The Femto Forum has kick started an initiative designed to harmonise the integration of femtocells into mobile core networks.

The Forum said that the growing interest in femto technology has fostered an environment in which there are many different, and sometimes proprietary, methods of integrating many different types of femtocell. And while this is not holding up the commercial deployment of femtocells, the initiative aims unite these different approaches in the longer term and set the stage for the development of future standards.

At the Forum’s next plenary meeting in March, a variety of approaches to femtocell network integration will be put forward by members. Based on these proposals, the Forum aims to develop a framework, which will enable vendors to respond quickly to operator demands for interoperability, and will provide a platform from which members can advance the best approaches into the relevant standards bodies.

The Femto Forum itself is not a standards making body.

There seem to be concerns amongst the analyst community that the Apple brand isn’t strong enough outside of North America to compete with the big names in the handset space.

On Tuesday, Deutsche Telekom’s domestic mobile unit, T-Mobile, announced that it has sold 70,000 iPhones on contract, since the device launched at the start of November.

Avian Securities notes that the German figures have come in weaker than both France and the UK - France Telecom hit the 70,000 mark on January 10, while O2 in the UK has shifted 200,000.

The analysts believe the disappointing figures highlight the level of competition in the European handset space, with an abundance of 5 megapixel cameraphones and touch screens flooding the market.

Finnish handset giant Nokia sent ripples through the market with the announcement of plans to acquire Scandinavian mobile Linux developer Trolltech for $153m.

However, the world’s leading handset vendor was quick to quash rumours that the move would see Symbian platforms running on Linux, or even an overhaul of the company’s favoured operating system.

Speaking at the press conference in Oslo, Norway, where Trolltech is based, Kai Oistamo, Nokia’s executive vice president of devices, said that the focus of the deal was, “Not to develop a Linux-based mobile device,” but rather to allow the Finnish firm to further develop its online services strategy.

At the heart of the acquisition is Trolltech’s Qt cross platform application framework, which would better allow Nokia and third party developers to build web applications that work across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. From what the market has already seen of Nokia’s internet services play, it is clear that the strategy is based on cross-platform development environments - layers of software that run across operating systems - such as Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C. Ultimately, this latest move allows it to better compete against web-services backed platforms such as Google’s Android, Apple’s OS X and to a degree, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

Disruptive Analysis’ Dean Bubley points out, “This is an Ovi play, and a pitch to offer useful third-party hosted services to mobile operators whose own internal services innovation has been weak.” Bubley says that Nokia wants to take an aggregation role between software developers, who have cool ideas but no easy way to deal with masses of operators, and the network owners themselves. Exactly the kind of direction taken by Microsoft and Google.

But the acquisition does put Nokia in something of a predicament, given the other half of Trolltech’s business model is developing a mobile Linux operating system.

Last year, in an interview with telecoms.com, Benoit Schillings, CTO of Trolltech, said that Linux was set to outstrip Symbian as the mobile operating system of choice within the next five years.

“Mobile operating systems are definitely the next battleground for the mobile communications industry, with major players such as Microsoft Windows, Symbian and Linux fighting for dominance,” said Schillings. “Handset manufacturers need to get different types of products to market quickly in order to keep up with the pace of innovation. Closed, vendor-specific proprietary operating systems do not offer the high levels of flexibility needed for this rapid mobile device and service innovation.”

But in a sense, that’s exactly what the acquisition is about. Nokia’s Oistamo said that the integration of Trolltech’s Qt framework would allow the Finnish firm to deploy applications for multiple platforms from a single source code base, reducing time to market and increasing the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40.

The question now is whether Nokia will overhaul its lower-tier Series 40 platform, to better cope with all these Web 2.0 services it plans to throw at it. Although S60 is a fully multitasking version of the Symbian OS, one of the biggest complaints about S40 devices is that they do not support true multi-tasking - an issue Nokia may need to address if it intends to make its online services available to the mobile masses.

When asked this, Nokia’s director of communications, Mark Durrant, said that although, “Series 40 offers a feature rich high volume, mass market platform. Individual enhancements to either platform are not the subject of today’s announcement and we have nothing further to add at this time.”

The Informer visited a basement bar in The City of London this week to see a friend who wears pinstripe suits every day. You hear tales of the City being full of men who are brash, flash and flush with cash and the Informer was expecting to see people burning £50 notes and pouring champagne over one another.

But the Citymen were glum - the bubbly was non-vintage! - because they’d lost a bloody fortune in this recession that’s been hitting the headlines. Stocks and shares, it’s a mug’s game. Unless you’re Nokia, in which case you’re simply unaffected by trifling global economic downturns. While corporate and financial bigwigs the world over were putting their holiday homes up for sale, Nokia, like a character from one of those old Imperial Leather adverts, popped another olive in its mouth and smiled suggestively at its beautiful wife.

The Finnish vendor announced its full year ‘07 results this week, posting net profits up a thumping great 67 per cent to EUR7.2bn. Revenues were up 24 per cent to EUR51bn, even factoring the restructuring costs at Nokia Siemens Network into the equation. NSN sales for Q4 were up 25 per cent to EUR4.6bn.

Not only were the numbers pretty tasty, the firm reckons that Q4 saw it hit its oft-stated target of 40 per cent of the global handset market. The final three months of 2007 saw Nokia shift 133.5 million units with the Christmas boom.

Happy days indeed at Nokia - well, everywhere apart from the plant at Bochum in Germany, which the firm is closing down because it’s less cost effective than the operation in Romania that will be replacing it. As many as 2,300 staff could lose their jobs in the closure and it’s understandable that - given the powerhouse performance their employer is putting in - they’re a little miffed to be given the boot.

There were demonstrations against the closure of the plant this week, with employees and residents in Bochum turning out to protest the decision. But Nokia didn’t grow its profits 67 per cent by passing up the opportunity to better manage its costs and it seems unlikely that the protests will achieve much. German unions this week also called for a boycott on Nokia products.

As Nokia sailed skywards this week, Motorola slid further into the doldrums. Q4 profits for last year dropped to $100m, from $623 for the same period in 2006. Forced to stand in the naughty corner - again - was the handset division, where Q4 sales were down 38 per cent year on year to $4.8bn and operating losses sank to $388m. Shipments for the quarter were a whisker shy of 50 million.

Ovum’s Martin Garner commented that “it’s increasingly difficult to see why shareholders should see logic in keeping the divisions together,” which will be music to the ears of rebel shareholder Carl Icahn, who’s been saying much the same thing for some time now. The Informer’s not too sure who would want to buy Motorola’s handset unit, which remains focused principally on a constant recycle of the RAZR format. Ovum reckons a JV might be an idea but, again, who wants it? If the Informer had to put a finger in the wind, he’d look to China for the partner.

Mind you, there are firms out there that want to buy mediocre handset concerns, as Japanese vendor Kyocera has proven this week by cementing its purchase of compatriot player Sanyo.

In other Motorola news, the firm has put Qualcomm back on its supplier list. The Jacobs family firm lost the Motorola contract in September last year and Motorola was believed to be looking at Texas Instruments in the longer term.

Staying in Japan, and in the handset sector, NTT DoCoMo has announced that it’s working with Google on devices for the Japanese market based on the Android platform. The two firms have struck a deal that will see the web firm deliver search services, mobile advertising and possibly i-mode applications to the carrier’s customers. i-mode is being adjusted to better exploit Gmail, YouTube and Picasa and Google’s getting home-page status on the operator’s phones.

Meanwhile, DoCoMo has disbanded its wireless broadband partnership with ACCA Wireless in the wake of their combined failure to win a tranche of Japanese WiMAX spectrum in December. The winners, you may remember, were KDDI and PHS player Willcom.

There’s been a bit of a palaver in the world of WiMAX this week and, wouldn’t you know it, the Informer had a cameo role in its creation. A couple of weeks ago, you may remember, we ran a quotation from Airspan CTO and WiMAX Forum founding member Paul Senior. It had to do with his assertion that the WiMAX Forum would “have an FDD profile for mobile WiMAX inside six months.” You can refresh your memory here.

Despite the fact that Senior had made a similar comment in November last year, which also appeared on telecoms.com, this time around his proclamation was picked up by a few bloggers and some news sites (precious few of whom bothered to mention that they’d found the quotation in A Week in Wireless). While describing the attention it got as ‘fevered’ might be overdoing it somewhat, there was enough of a hoo-ha for the WiMAX Forum to put out a statement to “clarify and correct the inaccurate information presented in these articles”.

Said Forum chairman Ron Resnick: “Contrary to any of the unofficial statements made recently, the WiMAX Forum has not made any Board-approved policy or determination of when FDD mobile WiMAX system or certification profiles will be created. All profiles will be determined by the WiMAX Forum, driven by market demand, and the WiMAX Forum is exploring mobile profiles for FDD certification and is defining a network architecture to support FDD. However, no decision has yet been made when to propose an FDD evolution of the “WiMAX” IMT-2000 air interface to the ITU, nor has it been decided what specific profile might be proposed by WiMAX Forum in the future.”

One reason why the Forum might not want the industry thinking an FDD profile was around the corner, as it’s only just started the certification process for the TDD profile - a process into which the Forum has poured an awful lot of work and from which it stands to reap key revenues. If vendors felt FDD kit might be a better bet, they might just sack off the TDD certification altogether if there was only going to be a six-month wait. We’ll have to see. Anyway, you can read more of Paul Senior’s comments in the February issue of Mobile Communications International, the lead feature of which is a discussion on the prospect of WiMAX and LTE going head to head in the mobile market - something that an FDD profile for mobile WiMAX would certainly bring about.

It’s all eyes on US carrier Sprint in terms of WiMAX this year, which has to make good on its pledge to launch its mobile WiMAX network in April. You’ll recall that the firm’s CEO Gary Forsee left under a cloud last year. Now his replacement appears keen to put his own stamp on the company, meanwhile, and has spring-cleaned a few top men out of the door.

Dan Hesse, the former head of Sprint’s fixed line spin off, Embarq, took over the reins as president and CEO of Sprint at the start of this year and now chief financial officer Paul Saleh, who had been acting as CEO since Forsee’s departure, will leave the company, accompanied by chief marketing officer, Tim Kelly, and Mark Angelino, president of sales and distribution. Earlier this month, Sprint said it is to cut 4,000 jobs as financial pressure and subscriber losses continued through the fourth quarter of 2007.

Staying in the US, the 700MHz spectrum got underway this week, amid some concerns that the economic issues affecting the nation’s wider economy might have a detrimental impact on the whole process. The first two rounds drew total bids of over $2.8bn, though, which, as the Informer’s old Granddad used to say, is better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.

There seems to be some confusion brewing in the WiMAX camp, after revelations that the WiMAX Forum has been working on an FDD profile for the technology and is aiming to implement it within six months.

The assertion came from Paul Senior, CTO of Airspan and founding member of the WiMAX Forum, who recently told the Informer, “The WiMAX forum will have an FDD profile for Mobile WiMAX inside six months. We’ve been working on it for the last 12 months.”

Senior made a similar comment to another of Informa Telecoms & Media’s titles, Global Mobile, back in November too. But Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, has since moved to counter the claim.

Resnick told another publication, WiMAX Day, that the six month timeline for FDD was “unofficial”, and that no decision has yet been made when to propose an FDD WiMAX air interface to the ITU.

Understandably, the WiMAX Forum had to tiptoe around the FDD subject when putting the technology forward for approval as part of the IMT 2000 family. As Senior told MCI, “We’ve been a bit quiet about it because we wanted to get the IMT 2000 decision. And if we had gone to IMT with an FDD profile, we probably couldn’t have got it through. We decided to go for something that was a little less threatening, which was a TDD profile.”

Under 3GPP standardisation the 2.5GHz spectrum band is typically split into paired spectrum, known as Frequency Division Duplex (FDD), which has separate channels for uplink and downlink, and unpaired spectrum, known as Time Duplex Division (TDD), which has a single channel but up- and down-link timeslots.

The creation of an FDD profile for WiMAX would remove the last impediment on using WiMAX as a voice centric technology and would also pitch it head to head against HSPA, LTE and EV-DO in the 2.5GHz band.

As Senior told Global Mobile, “the importance of the TDD vs. FDD issue is really all about whether you believe the future of services is going to be data - and not simply pushing data services to smartphones - or voice-centric. The business today remains very voice-centric, and to a certain extent there is no need for significant data infrastructure.”

Dean Bubley, industry analyst with Disruptive Analysis, also notes that some regulators, especially Ofcom, have been keen to see WiMAX evolve as a competitor to established UMTS FDD. Over the last year, the UK regulator has been working very hard on a controversial structure for the upcoming 2.5GHz auction.

This itself has cause lots of debate in terms of auction design and assessments over interference and the need for guard bands, but now with the FDD profile for WiMAX in the pipeline, Bubley says, “I wonder if that means that Ofcom and other regulators need to go back to the drawing boards and re-work their interference assumptions for a possible cellular/WiMAX mix across the whole band.”

We’re well into the fourth quarter/full year 2007 reporting period now, seeing a mixture of highs and lows but no great surprises.

Finnish vendor Nokia posted happy financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007 on Thursday, racking up a 67 per cent increase in profit for the year.

Net income reached Eur7.2bn in 2007, compared to Eur4.3bn in 2006, while revenues for the year jumped 24 per cent to Eur51bn even as the company consolidated Nokia Siemens Networks into its results.

The various mobile device units shifted a record total 133.5 million units in the fourth quarter, up 20 per cent sequentially and 27 per cent year on year, with the high end N series of devices accounting for over 11 million shipments.

Nokia estimates its mobile handset market share for the fourth quarter was 40 per cent, compared with 39 per cent in the third quarter and 36 per cent a year ago. The company said it gained market share in every region except North America and Latin America, where market share declined.

On the networks side, fourth quarter net sales hit Eur4.6bn, up 25 per cent sequentially, with an operating balance of zero as the company absorbed restructuring costs related to the integration of Nokia Siemens Networks.

Fourth quarter net profit for the whole company climbed 44 per cent year on year to Eur1.83bn, with revenues increasing 34 per cent from Eur11.7bn a year ago to Eur15.7bn in 2007.

Nokia chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said 2007, “was a year of important strategic initiatives by Nokia, with Nokia Siemens Networks starting operations, our internet services effort taking shape around Ovi, and the announcement of the pending acquisition of Navteq. Facing a market that remains intensely competitive, we are continuing to improve our leading device portfolio as well as execution at Nokia Siemens Networks. With this we believe Nokia is well positioned for growth in 2008.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, things were not looking so rosy for Motorola, which revealed that for the final quarter of 2007 profits fell from $623m a year ago to $100m, with net revenues falling from $11.8bn to $9.6bn in the same period.

Again, the Mobile Devices segment was the culprit behind the decline, with fourth quarter sales down 38 per cent to $4.8bn and operating loss dropping to $388m, compared with operating earnings of $341million in the year ago quarter. During the last three months of 2007, the company shipped 40.9 million handsets.

For the full year, Motorola recorded a net loss of $49m, compared to a profit of 3.6bn in 2006.

Second placed handset vendor Samsung, which began outpacing Motorola in 2007, shipped 46.3 million devices in the fourth quarter, a 41 per cent increase over the year, and 161 million handsets over 2007, marking a similar growth curve.

Sales for the telecoms department increased 6 per cent for the quarter to KRW5.37tn (Eur3.8bn) and 6 per cent for the year to KRW19.55tn, with handsets delivering KRW18.37tn.

“Having said that demand was strong, price competition was clearly tough in the quarter with revenue growth lagging shipments significantly,” said Ovum analyst, Martin Garner. Samsung’s average sale price fell from $151 in the third quarter to $148 in the fourth - a pain felt by all the handset vendors.

“In looking forward Samsung plans to strengthen its high-end devices with more touch screen, GPS, 5 megapixel camera and smartphone devices,” said Garner, but added that to grow its world market share significantly, Samsung needs to push into lower price tiers.

Fourth placed Sony Ericsson posted a strong set of results, shifting over 100 million units for the first time in 2007.

For the full year, net income climbed slightly from Eur997m to Eur1.1bn, with sales increasing from Eur11bn to Eur13bn.

Units shipped in the fourth quarter reached 30.8 million, an 18 per cent increase compared to the same period last year, offsetting concerns of a consumer slowdown in handset sales, although the average sales price dropped from Eur146 in the fourth quarter of 2006, to Eur123 in the same period 2007.

“Our target remains to become one of the top three players in the industry, and the momentum we established in 2006 and 2007 makes this a realistic and achievable ambition,” said Dick Komiyama, president of Sony Ericsson.

Ovum’s Garner, said that taken in isolation these are healthy results, however, he thinks the volumes are a bit disappointing. “Motorola handed its competitors a gift last year by losing more than 40 per cent of its world market share - a lot of market share changed hands during 2007 and Sony Ericsson has not cashed in on that as well as Nokia, Samsung and LG have.”

Meanwhile, relative newcomer to the handset market, Apple, racked up quarterly iPhone sales of 2.315 million, taking the total device shipments since the device launched in mid-2007 to over 4 million.

In his Macworld keynote in early January, Apple frontman, Steve Jobs’, revealed that the comapny is shifting 20,000 iPhones per day on average and in the US, Jobs reckons that the iPhone has got 19.5 per cent of the smartphone market, putting it in second place behind Research In Motion (RIM).

Leading Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo has revealed that it is working with Google on Android-based handsets for the Japanese market.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Thursday, the Japanese giant announced a partnership agreement with the web firm to deliver search services, mobile advertising and potential i-mode applications to DoCoMo’s customers.

There was also a fairly guarded revelation that the two firms studying the possibility of bringing Android based handsets to the Japanese market.

The two companies intend to making Google services easier to access through i-mode handsets, and DoCoMo is to pre-load Google Maps onto upcoming handsets.

Google Search will also be embedded within the i-mode search application with search results accompanied by key word based advertisements using Google’s AdWords platform.

The i-mode service will also get an overhaul to better feature Gmail, YouTube and Picasa, with Google set to appear as the default start-page on the full browser.

Earlier this month, Mobile Linux shop a la Mobile unveiled what looks to be the industry’s first demonstration of fully fledged applications based on Google’s Android platform.

The apps were running on HTC’s ageing Qtek 9090 smartphone and a la Mobile demonstrated a web browser, phone dialer, audio player, maps, camera, games, calendar, contacts manager, calculator, tasks manager and notes.

The big rumour doing the rounds this week is that Finnish handset giant Nokia is looking to buy a stake in social networking website Facebook.

Although Nokia is cultivating its own social networking site, Mosh, as part of its Ovi mobile services initiative, it appears that a deal is underway that will see Facebook plastered across the screens of hundreds of thousands of handsets worldwide.

Facebook already has a mobile site, but such as partnership would get it installed onto devices at the factory level, giving the community platform a strong foothold in the mobile market.

Some reports say that Facebook would also be given high profile exposure on point of sale displays at the handset giant’s retail outlets, suggesting that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is playing hardball and potentially getting a good deal with Nokia.

By buying up a stake in the company, Nokia would be getting into bed with Microsoft, which paid out $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in the site in October, valuing Facebook at around $15bn.

The Finnish firm would also join Canadian vendor Research In Motion (RIM), which made Facebook available to BlackBerry users late last year.

It looks like EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding is turning her regulatory eye onto SMS and data roaming services, following the first benchmark report on international roaming by the European Regulators’ Group.

The report confirms that implementation of the roaming regulation has generally gone smoothly and consumers are paying less for calls made and received overseas.

However, Reding said that the report also highlights that prices for SMS and data roaming services, which are currently not regulated, “remain high with a very diverse pattern across Member States.”

The Commissioner said that a decision would be made by the end of this year on whether the charges for these services also need to be regulated.

Perhaps in anticipation of regulation, Spanish carrier Telefonica, which owns the O2 group of companies, proposed to cut the cost of mobile data services when roaming by as much as 40 per cent earlier this week.

Consumers in Spain, the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic will benefit from a range of new data roaming tariffs aimed at those travelling within Europe ahead of the summer holiday season in July.

“This initial ERG report published today confirms the general trend towards lower roaming prices but it would be premature to draw firm conclusions at this stage,” said Reding. “However, on the basis of the figures in the report, I remain concerned about prices for SMS and data roaming services. We will watch developments very closely and respond appropriately by the end of 2008.”

The ERG Report covers the six months from April to September 2007 and includes data from 150 mobile providers in all Member States. But while the Commission welcomes the fact that operators have not tried to compensate for the effects of the Roaming Regulation by increasing prices for non-regulated roaming calls, the authority expressed concern that customers are being charged on a per minute basis instead of for the actual time of the call.

This is an element that will also be considered for regulation by year end.

Do stupid people need protecting from themselves? Is it anybody else’s responsibility to stop them doing stupid things? This is one of the great arguments of political philosophy, of course. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld made a useful contribution to the debate in his discussion of the US Helmet Law that forces motorcyclists to wear protective headgear. This is a ruling, he said, designed to “preserve a brain whose judgment is so poor, it does not even try to avoid the cracking of the head it’s in.”

Along similar lines, the Informer was emailed this week to alert him to the creation of a new charity called e-victims.org. This is a charity that has been set up to help people who have fallen prey to online scammers.

Fair enough, there are probably some people out there who are genuine victims. But the case study provided by the charity highlighted a major factor in the success of online scams: the reliable frequency with which human beings’ greed can override their good sense. In a press release that opens with a motherly, clucking-tongue tone, the charity says:

“It is exciting when a hot gadget like the iPhone hits the market. Unfortunately, they are also exciting for internet scammers. They use high profile products to tempt men wanting those must-have gadgets by offering a low price or a chance to buy a hard-to-get item.”

Hang on. Men? It’s surely not just men, is it? Turns out it is. Take ‘Bob’ the case study ‘victim’. When the iPhone was released he came across an ad online promising to send him an unlocked US unit to his home in the UK. Grinning moronically at his good fortune and pausing only to wipe the drool from his chin, Bob tapped in his credit card details. Stupid, greedy Bob.

There’s a donation link on the charity’s site and it would be a beautiful if perverse thing if the whole set-up turned out to be a scam itself.

Fortunately for Apple, it’s selling enough phones that it doesn’t need to worry about all the hapless Bobs. At its Macworld love-in this week, the firm announced that it holds second place in the US smartphone market, with RIM out front. So far, said Steve Jobs, Apple has sold four million iPhones, which works out at a daily sales rate of 20,000. For a wider round-up of events at Macworld, including a computer that’s lighter than helium, or something, click here.

Sony Ericsson, meanwhile, turned in some fairly healthy figures this week. Net income for 2007 broke the billion Euro barrier, rising from Eur997m to Eur1.1bn on sales of Eur13bn. Q4 shipments were up 18 per cent year on year, at 30.8 million. President Dick Komiyama reiterated the firm’s target of winning the number three spot in the handset rankings, but Ovum’s Martin Garner was on hand to dampen things down a little. The volumes were a little disappointing, he said.

“Motorola handed its competitors a gift last year by losing more than 40 per cent of its world market share - a lot of market share changed hands during 2007 and Sony Ericsson has not cashed in on that as well as Nokia, Samsung and LG have,” analysed Garner. This rather took the shine of the handset JV’s proud announcement that, for the first time, 2007 saw it shift more than 100m handsets.

By way of celebration, the firm announced a four-year sponsorship deal with shrieking tennis pin-up Maria Sharapova. The 20-year old Russian ranks fifth in the world in the women’s game and will soon be adding an agreeably leggy element to SE ad campaigns.

In other handset news, this week saw what appears to be the first demo of applications on Google’s Android platform. Mobile Linux outfit a la Mobile ran a number of apps, including a browser, calendar, games and contacts manager on an HTC Qtek 9090 handset. The firm wasn’t all smiles, however. Pauline Lo Alker, president and CEO of a la Mobile somewhat contradicted Google’s own assessment of exactly what Android is.

“It’s not an off the shelf complete software stack,” she said, before going on to deliver a rousing speech about her firm’s obligations. “We believe it is our responsibility to take the initiative to allay the ‘mystery’ and dispel any scepticism surrounding Android by first demonstrating a complete mobile Linux system stack, including drivers, middleware, and a suite of Android-based applications running on an existing advanced smartphone.”

Google has also struck a partnership with US wireless broadband player - and one time WiMAX cohort of Sprint - Clearwire, which will see the web firm’s applications delivered to the carrier’s customers. During the first half of ‘08, Clearwire subs will be migrated to Gmail and Google Calendar.

There were less positive scenes at Nokia’s German operations this week, as the Finnish handset market leader announced the closure of its manufacturing site at Bochum. It’s become too expensive to make phones in Germany, Nokia said, and so it’s waving Auf Wiedersehen to 2,300 of the good burghers of Bochum. Production will be moved to lower cost European sites, the firm said.

Unlike Nokia, the Informer is going to hang around in Germany a little longer from whence there were a couple more stories this week. You know that saying ‘Every Cloud has a silver German hotel-based wifi hotspot network’? Well, that came true this week as UK-headquartered wireless broadband outfit The Cloud purchased GlobalAirNet AG - known colloquially as Ganag - which, it says here, is Germany’s leading provider of sophisticated high quality wifi services to four and five star hotels. The Cloud already tops the British and Swedish wifi markets and this acquisition gifts it the number one spot in Deutschland too.

O2 Germany, meanwhile, is sugaring its domestic DSL proposition by offering customers who sign up between now and the end of March one year’s free flat rate Napster contract, worth some Eur179.40. Content bundled free with access - will this work better than access bundled free with content? Does it really make any difference?

In other German DSL news, T-Mobile is reaping the benefits of its parent’s total communications strategy by offloading its 3G backhaul traffic onto sister firm T-Com’s network. “HSDPA needs more bandwidth. So T-Mobile wanted an economical solution to expand what are known as the ‘mobile backhaul’ links between base stations and radio network controllers (RNCs),” said Adolf Nadrowski, VP of RAN Strategy at T-Mobile Germany. “It made sense to do without expensive E1 leased lines and, instead, access a very well-developed DSLAM infrastructure and T-Com’s transport networks and buy DSL backhaul as a service.” Vendor Rad Data Communications benefits from this manoeuvre, and will continue to do so as T-Mo looks to replicate the strategy in other markets where Deutsche Telekom boasts DSL properties.

DT, meanwhile, this week pledged to create 4,000 new jobs in Germany. Probably a good idea to get a poster up at Nokia’s Bochum plant.

In the UK, T-Mobile and Yahoo have struck a deal that will see graphical advertising supplied by Yahoo appear on the T-Mo Web’n'walk internet service. Yahoo already looks after the advertising on Vodafone’s Live service and is squaring up nicely for a big old mobile rumpus with Google.

For any internet firms that want to bypass the operator community idle screen tinkerer Celltick announced this week that its offering now includes a direct to consumer offering. Celltick’s Livescreen Media solution streams messages to handset screens when the phones are idle and, hitherto, has relied on the client being installed on SIM cards - and therefore depended on the cooperation of the operator community. Not any more, as Celltick now has a version of the client that can be distributed in a text message, allowing internet companies and content providers to reach users even when the carriers aren’t interested. Whether this will have an impact on carriers’ inclination to endorse the product remains to be seen.

It’s all been a bit quiet on the roaming front recently, but Telefonica O2 this week announced that it is slashing its roaming tariffs, both on and off-net. Consumers in Spain, the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic will benefit from the new rates, which cover data and voice usage. Pre- and post-paid users will now pay Eur4.01 per MB when downloading data overseas. This is down from a staggering Eur20 for prepaid users and Eur9.43 for postpaid.

SMS charges will now allow the use of bundled messages, while prepaid users will see their rate drop toEur0.33 per message, the current price charged to postpaid customers. The changes come into effect in July.

Perhaps Telefonica reckons it can make up the lost revenues by cracking down on roaming fraud, because that’s what it’s doing simultaneously through a deal with Luxembourg-based clearing house Mach.

Or perhaps the carrier thinks that less outrageous roaming charges will enable it to better combat churn. And well they might, because according to some research released this week by Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, churn in the mobile sector of certain key world markets has risen by 15.3 per cent to 38.6 per cent per annum. It’s relatively low in the US, the firm said and highest in Britain, with other leading western European markets not far behind. The firm also quoted a statistic that said there are now 666 million mobile users in Europe, bringing about what many have long predicted: the alignment of the European mobile market with Beelzebub himself. The dark lord was unavailable for comment.