Motorola shares tumbled, after the handset maker booked a fourth-quarter loss, suspended its dividend and offered guidance that fell short of analyst expectations.
The big bullet points are the new design, a new search system, searching for people to follow based on your handset's address book, and the ability to view tweets/trends without actually signing in.
Truphone integrates well with the handset's address book and the newer version of the software routes calls via the cheapest network available to the handset, be it GSM or Truphone's service over VOIP, but only if you select this manually.
Mr Chipchase's discovery that poor people often share their phones prompted the company to make handsets with multiple address books.Heavy investment in education is also essential.
And when a friend comes to visit, her phone roams on to your base-station, but the charges for any calls she makes appear on her bill.For consumers, fixed-mobile convergence promises the convenience of a single handset, a single address book and a single voicemail box, plus good reception and cheaper calls when at home.
Available in beta, the Kindle for BlackBerry app now brings over 400,000 books right to your handset.
Indians often share mobile phones, notes Stephen Johnston of Nokia, so the handset-maker developed software to allow multiple phone-books on a single handset; this idea is now being brought to Western markets so that users can, say, separate their home and work contacts.
He adds: "You've also got GPS in most smartphones now, so your handset can tell you that this book is £5.99 in a shop 100 yards away, and £4.99 in a shop a mile away".
Ian Carrington, director of mobile ad sales for Google Europe, Middle East and Africa, sketches out a scenario in which a mobile user is reading a book review on a handset in a cafe.
The advance of consumer electronics in the form of handsets, laptops, HDTVs, e-books, video games, GPS, etc., pleads for exponential growth in these technologies.
