Apple announced iPad international availability and pricing – the “magical and revolutionary device” will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on Friday, May 28.
Smartphone News
Visa and DeviceFidelity are working to allow iPhone users to make payments by simply waving their iPhone in front of a contactless payment terminal. The new technology, developed by DeviceFidelity and certified by Apple, combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that hosts Visa’s contactless payment application, called Visa payWave. The technology will work for both iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G devices.
Since Sprint’s acquisition of Virgin Mobile, the company has rolled out a series of new prepaid products, and today Sprint officially unveiled its new comprehensive multi-segment approach to the prepaid wireless marketplace. On May 12, Virgin Mobile will unveil three new "Beyond Talk" plans that all include unlimited messaging, email, data and web.
The NPD’s "Entertainment Trends in America" update reveals three quarters of iPhone and iPod touch users are connecting to the Web to download entertainment content and apps.
The worldwide mobile phone market grew 21.7% in the first quarter of 2010, a strong rebound from the market contraction in Q1 2009. Growth was fuelled by increased demand for smartphones, and the global economic recovery. According to the IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 294.9 million units in the first quarter of 2010 compared to 242.4 million units in the first quarter of 2009.
Motorola has successfully deployed the world’s first indoor over-the-air (OTA) TD-LTE showcase network at the Expo Center at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Together with China Mobile, Motorola is demonstrating end-to-end TD-LTE solutions at the Information and Communication Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.
“This is the future, this is the next big thing: save money on international calls and merging online social places with voice on your cell phone. You will never use your cell phone the same way!,” says Micha Benoliel, CEO of Digitrad, when asked by Smartphone.Biz-News.com about CallbyName, the company’s flagship product.
Telefónica has selected Myriad to provide social networking aggregation services to Telefónica’s mobile subscribers across 12 countries in Latin America. According to the 5-year strategic partnership agreement Myriad will deliver social networking solutions to more than 80 million customers.
ERCOM, a secure communication solutions provider, announced that it has upgraded Cryptosmart Mobile Suite with secure SMS feature. Launched in 2008, Cryptosmart Mobile Suite is a patent based and certified solution for mobile communications that protects both voice and data transmission, encrypts data stored on the device, and blocks MMS, SMS and internet attacks.
Although a week ago Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein still believed that “Palm can survive as an independent company” (FT), Palm was already up for sale and it was pretty obvious they would quickly find a buyer.
And they did. The company announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with HP, under which HP will purchase Palm at an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion.
Read more