The leading French air company – AirFrance, is pleased to announce to be the first airline which will provide full advantages of the Mobile OnAir services. This new addition of the company’s portfolio of services, and customer’s comfort – will offer to passengers the chance to use their mobile phones during long, transcontinental flights. This service will be offered during six months trial period. For the first half of it, passengers will be able to send and receive text and multimedia messages or e-mail messages. For the second half of the trail period the airline will offer its customers to make and receive calls. But this service also will be available only when a proper indicator will be switched of, informing passengers that the air plane reached a safe altitude of 3.000m for the technology to be implemented.

  Some scientific researches are heading to mark the next generation of mobile phones. Therefore a series of tests have been applied to regular handsets in interaction with a special chemical mixture. This substance is used in the military industry, to treat soldier’s uniform in case of a chemical attack. The mobile phones surfaces have been covered with this material and exposed to unfavorable weather conditions. Results have proved that the mobile phones is well protected against moisture thanks to the chemical add (Ion-Mask), which is repealing the water and therefore ensures a better protection for the mobile device. Currently a shoe manufacturer is going to test this technology on one of its collection of footwear.  As for the wireless technology, at the present moment some companies are already using this technology but only for some part of the components used in the industry. A larger implementation is planned to be performed by a specialized company which is in the process of negotiating with the world’s top three mobile manufacturers. 

If you’d ask what presents, a popular from now on, citizen of Darlington received in the New Year he will definitely tell you that a £27,000 bill for mobile data was an unexpected surprise for him. Ian Simpson had been advised by his friend to use the mobile phone as a modem for his laptop. Happy to find such a great internet solution, he signed up for a £41.50/month contract to receive internet traffic. After some time, he found his connection had been switched off. When he called the Company, to find out what was the reason, Ian was told that he already had a bill of almost £30.000 to pay. As he would run bankrupt if he’d pay this bill, the company agreed to negotiate a more specific settlement, but Vodafone representatives suggested not to use the mobile phone as a modem from now on.

The British network operator – O2, is happy to announce about a growing popularity of the iPhone. Its sales rose high enough, in order for the company to express its confidence that it will some up to 200.000 units by early January. This figure is absolutely surprising with the fact that the data transfer via the 2G technology received a better demand from the public, despite its initial critic for the lack of a 3G support. Therefore, Mathew Key – Chief Executive at O2, revealed that  iPhone users are averaging 25MB of traffic per month, while the rest of the customers who are using other 2G compatible phones are using only 1,8% of the same traffic. He also promised that O2 will manage to negotiate a partnership agreement for the upcoming 3G iPhone, in spite of the rumors that are saying that a rival network Carrier is heading for the exclusive contract with Apple.

The largest Japanese telecommunication company has signed an agreement with another top Company – Google. The partnership will result into a more diversified portfolio of services which will be included in the list of options provided by NTT DoCoMo along with the i-mode internet service. Network subscribers will now have the ability to use Google’s search tool, mail service, scheduling and some other photo features. The establishment of this relationship will bring benefits for both partners, as Google is pursuing to catch up with Yahoo’s positions in the local market, and DoCoMo is trying to refresh a little its service standards as the number of its subscribers is trending down. Currently The company has 100 million mobile phone users, 70% of which are constantly using internet connections on their devices.

Not long ago Nokia has released some firmware updates for the latest models that it had presented to the public. Those updates are downloadable and are promised to increase energy saving and other improvements for the devices to which they are destined. The Company may be looking to improve the quality of its products but it didn’t forget to add something new. So at the time the update is installed o the mobile phone, the owner of the handset may eventually discover that it doesn’t have access to Nokia Maps anymore. Although not all the functions were available for free in the previous version of this application, at least there was a sample of maps to cover 150 countries. Now the owner of the freshly updated handset will be invited to purchase the premium version of that application. Nokia didn’t warn customers on that but commented by saying that till now the application was only a promotional item, which was limited in time.

Initially launched in the UK, Samsung movies store can be found at www.samsungmovies.com and allows users either to buy movies and TV shows, or rent them for a 24 hour period. The service will be available in other European markets later in 2009. Customers can get both a PC and mobile version of the file. At present, only Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition is compatible with the store. Other devices will be compatible with it as they come to market this year. The store is powered by Acetrax, the experts in high quality movie content delivery, holding agreements with large movie studios. Source: GSMPress ®

Nokia's Services & Software unit today announced plans to refine parts of its global research and development activities. While Nokia continues to grow its investments in consumer Internet services, the unit plans to integrate some of our content delivery services into a single service to create a better experience for consumers and to continue increasing investments into key initiatives. Nokia's Internet services strategy continues unchanged with a focus on key service areas such as music, games, messaging and location based services. Nokia.com

The highly anticipated launch of the Prism collection was much speculated and awaited. Now it is the time not only to check our first impressions but even to explore it in detail Nokia 7500. We were guessing that those two phones, part of the Prism edition, are going to be in the front raw of the fashion oriented phones, which is true. But we didn’t expect to see prices that are making it accessible for the big public. We’re happy to be surprised like that, and are subtracting that in fact Nokia targeted the mid range markets which have tastes for style. However we can not talk about exclusivity here, nevertheless the approach is similar and it refers to the lack of a reliable technical specification as it all ready had happened to other fashion phones.

Apple has proudly announced that the iPhone sales have reached 1 million pieces. This extraordinary news was received not long after an impressive price cut of 33%, was made official by the company. However the company commented that the great sales volume was constantly increasing and it was expected to reach a seven figure number even without this recent discount. The drop down from $599 to $399 left a large number of unhappy customers. Therefore a vast amount of unpleasant by content e-mails was received at Apple’s address, but company’s CEO Steve Jobs manifested a reasonable attitude and came out with a great decision: to give a $100 credit to the Apple store to customers who bought the iPhone at the previous price. The very expected phone is going to hit the European market by the end of this year in collaboration with some of the major Network Operators like Orange and T-Mobile.

Surprisingly but till this day no one was concerned on how the Radio Stations are looking. Sony Ericsson comes with an innovative solution with its concept of the Green Base Station Site Concept. It is named that way because those buildings are going to be friendlier for the environment. Obviously the replacement of the old steel towers that are surrounded by fence with the new towers that seem to come from a far future is more pleasant and attractive. But this project is not a lonely design approach; it also features more advantages for Network Operators. The concrete towers have a 40 meters height and a 5 meters diameter. They will host all the base station equipment in the top of the tower, which means that less energy will be consumed for cooling the system. As long that all the technology is gathered in one building there are less necessary security arrangements. The fact that the tower is made of concrete will reduce the CO2 emissions by 30 percent, which take place during the manufacturing process of the steel body of the old stations.

Vodafone stated that it stops the work on building a new network for mobile phones in New Zealand. This incident is a result of the recent regulations that are intended by the NZ Commerce Commission and which care about the regulations of the prices that are applied to Vodafone when roaming in another’s competitive Mobile Networks. The company also commented that the obligations to implement top edge technologies like 3G, in very short terms, will seriously affect the business plan and it will cause unpredicted losses.

SanDisk surprised everybody today, by announcing the launch of the world’s biggest M2 card, with a total storage equal to Nokia’s top models of 8 GB. The main group of people who’ll get the chance to benefit and experience the new tech addition are going to be the owners of Sony Ericsson phones, as the M2 cards are more frequently used with this ones. The main advantages of the large capacity card are going to be the ability to store more music, more content, and it’ll be easy to share it too by replacing and exchanging them with your friends.