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Android largely unharmed in Google-China row

A mobile phone with Google’s Android operating system that was delayed in China will now ship next week, in the latest sign that Android has gone largely unscathed by a row between Google and the Chinese government.

A subsidiary of mobile carrier China Unicom has started letting users reserve the Motorola XT701 and estimates the phone will ship around March 13, according to its Web site. The pre-sale appeared to have started Thursday or later.

The price of the Motorola XT701 was listed as 4,299 yuan (US$630) on the China Unicom site. The 3G phone has a 3.7 inch touchscreen.

The Motorola phone was one of two Android phones delayed in China after Google said in January that it planned to stop censoring results on its China-based search engine. Google’s announcement raised fears of a possible government backlash and harm to the use of Android in China. Google.cn is currently still censoring search results, but lifting its filters would defy Chinese regulations.

Google did postpone availability of Google apps on Android phones from Chinese carriers. That is certainly a blow for the company, said Zhang Jun, an analyst at research company Wedge MKI.

“Mobile is a really promising market,” he said. After Google’s announcement, Motorola formed a search deal with Google’s Chinese rival, Baidu.com.

But interest in Android itself, an open-source OS, has stayed high among companies in China. Lenovo, China’s top PC maker, and Dopod, which distributes HTC phones in China, both say their plans to use Android on upcoming phones have been unaffected. The top executive at China Unicom this week called Android a mainstream OS and said the carrier, which is state-owned, will use it on phones. And a government-linked computer maker, Lemote Technology, is optimizing Android to run on a laptop with a Loongson microprocessor, part of a state-backed line of chips.

China’s IT ministry has said it will not restrict the use of Android as long as the OS conforms with Chinese regulations.

Still, “right now people probably expect too much in China for Android,” Zhang said. Windows Mobile is dominant in the country and some local phone makers simply use their own Linux-based OSes, he said. Chinese phone makers usually target low- or middle-end buyers, and Android so far is suited to high-end chipsets, he said.

That could change. One reason is that MediaTek, a Taiwanese company that supplies low-price chipsets to much of the Chinese market, is working on a package that pairs its hardware with Android.

A Motorola representative said the Android phone now on pre-sale was its only handset affected by Google’s move.

The other Android phone delayed after Google’s announcement was from Samsung. When asked if its phone had gone on sale or if any others were also affected, Samsung said it was still providing Android smartphones for Chinese customers.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

Original here (Computer World).

China Mobile allowed to set up Taiwan subsidiary

Taiwan said Friday it has given the go-ahead for China Mobile to open a subsidiary on the island, making it the first mainland telecom firm to establish a foothold there.

China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone operator by users, plans to sell electronics materials wholesale, according to its application filed late last year.

However, the Taipei-based Commercial Times said the mainland firm was aiming to use the subsidiary to take a stake in Far Eastone Telecommunications, one of Taiwan’s leading cell phone operators.

No mainland capital has previously been allowed for investment in local fixed line, cell phone and satellite operators.

China Mobile said in April last year it hoped to invest in Far Eastone, aiming to buy a 12 percent stake for about 17.8 billion Taiwan dollars (560 million US dollars).

Far Eastone was not immediately available to comment.

The economics ministry said Friday the rules would have to change before China Mobile would be able to buy into Far Eastone.

Taiwan and China have been governed separately since the end of a civil war in 1949 but Beijing considers the island part of its territory and has vowed to get it back, by force if necessary.

However, tensions have eased markedly since Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008 on a China-friendly platform.

Original here (AFP).

Apple iPhone prices may drop in China

The top executive of China Unicom said today that the company hopes the sale price of iPhone will be cheaper in China.

“For Chinese consumers, the sales price for iPhone should be the-cheaper-the-better, and we totally understand that,” said Chang Xiaobing, chairman of China’s No 2 cellphone carrier, at the opening of the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing on Friday.

But he noted that Unicom does not have a total say on any price reduction because it has to get the nod from Apple.

Chang’s remark seems to be in line with earlier reports that Unicom may reduce the price of iPhones by 20 to 30 percent at the end of March. The Beijing Morning News cited a report earlier this week from Merrill Lynch that Unicom may lower the iPhone price to 3,000 yuan ($439.46) to 3,500 yuan from the current 4,999 yuan to 6,999 yuan.

Chang also confirmed that Unicom and Apple are discussing the possibility of delivering an “official” WiFi-enabled iPhone to China.

China Unicom adopted a high pricing strategy for Apple Inc’s smartphone in China. Many analysts believe that the high pricing has driven away many Chinese consumers and even turned them to dealers of smuggled iPhones.

China Unicom said it has sold more than 300,000 iPhones in China in the two months since it launched the popular smartphone in China in October.

Original here (China Daily).

MediaTek steps up first-quarter revenue forecast

Amid stronger-than-expected demand for handset chips from China and emerging markets, Media­Tek Inc (聯發科) has raised its forecast for first-quarter revenue, the nation’s largest handset chip supplier said on Friday.

MediaTek, the world’s second-largest handset chip supplier after Qualcomm Inc, expects revenue to grow between 5 percent and 10 percent in the first three months this year from NT$29.1 billion (US$908.8 million) in the previous three months, the company said in a filing with the stock exchange.

This was better than the Hsinchu-based company’s Feb. 1 forecast of a quarterly increase of up to 5 percent to NT$30.6 billion.

Last month, MediaTek saw revenue fall 0.6 percent to NT$7.88 billion from NT$7.93 billion a year ago and drop 41.99 percent from the previous month’s NT$13.58 billion, the company said in a separate filing on Friday.

In the first two months, revenue was up 51.79 percent to NT$21.46 billion from NT$14.14 billion a year ago, the company’s financial data showed.

Citigroup analysts last month said MediaTek could report a quarterly increase between 10 percent and 15 percent in first-quarter revenue thanks to strong business performance in January, when sales rose nearly 119 percent year-on-year.

While analysts have warned that the saturated handset market in China could cause downward pressure on the company’s margin, MediaTek said it would stick to its previous guidance for first-quarter gross margin, which is expected to narrow to between 56 percent and 57 percent from 58.7 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to its filing on Friday.

Aside from Chinese mobile phone makers, MediaTek also supplies handset chips to such global brands as Motorola Inc and LG Electronics Inc.

The company’s shares were down 0.97 percent to NT$509 in Friday trading after the announcement of the revised forecast. The stock has declined 8.78 percent since the beginning of this year, compared with a fall of 6.37 percent on the benchmark TAIEX.

Original here (Taipei Times).

China Unicom to focus on 3G network construction in 2010

China Unicom will focus on 3G network construction this year, and ensure enough investment in 3G and fixed-line broadband sectors, though the company’s overall investment will be slightly lessen than that in 2009, said the board chairman Chang Xiaobing.

Chang reiterated that China Unicom will focus on 3G construction this year. The telecom operator plans to complete the 3G network coverage of all the towns and part of important villages of the nation in the first half of 2010.

Speaking of cooperation with Apple, Inc. on iPhone, Chang said that the cooperation has greatly promoted China Unicom’s development, but it shouldn’t depend on the smartphone alone to exploit 3G market. The carrier is also working on collaborating with other mobile device manufacturers and expects to roll out diverse smartphones.

Chang also reveal that China Unicom will continue the research, development and tracking of 4G technology, and may experiment at a proper time, but it’s impossible to apply the technology this year.

In response to cellphone business, Chang said the company was interested in mobile-phone payment service, in which phones morph into wallets, and would hold an open attitude to cooperate with the financial institutions. But it has no plan to buy stake in any banks now.

Original here (Trading Markets).

ZTE Corp – Company Profile: Global Goals

The goal of ZTE Corp., the second largest telecommunications equipment and phone maker in China, has remained simple and unchanged for the past four years, continuing to push further into the European and American markets.

At the four-day Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s largest mobile technology fair, in 2006, the Chinese telecom giant proudly displayed its slogan “Making the World Converge,” a symbol of its commitment to global telecommunications.

While the company has altered its strategy since 2006, it has always kept its overall goal in mind. At this year’s MWC, the company focused on its variety of wireless terminal products, including handsets and data cards, rather than its system solutions.

The move is one of ZTE’s overseas strategies to burnish its brand by introducing more low-cost quality cell phones and data cards to overseas customers. The company ranked No. 4 in the world in terms of handset unit sales in the last quarter of 2009 and sells cell phones to more than 160 countries.

“Sales of ZTE terminal products grew by more than 40 percent year on year in 2009 and we hope to keep growth around that figure this year too,” He Shiyou, Executive Vice President of ZTE, said at the fair. “Sales of wireless terminals surpassed 60 million last year. This year we expect to sell 80 million.”

While expecting healthy demand for its wireless handsets and data cards to continue, the company also anticipates subscribers for its handsets based on homegrown TD-SCDMA technology to increase by 500 percent this year.

Wide platform coverage

Predictions indicate that subscribers for mobile broadband connections would reach more than 3 billion in five years from the current 300 million worldwide creating a surge in demand for smartphones. Domestic handset makers such as ZTE and Huawei Corp. are gearing up to turn this growth into a profit boost.

The number of mobile broadband connection users will witness “an explosive growth” when the average selling price of smartphones decreases to below $150 from above $300 in a couple of years, according to Xu Xinquan, vice president of Huawei’s terminal subsidiary.

“Everyone has to get ready for the turning point, be it Internet content providers or handset makers,” He told NetEase’s tech channel during the MWC.

ZTE debuted its ZTE Bingo, which they dubbed “the world’s first ultra-slim big-screen BMP 3G smartphone,” at the fair this year, in addition to five smartphone models based on Google’s open-source operating system, Android.

BMP refers to the Brew Mobile Platform developed by U.S. wireless telecommunications giant Qualcomm. This, plus models based on Linux, Windows Mobile and OMS-platform phones already available on the company’s product portfolio, made ZTE one of the few handset makers to offer smartphones for a variety of mobile operating systems.

ZTE is also a member of the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit organization that manages the open-source Symbian platform, the successor to Symbian OS—the world’s No.1 operating system for smartphones used in Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

“We don’t have a large number of Symbian-based models, because the majority of our clients don’t have this requirement. But with a relevant technological repertoire, we are able to produce Symbian-based handsets if they want one,” said Xiong Hui, ZTE’s Vice President for handset marketing.

Tailor-made handsets

ZTE produces handsets largely for contracts from telecom operators. According to Xiong, the fact ZTE develops handsets according to operators’ contracts is conducive to ensuring the healthiness of its business.

“We need the right timing to promote services and software for 3G handsets, especially smartphones, and we haven’t launched the five Android models until operators inked contracts for them. That’s the way we develop handsets,” Xiong said, adding that this mode of ZTE’s handset development is unlikely to change in the next few years.

On the European market, operators including Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica and T-Mobile have all begun to purchase tailor-made handsets and data cards from ZTE.

A Goldman Sachs report says smartphone sales will grow by 38 percent in 2010. Earlier this year, ZTE established a European office for mobile phone operations to better tailor products for European customers and ensure a stronger market and brand presence.

“Smartphones will become a very important development direction for ZTE in 2010 in Europe and even worldwide,” said Lin Qiang, president of ZTE’s European office for mobile phone operations.

ZTE’s bestseller in Europe last year was the X760, a 2G handset with sales of more than 1.5 million units, Xiong said.

“In contrast to the belief that 2G handsets aren’t selling well in Europe, the success of the X760 convinced us that Chinese phone makers still have chances to attain commercial successes overseas if they offer customers exactly what they want,” Xiong said.

ZTE’s next focus is the North American market, the largest single mobile phone market worth nearly $26 billion that accounts for approximately 20 percent of the global market.

The phone maker’s competitive edge in securing contracts from operators for tailor-made handsets will help the company to achieve sales breakthroughs in the United States, another market dominated by telecom operators, although U.S. retailers generally abide by a no-questions-asked return policy for all products, Xiong said.

TD-SCDMA competence

In the home market, predictions claimed China would produce more 3G handsets than 2G phones this year. Domestic sales of ZTE’s wireless terminal products stood at nearly 20 million units last year, up almost 200 percent compared with 2008, Xiong said.

The MWC allowed ZTE to showcase its strengths and achievements in TD-SCDMA technology-based products.

Thanks to a final push for 3G telecom services in China earlier last year and increased spending by telecom operators on tailor-made handsets, ZTE sold TD-SCDMA (a homegrown 3G technology) handsets to 3 million of China’s over 600 million mobile services subscribers last year.

“ZTE is absolutely the number one in terms of last year’s sales of TD-SCDMA and CDMA handsets in the domestic market,” Xiong said. The company expects its new TD-SCDMA subscribers to exceed 18 million in the world’s largest mobile communications market this year.

Still, overseas sales generated about 70 percent of the company’s handset revenues last year. It has yet to promote TD-SCDMA-based handsets among users outside of China, Latin American and Africa.

A pre-4G foothold

In addition to its glitzy performance in the handset market, ZTE is striving to gain a foothold in researching and developing the next generation of mobile technologies.

It introduced its latest LTE-enabled data card, the AL600, at the MWC, pledging to introduce more LTE products this year. LTE, short for Long Term Evolution, is the last step toward the 4G radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks.

Sales of ZTE’s data cards increased by more than 400 percent last year, Xiong said.

Nearly 2,000 engineers specialized either in system solutions or terminal products have worked together on LTE technologies and products for more than two years and will upgrade the technologies to support the TD-SCDMA network this October, said Zhang Liang of ZTE.

“Small-scale commercial trials cannot be expected until the end of this year,” Zhang said.

LTE technologies and standards have won more supporters than other pre-4G technologies. China Mobile, which was licensed to construct and run China’s TD-SCDMA network, joined global operators such as UK-based Vodafone, Japanese NTT DoCoMo, American AT&T and Verizon in adopting LTE standards. With the help of Motorola, China Mobile will provide a TD-LTE trial network with a much higher transmission speed at the Shanghai Expo starting this May.

ZTE has inked more than 10 contracts with operators worldwide to deploy trial LTE networks on the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Spain, Singapore, the United States and Hungary, He said.

Original here (Beijing Review).

Alliance forged to boost China’s CDMA cell phone industry

China Telecom, a major telecom service provider, announced it has co-launched a CDMA industrial alliance Friday with more than 100 other companies from cell phone design and making to software and content providers.

Most of the member companies engaged in the non-profit alliance, initiated by China Telecom, were cell phone-related heavyweights such as Microsoft, Huawei and Samsung, said Yang Xiaowei, chairperson of the alliance, also vice president of the China Telecom Corporation.

Yang said as 3G and mobile internet technologies were introduced into everyday life, more individualistic and diverse demands for terminals have appeared.

“To meet these diverse demands, we need a highly concentrated and complementary industry between telecom service providers, chip makers, software platforms, terminal makers, and content providers,” said Yang.

The alliance aims to streamline and coordinate industrial resources, helping member companies better cooperate in design and production of CDMA cell phones, and push forward product innovation, said Yang.

CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, is a method for transmitting multiple digital signals simultaneously over the same carrier frequency, and is most widely applied for cell phones.

Sales of CDMA terminals topped 32 million units last year, four times the amount in 2008, said Yang.

Original here (Xinhua).

Mobile World Congress 2010 – day three overview

Steve Jobs wins ‘personality of the year’: Oh, the irony! Apple is one of the few companies in the mobile industry that doesn’t have a booth at Mobile World Congress, but its CEO has been named by the GSM Association, which organises the annual cellphone confab, as this year’s “personality of the year”. Other awards went to Research in Motion for its new BlackBerry Enterprise Server, to HTC for the best handset in the Hero. The award winners were announced by British actor Stephen Fry.

New Web browser for BlackBerry handsets: BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion has unveiled a new Web browser for its smartphones. The news is being welcomed by BlackBerry users — the device’s browser hasn’t been as good as modern browsers like Safari on the Apple iPhone. Like Safari and Web browsers on Android and some Symbian phones, the new BlackBerry browser is based on the advanced Webkit rendering engine.

Projector phones set for take-off: A number of manufacturers have been showing off phones with tiny projectors — known as pico projectors — at the Mobile World Congress, suggesting the technology could be ready for mainstream commercial adoption. The idea is they can be used for impromptu presentations or to show the holiday snaps on a wall to friends or family. Samsung’s new Android-based Beam smartphone has been getting much of the attention in Barcelona this week. It’s not surprising: in addition to its pico projector, it’s a gorgeous-looking touch-screen phone.

Original here (Tech Central)

Mobile World Congress 2010 – day two overview

Put mobiles before PCs, says Google’s Schmidt: In a wide-ranging keynote address at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt defended the company against accusations from mobile operators that it wants to turn them into “dumb pipes” (see next item), suggested that Google’s future lay in mobile devices more than in computers tethered to desktops, and touted Adobe Flash support in mobile devices running the company’s Android operating system.

Vodafone warns of Google dominance: Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, the world’s second-largest cellphone group by subscriber numbers, used a stage at Mobile World Congress to warn of Google’s growing dominance in Web search and advertising and suggested regulators should intervene to prevent the company from becoming a monopoly. “From a policy perspective, this should be looked into,” he said. “We need to ensure choice and avoid concentration before it’s too late.”

Ericsson demos 1Gbit/s LTE: Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson has demonstrated a fourth-generation Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network at Mobile World Congress able to download data at 1Gbit/s. To date, Ericsson has signed commercial LTE contracts with five major global operators; AT&T in the US, Verizon in the US, TeliaSonera in Norway and Sweden, MetroPCS in the US and DoCoMo in Japan. For the demonstration, Ericsson used four carriers of 20MHz each. Motorola, meanwhile, announced that it had won a contract to build Saudi Arabia’s first LTE network. At the same time, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg has predicted there will be 50m connected devices by 2020.

Symbian Foundation shows off new OS: The Symbian Foundation, which develops the Symbian operating system for mobile phones used by Nokia and other handset manufacterers has been demonstrating its Symbian 3 platform at Mobile World Congress. It’s the first fully open-source version of the popular handset software. “Now that it is fully open source, the door is open to individual contributors, device creators and third-party developer companies, as well as other organisations, to create more compelling products and services,” a Symbian spokesman said. Symbian 3 will include support for multi-touch finger gestures, 3D acceleration and HDMI, needed to connect handsets to high-definition screens.

HTC Legend

HTC takes the wraps off Legend: Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC has announced three new handsets at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but it’s the Legend, which runs the latest version of the open-source Android operating system, that is stealing most of the attention. Analysts say the single-block aluminium phone could give Apple’s iPhone a run for its money. The Legend has a bright 3,2-inch LED display and, despite the unibody design, includes a user-removable battery, unlike the iPhone. The Legend is expected to go on sale in April. The two other handsets announced by HTC are the Desire, which has also been garnering a fair amount of attention for its large 3,7-inch screen, and the Bravo.

Original here (TechCentral).