Communications Technology

Mobile chip maker Qualcomm said Thursday that it has started providing new wireless chipsets that combine 3G and 4G wireless technology to help carriers transition to the next generation of wireless technology.

The company said Huawei Technologies, LG Electronics Novatel Wireless, Sierra Wireless, and ZTE are among the first mobile-device manufacturers to test the new chips.

Qualcomm said that devices that use the new chips could be available in commercial products starting in the second half of 2010.

The new chips will allow wireless phones and other portable devices to switch between a 4G wireless network using LTE, or long-term evolution, technology and HSPA Plus, a 3G wireless technology.

This is important because many carriers around the world plan to upgrade their networks to 4G using LTE. But these networks won’t be ubiquitous overnight, and consumers will not be able to get 4G signals everywhere and will need to roam on 3G networks so they can have coverage almost everywhere. This means that devices will need chips that allow them to switch between networks.

HSPA Plus is the next iteration of 3G wireless technology that can provide download speeds of up to 21 megabits per second. Many wireless operators, including Telstra of Australia and AT&T in the U.S., are upgrading their networks now. These carriers eventually plan to upgrade their networks to LTE.

Qualcomm also announced it is providing a new set of mobile-device chips to manufacturers for testing that will add more robust multimedia features to new smartphones.

This new chipset family supports high-definition video recording and playback, enhanced graphics, and an overall chip design that is optimized for a highly responsive Web experience. Qualcomm expects phone makers to have devices that use the new MSM7×30 family of chipsets commercially available by the end of 2010.

The new chipsets will allow phones to operate on the most advanced 3G wireless networks, such as those running the latest generation of HSPA and EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized).

The chips will support handsets that use the Android, Brew, Symbian, and Windows Mobile operating systems. Some of the features that the new chips could enable include a 12-megapixel camera, 720p video recording, and 3D gaming.

No Tags

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, which is seeking to chip away at Google’s dominance in Internet search, is teaming up with WolframAlpha, another rival for the Google crown.

WolframAlpha, which was launched in mid-May, announced that starting on Wednesday, Bing would incorporate results from WolframAlpha in answers to certain search queries.

“WolframAlpha’s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics,” WolframAlpha said in a blog post.

“Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from WolframAlpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results,” it said.

WolframAlpha, which is named after the man behind the venture, British-born computer scientist and inventor Stephen Wolfram, calls itself a “computational knowledge engine” rather than the traditional search engine.

Unlike Google, which takes a query and uses algorithms to scour the Web and return a series of links to relevant websites, WolframAlpha.com takes a query and crunches through its databases to return answers.

Bing’s tie-up with WolframAlpha is one of several moves Microsoft has made recently in a bid to challenge Google in the multi-billion-dollar search and advertising market.

Microsoft entered into a 10-year Web search and advertising partnership with Yahoo! in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

Since unveiling Bing in June, Microsoft has also begun integrating messages from hot micro-blogging service Twitter into Bing and plans to do the same with status updates from Facebook.

Google dominates online search in the United States with a nearly 65 percent share of the market followed by Yahoo! with 18.8 percent and Bing with 9.4 percent, according to September figures from industry tracking firm comScore.

No Tags

HELSINKI (Reuters) - The world’s two largest cellphone makers, Nokia and Samsung Electronics, unveiled on Tuesday their latest rivals to the iPhone as Apple became the top profit generator in the handset industry.

Apple Inc overtook Nokia in the September quarter as the cellphone maker generating the highest total operating profit in the industry, research firm Strategy Analytics said.

Nokia said on Tuesday it had started deliveries of its top- of-the-range N900, while Samsung Electronics Co Ltd announced it would launch its own open mobile platform, bada, in December as it tries to make up for a late start in the smartphone market.

Nokia and Samsung together sell around 60 percent of all cellphones globally, but they have lost some ground to Apple and Research In Motion Ltd, maker of the Blackberry.

The N900 model is the first Nokia phone to run on the Linux Maemo operating system, which analysts see as key for Nokia to regain ground in the coming years.

“The Maemo platform, which powers the N900, reflects Nokia’s need to replace its legacy software platforms with something more powerful to compete with Apple and others,” said Ben Wood, head of research at British consultancy CCS Insight.

“Samsung’s announcement of bada shows it has also identified the same requirement. The big question is, does the mobile phone world need yet another operating system?”

While Nokia has lost ground in the smartphone business, it is still the world’s largest smartphone maker by volume. Samsung’s volumes are well behind Apple, RIM and HTC Corp.

But measured by profits, Nokia lost in the third quarter against Apple, which entered the cellphone market only in mid-2007.

Apple does not unveil profits per business line, but Strategy Analytics estimated Apple’s operating profit for its iPhone handset unit stood at $1.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with Nokia’s $1.1 billion.

“With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, the PC vendor has successfully broken into the mobile phone market in just two years,” said Alex Spektor, an analyst at Strategy Analytics.

Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones during the July-September quarter, generating sales of $4.5 billion. Nokia sold 108.5 million phones in total in the same quarter, generating sales of 6.9 billion euros ($10.36 billion), but its profits were hurt by the economic downturn.

WORRIES OVER SMARTPHONE BOOM

Global sales of mobile handsets will snap a four-quarter losing streak in the last three months of the year as the industry is buoyed by economic recovery, a Reuters poll of analysts showed on Tuesday.

Sales are expected to rise 3 percent in the fourth quarter as the Christmas period brings a brighter end to a year in which sales are forecast to fall 6.9 percent, the poll of 31 banks, brokerages and research firms showed.

While the broader handset industry has struggled, smartphones sales have boomed and analysts have forecast the smartphone market will grow 20 percent to 30 percent this year.

But there are signs that increased competition is starting to put pressure on margins and put some companies on the defensive.

This week, the world’s No. 4 smartphone brand, HTC, said it expected fourth-quarter revenue to fall almost 15 percent from the same period a year earlier, as the intense rivalry forces prices down.

Strategy Analytics said growth in the smartphone market slowed to just 5 percent in the third quarter from 17 percent in the second quarter.

“On the supply-side, a weak lineup from Nokia, the industry giant, has helped to keep a cap on growth,” said Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

“On the demand-side, consumers have been buying huge volumes of high-end feature phones with touchscreens from Samsung and LG and many consumers seem happy for now to go without full app-store support,” Mawston added.

No Tags