about-electronics.eu

Tech: A study carried out among students at five UK universities has concluded something we’ve known all long: the mobile web is crap.Two-thirds of the 1,000 students surveyed said the mobile web was such a poor experience they gave up trying, says InfoGin.

The study also found 3G phone owners fared little better, despite their faster connections. Only 18 per cent of 3G phone-using students said they were satisfied with the mobile web experience, telecoms.com reports. (…)

read more

Heise: According to a study entitled Global Tech Insight 2006 conducted by TNS Infratest, most Germans still tend to shy away from television and Internet on their cell phones. Only 14 percent of cell phone users use their mobile devices to surf the Internet, while only two percent use a TV function. In contrast, 16 percent listen to the radio over their mobiles. The study found that mobile phones are still most frequently used to make calls, write text messages, and take photos.When asked why they were not using other services such as mobile Internet, television, and radio, the majority of cell phone users stated that they did not need them or that the costs were either too high or too hard to understand. In addition, some of the people surveyed stated that the quality of images on mobile TV services was not sufficient.

(more…)

read more

BBC: Mobile phone users in the UK accessed the internet via their handsets about 15.9 million times throughout December 2006, says the Mobile Data Association.The association’s report shows an increase of one million unique sessions over November 2006, the prior record. However, much of the recent increase could be due to seasonal gift-giving said Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Jupiter Research.

In the past three months, mobile users accessed the web 45.6 million times. Unique consumer internet sessions on the O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone networks were included in the report.
Despite the new numbers, Mr Husson said mobile data was “far from being mainstream”.

(more…)

read more

Electronista: HTC’s once mysterious Athena smartphone has been released on T-Mobile in the Netherlands. Now called the Ameo, the smartphone is substantially upgraded from early specifications and features a 5-inch, 640×480 touchscreen as well as an 8GB hard drive to complement its miniSD card slot.

Also new is a 3-megapixel camera and an unusually quick 624MHz XScale processor. Bluetooth 2.0, GPS mapping, and Wi-Fi are equal components.

Battery life is long in spite of these features, with 5 hours of talk time and 300 hours when in standby. Exact availability outside of Europe remains unknown, but the presence of quad-band GSM support with both HSDPA and UMTS Internet access points to an eventual North American release, likely with T-Mobile’s American division.

read more

Reuters: Yahoo unveiled a slew of deals with mobile phone handset makers and network operators to feature its Web search services on tens of millions of phones worldwide, the company said on Monday.In a flurry of announcements with major electronics makers, officials of the Internet media company introduced software that mobile phone users can download themselves at a news conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Yahoo said it had developed oneSearch, a new mobile search service that give phone users instant answers. OneSearch redesigns search to offer potential answers as immediate search results instead of how computer-based Web search returns lists of search results.

Yahoo is seeking to outpace archrival Google Inc., which dominates the market for computer Web search, by being the fastest to win over consumers to its mobile phone Web search and related advertising system. Yahoo will offer mobile search software directly to phone users to download as well.

The company unveiled new or expanded partnerships with handset makers Motorola Inc., Nokia, Samsung Electronics Co., and Research In Motion Ltd. to include the new software on some of their phones.

A year ago at the same industry trade show, Yahoo unveiled relationships with Nokia and Motorola to pre-install Yahoo software on several million mobile handsets as part of its “Go” effort to expand beyond computer-based Web search onto other devices including mobile phones and television sets.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it was working with Sony Corp. to surf Web-based video programming with a remote control on Sony Bravia TV sets, which come ready to run Internet video.

Nokia agreed to a follow-on deal that will put Yahoo services on Nokia’s “Series 40″ line of mobile phones — the most widely available line of Nokia phones in the world, extending a year-old deal on some advanced “Series 60″ models.

Samsung, the world’s No. 3 mobile phone maker, agreed to distribute and pre-load services on “millions” of mobile phones available in 60 countries of the world.

Research in Motion expanded an existing deal to encourage millions of Blackberry users to download Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 onto their e-mail machines. The agreement calls for tighter integration between Yahoo and Blackberries by mid-2007.

Yahoo extended a deal with 3 Group, a unit of Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa that operates advanced mobile networks in countries across Europe, in which Yahoo Go for Mobile and oneSearch will be offered to customers in Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Denmark. More markets will follow in coming months, the two companies said.

Yahoo said it had agreed to an exclusive partnership with Norway’s Opera Software to make Yahoo the provider of Web search on millions of mobile phones in some 100 countries worldwide. While little known in the United States, Opera is popular among mobile enthusiasts internationally. The news sent Opera shares up 3.1 percent in Oslo market trading. (…)

read more

Hooray, it’s a big success. Alas, it won’t live.
That’s the story of Opera Mini – a web browser that allows you to access the internet on your mobile phone. Since its launch seven months ago, over 5 million people have downloaded it. Most popular are Google, e-mail, community sites and (surprise, surprise) porn.
Eskil Sivertsen of Opera Software is convinced there’s a demand for a free, easy to use, mobile web browser.
A recent research from Hostway however has found that 73% of the people that can access internet services from their mobile phone are not taking advantage of it.

(source: zdnet.be)

read more