India, one of the largest telecom industries in the world with almost 300 million mobile users is reported to be housing as many as 25 million mobile phones with an IMEI number. The IMEI number, a unique 15-digit code for every mobile manufactured, is an integral part of any mobile handset as it is used to monitor the activities from the phone.

The department gave the operators 3 months to arrange for the equipments if the hardware wasn’t in place. In a letter to all the mobile service providers in the country, DoT said

In the interest of national security, all cellular mobile service providers in unified access service licences (UASL) are hereby directed to make provisions for EIR so that calls without IMEI or with IMEI consisting of all zeroes are not processed or rejected,

India is a tremendously huge marker for grey market phones, most of which originate in China. Lately, there has been a surge in the demand for ‘almost-real’ fake phones in the marker, with the introduction of many high-end phones from companies such as Apple, Nokia and HTC.

The department, today, announced that it has extended the deadline to April 15th after the previous deadline of January 6th was blatantly ignored by the telecom companies. However, DoT this time has put its foot down and made it very clear that if the telcos fail to comply with these guidelines will not be allowed to take on any new subscribers after the expiry of the deadline. The telcos are already paying a daily fine to DoT.

The fate of these 25 million handset users now clearly lies on the livewire, as the very reason most of these handsets were purchased because their original counterparts were too expensive for them, or there was a lack of awareness in the market. Eventually, the Chinese handsets still serve as a very cheap alternative and you can grab a very basic color – screen handset with a decent 3 mega pixel camera for as Rs. 3000.

A “credible source” tells WebOS Arena, that Best Buy would be hosting a 60 days exclusive deal for retailing the Palm Pre. The Pre, which will be launched on Sprint’s network in the US would be the second phone to be available exclusively at Best Buy, following the Samsung Instinct which was touted to be highly anticipated and better than the iPhone.

Of course, as it is with the tons of rumors floating out there, there’s a huge cloud of uncertainty surrounding this one too.

[Via PhoneArena]

What’s Zit Picker you ask? 

It’s exactly what it sounds like it is. You know what are Zits, don’t you? Zit Picket makes you pinch, pop, touch and pick the Zits off a beautiful girl’s face on the iPhone. The goal of the game is simple. Keep the girl’s face clean off any marks and she’ll be thankful to you. If not, all the stress and pain will make her cry.

The game makes use of the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, allowing your to zap the Zits with either one of two fingers, touching or pinching them. Do that and *ploop* goes one. You are awarded points for every single Zit you clear. There are 3 different types of Zits and based on their complexity, they carry different points.

Zit Picker is FREE for the first 2500 downloads, so get it in the App Store while you can.

The update bumps up your phone to Firmware v11.0.008 from the previous Firmware v10.0.010 and brings in overall stability of the phone’s OS. The update should be available through the Nokia Software Updater, but I’ve come across a couple of people who’re reporting no activity at their end. So if you’re lucky enough for the update to show up at your desktop, remember to back up your data before proceeding.

A complete list of changes, courtesy of S60Inside.com:

• Homepage is not defined for Vodafone Live!
• Last word disappears when selecting receiver in SMS
• My Nokia: phone displays “#” in front of Application name.
• During Back-Up & Restore operation, calendar entries are not restored
• Operator menu link within Welcome application
• Invalid message pops up before playing the file received via Bluetooth.
• Input Method, VKB just display number when selecting a WLAN access point which contains a password.
• Chinese box HWR control buttons and FS HWR control bar are too small.
• Unable to add image to Contact bar from Gallery when there is about 5 GB of data in memory card
• In Arabic UI, in calendar, the arrows on the top are reversed in week view and day view
• UI-rotation is too sensitive
• Search: Google search service is missing in Search.
• Contact could not display when switch numbers in Singtel 2-in-1 SIM card
• Maps: Wrong layout of the strings in the Maps search and favorites views
• Could not send new email if user name and password is not pre-defined
• Phone drops from service when both A5/3 +GEA3 used simultaneously with WLAN
• The Messaging application crashes a lot specially when replying or trying to send SMS you have to remove battery to be able to use the device again
• License Manager for Maps is not integrated to SW
• 5.0 Touch: Phonebook crashing when adding detail: Birthday, Anniversary
• Web screen is messed up
• Non stop Music Player “Library update”
• Clock, Alarm is inactive when phone is power off.
• APN Configuration Settings Update to be used for the Setting Wizard
• Ex-Factory settings are wrong
• UE unable to open Setting Wizard
• StartUpSettings version updated.
• Phone lost correct time during power off
• USSD – “Call Control Send USSD” command
• UE drops from 3G, then cannot sync to 3G cells
• Browser: Flash objects causes problems while browsing

[Via MobileBurn]

Apparently, everyone’s up celebrating Bond week. With Quantum of Solace out this week, one of the partners of the movie, Sony Ericsson has just launched a Microsite celebrating the spirit of the movie and, obviously, promoting their phones.

Check out the site, it has a nice bond theme.

Bearing a sturdy titanium body, which apparently has been forged at 850ËšC, the phone features 4GB of internal memory for a 3MP camera which is supplemented by integrated flash. For the internet savvy user, the phone is 3G enabled.

So how much does the Ferrari brand damage your pocket? Although no official pricing is available, TechRadar estimates it to be around £3,000.

The company is making the camera the USP of the phone, highlighting that it is “so perfect, this whole page was shot on the mobile itself.” Apparently, C905 has the ability to reproduce high quality prints at any size.

Check out the advert on the Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Telenor has been eyeing a stake in the company for quite a while now and has been in talks with the company ever since. Italy’s Telecom Italia too was rumored to have bought a 49% stake in the company, but the claims soon died down. However, it has been confirmed that it is infact Telenor which now controls a whopping 60% stake in the company.

Why so much interest in the company?

India’s Mobile subscriber base is growing at an alarming rate and there’s already enough competition in the market. Unitech Wireless recently won license to operate in the 13 telecom circles of India from the Indian government, something which increased the demand of the company. 

With a pan Indian license, the company was looking for strategic partners to do business with and they’ve finally settled with Telenor here.

The study, which was carried out by the Mobile Data Association suggests that the amount of text messages sent in a month could be around 6.5 billion. Along with the text messages, users also send 1.5 million picture messages and video-based text messages every day.

Could this be credited to the fall in tariffs? Or could this because of the evolution of the mobile market as a whole? I sent a total of 433 text messages last month, according to my service provider.

Rogers has reported a net income of USD 386 million, compared to USD 210 a year ago and the operator is highly crediting this to the sales of Apple’s iPhone 3G and the subscriber growth to go along with it. While two-thirds of the total iPhone sales were to existing subscribers who upgraded to the iPhone with new contracts, Rogers sold around 85,000 iPhone 3Gs to new subscribers, selling a total of around 255,000 iPhone 3Gs. The revenues of the company climbed to US$2.34 billion, a staggering 14% rise.

Speaking on the announcement, President and CEO, Ted Rogers, said:

The results for the quarter also clearly reflect the substantial and very successful investment Rogers has made to bring Apple’s iPhone 3G to more than a quarter million Canadians over a very short period of time. While the upfront cost associated with adding this many iPhone subscribers so rapidly is high, it is an investment that we expect will provide considerable returns in the form of higher revenue per customer and lower churn in subsequent periods.

All this makes me wonder what the fuss was all about.

Now, before you start wondering what’s with Nokia and the Benches, let me elaborate. The benches are actually a clever advertising medium to promote their ‘Comes with Music’ service here in the UK. These benches are fitted with Nokia’s handsets and headphones into the armrests. These handsets will be pre-loaded with music, depending on the the region where they are located. For example, Liverpool may get The Beatles while Birmingham might just get Black Sabbath.

DId someone say vandals? Nokia is staying one step ahead here, by placing a security guard at every location. There will also be a live performer and different appearances will be made each day until Christmas.

While the popular word is that the build number is RC28, one reader over at Engadget has come across a mystery RC29 update. His device now runs the RC29 after his device rebooted “a few times”, according to the post. Another user, however, required only one single reboot and only about 5 minutes of his time.

Have you come across such updates yet?

All this while, folks who wanted to go round the earth on their mobile screens had to be content with Earthscape, an app similar to Google Earth, but using it’s own imaging. In fact, the developers had dropped its price from $10 to FREE.

This is the third major release from Google’s stable within a span of 5 days. And boy is this a fantastic release. The Google Earth app takes full advantage of the iPhone’s hardware and gives us some impressive features including the ability to:

• View the Terrain just by tilting the phone.
• View your location on the globe by using the “My Location” feature.
• Search cities, places and businesses around the Globe by making use of the Google Local Search.
• View millions of geo-located photos from around the world with the new Panoramio layer.
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles for the places.

The app, obviously, is available FREE on the iTunes Store (iTunes Link). I tried searching for the app on the Indian store, but I was told that it is not yet available.

However, if you’re a developer and if neither the iPhone OS nor the Android OS are your grounds, you need not worry. Sony Ericsson might just be the someone you were waiting for. After the much awaited launch of its XPERIA X1 handset, Sony Ericsson has now released a new Windows Mobile SDK version to the public. 

MobileCrunch has a list of the key features of the new SDK:

• Compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – with predefined templates for greatest ease of use
• Windows Vista OS support (adding to its support for Windows XP)
• Built-in true Xperia X1 phone device emulator – allowing developers to run, test and debug panels locally on a desktop without phone hardware
• Key mapping support in the device emulator

For the lesser mortal phones, Access also unveiled the ALP mini. The ALP mini operating system is like a stripped down version of the new successor and is intended to drive smaller devices.

The official availability of ALP 3.0 is yet to be announced, though ALP mini has been made available to the manufacturers already.

Making the jump from 1.5.x to 2.0, a lot of exciting new features have been introduced with this release. On of the most annoying things about the app was the time when there was no signal. As per the team, their focus for this version was to make the whole experience faster and more reliable at the same time. Here’s what version 2.0 brings.

• Improved Performance: There’s a notable speed improvement and absolutely no lag while scrolling.
• Multiple Account Management: The new version lets your manage multiple Gmail or Google Apps account, allowing you to quickly switch between them. No more running two apps for Gmail and Google Apps.
• More Shortcut Keys: The new release adds more power to QWERTY phones, by adding even more shortcut keys for scrolling, undo, new and old conversation etc.
• Offline Support: At times when there’s no or bad signal, the app allows you to compose a new message or read through your most emails. Outgoing messages are saved to the Outbox and sent out automatically.
• Multiple Drafts: The new version can also store multiple drafts on the phone.
• Additional Region Support: The version 2.0 is now available in over 35 languages.

As usual, the latest version is available for download at http://m.google.com/mail

The team has also posted a fun video run-through of the new features.

Today, companies like Apple are making mammoth profits through their application store for their phones and Google too has joined the race. It only makes sense for RIM to give the best to the developer community.

We’ve already talked about DeviceAnywhere in the past and even spoke to them at CTIA.

This addition comes right after the location team released new optimizations that enhanced the abilities of Google Maps to calculate your location even more accurately. 

My Location with Wi-Fi works pretty much similar to how your location is calculated based on Cell tower information. In this, information transmitted by Wi-Fi access points is used to calculate your location. Theoretically, since the range of the routers are very small compared to that of a cell tower, the location info calculated is more accurate.

However, they go onto mention that even though WiFi based location is available in many of the major cities in the world, the coverage and accuracy may vary. 

Is this what Ewan needed?

Do you see this as a feature that’ll change how you use Google Maps?

The Net60 framework, along with Microsoft’s Visual Studio provide you with a powerful platform to develop apps for the S60 platform very easily. The app will be demonstrated at the Show today.

Dusan Babich, CEO of Red Five Labs, said:

We have been building the .NET compact framework for Symbian devices for many years. Symbian developers have never before had such an easy to use, easy to deploy, development experience.

The version 2.0 of Net60  brings:

• .NET Compact Framework 2.0 compatibility (including generics)
• Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 support
• SQLite support with an ADO.NET provider
• A managed namespace providing access to native Symbian APIs (telephony, camera, OpenGL, GPS etc.)

With Net60, developers can run managed WinMo apps on S60 without any changes. The same code and programming environment can be made use of to develop apps for the S60 platform.

These sales figures have now ranked Apple as the world’s third largest mobile phone supplier in terms of revenue. In fact, Apple sold more iPhone 3Gs than RIM’s entire BlackBerry lineup taken together. The only obvious companies holding the first two places are Nokia and Samsung respectively.

So how well a decision was the introduction of the iPhone for Apple? Even though Apple had ventured into unknown territory, the iPhone being their first mobile handset, it now contributes about 39% of the company’s total business.

The country added almost 10 million new mobile subscribers last month, taking the total figure to 310.62 million. Now, if my maths knowledge serves me right, that’s about 4 new subscribers every single second. However, the penetration rate still lags at 27.5%, leaving out enough room for further growth.

The country’s market is large dominated by the GSM technology, contributing about 75.2% of the total subscriber base. 7.65 million new GSM subscribers were added last month while the CDMA base contributing 2.34 million.

Bharti Airtel continued to be the country’s largest cellular operator, adding 2.7 million subscribers out of the 9.9 million. Vodafone, which ranks third added 1.86 million subscribers. Airtel currently services 77.48 million subscribers in the country, while its closest rival, Reliance Communications serves about 56 million.

It would be interesting to take a look at the market share for the mobile handsets and the manufacturers that carry these new subscribers.

[Via Cellular-News, Photo: Sirensongs]

However, what’s surprising is the fact that a major portion of the new mobile subscribers being added today come from the rural parts of the country. According to the recent statistical data, mobile carriers are getting more than 30 percent of new users from villages. 

As per the data, of the 25 million new mobile subscribers added during April 2008 to June 2008, 8 million were from the villages, taking the total to 70 million now. This is a substantial increase over last year’s total of 40 million.

Another interesting fact that the statistics tell us is that nearly 75 percent of all the mobile users in the villages use services offered by private telecom operators and not by the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). This could be largely due to the aggressive marketing campaigns undertaken by the operators and the at par rates being offered by them.

Today, most mobile carriers are investing in infrastructure build ups in the sub-metro states, since they show better growth rates compared to the metros. 

According to a recent study by US based Yankee group, 62 percent of all the handsets imported costed less than $50. That’s less than what I pay monthly for my mobile bill.

MobileTechAddicts got hold of a leaked internal memo and have published the full text on the site. 

Internal Orange Statement on the Bold:”Following reports of software issues with the BlackBerry Bold handset across a variety of mobile operators, Orange has decided to act in the interest of its customers by suspending shipments of the device in the UK. We are currently awaiting feed back from RIM as to when an industry wide fix for these issues will be in place, and expect this suspension to be an interim measure.We apologise for any inconvenience this issue may cause you.”next stepsBlackBerry/RIM are doing everything they can to resolve this issue and will be completing full testing and validation to ensure future handsets do not have any quality issues.  This may take a couple of weeks so it’s up to us to do what’s best for our customers.

Interestingly, the exact cause/nature of the “software issues” is not known.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which has been more widely referred to as the “Tube” is all set to hit China, albeit without 3G or Wi-Fi. The lack of 3G may be due to the lack of coverage in China, but there’s hardly any reason to negate the W-Fi on the phone. 

No 3G and no Wi-Fi on a phone running Symbian S60 5th Edition with a full touchscreen front, makes it what, a hollow “Tube” ?

Initial reports by him suggest that the following changes have been made:

• Much faster orientation switching (open/close lid etc)
• Nokia Maps 2.0 now built-in
• Download! application updated (v 3.1.736)
• Cosmetic upgrade to Music player
• Update for Flash Lite 3 and Flash video
• Wi-Fi improvements
• New baseline for VoIP
• Realplayer supports FLV format (i.e FLV files can be played directly like MP4)