NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 4 February
04-02-2010
by Deirdre McArdle
Vodafone signs up 35K new customers | Schwartz: Sun 'CEO no more'
Dublin-based Solaris Mobile has linked up with car rental company Europcar. The partnership will see Europcar equip a number of its cars in Paris with TV and radio services either via devices located in the vehicles or directly in the embedded car multimedia systems. Solaris Mobile was founded in 2008 and is working on deploying a hybrid satellite and terrestrial network enabling the provision of mobile TV, radio and data channels as well as broadband and voice communication services to mobile phones and in-vehicle devices.
Mobile operator Vodafone Ireland said it added 35,000 new fixed line and mobile customers during the fourth quarter of 2009, bringing its total customer base to 2.33 million, of which 2.15 million are mobile customers. Breaking it down, Vodafone said it recruited 9,000 new DSL broadband customers during the quarter, as well as 11,000 mobile broadband customers. The operator claims to be the country's second largest broadband provider (after Eircom) with 278,000 broadband customers. The company also announced that it had started its rollout of 3.5G technology in Dublin and will extend it to Cork and other urban areas during the current quarter. This technology will enable it to deliver 21Mbps mobile broadband speeds, according to Vodafone.
The smartphone market grew a massive 39 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009, according to IDC, which said some 54.5 million devices were shipped globally during that time. Nokia, the market leader, shipped 20.8 million smartphones, up 37.7 percent on the same period in 2008. In second place Blackberry maker Research in Motion shipped 10.7 million units, an increase of 40.8 percent, while Apple saw year-on-year growth of 97.7 percent, shipping 8.7 million iPhones globally. Rounding off the top five were Motorola and HTC, which saw growth of 56.3 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively.
In more news of smartphones, South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung said it aims to treble its smartphone shipments during 2010 to approximately 18 million. Though the second largest mobile phone vendor in the country, Samsung has had less of an impact on the booming smartphone market, holding just 3 percent of the market, reports Reuters. Samsung said it will roll out a range of smartphones this year using various operating systems such as Google's Android, as well as aggressively promoting its own open smartphone platform, Bada.
Staying with smartphone news, the Symbian Foundation has said proprietary computer code used in the Symbian mobile operating system is now open source. This means that smartphone manufacturers can potentially save significant money on each device; reports suggest that Microsoft, for example, charges USD15 per phone for its Windows Mobile OS. Symbian currently controls about 50 percent of the smartphone market but has been feeling some heat of late from Apple and Google's launch into the sector.
On Thursday Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation via Twitter in the form of a haiku. His tweet reads as follows: "Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more". At the end of January Oracle completed its USD7.4 billionacquisition of Sun.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 