about-electronics.eu

Heise: According to information provided by the Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding the EU will before the year is out introduce a cap on the costs of using a mobile phone in another EU member state.

The regulation would come into force before Christmas and the cap mandated thereby would lead to roaming charges dropping significantly below those of today, Ms. Reding told the German daily Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

The EU had been forced to take this step, because the mobile operators had not been prepared to lower their unreasonably high roaming charges of their own accord, the Commissioner observed. “This is a good example of how EU policy as a whole should work,” she said.

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Forbes: Pioneer said its net profit more than doubled in the fiscal third quarter to December after it sold some of its securities holdings, but the company issued a profit-warning for the full year, citing lower than expected sales of plasma TVs. 

The company also said that it will delay construction of a new plasma factory after prices of the flat-screen sets declined.

In the three months to December, the consumer electronics maker posted net profit of 2.4 billion yen, up from 1.1 billion yen the year earlier after selling an undisclosed amount of securities as part of a review of its asset portfolio.

Operating profit rose a more modest 3.4% to 5.0 billion yen, as the benefits of a restructuring drive began to flow. In the year to March 2006, Pioneer spent more than 13 billion yen on restructuring.

Revenue slipped 1.1% to 214.6 billion yen in the quarter, due to weak sales of plasma TVs.

Pioneer did not disclose sales for the third quarter, but said it expects to sell 640,000 plasma TVs in the year to March, down from an earlier forecast of 720,000 TVs.

Pioneer’s problems arose after the company bought the PDP-making operations of NEC for 40 billion yen a few years ago, giving Pioneer a 16-17% share of global plasma output.

But because NEC supplied its products to Sony, which later stopped making plasma televisions, the purchase meant Pioneer was saddled with overcapacity and declining prices.

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DotGizmo: Global gaming chief Abizar Vakharia from Dell has said that Dell could possibly be looking towards a gaming handheld in the future, although there are no concrete plans to do so yet.

This means even more competition on the handheld front, and would Dell opt for the UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC) route to keep gamers hooked, or will they go to the extreme portable market which currently involves a two-horse race?

Chances are the final product will be the former, as it would make more sense for Dell to use its close ties with Intel and Microsoft as leverage instead of working on a portable gaming device from ground up to compete with the Nintendo DS Lite and Sony PSP.

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Philips’s new Xenium 9@9 series of phones offer longer talk time of up to 10 hours and stand by times of up to 40 days.  (…)

The Philips Xenium 9@9a has the longest battery life with up to 10 hours of talk time and 40 days of stand by. It’s a basic dual-band GSM phone with WAP support, a 1.5-inch, 128×128 pixels 65k color screen. It has 2mb of internal memory, polyphonic ringtones and a phonebook capable of storing up to 1,000 entries.

AE: as Philips sold its gsm division to Chinese CEC, these phones probably won’t make it to Europe.  

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TechDigest: Apple iTunes may begin selling TV shows to Europe from the spring, according to Luxembourg’s economic minister Jeannot Krecke, who said that Apple had been in talks with Luxembourg authorities for several months.

“Apple is going to extend its electronic retail activities in Luxembourg by launching this coming spring its iTunes video platform for the sale of videos in Europe,” Krecke told Agence France Presse.

And in other iTV news, the BBC is looking to make a little history today possibly becoming the first traditional TV station to offer all of their programming on demand and over the Internet.

The BBC’s new iPlayer service will lets viewers watch all of the BBC’s programmes from the previous 7 days, and even lets them store shows on their PC for up to 30 days. A final decision approving the service will be made May 2nd.

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Electronista: Cellphone makers have misjudged the market, says a new report by New York-based ABI Research. While many designers are focusing on HSDPA and other 3G wireless Internet connections, most of the buyers looking beyond basic phones are more interested in media playback and style, the analysts say.

Though sales of cellphones reached one billion units in 2006, Internet-focused phones such as the Nokia E61 actually suffered from lower sales in the year, baffling many expectations. Phone owners are also “fickle” when it came to fashion, ABI’s Stuart Carlaw notes: while Motorola’s RAZR may have saved the company years ago, it no longer has its early appeal.

Predicting the future, the researchers specifically singled out the iPhone as one of the phones standing the best chance of success.  The Apple handset not only emphasizes its iPod-like media functions but should also do well because it breaks from the conventional lineups that no longer interest them, ABI writes.

In contrast, the report bodes ill for the recently unveiled RAZR V3xx and other devices that rely almost exclusively on their 3G support as a selling point.

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Anna Lahkola of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority together with colleagues from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK had interviewed some 1500 patients suffering from glioma, a malignant tumor of the connective tissue of the brain, the southern German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung citing information provided by the study reports. Thus after more than 10 years of use there was a 39 percent increase, according to the study, in the risk of developing a glioma on that side of the head to which a person normally held his or her mobile handset.

However there is still an intense debate about whether or not the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobile handsets represents a health hazard. Thus Danish researchers at the end of last year had concluded from the results of a large-scale epidemiological study that mobile phone use, even if continued for decades, did not increase cancer risk. Earlier studies, on the other hand, have, like the present one, detected an increased cancer risk on that side of the head to which a user commonly holds his or her handset.

Such studies have multiple sources of error, however.

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T3: Nokia’s been showing off an updated version of its game-playing phone behind closed doors. The original N-Gage may have fallen by the handheld gaming wayside, but Nokia is hard at work on a powerful new edition.
According to a report on PocketGamer, the platform was shown off to US game developers and publishers last week at a behind-closed-doors preview event, presumably with the intention of convincing the industry to start making games for it. According to reports, the companies included top names like EA, Sega, THQ, Capcom and Sony Online Entertainment, which suggests that some high profile franchises could be on their way to the platform – and that’s a positive sign for Nokia.

The N-Gage platform seems likely to be a feature of Nokia’s forthcoming N95 super-phone, and then on later N-series models. Due to its rotating screen and some nifty slide-out buttons, the N95 can be configured to sit in the hand much like a PSP. The phone launches in March, but we’re expecting to hear more info on N-Gage at the 3GSM mobile phone expo in mid-February. Stay tuned for the full lowdown.

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Guardian: The palpable sigh of relief emanating from the games industry last week when Sony finally announced that the PlayStation 3 will reach the UK on March 23 was swiftly drowned by howls of outrage from consumers (expressed vehemently on The Guardian’s gamesblog) regarding the next-gen console’s RRP of £425 (640 euro).Hard done-by UK gamers were understandably unhappy at a price that compares unfavourably, to say the least, with US and Japanese prices of $599.99 and ¥60,000 – roughly £300 (450 euro) and £250 (375 euro) – respectively. So why will the PlayStation 3 cost so much more in the UK, even though we will have waited four months longer for it than the Americans and Japanese?

There was only one thing for it: an audience with Sony Computer Entertainment’s UK managing director, Ray Maguire – the man who dictated the PS3′s UK price. Maguire puts the finger on a number of reasons. First comes the most obvious: VAT. He says: “There’s a compulsion within the media to look at everything as a snapshot, and do a calculation, normally based on just the RRP in somewhere like the US and just the RRP in the UK. What you should do with the RRP from the US is add sales tax.”

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