Our beloved manufacturer of carrying cases for portable electronics, Krusell, enlightens us again with their top 10 list of best-selling phones for the month of January 2009 (or should that be best-selling phone holsters?).
Month: January 2009 Page 1 of 3
Today, there was a piece analyzing recent reports whereby Apple was well on its way to wipe out DS and PSP from the handheld gaming sphere, and that it would therefore seek to address a number of weaknesses in its next iteration of the iPhone (and iPod Touch) that would add a few currently missing features that should bridge the – already slim – gap to the PSP.
- Enhanced graphics (to address its current lack of loading complex textures);
- improved processing capabilities (through its own ARM chip, which is currently developing; this follows the acquisition of PA Semi last spring);
- Better camera (minimum 3.5 mega-pixels) and video-recording.
Did you know about Vodafone’s Flipfont app? No, I didn’t think so; it seems to have gone more or less unnoticed. Well, it allows you to – listen to this – customise your phone frontpage. Woah! How cool is that? The downside? Well, you need to pay £1.99 for the pleasure, per screen! I don’t think so… And, apparently, (now) so does Vodafone. Amidst the iPhone/AppStore rage and the “revelation” that UI might actually matter to people, they seem to have realized that changing a font will not necessarily change the uptake of consumption to new levels. And because they cannot have the iPhone (although it has the Blackberry Storm, which is performing much better than the initial damning reviews would have suggested), they will launch their very own app store, or so they said (if you read Dutch, that is; how nice that we have a Dutch blogger amongst us who translated it for us).
“If you think of three players, China Mobile is very strong in China; it’s a big country. Vodafone is very strong in Europe, Africa, India. Verizon is very strong in the US.“If these three companies could work more closely… in the management of customers, procurement and service creation, we could be unbeatable, quite frankly.”
This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, the definitive guide to the must-read blogs on everything mobile is hosted over at Tsahi Levent-Levi’s VoIP Survivor blog. Check it out here.
Twitter is this phenomenon of which some people say it is the business that never was. Not that Twitter never was but that it never was a business… which is why they apparently need fresh money, or more specifically $20m, or so it is said (see also here) The valuation? A cool $250m. A lot, you say? Well, they allegedly recently turned down a $500m acquisition offer from Facebook, so it’s a bargain!
I’ll be giving a presentation at Casual Connect Europe in a few weeks and have hence been looking a little at the concept of social gaming. In particular with the iPhone success story, this concept has received its fare share of the limelight recently – and rightly so: the unique distinguishing factor of a mobile phone is that it is always with its owner and that it’s always on, making it the perfect tool for connecting with people (well, this is what they were invented for in the first place), and the iPhone does that well not only with voice or SMS…
Another week, another carnival. #157 is hosted over at mjelly this week. Check it out here! Lots of goodies in there, including the Nokia biography by Tomi Ahonen, well something like that at least 😉