He is writer for Crunch Gear and Tech Crunch - publications owned by Michael Arrington.

Good to see that Americans are coming to Mobile World Congress too!

Mobile Phones
Nokia Corporation is the world's largest manufacturer of mobile telephones (as of September 2006), with a global market share of approximately 36% in Q3 of 2006. It produces mobile phones for every major market and protocol, including GSM, CDMA, and W-CDMA (UMTS).

The corporation also produces telecommunications network equipment for applications such as mobile and fixed-line voice telephony, ISDN, broadband access, voice over IP, and wireless LAN.

Nokia's headquarters are in Espoo, a neighbouring city of Helsinki, Finland, but it has R&D, manufacturing, and sales representation sites in many continents throughout the world. Nokia Research Center, the corporation's industrial research laboratories, has sites in Athens, Helsinki, Tokyo, Beijing, Budapest, Bochum, Palo Alto, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Nokia is by far the largest Finnish company, accounting for about half of the market capitalization of the Helsinki Stock Exchange (OMX Helsinki); a unique situation for an industrialized country. It also plays a very large role in the economy of Finland, and Finns have ranked it many times as the best Finnish brand and employer.

Nokia mobile Phones:

Nokia 5200 | Nokia 5500 sport | Nokia 7373 | Nokia E61 | Nokia E61 TomTom | Nokia E50 | Nokia E60 | Nokia 8800 Sirocco (Black) | Nokia 8800 Sirocco (Silver) | Nokia N95 | Nokia N71 | Nokia N72 | Nokia N91 | Nokia N93 (Silver) | Nokia N93 | Nokia N80(clearence) | Nokia N80(Black) | Nokia N80 | Nokia N73 | Nokia N70(Clearence) | Nokia N70 | Nokia 8800 | Nokia 7380 | Nokia 7370 | Nokia 7360 | Nokia 8800 | Nokia 6630(clearence) | Nokia 6630 | Nokia 6280 Plum | Nokia 6280 | Nokia 6270 | Nokia 6233 | Nokia 6230i | Nokia 6131 | Nokia 6111 Pink | Nokia 6111 | Nokia 6070 | Nokia 6031 | Nokia 6021 | Nokia 5140i | Nokia 6131 | Nokia 1100 | Nokia 1112 | Nokia 1600 | Nokia 3120 | Nokia 3250

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Nokia to start production in Romania Telecom Paper (subscription), Netherlands - Jan 11, 2008 Nokia will start its production activity at its new plant in Romania on 11 February, according to Romanian news site ZiarulFinanciar.ro. …

Toronto, October 15, 2008: The premier annual 2008 Financial Services Technology Forum will take place on October 28 & 29, 2008 at the Design Exchange (formerly Toronto Stock Exchange) in Toronto, Canada.

Is blogging really dying?  Is TechCrunch headed to the dead pool? That seems to be a vibe that has been circulating lately.
According to my feed reader, NewsGator?s awesome FeedDemon, I am certainly seeing what appears to be less activity and a bunch of repetition in my subscriptions.  So, does that mean blogging is going into the can or is something else going on here?

I decided to do some investigation on my own to get to the bottom of this… I think one of the strongest indicators of blogging?s health is the amount of comments that are posted. So, I went Geraldo style and wrote a script (see script at bottom) to scrape the number of comments from the popular tech blog, TechCrunch, over the last three years.

As you can see from the chart below (piped the script output -> Excel), the number of comments on TC is steadily increasing. TechCrunch is definitely not headed underground; it is doing very well!  Blogging is not dying… yippee, but it is most definitely changing.

So, what is going on? Well, I think blogging is just turning into another channel for the same type of media it was supposed to replace. Blogs are rolling up, trusted authorities are rising to the top, and the rest is just noise or repetition or gone bye bye. We already have too much going on in our lives, so it is only natural that this organic filtering would occur.

Here is the Ruby script if you want to see for yourself:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘hpricot’

@url_base = “http://www.techcrunch.com/”
@response = ‘’

begin
File.open(”comments.txt”, “w”) do |file|
2008.downto(2005) do |year|
12.downto(1) do |month|
url = “#{@url_base}#{year}/#{month}”
begin
open(url) { |f|
@response = f.read
doc = Hpricot(@response)
(doc/”div/div/div[3]/ul/li/div”).each do |comment|
post = comment.innerHTML.split(’,')
file.write “#{post[0].strip},#{post[1].strip}\t#{post[2].split(” “)[0].strip.sub(”No”, “0″)}\r\n”
end
}
rescue Exception => e
print e, “\n”
end
end
end
end
rescue Exception => e
print e, “\n”
end

Presidential candidate Barack Obama reached out to the smart mobs in new and effective ways that contributed significantly to his victory. It seems inevitable that the crowd will now be eager to direct its wisdom into his administration. Here is a pioneering project in that venue: BigDialog: Ask the President-Elect is a post-election method to keep the public participating in the governing by the new President. In a techPresident post — White House 2.0: The Public is Knocking on the Door – Micah Sifry sketches the project. Here are some basics for harnessing of this here comes everybody method:

[The projects] seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. . . .

The site builds on our experience during the primaries with 10Questions.com and is designed to take video and text questions for the President-elect and then enable users to vote the best questions to the top. If we manage to get the President-elect to respond, users will then get the opportunity to rate his responsiveness.

Maxent MX-50HPT51 Plasma TV - 50, 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 16:9, HDMI, ASTC, NTSC, QAM
PRICE: $899.00
Source: Tiger Direct

A

The Samsung Propel SGH-a767 is one of an army of QWERTY keyboard messaging phones out for the holiday season. The Propel, like the QuickFire, Slate and Matrix have hardware keyboards but aren't smartphones, meaning lower data plan prices and ...

Owen Thomas / Valleywag:
Is Yahoo done with search?  —  Among the many windmills Jerry Yang tilted at in his brief career as Yahoo's CEO was his devotion to Web search.  It veered on an obsession for him.  It played into his decision to resist Microsoft's offers to shower him with cash, first for his whole company, then for just its search business.

Samsung Renown (SCH-U810) More Photos - View Specs

Verizon Wireless today unveiled the Samsung Renown, a fashionable clamshell with a 2.0-megapixel camera.

The Renown comes with a 2.0-megapixel camera with NightShot, a camcorder, and video, picture, text and mobile IM messaging options. It also supports Verizon Wireless' VCAST Music with Rhapsody and VCAST Video services in the U.S. VCAST Music with Rhapsody lets users transform their handheld into an MP3 player.

Customers to access more than 5 million songs and purchase full songs over-the-air. They can download a master copy of songs to their PCs, and sync favorite tracks, albums and playlists from their PCs to their phones via USB cable.

With VCAST Video, users can download or stream video clips from news, sports and entertainment.

The Samsung Renown is available will be available in business sales channels, online on Nov. 19 and in stores on Dec. 1.

- Samsung Renown Specs

Related News Articles

• Samsung Saga Touch Screen Smartphone Announced for Verizon
• Samsung Eternity Touch Screen Phone with AT&T Mobile TV
• Verizon Begins Selling BlackBerry Storm on Nov. 21 for $200
• Samsung Gravity Messaging Phone Unveiled for T-Mobile
• Samsung Behold Touch-Screen Phone Announced for T-Mobile

©2002-2008 Mobiledia Corp. A Cell Phone Resource Site. All Rights Reserved. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only.

While you may not be surprised to learn of the massive number of text messages that will be sent in 2008 – 200 billion text messages, according to a new...

In a report we published last month called “Traveler Behavior in a Slowing Economy”, we discussed how the current economic environment is forcing travelers to reduce their travel frequency and spending.

We found that 33% of people who took a leisure trip in the summer say they will be more price sensitive than usual in their travel plans. Considering this is already an intensely price sensitive group with the average person researching 3 websites per product, More Price Sensitive is an important shift. In addition, 28% say they will research their travel even more intensely than they have before.

There are two trends whose implications I’ve been thinking about.

Last year, we’d seen an increase in branded search terms. I suspect going forward, words like “cheap”, “discount” and “deal” will creep back into top searches.

I also think we’re going to see travelers start researching earlier. That doesn’t mean they will purchase earlier. But they will be scanning, researching more intensely, and aware to pricing options to their desired destinations.

The combination of these two behavioral shifts could have a profound affect on all areas of online travel marketing. Search marketers will need to analyze their SEM robustly to determine if, in fact, they are affected by an increase in generic search terms. Promotions may need to start earlier and last longer. Website features will need to support longer planning windows.

The list will go on. “new economic reality” + “travel marketing”. Search.

Thanks to the new Google sync, BlackBerry users will soon be getting a taste of how it feels to live the Android life. While the HTC G1 may lack a desktop sync tool, it does feature automatic syncing with Gmail?s address book and vice-versa, providing you with a safe way of backing up your contacts on the internet. This same feature is now headed BlackBerry?s way and, in true Google fashion, it?s free of charge.

For instructions on how to get the Google Sync update, just head on over to mobile.googl.com/sync and enter your phone number. Once complete, an appropriate link will be sent to your mobile phone. I guess this is Google?s way of spreading the love to the rest of the mobile community even if you?re not yet ready to hop on the Android bandwagon.

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Here are a series of links which can be useful for the BlackBerry Pearl, by your About.com guide to cell phones.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Just four factors can predict with 70 percent accuracy whether a woman will become pregnant through "test-tube" baby technology known as in vitro fertilization, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Lifehacker reports that Google's new Voice-Enabled Search application is now live in the App Store (sort of).

The new application is actually an update to Google's existing Google Mobile Application that is already available in the A...

Heh -- I'm a vodka fan, so I got a kick out of learning this today. Orange County has its own homegrown vodka -- Bu-Tay Vodka! I gather it's made or distributed out of OC, and I got another fun surprise. It's made with water from Bend, Oregon. Bend's long been a hub of search marketing related activity, not to mention home to the best breakfast place I've ever eaten at (the name I forget, but I suspect some Bendites will comment to refresh my memory). I don't see it rated on this cool review chart over at Rate-It All, but it's also apparently not sold widely outside California. I'll have to give it a whirl.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that “Sprint Will Kick Off a Series of Eight Football Phone-Casts”:

For the first time Thursday, a National Football League game — the Cleveland Browns vs. the Denver Broncos — will be broadcast on Sprint mobile phones as part of the wireless company’s exclusive partnership with the league. That partnership deal is valued at about $500 million over five years.

Over the next seven weeks, Sprint will phone-cast the eight games that are televised solely on the NFL Network, the league’s cable channel. For the past three seasons, the NFL has struggled to persuade major cable operators to include its channel in their basic programming packages.

With the NFL Network is available in only about 40% of American households, Sprint executives hope the NFL games can do for their company what the league’s Sunday Ticket package has done for satellite-television provider DirecTV Group. Sunday Ticket, which is exclusive to DirecTV, allows dedicated fans to see every NFL game on Sunday afternoons, and has been crucial to DirectTV’s growth.

In light of today’s economic downturn and the plan by many consumers to reduce their cell phone upgrades and service plan costs, now may be as ripe a time as...

Eastman Kodak has filed a pair of lawsuits against LG (SEO: 066570) and Samsung alleging that the companies infringed on patents involving digital cameras in some of their devices. The complaints, which were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York and with the U.S. International Trade Commission, involve technology related to image capture, compression and data storage and a method for previewing motion images.

Kodak is asking for compensation for damages resulting from the companies' alleged infringement and injunctions to prohibit the further sale and importation of products cited in the complaint, which are believed to be Samsung's Blackjack II and LG's Dare. Kodak didn't disclose how much money it was seeking in the suit. It said it's held discussions with both companies to try to resolve the matter, but they've been unable to reach agreement. Samsung and LG have both indicated their plans to fight the charges, but the dispute could, of course, end in a settlement before ever reaching a court's docket. Eastman Kodak makes a large slice of its revenue from licensing imaging patents to several companies including Panasonic, Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Olympus, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) and others. Kodak is making a bigger push in the mobile device space of late, most notably with the recent launch of the ZN5, a co-branded device from Motorola that features a 5-megapixel camera. Release.

Pictured: Samsung Blackjack II and LG Dare

Social Media Deals Report: This 199-page report, filled with charts and data, examines the categories, number and size of VC and M&A deal in social media from 2007 through 2008. Visit the ContentNext Reports page