Carriers have built plenty of 4G networks, but they’re still not in agreement in how they use them. Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg believes the next few years are going to be a period of pricing and service experimentation. Read more »
The OneAPI Exchange will get carriers into the identity verification business, but more significantly it’s the first carrier developer service designed to work universally across all carriers’ networks. Read more »
The deal runs counter to bring-your-own-connectivity approach GM and the rest of the Detroit automakers have backed in recent years. Read more »
At Mobile World Congress, NSN announced plans to embed IBM application servers into its base stations. The radio and services networks have always been separate, but NSN is making a case to merge them. Read more »
At Mobile World Congress, Spotify debuted in its first cars appearing in Ford’s already music-loaded Sync AppLink platform. Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas also told us that its graduate its first apps from its developer program. Read more »
Ssangyong may not have the global name recognition of the Wireless Power Consortium’s first automotive partner Toyota, but adding the Korean automaker to Qi’s roster shows the technology is building momentum. Read more »
Fresh off portfolio company Intucell’s $475 million exit, Bessemer Venture Partners’ Bob Goodman is on the hunt for new mobile infrastructure startups. At the wireless industry’s biggest event, Mobile World Congress, he’ll find plenty to choose from. Read more »
PayPal’s Here mobile payments service is bound for Europe, launching first in the U.K. over the next few months. Instead of the card-swiper used in the U.S., Europe will get a new Chip & PIN device. Read more »
Qualcomm’s new RF360 radio chip cold be the answer to the problem of 4G fragmentation. It won’t produce a universal LTE phone just yet, but with 40 bands supported, it will get the industry close. Read more »
Altair Semiconductor may be the latest vendor to malign the term LTE-Advanced, but it does have an impressive new 4G chip. It’s new device silicon is the first we’ve seen that uses envelope tracking battery-sparing technology. Read more »
First we had benchmarks for the elusive Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet and now there’s a report that a key Samsung exec has confirmed the slate’s debut at Mobile World Congress. Read more »
Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has agreed to work with network builder Ericsson to experiment with a crowdsourced music composition on. Starting on Wednesday, the public will be able to submit audio tracks that could wind up in Avicii’s new single. Read more »
Mobile industry trade group CTIA hopes that replacing its two suffering conferences with a single fall event will halt its fall into trade show irrelevance. MWC and CES have been stealing CTIA’s thunder, but it might be too late to steal it back. Read more »
The industry has moved beyond starry-eyed soothsaying about a world of 50 billion connected devices to start talking about how these mammoth networks of objects and appliances would actually work and how they would be managed. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With 1400 exhibitors, Mobile World Congress produced a lot of product and technology demos, most of the unmemorable. Three of those demos, though, really got my attention: iOnRoad’s augmented driving app, P2i’s water resistant nano-technology and Nokia’s 41-megapixel PureView camera phone sensor. Read more »
T-Mobile expects to be the first U.S. carrier to offer 4G phones with integrated LTE radios and antennas. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray made the prediction, which is important because the LTE phones of today drain a device’s battery too quickly for a number of reasons. Read more »
If we build a world where 50 billion devices are connected, those devices will generate a lot of chatter, and that chatter could get very annoying. By telling us everything about our homes, cars and appliances the Internet of things may wind up telling nothing at all. Read more »
At MWC executives of two prominent operators said the industry has significant challenges in the form of over the top providers commoditizing their revenue streams without those companies putting any significant investment of their own into the network. Here’s what operators should do. Read more »
Gaming on desktop PCs and consoles is a big business, but one that generally requires participants to be locked down to a location. In today’s growing mobile world, that’s less than ideal. That’s partly why mobile device chips are gaining capabilities for immersive, multi-player 3-D gaming. Read more »
Last year, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop declared war on Google and invited developers, mobile operators and handset makers to join Nokia and Microsofts’ ranks in preparation for the coming smartphone armageddon. At MWC, Elop gave us an update on how Nokia’s war and recruitment efforts are going. Read more »
Nine months after purchasing Skype for $8.5 billion, Microsoft Windows Phone handsets have a beta version of the audio and video chat service. There are some notable limitations in this first release, but as the software gets refined and integrated, Microsoft’s platform could gain more momentum. Read more »
Broadcom claims that all of that hardware and functionality found in high-end devices smartphones like the the Galaxy Nexus can be had for half of the cost. On Monday at Mobile World Congress it’s unveiling the silicon component of that low-cost equation. Read more »
Freescale Semiconductor has succeeded in cramming an entire cellular base station onto a single chip. That’s not only an impressive feat of miniaturization, it could kick off the next-generation of LTE deployments, lower the costs of building mobile networks and cut the energy required to run them. Read more »
Mobile World Congress just became Intel’s mobile coming out party. On Monday Orange will debut the first smartphone powered by Intel’s Atom processor at the show, giving Intel a key foothold in the European market as well as a critical endorsement from a major carrier. Read more »
With a new phone line called the One, HTC is hoping to reinvigorate sales. AT&T will be selling the HTC One X variant this spring: a 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 resolution Android 4.0 handset with HTC Sense 4.0 and support for AT&T’s LTE network. Read more »
Amid flagging sales, HTC announced its HTC One line of phones at the Mobile World Congress. T-Mobile is a premier launch partner for the HTC One S, which arrives this spring in the U.S. with Android 4.0, Sense 4.0 and a super-fast camera with f/2.0 aperture. Read more »
Get ready for phones with integrated projectors in them; Samsung announced the Galaxy Beam, which can project images on a wall or screen. Although it’s a completely new model handset, it still runs Android’s old 2.3 version and uses an 800 x 480 resolution touchscreen display. Read more »
SMS is getting a facelift at Mobile World Congress. Mavenir Systems is launching a messaging platform that could turn carriers’ staid old SMS into a much more vibrant platform on par with Apple’s iMessage. But most importantly, the technology preserves SMS’s most valuable asset: its ubiquity. Read more »
Want to know what’s going to happen at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week? Why not ask the organizers? I got on the phone with the GSMA, and here’s what they told me to expect: connectivity in everything, NFC and, of course, LTE. Read more »
The Wi-Fi Alliance will begin certifying devices under its new Passport initiative, which ensures that mobile phones can log into Wi-Fi networks seamlessly. Now it’s the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s turn to take over, integrating those devices and the access points into the mobile operator’s network. Read more »
Ericsson is showing off a new network technology at Mobile World Congress that will boost uplink capacity on HSPA systems by three times, to a theoretical 12 Mbps. That’s ideally suited for the changing ways we’re consuming mobile broadband. Read more »
Samsung has been reigning supreme in Twitter buzz relating to Mobile World Congress, but one week before the start of the show, HTC has leaped over the handset giant on news of a new “superphone” being unveiled there, according to social media number cruncher anly.tk.. Read more »
Qualcomm says the only quad-core Snapdragon smartphones we’ll see at Mobile World Congress next week will be concept devices, but Qualcomm is promising we’ll get a glimpse of something even more elusive: an LTE phone that won’t eat your battery for lunch. Read more »
At MWC, Nokia Siemens Networks plans its most ambitious mobile network design yet: a system of 100 small cells that behaves like a single cell site. This has huge implications for the heterogeneous networks of the future, which aim to create a sea of cheap bandwidth. Read more »
Nvidia has landed its first deal to provide both mobile connectivity and app processing for a single handset, revealing that ZTE is sourcing both its Tegra 2 and Icera radio chips for its new Mimosa X Android phone. Nvidia isn’t Qualcomm yet, but it’s getting closer. Read more »
The hub of mobile infrastructure in the U.S. may be in North Dallas, but the allure of Silicon Valley is bringing more telecom vendors to the Bay Area. Nokia Siemens is the latest, announcing the opening of one of its Smart Labs in Mountain View. Read more »
Your LTE phone is just as adept at eating battery power as it is at eating bandwidth. Last week, I wrote about the many ways that LTE devices are far more power hungry than their 3G predecessors. Now let’s look at what’s being doing about it. Read more »
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, you would expect LTE to hog the spotlight, but LTE might find itself overshadowed by a less sexy technology: Wi-Fi. As telecom vendors prep their new porfolios for MWC in two weeks, there is a preponderance of Wi-Fi products. Read more »
