Change is coming swiftly at Motorola Inc., fueling further speculation on the company's direction. CEO Greg Brown apparently told employees Friday in an internal memo that he personally will take charge of the company's ailing handset business. Brown's internal memo, reported first by...
AS WORD SANK IN that Motorola Inc. is "exploring the structural and strategic realignment" of its business - including the possible creation of a standalone company for its devices business - attention has turned to the company's strategy, its actual value and potential outcomes.Strategically,...
Nokia Corp. and Sony Ericsson are gearing up for what looks to be an epic battle on the mobile content playground. But the complicated world of mobile content is more like one of those bar-fight scenes in the movies where it's tough to tell...
The landscape of the wireless industry is in flux as you read this story, with product launches, pre-announcements and hype flying by like so much confetti on the wind.Or is that confetti actually the cellular industry after being fed through a shredder?The traditional cellular...
As word sank in that Motorola Inc. is "exploring the structural and strategic realignment" of its business - including the possible creation of a standalone company for its devices business - attention has turned to the company's strategy, its actual value and potential outcomes.Strategically,...
Motorola Inc.'s CEO Greg Brown today said the company is exploring options to accelerate the recovery of its mobile devices business, including the possible creation of a standalone devices business.Rumors circulated among market analysts earlier this week that Motorola might consider selling off its...
Garmin Ltd. yesterday in New York revealed its "nuvifone" product, a personal navigation device (PND) with a touchscreen, GSM/HSDPA functionality for voice and data and native GPS.While the product had been long-rumored, the timing seemed to surprise the market.Photographs of the device immediately brought...
Sony Ericsson said it has secured deals with 10 music labels, adding 5 million new tracks to its mobile music service.The company, a joint venture between Sony Corp. and L.M. Ericsson, announced agreements with Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, EMI, The Orchard and six...
LG Electronics Inc. shipped 23.7 million handsets in the fourth quarter, up nearly 40% year-on-year, based on its expanded feature phone offerings, the company said.LG's handset revenue for the year-end quarter grew to about $3 billion, 12% above the year-ago quarter. For 2007, operating...
Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. will sell its ailing handset business -- and wireless infrastructure assets -- to Kyocera Corp. for about $375 million, the two companies announced.Sanyo's handset unit had been among the top ten original equipment manufacturers (OEM) in the world and a...
The first two handset vendors to report fourth-quarter and full 2007 earnings last week both forecast 10% growth for their sector in 2008, on top of healthy unit volume growth last year. That seemed to reassure industry analysts that macro-economic trends now capturing headlines...
Slash and cashVerizon Wireless said Guitar Hero III Mobile is its third-best-selling game of 2007 after only a few weeks of availability. The game, developed by Hands-On Mobile, was launched Dec. 4 to a limited number of handsets. Guitar Hero III Mobile is currently...
The Japanese-Swedish joint venture, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, had a mixed fourth quarter but ended 2007 with strong numbers and a projection of 10% industry-wide handset growth this year.The news may have affected the vendor's parent corporations' stock values, as Sony Corp.'s stock rose...
Promising to take consumers "beyond music" with a music-centric phone -- a tri-band HSDPA Walkman W760 -- Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications offered two Walkman handsets yesterday in a prelude to the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.The W760 offers built-in GPS with the vendor's...
PREDICTIONS ARE SO LAST YEAR.Instead, let's talk "expectations" - a term that seems to promise a more realistic look ahead at the new year. And there are questions worth asking that dog the conventional wisdom.To keep it tangible, consider issues related to mobile handsets...
While we won't know for a couple of weeks how specific wireless carriers did during the holiday season, it is safe to assume as a whole they did pretty well. It was rare to pass a carrier-branded wireless store and not see hordes of...
The latest casualty in the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) space is XE Mobile, which targeted college-age youth and marketed itself as a hip, provocative alternative to traditional carriers with an affinity program and cheap long-distance calling.According to a message on the pay-as-you-go MVNO's...
That sucking sound you hear is the wireless industry on the mat, gasping for air.Enter the dragon, Steve Jobs, RCR Wireless News' Person of the Year.In the United States alone, in six months, Apple Inc. sold more than 1.4 million iPhones, which rapidly gained...
For spectators at the iPhone circus, two basic questions seem prevalent. Will Apple Inc. sustain the brisk sales of its signature handset at AT&T Mobility here in the United States?And, in the circus' high-wire act, how will the iPhone fare overseas, as it rolls...
CompUSA, a leading consumer electronics retailer and purveyor of unlocked mobile phones, is going out of business, the company announced. The announcement did not cite a reason for CompUSA's sale. But the electronics retailer, founded in 1984 in Dallas, had announced last fall that...
LG Electronics Co. Ltd. said it has consolidated its $350 million global brand-and-product account at Publicis Groupe's Bartle Bogle Hegarty following a review.London-based Bartle Bogle, which had emerged from the pack as the expected winner more than a week ago, will create a unified...
In its annual rating of wireless service, Consumer Reports christened Verizon Wireless and Alltel Corp. its top picks-and largely panned service from Sprint Nextel Corp.Based on nearly 48,000 responses from Consumer Reports' online subscribers, the magazine ranked the five largest wireless carriers' performance in...
Verizon Wireless' declaration this morning that "any application, any device" will run on its network next year is clearly an overstatement-Verizon's CDMA network allows only CDMA-based devices, in use by 60% of subscribers in the United States market, but only 20% of the global...
One little press release can change everything (including this column).Verizon Wireless' announcement today that starting next year it will begin allowing any device and any application to work on its network is groundbreaking-and smart.Verizon Wireless has a tradition of innovation, and this may...
