T-Mobile has launched the first mobile-to-mobile multimedia messaging service (MMS) in the UK. The service called T-Mobile Picture Messaging enables customers to capture moments as they happen and share them straight away: Customers can create and combine personal images, sound clips or personal voice recordings and text into a single multimedia message and send it instantly from their mobile to another mobile or e-mail address. T-Mobile is the only UK mobile operator to offer a complete picture messaging service with both mobile and web-based features. As part of the picture messaging package, T-Mobile customers can store their favourite picture messages on the web where they can also access a gallery of downloadable images and create and send new picture messages from the web to a mobile or email address. Clent Richardson, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at T-Mobile, said: A picture paints a thousand words that is the spirit behind the proposition. This is a radical and hugely positive example of bringing our Get more services brand promise to life. Were adding sight to sound forever changing mobile communications. There will be endless uses for this service, creating a new dimension to instant mobile communications. T-Mobile customers will be able to capture those funny, special or compromising moments where a camera would usually be forgotten.

A leading innovator in personal communications and hand held computing, today introduced Treo 270, a compact, full-color wireless communicator that integrates a mobile phone, wireless applications like email and Internet browsing, and a Palm OS organizer all in one. Treo 270 also has a built-in, backlit QWERTY keyboard and enhanced battery life. Treo 270 is available for $499 with GSM service activation or $699 without a service plan. In a separate announcement today, Handspring also introduced its first Treo that is not a wireless communicator: the Treo 90, a sleek, lightweight organizer with a built-in keyboard and a full-color display. Treo 270 is available now from Handspring’s Web site and will become available through authorized Handspring retailers in the coming weeks. In addition, Treo 270 will be available throughout Europe and Asia where Treo 180 and 180g are already sold. Handspring expects to announce availability in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Latin America in the months to come.

Leading aggregator and publisher of wireless content, is delighted to announce that T-Mobile has selected nGame’s Java QuickStart Program as the cornerstone of its launch of mobile Java gaming throughout Europe. The two-year deal sees n Game shipping one hundred and twenty J2ME games, designed for a wide variety of Java-enabled handsets, which T-Mobile will distribute in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom. In addition, T-Mobile will also be initially using nGame’s Java Games Store platform WOTAN as its content delivery platform at launch in the UK.”nGame has consistently been a leader in offering innovative services for the wireless Internet, and is committed to providing the best micro-Java games and entertainments to users all over the world,” said nGame CEO, John Brimacombe. “We are extremely excited to be working with T-Mobile on this project, and delighted that they are launching their micro-Java service primarily with nGame titles. We are working with developers based throughout the world - in the UK, America, India, and Korea, to name but a few - and this deal enables us to bring the best of their games, as well as our own titles, to both European and North American consumers. This is by far the largest and most significant content deal yet seen anywhere in the mobile games industry.” “WOTAN is nGame’s next generation enterprise-level platform for delivering mobile entertainment content,” said nGame CTO, Dave Lloyd. “We are very pleased that this will be the first ever live deployment of a vending machine for micro-Java games. nGame QuickStart is as simple to use as a real-world vending machine, making the dispensing of Java games simple, easy and immediate. We are extremely pleased to have nGame QuickStart received so well, and delighted that T-Mobile users will be the first to benefit from this experience. We look forward to exploring how our expertise and technology can help T-Mobile offer greater value, entertainment, and enjoyment to their customers worldwide.”

The company’s PowerVR architecture has powered everything from arcade games to the defunct Dreamcast console. ARM worked with Imagination to retool PowerVR for the embedded market, a broad term for non-PC computing devices, resulting in the PowerVR MBX graphics and video core. This core was recently licensed by chip giant Intel, which separately licenses ARM’s products for its XScale embedded processor architecture. ARM’s involvement is important because it has the potential to bring PowerVR MBX to a wide variety of mass-market embedded devices.

The company is initially targeting the huge mobile phone industry, which can use the chip to offer games on phones. “Mobile phone service providers have invested a lot of money (in 3G), and they need to get that back by raising their revenues per user,” said Noel Hurley, consumer entertainment segment manager with ARM. “Gaming is going to be an increasingly important feature in phones. There is a tremendous demand for games in the marketplace.”

A YOUNG woman was pushed to the ground and robbed of her mobile phone mid-conversation while she was walking through an alleyway. Police have warned people to think carefully about where they are before using their phones and say people should try to avoid talking on them while walking in public. The woman, in her 20s, was walking through an alleyway which runs between Stratford Road and Yeading Lane in Hayes at 7.15am on August 1.The robber, described as a white male, aged 18, around 6ft 2in, and of slim build, came up behind his victim, who was on her way to work, before shoving her and grabbing the Siemens phone. A police spokesman said: ‘It is not ideal for women to walk on her own down alleyways and it is certainly not ideal for her to be on her mobile phone at the same time.” Think of safety and think of where you are.”

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced on Monday the public beta availability of Acrobats Readers for Symbian OS, a new software application that provides mobile professionals and others the flexibility to view Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files on data-enabled mobile phones. The product, which builds on the company’s vision to drive delivery of compelling content regardless of platform or device, is immediately available.

Acrobat Reader for Symbian OS extends the value of award-winning Adobe Acrobat 5.0 software by allowing enterprises the freedom to share a wide range of Adobe PDF documents on a third prominent mobile device platform. Acrobat Reader products for Palm OS and Pocket PC handheld computers, available for several months, have already collectively surpassed two million downloads from the Adobe.com site.

The latest Acrobat Reader product is initially offered.” We have been working with leading content application providers to make Symbian OS phones more attractive to mobile enterprise users,” said Jerry Panagrossi, Director of the Symbian Technology Partner Program. “As a result of our close working relationship with Adobe, we are delighted to see its compelling application now available on Symbian OS phones, providing business users the ability to read PDF documents wherever and whenever they need.” The Nokia 9290 Communicator and Nokia 9210 Communicator bring the best of wireless communication together, and allow business professionals to be effective anytime, anywhere,” said Darrell Sagehorn, Director of Business Applications, Nokia.  

“The ubiquitous nature of Adobe PDF files on the Web and email make Acrobat Reader one of the essential tools for sharing information across an extended enterprise of mobile workers. We’re sure Nokia customers will be delighted about the added utility Adobe’s product provides them.”

Within the world of UMTS and W-CDMA, the most vocal proponent of a business-oriented strategy for 3G is Lucent, the US manufacturer who might sympathetically be described as a second tier wireless infrastructure vendor.Lucent argues operators should adopt an enterprise-first strategy, and that the successful operators will be those who get their hands on the first wave of early-adopting, price-insensitive, high-using enterprise customers.

 Moreover, an enterprise-first strategy will work because all of the critical complements are already in place - while for a consumers-first strategy, they are not. For example, Lucent says look at devices. There might be some good first tries at phones capable of displaying and navigating multimedia content but it would be a brave person who said the main issues have been resolved. But for enterprise users, the key devices are laptops and (to a lesser extent) PDAs - mature products with the battery life, processing power and user interfaces necessary for the applications they run.

All they lack is connectivity, which is something that can be provided by 3G right now, using either a phone and cable (or radio equivalent like Bluetooth) or even a plug-in card. Similarly, consider applications and content. For consumers, there are some interesting ideas about applications and kinds of content that require broadband but there are lots of issues - not least about digital rights management - to be fixed. But enterprise applications such as intranet access, email and access to specific tools such as CRM or ERP are well-developed and ownership of content is a non-issue here

Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced a new auction on the company’s eBay store providing consumers the ability to design their own Motorola V60i — an enhanced version of one of the nation’s top selling phones, the Motorola V60. Each day for a month, beginning August 1, three phones will be placed for a three-day auction on the eBay marketplace. Approximately 100 phones will be auctioned off in total. Winning bidders will receive the exclusive opportunity to customize the exterior and interior of their phone, creating a mobile phone that best reflects their individual style and tastemConsumers will choose from a rainbow of anodized aluminum covers for the front and back of the phone, as well as select from multiple designs for the front lens containing the Motorola V60i’s exterior caller ID.

Motorola will also personalize each handset with the winner’s name and program the customer’s phone book entries and date book reminders. All auction winners will receive a Vehicle Power adapter and one-touch headset as part of their exclusive package. The Motorola V60i mobile phone builds upon the strengths of the original model V60 incorporating the same sleek design and adding three new embedded games, composable ring tones, calculator, expanded phonebook, along with five interchangeable anodized gloss and matte aluminum clamshell housings. Consumers who are not lucky enough to place a winning bid can purchase the new Motorola V60i with interchangeable faceplates at retail outlets later this summer.

“J-PHONE” announced today it will offer two new Movie Sha-mail (video messaging) handsets from the beginning of October 2002, the J-SA51 (manufactured by Sanyo) and the J-SH52 (manufactured by Sharp). Movie Sha-mail is a service that enables users to send video clips of up to five seconds with sound as e-mail attachments.The J-SA51 features the industry’s largest built-in, one-inch STN LCD “Notification Display” and can take pictures at low light levels with its highly sensitive embedded CCD mobile camera.

In addition, the J-SA51 can compress or expand ZIP files as well as send or receive them as e-mail attachments.With the addition of the J-SA51 and the J-SH52 to J-PHONE’s lineup, there is now a total of six Movie Sha-mail handsets available, thereby bringing the pleasures of the Movie Sha-mail service to even greater number of individuals.The J-SH52 comes with new video and voice recording features compatible with SD memory cards which allow for longer recording times. The handset can also take pictures at VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels) with its 310,000 pixel built-in CCD mobile camera. Camera functions are also greatly enhanced by a mobile light and an embedded color sub-display that can be used as a photo viewfinder.

At a landmark 3G event in Helsinki, Finland, Nokia and Sonera demonstrated the evolution of mobile communications towards increasingly advanced 3G mobile services and devices. Both companies also reinforced their commitment to the development of interoperable mobile multimedia services and technologies. The companies further reaffirmed their frontrunner position by exhibiting live demonstrations of advanced Sonera services using the Nokia 6650 - the world’s first 3GPP-compliant dual-mode WCDMA/GSM terminal, also introduced today.

The practical and easy-to-use mobile Sonera services demonstrated to media representatives from around the globe at Kiasma, the Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, are also the first to use the Nokia 6650 in a live WCDMA network environment, marking an important milestone in the progress of 3G. The wide range of advanced services introduced today blend picture messaging, video clips, games and e-mail into a rich service offering. These advanced services can be delivered seamlessly using both GSM/GPRS and WCDMA evolution phases of current mobile communications technologies.

The development of next-generation mobile terminals such as the Nokia 6650, combined with attractive service development, will further accelerate the take-off of new advanced 3G mobile services. Openness and interoperability will meanwhile result in the seamless use of services across networks and borders, enhancing user experience and volume usage.Senior representatives of Nokia and Sonera speaking at Kiasma outlined how they see 3G services developing in the coming months.

“The transition of services between 2G and 3G ecosystems will be an evolutionary one, with the ultimate goal of total transparency between different technologies to bring a seamless user experience,” says Harri Koponen, CEO, Sonera. “The successful introduction and adoption of these new mobile services combining both visualization and user-friendliness are based on honoring true customer need and, thus, are suitable for everyday life.”