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PC World: Economic woes slashed cell-phone sales growth in the third quarter of this year as consumers waited longer to replace their handsets, and the market is likely to contract next year, according to Gartner.

The global slowdown affected sales in both rich and poor countries, though results varied around the world. Western Europe and Japan were hit hardest, with unit sales below those of a year earlier. Handset sales worldwide grew 6 percent in the third quarter, less than half the 16 percent growth that took place in the third quarter of 2007, according to Gartner. Unit shipments of phones grew to more than 308.5 million in the quarter from 291.1 million in the third quarter of 2007.

The news will be yet more grim in 2009, when Gartner expects worldwide unit sales to decline between 1 percent and 4 percent from 2008. New users still flocked to cell phones in the third quarter, but sales of replacement phones were hit hard, the company said.

Emerging-market gains drove up sales in Eastern Europe but sales in Western Europe were down, from 47.2 million to 43.5 million. Motorola suffered most among the major manufacturers, seeing its sales fall from nearly 38 million units to less than 25 million, and its market share drop to 8 percent from 13 percent.

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SlipperyBrick: DisplaySearch has released its quarterly reports on the number of TVs shipped worldwide for Q3 2008.

Despite the poor economy, TV shipments grew by 11% quarter-over-quarter and 6% year-over-year. Over 53 million TVs were shipped worldwide in the quarter.

Shipments in North America grew more than expected with a 12% increase compared to last quarter to 10 million units.

Globally the share of flat panel TVs grew to 57% in Q3, a gain of 1% compared to the previous quarter.

Plasma TVs retailed the same 7% share of the worldwide market. The top TV brand globally was Samsung.

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Techradar: Sony PlayStation’s US division has moved quickly to dismiss reports from earlier this week, emerging from anonymous sources apparently within Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, that the company had plans to slash the price of the PlayStation 3 around March 2009.

While both Microsoft’s various Xbox 360 packages and Nintendo’s Wii are pretty competitively priced right now, Sony has stuck to its guns on pricing.

Sony has constantly come under attack from some quarters for its strategy on PS3 pricing.

Following the rumours of a planned PS3 price cut emerging yet again this week, a Sony Computer Entertainment America rep told Edge:

“There are no plans for a price reduction on PS3 in March 09, and anything reported on or discussed otherwise is purely rumour or speculation.”

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Edge: Last week, Microsoft’s Mindy Mount said the company expected Xbox 360 to surpass the original Xbox’s global installed base with 25 million units sold by the end of November.

Now, a report in industry mag MCV says that milestone has officially been reached.

“We’ve already surpassed the installed base of the original Xbox – which is a really significant milestone. We’ve been blown away by the appetite of people to consumer digital entertainment experiences,” said Chris Lewis, Microsoft VP of Interactive Entertainment Business for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Xbox 360 hit the mark in about three years. The original Xbox took around five years to sell the same amount.

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ITProPortal: A study by research firm Nielsen Online shed light on the booming mobile internet market in Britain which grew eight times faster than wired internet across the country, although in absolute numbers, the latter still accounts for the overwhelming number of connections.

In the last quarter alone, mobile internet was up by 25 percent with the younger generation of surfers more likely to use the internet on the move than stuck to their desktops. A quarter of all mobile internet users are aged between 15 and 24 while only one in six of desktop internet users.

According to Nielsen Online, more than 7.5 million UK users access the web regularly through their mobile phones. The research did not cover mobile broadband internet using dongles (or tethered mobile phones) and laptops.

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DVICE: Plug your iPod into this DLO HomeDock HD Pro, and it upscales your video to 720p/1080i quality.

Notice the HDMI and optical digital audio ports on the back, giving you a digital connection between your music player and home theater AV system. It even has an RS-232 control port for those high-end home theater mavens.

Can this dock really make HD video out of your iPod movies? Our experience with upscaling video to HD tells us not to get our hopes up.

However, if you have some good quality video that’s not too compressed, this might be able to do it justice.

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Electronista: South Korean scientists say they have developed a new material they call “true blue” that should speed up the development of organic light-emitting displays (OLEDs), according to a weekend report.

The announcement comes from a chemistry professor at Pusan National University, Jin Sung-Ho, who led the state-funded project, which was performed in conjunction with engineers at Seoul National University.

Up until now, scientists had trouble developing efficient blue lights for the application. OLEDs require green, red and blue lights in their screens for proper color reproduction.

With this breakthrough, Sung-Ho says OLED screens can be made more efficient. Compared to LCD screens, OLED displays offer advantages such as a greater field of vision, better color accuracy and use up less energy.

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HDTV UK: Panasonic has announced that its TH-65VX100 and TH-50VX100 (65- and 50-inch, respectively) VIERA plasma TVs will be arriving in the UK from January.

According to the press release, there’s new-generation plasma technology on board including a “Dynamic Black Layer” positioned at the front end of the panel which is supposed to reduce the amount of predischarge to one-sixth that of conventional models.

In English, this means that the contrast ratio is a self-proclaimed 60,000:1, offering deeper, richer blacks and expanding the colour gamut.

Also on board is an 18-bit digital signal processor, “Digital Colour Reality” technology for fine gradation from light to dark.

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Techradar: HTC has apparently doubled its projected shipments of the T-Mobile G1 handset after demand for the device has soared to unprecedented levels.

The company now thinks it can shift a million of the new mobile phone by the end of 2009, outstripping a huge amount of its more powerful rivals’ releases by some margin.

Earlier projections of 400,000-600,000 from analysts have now been quashed, so Google must be feeling pretty content at the moment with its first effort.

Although it has only been available in the wild for a month so far, the imminent sales in countries such as the Netherlands, Austria and Germany will help drive demand even further.

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Engadget: For those of you plugging your ears whilst humming along in hopes of this whole 3D revolution fading away, we’ve got a rude awakening headed your way.

Just days after hearing that the HDMI specification could be updated to better handle stereoscopic 3D content, along comes word that Panasonic has submitted a proposal to the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) for an official BD standard to store 3D imagery formed of “left / right-eye two-channel Full HD images.”

Panny reportedly made the move early in order avoid a format war.

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SlipperyBrick: Hitachi isn’t a name you hear as often in the consumer electronics realm as Sony or Samsung. Despite that, Hitachi makes some fantastic home theater and AV products.

Hitachi is branching into the professional market with its latest AV projector.

The projector is called the CP-X10000 and offers a whopping 7,500 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 2500:1. The projector offers ultra-wide range lens shift and a 10-bit full digital video processor along with a 10,000-hour filter.

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Electricpig: The 6260 looks quite similar to the 6220 Classic, aside from the quite obvious difference that his puppy has a slide-out keyboard, maintaining the profile whilst boosting the screen size.

It also sports Wi-Fi connectivity and respectable 5MP snapper.

HSDPA connectivity also features, with photo/video sharing using Nokia’s Ovi service and navigation via A-GPS and Nokia Maps. A music player, web browser and ‘hot key’ access to all the main features make navigation a breeze.

It’s expected to begin shipping at the beginning of next year, priced around €299.

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