Wireless Blog

InterDigital Technology Corporation and Nokia Corporation have agreed to end two legal actions in the English Courts.

Can the lure of wireless Internet service get more people outdoors? That experiment is under way this summer at Itasca State Park, where the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is offering free, ...

After being in development for quite sometime, OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner is now available for end users to buy.

Last month, Apple announced that its new iPhone 3G would cost just $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version. AT&T confirmed that pricing Tuesday, but clarified that those prices are only for certain users -- buyers of any iPhone before the iPhone 3G goes on sale July 11, new AT&T customers, or subscribers eligible for an upgrade discount.

For all others, the price is $399 for the 8GB iPhone and $499 for the 16GB iPhone 3G. In a new wrinkle, customers can buy the iPhone 3G without a service plan, but the price is steep at $599 for the 8GB iPhone 3G and $699 for the 16GB iPhone 3G.

AT&T also announced monthly service plans for the 3G iPhone, ranging from $69.99 for 450 anytime minutes to $129.99 for unlimited minutes. The plans include unlimited Web and e-mail access, but not texting. AT&T will charge $20 for unlimited text messages.

Those monthly service fees are higher than for the original iPhone. So will customers blink at those rates, even with a subsidized service plan?

New 'Value Proposition'

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, doesn't think there will be much blinking. "I believe the new iPhone delivers a different value proposition via software, so the pricing plans will be viewed through the lens of its new software applications capabilities," he said in an e-mail.

Apple's iPhone 2.0 software will be preloaded on all 3G iPhones, AT&T said. The software supports a new ecosystem of third-party software and will connect to the Apps Store, Apple's mechanism for users to download software over the air.

Apple's Web site advertises that users will "find applications in every category, from games to business, education to entertainment, finance to health and fitness, productivity to social networking." And it boasts that the apps will exploit iPhone technologies...

Sprint’s new Airave service, like T-Mobile’s Hotspot@Home delivers customers unlimited mobile minutes while at home.

Like T-Mobile’s service, AIRAVE works with either DSL or cable broadband service. Unlike T-Mobile, Airave does NOT use WiFi to connect to a cellphone, it uses the cellphones own radio

The new femtocell-based system can extend cellular coverage and offer unlimited calling for an additional $15 per month ($30 for multi-cell families).

According to Sprint Users, Sprint is preparing for a market wide launch starting on July 15. The Samsung femtocell is expected to cost around $100 and is said to be about 5,000 square feet. It will work with any Sprint phone.

Unstrung reports that a lack of standards, unresolved technical issues, and unclear business cases are conspiring to push operator plans for commercial femtocell launches into next year. That’s the message from major mobile operators at the recent Femtocell Europe 2008 conference.

Operators are enticed by the potential for cost savings, capacity increases, and new service revenues that the mini home base stations promise, but anticipate commercial deployments in the market some time in 2009.

European regulators cleared Nokia's takeover of U.S. digital mapmaker Navteq on Wednesday, saying the deal would be unlikely to shut off rivals' access to digital maps.

At Glastonbury (wikipedia), the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world, Orange is trialling a dance-powered phone charger and a solar- and wind-powered charging tent.

Not to be outdone, the UK’s O2 is showcasing its new pedal-powered charger at the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park in London from 3 to 6 July 2008.

The company is letting people charge up their mobiles by pedalling on its BMX, Chopper and racer-style bicycles. Since there aren’t many plug sockets in the park it could be your only option.

Posting on DailyWireless may be light this week as we’re off to Portland’s Waterfront Blues Festival, expecting 100K+ visitors over the next 5 days.

Mike Boyd provided the festival with free WiFi — no strings attached — by using Meraki Outdoor nodes fed by Mobile WiMAX. A Motorola CPEi 150 WiMAX modem provides the backhaul. Here’s more on Mike’s setup. Portland is a beta test site for Clearwire, which expects to have some 300 cell towers armed and ready this fall.

Mike installed a 2 Gig Eye-Fi card to automatically post pictures from his camera at the concert. Here’s his photostream. There’s not much yet since the concert doesn’t start until Thursday. He says it works great.

In related news, On-Communications & BT Openzone provided Wi-Fi at the World Cycling Championships in Manchester earlier this year. Today they announced a WiMAX thrust with Airspan.

From mainframes to minicomputers and then personal computers, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That is why the PC industry's commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cell phones.

An engineer at Qualcomm's gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-size circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now common. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cell phone. Many expect the resulting effect to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cell phone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed -- at which Intel excels -- is no longer the most important factor. For a cell phone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost 30 years.

Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just last month at Computex, an electronics trade show in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long...

Google benefits if its applications come preinstalled on a phone. Being the default search engine on Apple's iPhone has helped Google dominate the nascent U.S. mobile search market, with 61 percent share, ...

Internet calling company Skype on Tuesday named former Motorola Inc. executive Scott Durchslag its first chief operating officer.