Samsung streams on Sprint with MM-A700
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Samsung&#39;s latest phone offers streaming video and audio, including from major old media companies, along with a megapixel camera.
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(InfoWorld) - The groundwork is being laid for a risky experiment in consumer electronics as manufacturers prepare for Sprint Nextel and Clearwire's Xohm WiMax service. Motorola unveiled a WiMax client chipset on Tuesday and praised Sprint's strategy of leaving WiMax clients to device makers and retailers. But that plan, a change of pace from U.S. carriers' usual practice of selling and subsidizing phones themselves, could take years to pay off in the mass market. The chipset, introduced at WiMax World USA in Chicago, is small, economical, and more power-efficient than 3G platforms, according to Gary Koerper, Motorola's vice president of platform planning and architecture. It will hit the market in client devices in the second half of 2008, with the company initially focusing on building WiMax phones that carry its own brand, he said. The devices will be offered for various WiMax services around the world, including Xohm. With Xohm, Motorola will have free rein to make whatever kind of device it wants as long as it's certified to work on the carrier's network, Koerper said. Motorola calls that great news, but some observers see a hard road ahead with device makers or carriers pushing an alternative to carrier-subsidized phones. "The model Sprint is pursuing is really taking the shackles off Motorola innovation and Motorola's brand," Koerper said. Typically, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker has to develop a new product and then get a carrier to buy in on it. With WiMax devices designed to work with Xohm, Motorola can look straight to the consumer and build what they want. This could make it easier for Motorola to compete with Apple's hot iPhone, he said. Apple's product has stolen the thunder from Motorola's popular Razr line even though it commands a full, unsubsidized price. Sprint's whole WiMax initiative is a risky bid to gain an edge in the U.S. mobile market, where Sprint is in third place by subscribers. The technology promises a fat pipe to the Internet that subscribers can take with them all over a metropolitan area. Motorola said its chipset offers 10Mbps downstream and 3 to 4Mbps upstream, far faster than current 3G and comparable to a cable modem. But it will take more than fast Internet access to attract and keep paying customers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research. There are other ways to get fast data service, and there will be more in the future, so Sprint needs to create attractive services such as a VoIP application, high-quality video content, and easy tools for professionals to access corporate networks over VPNs, Lin said. Ease of use, support, and coverage will also be key because cellular services already have those established, he added. "You don't automatically get hundreds of thousands of early adopters," Lin said. The lack of a subsidy isn't even the biggest concern for vendors trying to sell devices for such a service, but it is a long-term problem, he said. Although down from about 95 percent a few years ago, the percentage of phones sold with subsidies in the U.S. is still 85 percent or more, according to Lin. Worldwide, about half of all cell phones are sold with subsidies, he said. As people look for more special features on their phones, they are looking outside of carriers' offerings more often, but it will be three years before the average U.S. consumer will want an unsubsidized phone, Lin predicted. Len Lauer, an executive vice president at mobile technology giant Qualcomm, was also pessimistic in an interview earlier this year. He doesn't think the mobile industry can be transformed by new strategies like Sprint's nor by the any-device, any-service band planned for the 700MHz wireless spectrum to be auctioned next year. U.S. consumers are too addicted to subsidies to buy many devices sold outside the carrier channel, said Lauer, a former Sprint executive. Motorola is pitching its chipset as competitive with 3G instead of an expensive, futuristic new technology. The cost of the chipset is already low and will keep falling to the point that Motorola could soon bring the chipset to inexpensive phones to be used primarily for voice in developing markets, Koerper said. The chipset, consisting of a baseband modem and a radio reference design, has been tested and verified with WiMax network infrastructure from Motorola and other leading vendors, the company said.
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InfoWorld - Sprint Nextel plans to cooperate with enterprises on the rollout of its WiMax mobile broadband network, letting the customers install and own short-range base stations in their buildings with automatic roaming onto the carrier&#39;s WiMax network outside.
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InfoWorld - Underdog mobile operator Sprint Nextel quietly rolled out an emerging technology on Monday to give customers a strong cellular signal and flat-rate calling at home.
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Sprint Nextel and its hardware partners sought to convince a small audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that their WiMax plans are on track, despite the recent departure of Sprint&#39;s CEO and the dissolution of its partnership with Clearwire.&quot;We are exactly where we said we&#39;d be,&quot; said Barry West, Sprint Nextel&#39;s CTO and president of the company&#39;s Xohm WiMax business unit. Sprint is in the process of soft-launching in Chicago and Baltimore, he said.Executives from Nokia and Samsung said they both expect to have user devices ready for the second-quarter launch. In addition, Motorola said it is working on a device that will operate over Sprint&#39;s EvDO (evolution, data optimized) cellular network, Wi-Fi, and WiMax.Since the&#160;ouster of Gary Forsee, the former CEO and chairman of Sprint Nextel, who was thought to be a champion of the company&#39;s WiMax plans, onlookers have speculated that the network might not roll out as planned. In addition,&#160;Sprint Nextel ended a partnership with Clearwire&#160;to jointly deploy WiMax, a further cause for uncertainty. Sprint has been hemorrhaging mobile subscribers and recording declining revenues since its purchase of Nextel.Beyond the unrest internally at Sprint, the company faces critics of WiMax who say that the technology won&#39;t work as well as cellular technologies in a mobile environment and that it won&#39;t support international roaming as easily as the cellular standards.But in describing the reasons why Sprint chose WiMax and why it intends to aggressively pursue the network, West further sought to soothe market qualms about the future.&quot;Being first to market is a huge advantage,&quot; he said. &quot;And WiMax technology is here, now, and mature.&quot;While an investment in a totally new technology requires a strong reason for change, this won&#39;t be the first time Sprint&#39;s doing it, he noted. WiMax doesn&#39;t follow on the upgrade path for CDMA, the basis for Sprint&#39;s cellular network, so it requires a totally new network.Sprint did that first when it moved from an analog cellular network to digital, West said. The same went for the move to third-generation technology, although in that case Sprint stuck with the CDMA path.Sprint also considered LTE (Long Term Evolution), a fourth-generation mobile technology, but one big disadvantage is that it&#39;s not yet available, he said.Moving to WiMax represents a shift to a new air interface technology: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) instead of CDMA, which is the basis of the current 3G technologies. According to West, when CDMA is deployed in a wider section of spectrum, which helps boost throughput, the computational complexity required goes up exponentially. That requires higher-performance chips, which come with a steep price tag, he said.With WiMax, Sprint plans to use a wide section of spectrum that can dynamically switch from carrying data up or down, depending on user requirements, he said.Beyond the radically different network technology, Sprint envisions a very different business model than cellular, one that will support any kind of standard device.&quot;Look at the cellular model. It was very successful but also very frustrating,&quot; West said. He was referring to the business model in the United States where operators subsidize phones and then require long-term subscriptions from users.With Xohm, Sprint will allow any WiMax-compliant device to run on the network, he said. End-users will buy the devices themselves, probably at a variety of retail stores and hopefully for a low price because vendors expect the cost of WiMax chips to drop dramatically, like Wi-Fi. &quot;Since I&#39;ve got no money in you, I don&#39;t need a contract,&quot; West said. That opens the door to a wide array of new pricing scenarios. End-users could pay for the day, week, month, or on a regular subscription, he said.While West declined to cite specific prices, he said a monthly subscription to Xohm will be comparable to existing DSL rates.Initially, Sprint will sell PC cards and modems, but by the end of this year as many as&#160;10 different kinds of devices could be available, he said. Navigation and gaming devices are possibilities, he said.If the market has any doubts about Sprint&#39;s plans for the network, it should rest assured that, regardless, the future of WiMax is more certain, panelists said. &quot;WiMax is bigger than Sprint,&quot; said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president and general manager for Intel Capital and for Intel&#39;s WiMax business.Motorola alone has 17 contracts for networks and is involved in 60 trials, said Fred Wright, senior vice president and general manager at Motorola. &quot;This technology is real, it&#39;s not a fairy tale,&quot; he said.
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Sprint Nextel  is on track to  launch commercial services for its next-generation WiMax  high-speed wireless network at the end of April, Chief  Technology Officer Barry West said on Tuesday.
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Sprint (FON:NYSE - news - research) and SBC Communications (SBC:NYSE - news - research) set a plan that will give their customers access to both companies&#39; Wi-Fi Internet service hot spots.
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Cingular Wireless have announced plans to begin deploying a fast high-speed mobile wireless data network. The company expects to offer wireless data speeds between 400-700 Kbps (kilobits per second) and bursts
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Sprint is launching a set of services designed to help businesses get a better grip on the array of wireless devices and applications that enterprises are rolling out with increased frequency.
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A variety of business notebooks will come with access to Sprint's 3G network built in.
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Sprint Nextel is taking a different path to high-speed wireless than its rivals: Instead of bidding billions of dollars on airwaves in a federal auction, Sprint is building a network that uses WiMax technology, a move that has attracted plenty of criticism.
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Sprint on Monday introduced the Mogul, the company's first Windows Mobile 6 device that will support its enhanced EV-DO Revision A network. However, the capability will require a software upgrade.
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(InfoWorld) - Smartphone users will be able to watch broadband television and snap high-resolution photos on their handsets in 2007 thanks to new processor and memory chips launched at theÂ 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Together with dropping prices, these chips will help spread smartphones from high-end business users to a larger mass-market audience, according to hardware component manufacturers attending the 3GSM show. Camera phones will get a boost in power by using high-resolution image sensors from Micron Technology. The company's new MT9-series sensors use a 1.75-micron pixel design in resolutions of up to 5 megapixels. The top-shelf version, MT9P012, captures video at 60 frames per second at 720p resolution or 30 fps at 1080p and will be ready for sampling in the second quarter of 2007 with mass production by the middle of the year. Likewise, OmniVision Technologies announced a 5.17-megapixel camera module for mobile handsets using the OV5623 CameraChip sensor. That sensor will help high-resolution camerasÂ enter the mainstream mobile handset market, the company said. To store those large photo files, SanDisk announced it had developed a high-capacity version of its iNAND embedded flash drive, capable of holding up to 8GB of data. The new drives are now compliant with JEDEC (joint electron device engineering council) standards, allowing phone vendors to use them in designs that demand enough storage for mobile TV, multimedia downloading, digital audio players, gaming, and GPS. Also supporting mobile television, Qualcomm said that its UBM (Universal Broadcast Modem) chip would ship ahead of schedule, delivering mobile TV capability to mass-market handsets. A single UBM chip contains three technology standards, including FLO technology, digital video broadcasting for handhelds, and integrated service digital broadcasting-terrestrial. Qualcomm also said it would boost mobile broadband by the end of 2007 by launching the Mobile Data Modem 8200, a chipset supporting the next generation of WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access). A smartphone using that chip could support mobile Internet browsing, real-time location services, and multimedia sharing, the company said. To support these capabilities without driving up retail prices, vendors say they need to increase the market size, so another feature of many chips launched at 3GSM was low cost. Broadcom launched its EDGE processor, integrating a radio frequency transceiver, baseband functions, and multimedia connectivity support on a single chip. That design lets phone vendors create slimmer designs, reduce power consumption, and control costs, Broadcom said. Likewise, Qualcomm said its Mobile Station Modem (MSM) 7225 chipset would allow vendors to sell broadband-capable smartphones for less than $200. The chipset uses a dual-processor architecture for high-speed downlink packet access. The company will ship samples in the third quarter of 2007 and expects vendors to bring it to market by the first quarter of 2008. Microsoft said it had another way to open up larger markets for smartphones, adding desktop-quality features to handsets, such as VoIP calls and faster e-mail traffic with higher-quality graphics. Microsoft launchedÂ Windows Mobile 6, its latest OS for mobile handsets, and said it expected a crop of smartphones using the OS to reach market in March or April. Marvell Technology Group pledged to help that migration by announcing it would support the new OS on its PXA300-series processors. Those chips were formerly known as "Monahans" until Marvell bought the division from Intel in 2006. Â
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Sprint introduces the Samsung Ace smartphone. Similar to the Samsung BlackJack, it offers dual-mode functionality for world roaming.
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Vodafone shows off new handset colour Samsung has stayed true to its word and created a white-edged version of its F700 smartphone.â¦
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Customers of Sprint Corp. and SBC Communications Inc. will be able to use both companies&#39; wireless Internet connections with less hassle under a reciprocal deal announced Friday.
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Sprint Nextel Corp  is on track  to launch commercial services for its next-generation WiMax  high-speed wireless network at the end of April, Chief  Technology Officer Barry West said on Tuesday.