The 2010 F1 championship starts today and now is a good time to check out the official mobile site where there is a download option to obtain the official F1 app. The compatible devices list is long and includes the iPhone, BlackBerry’s, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. All looks good to me- thanks to Gavin for the tip.

The FCC has launched apps for the iPhone and Android platforms which can test your mobile connection speed. You may need to run them a few times to get some accuracy, but it is good that we can finally test our mobile speeds with ease. Let us know what you get- my first test is pictured in this article. To get the app search for ‘Fcc Mobile Broadband Test’ in the iTunes app store of Android Market.

“Washington, D.C. – Today, the Federal Communications Commission launched new digital tools — the Consumer Broadband Test and the Broadband Dead Zone Report — that allow consumers to test their broadband service and report areas where broadband is not available.

“Transparency empowers consumers, promotes innovation and investment, and encourages competition,” said Chairman Julius Genachowski. “The FCC’s new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country. By informing consumers about their broadband service quality, these tools help eliminate confusion and make the market work more effectively.”

The Consumer Broadband Test measures broadband quality indicators such as speed and latency, and reports that information to consumers and the FCC. The mobile version — the FCC’s first mobile app — is available through the Apple and Android app stores. The fixed version is available at www.broadband.gov. Two popular broadband testing tools are used in this beta version — the Ookla, Inc. Speed Test and the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) running on the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) platform. In the future, the FCC anticipates making additional broadband testing applications available for consumer use. The Commission does not endorse any specific testing application.”

The Phones Show 105 is now available to view online or to download. This time we have the following- “Testimony of Maps Booster, plus a big hands-on review of the Android-powered Motorola Milestone/Droid, plus my youngest ever user story.”

Android users now have the opportunity to try out Opera Mini thanks to a new beta release. The Android browser is exceptionally good, but as a fast alternative it probably has a place.

Opera Software today launched the newest beta version of the world’s most popular browser for mobile phones, Opera Mini 5, on the Android platform. Opera Mini 5 beta for Android brings a fast and cost-efficient Web experience to any handset built on the Android platform.

Opera Mini, with more than 50 million users worldwide, enables Web browsing on almost any handset by compressing data by up to 90 percent before sending content to the phone, resulting in significantly improved page loading and speed. With a simple, easy-to-use interface, Opera Mini offers a desktop-like Web browsing experience on a mobile phone, with favorite features such as Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, password manager and bookmarks. With Opera Mini optimized for Android, more people will be able to get a PC-like browsing experience on their mobile handsets.

“Android users should not have to compromise when it comes to surfing the Web on their phones. Opera Mini will give Android users a fast and cost-efficient access to their favorite Web sites and services,” said Dag Olav Norem, Vice President of Products, Opera Software.

Download

Download Opera Mini directly to your Android phone. To download, simply visit m.opera.com/next with the Android browser or search for Opera Mini 5 in the Android Market. For more information, visit http://www.opera.com/mini/next/.

comScore has reported on US mobile sector market share for January 2010 and the results are quite surprising. Of course year on year stats rarely give a true picture, but these show that RIM and Google are growing the fastest, especially Google, and that Microsoft and Palm are really struggling. Apple is steady with a 0.3% increase which is a surprise.

“42.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the November to January period, up 18 percent from the August through October period. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 43.0 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, rising 1.7 percentage points versus three months earlier. Apple ranked second with 25.1 percent share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft at 15.7 percent, Google at 7.1 percent (up 4.3 percentage points), and Palm at 5.7 percent. Google’s Android platform continues to see rapid gains in market share…”

Michael Morgam from ABI has put together an analysis of the world’s top 10 handset makers. On the whole it looks back rather than forward and does consider ’sell in’ numbers which is the amount of phones shipped out, not sold to end customers.

“The numbers are in, and it’s time to make sense of the data. ABI’s Michael Morgan checks out the world’s 10 largest branded cell phone makers in the fourth quarter of 2009, providing sales data as well as insight into their strategy and competitive position in the market.

The Microsoft Courier certainly looks quite impressive from the video below, but I do wonder if it needs to do more to take off. Thanks to Jah. More details are at engadget.

The European Commision has approved the merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK, but it is dependant on an amendment to an existing network sharing agreement.

The European Commission has cleared the proposed merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK, respectively France Télécom’s (FT) and Deutsche Telekom’s (DT) UK subsidiaries. The decision is conditional upon the amendment of an existing network sharing agreement with Hutchison 3G UK (3UK), to ensure that there remain sufficient competitors in the market, and the divestiture of a quarter of the combined spectrum of the merging parties in the 1800 MHz band, which is one of three frequency bands currently used for mobile communications in the UK. In light of these commitments, the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) withdrew its request to refer the case for review by the UK Competition Authorities.

” I am happy that we managed to resolve the competition issues in this case quickly in close cooperation with the Member State concerned,” said European Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia.

Orange UK is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French incumbent telecommunications operator France Telecom. It provides mobile telephony services in the UK and, to a lesser extent, broadband internet access services on a fixed network. T-Mobile UK is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the German incumbent telecommunications operator Deutsche Telekom. It provides mobile telephony services in the UK.

In the course of the investigation, the Commission identified no direct concerns in relation to the market for the provision of mobile telecommunications services to end-consumers, the wholesale market for access and call origination on public mobile telephone and the wholesale market for international roaming and related markets.

However, the Commission investigation showed that the transaction, as initially notified, could put at risk the future of T-Mobile’s Radio Access Network sharing agreement with 3UK (the Radio Access Network being one of the main infrastructure elements of a mobile network), which is the smallest mobile network operator (MNO) in the UK, owned by Hutchison Whampoa. This could threaten 3UK’s viability on the market and possibly eliminate a competitor. With the merger of the subsidiaries of FT and DT there will be only four players in the UK, hence the concerns about the fate of 3UK.

Second, the investigation also revealed that the combined amount of contiguous spectrum held by the parties at the 1800 MHz level (60 MHz) would be significantly larger than that of their competitors. This could result in the new entity being the only MNO in the UK able to offer next-generation mobile data services through Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology at the best possible speeds within the medium term.

In order to address the competition concerns identified by the Commission, the parties concluded a revised agreement with 3UK which will secure its position as a competitive force on the market, and offered to divest 15 MHz of spectrum at the 1800 MHz level. The Commission concluded that the commitments offered by the parties remedy the identified competition concerns.

You can take 20% off ALL mobile software in the PDA-247 software stores today by using discount code ‘raining’. The stream next to my house looks like it is about to burst so think of this as a gift in case it does blow and there is little news for the next few days:)

The software store links you need are here.

Gartner has produced its final report covering all of 2009 and the news is good for Android, RIM and iPhone. All of the others are down except for webOS which took a measly 0.7% of the market and even Android was only showing 3.9% at the close- expect that last figure to change a lot in 2010 though. So, Symbian did not increase market share after all…

“In 2009, Nokia’s annual mobile phone sales to end users reached 441 million units, a 2.2 per cent drop in market share from 2008. Although Nokia outperformed industry expectations in sales and revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009, its declining smartphone ASP showed that it continues to face challenges from other smartphone vendors. “Nokia will face a tough first half of 2010 as improvement to Symbian and new products based on the Meego platform will not reach the market well before the second half of 2010,” said Ms Milanesi. “Its very strong mid-tier portfolio will help it hold market share, but its ongoing weakness at the high end of the portfolio will hurt its share of market value.”

Samsung was the clear winner among the top five with market share growing by 3.2 percentage points from 2008. This achievement came as a result of improved channel relationships with distributors to extend its reach and better address the needs of individual markets as well as a rich mid-tier portfolio. For 2010, the company is putting a focus on Bada, its new operating system (OS) that aims at adding the value of an ecosystem to its successful hardware lineup.

Motorola sold slightly more than half of its 2008 sales and exhibited the sharpest drop in market share, accounting for 4.8 per cent market share in 2009. “Its refocus away from the low-end market limited the volume opportunity, but should help it drive margins going forward. Motorola’s hardest barrier is to grow brand awareness outside the North American market, where it benefits from a long-lasting relationship with key communications service providers (CSPs).

In the smartphone OS market, Symbian continued its lead, but its share dropped 5.4 percentage points in 2009 (see Table 2). Competitive pressure from its competitors, such as RIM and Apple, and the continued weakness of Nokia’s high-end device sales have negatively impacted Symbian’s share.

At Mobile World Congress 2010, Symbian Foundation announced its first release since Symbian became fully open source. Symbian^3 should be made available by the end of the first quarter of 2010 and may reach the first devices by the third quarter of 2010, while Symbian^4 should be released by the end of 2010.

“Symbian had become uncompetitive in recent years, but its market share, particularly on Nokia devices, is still strong. If Symbian can use this momentum, it could return to positive growth,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.”

Handango, the home of never ending sales and iffy customer service, has been bought by PocketGear.

Durham, NC – February 23, 2010 – PocketGear, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Handango, the leading provider of smartphone applications globally, creating the world’s largest cross platform, open app store and content marketplace with a catalog of more than 140,000 paid and free titles that are available for discovery and download by the more than 4 billion consumers worldwide using Android©, Symbian OS©, BlackBerry©, Windows Mobile©, Palm©, Linux, and Java© powered mobile devices. PocketGear and Handango are the two largest independent app stores and combined to date have generated over $400 million in mobile application revenues from customers living in more than 175 countries and using over 2,000 unique mobile devices.

With the acquisition, PocketGear’s mobile app marketplace has been expanded to connect more than 32,000 developers in the PocketGear Developer Program with over 40 PocketGearpowered storefront and distribution partners, including 4 of the world’s top 5 handset manufacturers, 4 of the top 5 mobile operators in the US, 3 of the top 10 mobile operators globally, and leading media and ecommerce companies including Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Research in Motion, Microsoft, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless. The reach of PocketGear’s direct to consumer app stores has also expanded to include the largest independent app store, Handango.com, joining PocketGear’s app store network that includes PocketGear.com, Mobile2Day.de, SymbianGear.com, AndroidGear.com, RIMGear.com, Smartphone.net, and PalmGear.com. In addition, more than 1,000 app developers are now using PocketGear’s developer storefront solutions to market and sell their mobile apps directly to consumers from their own websites and other marketing channels.” The full announcement is here.

The Environmental Working Group has produced a database of over 1000 mobile phones and listed their radiation levels. The Bold 9700, Nexus One and Droid do not fair well which probably explains the headache I have… Thanks to Julie for the link.

“New cell phones in 2010 are loaded with new features. For some models, like Motorola’s Droid, Blackberry Bold 9700, LG Chocolate Touch and HTC Nexus One by Google, consumers pay a hidden price: exposure to the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation. You can see for yourself by looking the radiation levels for new 2010 cell phones.

Other new phones emit significantly less radiation.

Which is which? You won’t find out from those pricey ad campaigns or even the labels. Makers and vendors aren’t required to disclose their products’ radiation output at point of sale.

That’s why EWG has created a user-friendly interactive cell phone radiation list and database, covering more than 1,000 phones now on the market. We’ve updated it with the wireless industry’s latest and greatest offerings for the 2010 market.”

Wired has demonstrated its magazine on a tablet device and shown what is possible in the future, probably the not too distant future…

If you have missed all the buzz about Google Buzz, you can now try it on your smartphone. It is fully available for Android devices and the iPhone with a partial Google Maps layer solution ready for Symbian and Windows Mobile, but BlackBerry users will need to wait a little while to savour the experience. Could be huge!

“Google Buzz for mobile allows you to post buzz and keep up with your friends when you’re away from your computer. It also uses your location to identify places around you. You can select one of these places and attach it as location tag to your posts, or read what others have posted about the place.

There are several ways to use Google Buzz on your mobile phone: Buzz.google.com: This web app provides access to Buzz from your iPhone or Android phone’s browser, allowing you to view and create buzz messages. It has two different views: ‘Following’ view shows buzz from the people you follow, just like Google Buzz in your Gmail; ‘Nearby’ view shows public buzz that has been tagged with a location near you, and might be from people you don’t follow. From Nearby view, you can also select a specific place from the list of nearby places and view posts attached to that place…”