Mobiles

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) announced today that the company shattered its text messaging record of 64.5 million by generating more than 78 million messages this season of "American Idol" -- the most popular show on television. By texting their votes this season, AT&T’s wireless customers helped crown the new American Idol winner, David Cook.

Today, text messaging is broadly used by just about everyone with a mobile phone, but before Idol introduced text-to-vote, it was just starting to take off. Partnering with Seattle based Mobliss, AT&T's sponsorship of "American Idol" helped put text messaging on the map. Back in 2003, when the text message voting component was first introduced to the show, text messaging was still a relatively new technology and almost exclusively limited to the youth market. Today, text messaging has become almost as popular as voice communication as a way to stay connected while on the go.

“There’s no question that Idol fans are texting in huge numbers,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer, AT&T’s wireless operations. “We rolled out a lot of great Idol-themed content this season that kept fans engaged and connected. From ‘American Idol’ trivia, special sweepstakes, TXT chats, vote number reminders and, of course, voting, there were plenty of opportunities for AT&T customers to enhance their favorite Idol moments.”

Opera today announced the availability of Opera Mobile 9.5 on the new HTC Touch Diamond. The customized HTC-specific version enables easy one-handed viewing and effortless navigation. Page viewing and panning allows users to scan and navigate pages quickly while Opera Zoom enables users to dive into the page and get closer to the content they want. Turning the device sideways automatically rotates the Web page view from a portrait to landscape view.

Opera Mobile 9.5 makes multi-tasking easier than ever before with improved tabbed browsing. In addition, productivity tools like the ability to save pages for offline browsing, Web address auto complete and password manager allow for a more enjoyable experience. In addition, Opera Mobile 9.5 gets users closer to family and friends as it allows users to easily share images from online photo albums or any other Website through MMS or e-mail.

Other features in Opera Mobile 9.5 include:

• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Landscape mode
• Call phone number directly from Web page
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text

“Opera Mobile 9.5 on the HTC Touch Diamond will bring to customers the most powerful Web browser yet on a mobile phone,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Opera is on the road to give mobile Web browsing a complete facelift and an elevated user experience. This is just the beginning.”

HTC Touch Diamond mobile internet demo

Video Source [phonemag]

Instead of previous forecast of 2 million units, a chinese newspaper “Commercial Times” reported that the CEO Peter Chou now expects to see 3 Millions units sold in the next 7 months starting June.

Source [Digitimes]

read all about HTC Touch Diamond here

http://www.slashphone.com/tags/htc-diamond

Velti announced today that it has partnered with Vantrix, a mobile content delivery company, to support a universal video advertising platform. Armed with the Vantrix Media Broadcaster device detection and video optimisation technology, Velti can stream or provide on demand ad-supported video content on mobile internet sites to a vast array of mobile devices.

“With over 3 billion mobile users globally, the adoption of mobile media and advertising continues to be a catalyst of growth in our industry,” said Alex Moukas, CEO of Velti. “As new devices are introduced each day it is increasingly important to reach your target market, regardless of which gadget or service provider they use. With the help of Vantrix to detect any device and adapt the video content for each specific phone and network conditions, Velti is able to provide a technology agnostic mobile advertising platform with high-quality video content.”

Mobile users who subscribe to video services delivered by Velti’s enhanced Mobile Marketing Platform (MMP) are asked to provide basic personal data such as gender, date of birth, area of residence and range of income the first time they sign up. This information, combined with additional behavioural and contextual data managed and updated by Velti’s Personalization Engine, as well as device, carrier and network performance characteristics provided by Vantrix, is used to target consumers with advertising that’s relevant to them. Mobile users can then use the service on most networks for free and view video clips as often as they like. Brand advertisers will bear the cost of the service, so users can enjoy high quality video on their mobile phones, complete with targeted ad content.

REGIONAL 3C brand Verzio has launched the company’s first 3.5G high-speed packet data access (HSPDA) PDA phone. The Verzio Envii is already available in Philippines since March.

Verzio Envii is powered by the Marvell PXA270 processor at 624MHZ. Running on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 platform, Verzio Envii gives access to information and operations including Microsofts Office applicantions, media player functions,Outlook Mobile with Direct Push, mobile Internet Explorer, Active Sync, and other vbasic functions that are usually accessible only from desktop computers. It also has a large built-in 1GB Flash ROM that can be extended to 4GB with the use of Micro SD.

Specifications:

• Network: GSM Triband (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz)
• HSDPA / UTMS / GPRS
• OS: Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional
• Dimension: 106 x 58 x 18 mm
• Weight: 145 grams
• Memory: 1GB ROM / 64MB RAM
• Display: 2.7-inch 64k colors TFT
• Dual Speaker with SRS WOW HD
• 2 megapixel camera
• Secondary video camera for video call
• mini-USB
• 2.5mm Audio Jack
• Bluetooth
• WiFi b/g
• FM Radio with RDS
• 1530 mAh battery
• Up to 4 hours GSM talk time
• Up to 2 hours UTMS talk time
• Up to 200 hours standby time

via [msmobiles]

Nokia today announced that its Nokia Maps has left beta stage and is now ready for consumers to download. Downloaded over 240,000 times since announced in February, Nokia Maps 2.0 has improved its optional Car Navigation, enhanced its pedestrian navigation, added multimedia city guides, now offers satellite images, and is sporting a redesigned user interface.

A partial list of the updated features in Nokia Maps 2.0 includes:

DRIVE:

• Improved optional Car Navigation equals PND-level car navigation experience with faster routing.
• Easy-to-use, updated User Interface features including a new navigation carousel with pre-defined navigation views - i.e. navigation, arrow, bird-eye.
• navigation features: signposts, multi-stop route planner

WALK:

• Optional pedestrian navigation efficiently walks you from A to B with visual guidance. It helps you to locate yourself by giving information about the surrounding buildings, streets and parks and, if the device supports it, notifies the direction you are walking.
• Nokia Maps 2.0 includes public transportation information (station entrances) data in 17 cities with localized icons for stops.
• Advanced multi-sensor positioning using A-GPS, and pedestrian orientation using the compass feature (Nokia 6210 Navigator needed for built-in compass usage)

DISCOVER:

• Satellite images with hybrid rendering overlays for selected cities worldwide provide real aerial views on your mobile.
• Signature “one-box search” allows you to search through places, addresses, restaurants, nightlife, outdoor, accommodation.
• New premium multi-media city guides including features photos, video, audio streams.

Nokia Maps 2.0 uses vector maps provided by Navteq and TeleAtlas, Nokia Maps now has maps covering over 200 countries, with over 70 of them navigable. Maps can be downloaded over the air directly to selected devices or by using the Nokia Map Loader on a PC. A new beta version of the Nokia Map Loader is available on the Nokia Betalabs web site. For download and more information, please visit http://www.maps.nokia.com

For those of you eagerly awaiting the availability of the Samsung Instinct (see previous post), Sprint (NYSE: S) said that the phone will be available for sale June 20.

Today Sprint announced that it would start selling Samsung's SCH-M800 Instinct starting on Friday, June 20th. This iPhone competitor offers a full desktop like web experience on its 3.1" touchscreen display.
Read the full story here.

World's first mobile computer with push email combines the power of Windows Vista and the speed of Canada's most reliable wireless network
Read the full story here.

Research firm M:Metrics reports that U.S. smartphone users spend an average of four hours and 38 minutes per month for Web browsing. This is nearly double the British, who spend about two hours and 30 minutes per month Web browsing on their smartphones. M:Metrics says that one primary reason for the difference between the U.K. and the U.S. is that 10.9% of American smartphone users have an unlimited data plan compared to only 2.3% of U.K. users.

"People are becoming increasingly engaged in the mobile medium," said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. "Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and pageviews have increased 127%. Consumption is quickly evolving from brief transactions, such as checking the weather or flight status, to time-intensive interaction with mobile Web sites-even without an iPhone."

Top domains that U.S. smartphone users browse are Craigslist.org (1 hour and 38 minutes per month); ebay (one hour 25 minutes per month); Myspace (1 hour and 25 minutes per month); facebook.com (1 hour 24 minutes per month); and go.com (1 hour, 7 minutes per month).

Check out the full release here.