India is one of the most important markets for our multimedia devices," Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told Finnish national broadcaster YLE on Thursday. Multimedia phones usually carry a high price tag and higher profit margins.

Simonson also said Russia was a key market for Nokia's top-range 8800 model, priced at roughly 1000 euros ($1,250).

Nokia has 50% share of mobile phone market in many of the emerging countries.

Sony-Ericsson sales jumped 42%

The company shipped 19.8 million handsets during the quarter, which is up from 13.8 million in the same quarter a year ago. The success is due to its increased shipments of the Walkman music phones and its Cyber-shot line of cameraphones.

The Walkman phone line included W850, a tri-band/UMTS slider phone with storage capacity for up to 1,000 songs. In an effort to strengthen its position in the mobile music arena, Sony Ericsson also updated its PlayNow service to support full track, over-the-air (OTA) downloads to high-end Walkman models. The updated service is branded as M-Buzz.

Music market rockets in Asia

From almost nothing five years ago, the mobile music market in Asia/Pacific grew to US$3.3 billion in 2005, and will reach US$9.3 billion by 2010, according to Instat.

Growth drivers include large markets like China and India reaching a critical mass of mobile subscribers and 3G services becoming prevalent regionwide.

By 2010, the music market in:
China grows to $2.8b
Japan to $3.4b

QUALCOMM and MediaFLO USA Support FCC Ruling

The FCC today issued a decision that clears Qualcomm to launch its MediaFLO mobile TV network in a much larger number of markets. Qualcomm is building the network in the 700 MHz band with spectrum it owns on UHF TV channel 55.

The ruling specifies both the permitted level of minimal interference and the methodology to calculate the presence of interference from MediaFLO USA to TV or DTV stations on Channels 54, 55 or 56 until the DTV transition ends on February 17, 2009, when the stations must move off those channels. As a result, the ruling greatly expands the number of markets in which MediaFLO USA can operate prior to the DTV transition date.

European handset manufacturer woes

BenQ Mobile (Germany) files bankruptcy. the division was haemorrhaging money to the tune of €1 million per day before heading east. Unfortunately, the Taipei-based company could do little to stop the bleeding. On Friday, BenQ Mobile GmbH -- the subsidiary formed as a result of the sale -- declared bankruptcy.

Philips is selling the handset unit to China Electronics Corporation (CEC) after amassing hundreds of millions of euros of losses.

China wireless market growth

The China wireless market scale surged 110% from RMB 750 million in 2003 to RMB 1.58 billion in 2004, and is expected to be RMB 7 billion by 2008. China's ever expanding Mobile Wireless market has already exceeded 431 billion. Total GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) have reached 2.066 billion subscribers, or 82% of the Global market, with 1000 new GSM network subscribers per minute.

T-Mobile launches Dash

HTC's Dash will start making its appearence at the T-Mobile stores. The Dash is equipped with WiFi access which allows users to log on to T-Mobile's HotSpot.

WiMax World briefing

Nortel is doing a WiMax Mobile field trial in Moscow for Golden Telecom.

A number of base station manufacturers announced new products. Companies include Airspan, Telsima, Nortel.

It appears the WiMax infrastructure is the phase of field trial. I don't think it has solid proof that actual deployment is taking ground.

Ruckus wireless

The Ruckus Wireless smart Wi-Fi system is based on patent-pending technology that selects the best RF path at any given time for a specific type of multimedia content. Instead of broadcasting Wi-Fi signals in all directions, Ruckus technology directs Wi-Fi signals over the best path to a given receiver. If, however, that path experiences interference, the Ruckus Wireless system automatically steers the traffic over another path in real-time and ensures up to 20 Mbps of consistent bandwidth to every location in the home so there is no interruption in Wi-Fi transmissions.

A very interesting p0st about the Hong Kong borned CEO Selina Lo .

T-Mobile says that 30% of the SideKick users accesses MySpace. That contradicts to the article by PCMag article. It said that "so far nobody's been able to make much of mobile-generated user communities". Looking at Helio's handset selection which is none suited for access online user communities. Therefore, I can see why people would use SideKick to get onto MySpace. And thus explained why T-Mobile is so excited about the MySpace & YouTube market.

Based on M:Metrics data, e-mail usage (both work & personal) has grown above 11% the past 3 months. So is mobile game download. Click to enlarge the image.

T-Mobile 3G rollout.

After spending $4.2 billion on the AWS auction, T-Mobile says to spend nearly $2.7 billion on a network upgrade. The upgrade will start this quarter and end in 2009 with most network completed by 2008.

New devices will have to be developed to work in the new 1,700-MHz and 2,100-MHz bands. While many European countries have a 2,100-MHz band as well, their band is configured differently, so European 2,100-MHz devices will not be able to work well on the American version.

T-Mobile's 3G rollout will include HSDPA, which will start during the fourth quarter of this year and will extend through 2007 and 2008, costing around $2.1 billion for the buildout through 2009. Consumers will be able to buy 3G handsets and services beginning in mid-2007

How Single Antenna Interference Cancellation (SAIC) Works

SAIC refers to a class of processing algorithms, which attempt to cancel
or suppress interference using a single receive antenna. The two most prominent families of
SAIC algorithms are:
• Joint Demodulation (JD), also called Joint Detection
• Blind Interference Cancellation (BIC)

The basic difference between JD and BIC is that the JD receivers attempt to jointly process
(demodulate) both the desired signal and one or more of the interferers, while BIC receivers
only process (demodulate) the desired signal while canceling or suppressing the interference.
Since the BIC algorithm only specifically deals with the desired signal, it is said to be “blind” to
the interferer. BIC algorithms may not be applicable to all wireless systems, but they can be
applied to GMSK signals used in GSM due to the nature of the modulation.

SAIC works best in a synchronous network.

Mobile TV Comparison chart.