GigaOM

Mobile browsing has clearly moved beyond 9-to-5 users and made inroads among the happy hour set. A recent survey by Opera showed about 40 percent (and about 60 percent in the United States, South Africa and Indonesia) of Opera Mini users visit social networking sites when surfing on a mobile. For those unfamiliar with the Opera Mini browser, it allows a user to see an entire web page and zoom in on desired content as long as they have Java on the phone.

The survey also shows which top 10 sites surfers visited in each country. The U.S. list begins with MySpace and ends with eBay. In between socializing and shopping is more socializing through Hi5 and Facebook, as well as search via Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo. It looks like even if we aren’t using our phones for talking, we’re still using them to connect — and to settle bar bets. Wikipedia is the No. 8 slot in the United States. As the chart below shows, if users have an easy way to access the web on their mobiles they will. Carriers and device makers take note!

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I’ve spent a considerable amount of my personal and professional time mocking conspiracy theorists, but it is true that as we open our homes and our wallets to electronic devices, we are also opening up our lives to surveillance. So if you plan on doing something risky, read the list below. Then then check out your ISP’s terms of service, wrap your phone in tinfoil, and call a cab (leave your wallet at home). Continue Reading

With Nokia, Apple and RIM all trying to flex their muscles and become the new gatekeepers of the mobile Internet, carriers are responding by making their own moves. AT&T and Vodafone are amongst likely buyers of Huawei’s handset unit.

Huawei Technologies, the largest mainland manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, is attracting interest from global industry players such as AT&T, the largest phone companyin the United States, and private equity firms including Blackstone on its sale of more than 50 per cent of its handset unit, sources said. (via)

The fact that carriers are looking to own a supplier of cheap mobile phones doesn’t bode well for the boys at Motorola!

Sprint isn’t just losing millions of customers and billions of dollars, it’s in the midst of pioneering a new management philosophy. We’ll call it the Three-Megabit Monte. Similar to the venerable street con, this is where Sprint leads a customer down a confusing line of lies and inflated charges in the hopes of making a buck.

As detailed by Allen Harkleroad (who is one wrathful Southerner) on his web site, Sprint has been charging him almost four times the price of the amount it pays the local telephone company for two T-1 access lines. That’s about a 75 percent gross margin. But what really drove Harkleroad around the bend was being lied to by a Sprint salesman, who claimed that the company was charged $1,998 for the T-1s (the phone company, on the other hand, said it charges some $500). Harkleroad has since switched providers and pays about $1,500 less per month. Continue Reading

Sprint and Samsung have declared mobile WiMax to be ready for launch in Baltimore and Washington D.C. later this year. The two firms said on Thursday their trials met Sprint’s technical specifications, which means mobile WiMax is now out of the gate in an urban area. Previous deployments have focused on rural areas, fixed WiMax or a similar service that isn’t true WiMax, so this could be mobile WiMax’s big test. Let the network upgrades begin.

Earlier this month, India surpassed the U.S. as the second-largest mobile market (by subscriber count) in the world. With close to 280 million subscribers, it now has enough of a user base to become a breeding ground for a new class of applications that take into account local realities such as a lack of high -peed networks, cheap phones and a reliance on SMS.

Take Yulop, a Bangalore, India-based location-based startup. Instead of waiting around for GPS data, the tiny company is launching its location-based search service, which uses triangulation technologies and offers consumers listings of find businesses (shops, restaurants and) based on geo-tagged data from its database. Yulop plans to offer service in six cities in addition to its current market of Bangalore.

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