Steve Jobs’ Californian kit maker, Apple, may be a relative newcomer to the world of mobile communications, but one thing it’s got going for it is brand awareness.

Brandchannel, owned by brand consultancy Interbrand, said that Apple swept the board at its annual brandjunkie awards. The maker of the iPhone topped the charts as brand that consumers ‘cannot live without’, which is interesting given that the company’s most famous product is probably the iPod.

Granted I carry an iPod around with me pretty much everywhere, but I carry my phone around with me more that that, and the phone maker’s logo is probably the brand I see more times in one day than any other. So it actually surprised me to see that the more ‘familiar’ mobile phone brands - to those in the telecoms industry anyway - didn’t get a look in.

What also surprised was that Apple also secured the top rank in five other categories, including ‘most inspiring brand’, ‘Brand that you most want to sit next to at a dinner party’, ‘Brand with which you most identify’, ‘Brand most likely to revolutionize the branding industry in the next five years’, and ‘Brand that would have the biggest impact on the course of history if sent back 100 years’.

Sony’s reputation as an electronics giant got it a couple of mentions, but it always lagged a long way behind Apple, while Microsoft won the rather dubious titles of ‘Brand that you want to rebrand’ and ‘Brand with which you want to argue’, positioning the Redmond Giant as the polar opposite to Apple’s embodiment of cool. I remember there were some concerns about the success of the iPhone outside of the US because of brand awareness, but it sounds like Jobs and co. have got nothing to worry about, at least in terms of brand presence anyway.

So I’m interested to see what handset brands our readers can’t live without:

 
 
 
 
The long-awaited restructuring of China’s telecoms market finally seems to be on the horizon, after the ruling State Council agreed last month to split up second-ranked mobile operator China Unicom and create three new integrated telecoms firms.

Under the plan, Unicom would merge with second-ranked fixed-line operator China Netcom and continue operating its GSM networks, while its struggling CDMA operations would be sold to fixed-line leader China Telecom. Mobile market giant China Mobile would buy out small fixed-line operator China Tietong (formerly China Railcom), giving the firm its own limited fixed-line infrastructure.

The timing of the restructuring remains unknown, though many observers say it will most likely occur in 4Q08, and the government has also not fully worked out how to execute the restructuring.

Nonetheless, the goal of the plan is twofold: to create three integrated operators that would operate with greater efficiency than is being demonstrated by the lopsided mobile and fixed-line markets, and to create significantly more competition as China moves toward fixed/mobile convergence (FMC).

The restructuring will probably be followed by the equally as anticipated 3G-licensing process, in which China Mobile will most likely be awarded a TD-SCDMA license and a WCDMA license, while China Netcom/Unicom receives a WCDMA license and China Telecom receives a CDMA2000 license.

Some analysts have said that a key objective of the National Development and Reform Commission, which devised the restructuring plan approved by the State Council, is to make sure that China Mobile’s strength is not compromised by the plan.

However, although the restructuring plan itself does not seriously affect China Mobile, it is clear that the firm will be massively disadvantaged if it is forced to offer the homegrown TD-SCDMA. Even if China Mobile is granted a WCDMA license in addition to a TD-SCDMA license, the government would almost certainly force the firm to focus on TD-SCDMA. (China Mobile has since announced plans to roll out TD-SCDMA in eight cities).

After all, the government has not poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing TD-SCDMA just to allow China Mobile to put the technology at the back of the store. The government is going to want it front and center.

The idea has long persisted that China Mobile would be the best outfit to operate TD-SCDMA, because of its market strength. The firm added more than 7 million net subscriptions in January, out of total market net adds of 8.9 million, taking its subscription count to 376.4 million in a market of 540 million.

However, those who say China Mobile would not be overly burdened by TD-SCDMA are ignoring the realities that a TD-SCDMA rollout would place on the operator. Sure, China Mobile has extremely deep pockets, but the burdens imposed by TD-SCDMA - such as the new and unproven nature of the technology and the lack of global economies of scale of TD-SCDMA handsets - make its deployment an uphill struggle.

A lesser-quality service combined with expensive handsets could enable rival operators in the newly restructured market to bite back hard against the long-time market king.

China Telecom looks to be the main threat, if the restructuring and 3G licensing proceed as planned and the firm finally gets its hands on a full mobile license, albeit not the WCDMA license it would most like.

China Telecom will seek to bolster its dwindling fixed-line business by aggressively turning around Unicom’s struggling CDMA operations, almost certainly offering heavily discounted tariffs and discounted quadruple-play services.

And China Unicom will also probably be reinvigorated by finally being released from the burden of operating dual GSM and CDMA networks and will finally be able to launch a concerted attack on its longtime nemesis.

Although remaining at a clear financial disadvantage to its bigger rivals, Unicom should be able to use the significant global economies of scale generated by WCDMA to offer much more competitively priced handsets than anyone else. It should also be able to offer the widest and highest-quality range of 3G handsets in the country, given the supply of WCDMA handsets from multiple international and local vendors.

In addition to the disadvantages caused by TD-SCDMA deployment, the industry restructuring would leave China Mobile with a far weaker set of fixed-line assets than either of its rivals.

China Telecom is the runaway broadband-market leader, and even the underperforming Netcom has more than 21 million broadband subscriptions, and both firms have already launched commercial IPTV services.

In comparison, and even allowing for the fact that China Mobile has deployed some of its own fixed-line infrastructure, China Tietong remains a poor cousin in the fixed-line market and cannot compete as anything more than a niche operator.

Therefore, although some people still see China Mobile as a behemoth that cannot be budged from its pre-eminence, it is fair to say that the combination of burdening the firm with TD-SCDMA and the industry restructuring will place huge competitive pressures on the firm.

Given that China Mobile is one of the country’s flagship companies and that the government is eager to see it become a serious player in the global telecoms market, it will be interesting to see how the government reacts if China Mobile starts struggling.

The government might well end up caught between a rock and a hard place, with its commitment to seeing a successful TD-SCDMA rollout and a more balanced domestic telecoms market conflicting with its grand vision of China Mobile as a global giant.

Sooner or later, the government is going to have to make some difficult choices, because it cannot have its cake and eat it too on these strategic issues. It will have to decide whether China Mobile is to be a domestic guinea pig for TD-SCDMA or a global giant.

It really does look like, after years of allowing China Mobile to establish an unhealthily dominant position and of pursuing a hard-headed approach to TD-SCDMA development in the face of all available logic, China’s regulators will finally have to sit down to a banquet full of consequences.

In scenes reminiscent of some corny medical drama this week, Motorola finally opted to sacrifice the infected limb that is its handset division in a bid to save the rest of its body. The Informer presumes this decision was taken on the advice of the firm’s personal physician, Dr Carl Icahn.

Motorola’s CEO Greg Brown gave it some blah about remaining committed to the handset unit, saying that “creating two industry-leading companies will provide improved flexibility, more tailored capital structures, and increased management focus - as well as more targeted investment opportunities for our shareholders.”

That last bit’s certainly true, as it will enable people to invest in the bits of Motorola that aren’t being carried away by an orderly at arm’s length. The part of the statement that confuses the Informer somewhat is the bit about “creating two industry-leading companies”.

Yes, that’s a good idea, but it’s not clear that this is what will actually happen.

Nonetheless, the move won the support of Ovum’s Martin Garner, who has shared Icahn’s belief in the split, and who described it as a “big relief for Motorola investors”. Garner’s only issue with it is that, with the split tabled for 2009, it might not happen soon enough.

The move also suggests that Motorola has had no luck in finding a buyer for the unit and Brown announced that he is undertaking a “global search for a new chief executive officer for the Mobile Devices business”. This process will no doubt be characterised by that kind of desperate, weary optimism that accompanies the search for a new England football manager.

There was a kerfuffle this week in the wonderful world of WiMAX, as vendor Airspan hit back at claims from an Aussie carrier and ISP that the technology is a flamin’ gallah. Last week, the CEO of service provider Buzz, Garth Freeman complained that the kit supplied by Airspan was a “disaster”, adding that non line of sight performance was “non-existent” further than 2km from the base station and that latency rates were so high that VoIP on the network was impossible.

So it was handbags at dawn. Airspan’s CEO, Declan Byrne, issued a stinging rejoinder, in which he claimed that the Buzz experience was down to the carrier being a bit cheap.

“With regard to range, although Airspan offers both micro-cell and macro-cell base station solutions, Buzz Broadband opted to go with the less-expensive micro-cell base stations in order to reduce cost,” said Byrne.

He continued: “We know that there were significant under-provisioning issues in the core network which connected the Airspan equipment to the internet,” as other Airspan employees shrieked: “leave it Dec, he’s not worth it”.

“Very early in the relationship, Airspan technical services determined that Buzz’s backhaul network was considerably under-dimensioned (again to save cost) and lacked sufficient QoS, and that these factors were the direct cause of VoIP quality issues in the network,” Byrne concluded. It’s all about customer relationships, eh?

In other WiMAX news, research outfit Maravedis this week, said there were more than 800,000 subscribers using WiMAX Forum certified products across the globe at the end of last year. That said, Maravedis suggested that WiMAX has yet to reach the tipping point that will see growth seriously accelerate.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal turned up some insider suggestions this week that two of the largest cable players in the US, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, could be looking at shovelling $1.5bn into the Sprint/Clearwire will-they-won’t-they nationwide WiMAX rollout. According to the WSJ, the cable players would get equity in a Sprint Clearwire JV and first dibs on any wholesale access deals.

On the other side of the technology wall, Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo this week announced that it had wrung downlink speeds of 250Mbps from its ‘Super 3G’ LTE network. But that’s too near term for the boffins at DoCoMo to rest on their laurels, so the firm also announced that, in conjunction with the University of Tokyo, it had successfully demonstrated the world’s first “molecular delivery system for molecular communication”. Que?

Turns out DoCoMo has been working on a means of using molecules as a communication medium, allowing biochemical information to be transmitted directly from living organisms. The Informer will quote this next bit from the release, because it makes about as much sense to him as monkey babble.

“The experiment has confirmed the feasibility of a proposed delivery system to transport specific molecules using artificially synthesized DNAs and chemically energized motor proteins, typically found in muscles and nerve cells, which are capable of moving autonomously by converting chemical energy into mechanical work.”

So, if you get that, and want to know more, you can read about it here. It looks like the days of letter writing are numbered, though, doesn’t it.

Back to the real world, though, and in an announcement that by comparison with the above seems a bit Luddite, Nokia Siemens Networks wants the world to know that it has doubled the downlink speeds available over EDGE. Good news for iPhone users, the Informer supposes, now that NSN reckons it can get 592Kbps from EDGE networks. The Dual Carrier EDGE software upgrade will be available in the third quarter of this year.

Let’s have a look at something else, altogether, specifically the plans of Orange UK to run some mobile advertising trials. The carrier is shortly to test a service that lets users access free music content in exchange for their willingness to consume advertising material. Orange is making just 500 tracks available on a section of its portal, and 800,000 users will be invited to pick from these for three months while being poked and prodded by the likes of Paramount Pictures and Ford Motors. Mobile ad specialist ScreenTonic is providing the ads for the trial.

Orange is the host operator for UK ad-subsidy MVNO Blyk, which launched last year to mixed predictions of success. The Informer spoke to Leif Fagelstedt this week, who is Blyk’s COO. He said that the firm is ahead of schedule for its target of signing up 100,000 users in the first year of operation, and revealed that response rates for the advertising are more than satisfactory.

With 600 campaigns under its belt, said Fagelstedt, response rates are averaging 29 per cent, which is a pretty hefty number. Traditionally, with the arrival of any new advertising media (television, online) responses have peaked during a honeymoon period because of the novelty factor. But Blyk says that rates stabilised at 29 per cent after 500 campaigns.

Either way, it looks like Orange has been convinced by Blyk’s advertising model and is trying one of its own. Fagelstedt told the Informer that it is crucial that there is no brand clash between his MVNO and any host with which it is working and, given that Blyk targets the 16 - 24 age range and Orange is working with clients in the automotive industry, it looks like overlap will be minimal.

Unlike the impact of Emirates Airline’s decision this week to allow the first mobile call to be made during a commercial flight. The airline is using a system called AeroMobile, which limits the power at which handset transmit, and also restricts the number of simultaneous calls to just six. Cabin crew can also turn the system off in the same way that they can withhold alcohol from boisterous passengers. The inaugural call was made en route to Casablanca. Whoever made that call will go down alongside Neil Papworth in the history books, of course.

So now Emirates is kitting out its whole fleet with the system. Airliners hold quite a few people and the Informer wonders how effective the service will be given that only six at a time will be able to make calls. Will there be a queue? Will you have to pay to get to the front of it? Will there be a time limit on calls? Sounds like a recipe for a whole lot of air-rage. Better off sticking to the red wine and the movies.

And finally: It’s not often that you can look to the Taleban for light relief, is it? This week, though there was a development in the group’s anti-mobile strategy that was not without a certain irony. You may remember a few weeks ago the Afghan insurgents threatened the troubled country’s mobile networks with sabotage unless they began powering down in certain areas at certain times. The Taleban were concerned that they were being tracked by US forces using cellular network information.

They made good on their promise and started blowing up towers, leaving the nation’s operators with little option but to comply with their demands. This didn’t go down too well with inhabitants in the affected regions and, much more amusingly, went down no better with the Taleban’s foot soldiers, who found themselves periodically (and predictably) unable to communicate. You couldn’t script it, could you.

So now, according to US news sources, the Taleban has hinted that it might change its tactics when it comes to mobile networks.

It’s a bit like those anti-tower nimbys who campaign against having cellular masts anywhere near their homes or schools because of The Rays!!! but then whinge when they can’t get a signal. Obviously the Informer isn’t likening these campaigners to fundamentalist insurgents, but there is a similar irony involved.

Perhaps the two groups could arrange some exchange visits.

“Ok, everybody, welcome to the meeting. There’s some good news to start with: Myself and Anita had a meeting between ourselves, the council and a representative of the phone company and I think we sent them away with something of a flea in their ear. The mast will not be sited anywhere near the children’s play area. Some we win, my friends, some we win. So we’ve bought along some sparkling wine. And there’s some plastic cups. Has everyone got one? Good. Ok, well a toast then: Death to the Infidels!”

Since the close of the US 700MHz auction last week and the subsequent revelation of the winning parties, there’s been lots of talk about Google’s plans deliver wireless internet using spectrum between TV broadcast channels.

It’s known that Google, along with a collaboration of tech firms including Intel, HP, Microsoft, Philips and Dell, has been investigating the potential for this so called ‘white space’ for over a year now.

Last summer the collaboration, under the banner of the White Space Coalition, submitted a white space internet gadget to the FCC for testing. The platform could be used to deliver wireless broadband services using the ‘white space’ that separates TV and radio channels from one another.

But the prototype failed the FCC’s tests and caused interference on the TV channels. Microsoft promptly announced that the device was defective, which led to the poor results, however, its initial failure has given broadcasters enough of a stick to beat the technology with.

However, in a recent filing to the FCC, Google claims that it could use geo-location technology and protective beacons to eliminate any sort of interference and deliver “wifi 2.0″ type capabilities in the white space.

There’s still a lot of questions to be answered, but Ovum analyst Jan Dawson, has this to say on the matter: “If Google’s technology is really as good as it suggests, it’s surprising that it didn’t secure some of that 700MHz spectrum through the auction, which would have obviated the need for petitioning the FCC. On the other hand, if its petition is successful, it will have saved several billion dollars. One thing is certain: if anyone can shake up the wireless market it’s Google, which will be a player in the device market whether its wireless technology makes it or not through the Android initiative.

“It will also be worth watching the relationships between Google and the various companies that are working with it on the white spaces effort in the Wireless Innovation Alliance. Although they have been able to find sufficient common ground so far to work together, Google’s partnership with Microsoft in particular, but also others such as Dell, will be stretched if the petition is approved because their differences in strategy and competitive pressures will pull them apart. But even then, Google seems likely to come out on top since its technology appears to have put it in the driving seat.”

 
 
 
 
HelloMoto may morph into Goodbye Moto if Motorola’s investors have their way. Nonetheless, the beleaguered business’ legacy could help its purchaser become a pioneer in next iteration of the mobile devices industry.

From its original “brick” handsets to the iconic StarTac, which drove consumers’ love affair with the clamshell form factor, to the wildly popular RAZR, Motorola has been a trendsetter in mobile handsets. But investors and potential buyers are interested in the future, not the past, which raises questions regarding the marketability of Motorola’s anemic handset unit.

Motorola’s investors are pushing for the firm to divest its floundering Mobile Devices business, which saw 4Q07 sales slide 38 per cent, leading to a quarterly operating loss of $388 m, compared with operating earnings of $341m one year earlier. The handset unit has now posted losses for the past four quarters.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn now holds a 6.3 per cent stake in Motorola and is pushing to get his people on the company’s board in order to force it to dump the cell phone biz, which analysts have said could fetch up to $20bn.

If a buyer for the devices business cannot be found, Motorola might opt to spin off the division into a legal entity with its own publically traded shares.

But there may be buyers, or possibly joint-venture partners, waiting in the wings. According to reports, Asian handset makers are potentially interested in buddying up to Motorola’s handset division, if not buying it outright. One recurring name has been China’s ZTE, which I found curious to begin with because ZTE is known as a price leader, not a style leader, particularly in emerging markets where it marches in with guerilla pricing designed to attract new mobile customers.

But just as the rumors started to take off, ZTE’s management sought to quash them by saying that the company hopes to expand via internal growth rather than through acquisitions.

Nonetheless, I’m now starting to warm up to the idea of a ZTE-Motorola hookup. Like ZTE, Motorola has been a price-leader of sorts, via its participation in the GSM Association’s Emerging Markets Handset initiative. Further, ZTE wants to make a dent in North America, where it sells a single handset model to US operator MetroPCS Communications, and Motorola is still strong in the US market, much to the chagrin of Nokia, which just can’t seem to make sense of Yankee product preferences. Huawei Technologies might also seek to elevate its status via a buyout of Motorola’s cell phone biz. For that matter, I would suggest that Nokia could benefit greatly from the innovations and sense of style that Motorola handsets have exhibited over the years.

Thinking outside the box, however, Motorola’s handset unit could be a strategic investment for an Internet player such as Google or maybe even Amazon, whose unique Kindle wireless book reader has shown that the Internet retailer is willing to take some daring steps technology-wise.

Motorola still holds third place in terms of global mobile handset market share, and it shipped 40.9 m handsets during 4Q07. Mobile phones and related devices will be key to future Internet access models, particularly in emerging markets that don’t have a lot of computers. Mobile will help drive future consumption of digital content in various forms, including entertainment, location-based services and, of course, advertising. Any technology company looking for a quick opening into the wireless future might consider whether Motorola’s handset unit could help it make that entry.

Navigation companies that hope to enter the cell phone business are also possible acquirers. On Jan. 30, Olathe, KS-based Garmin announced the nuvifone, a combo cellular handset and personal GPS navigator that is slated for sale in 3Q08. Netherlands-based TomTom also is said to be developing a GPS-enabled handset. Another GPS device maker, Taiwan’s Mio Technology, announced on Jan. 30 that it is working with Qualcomm to develop a line of connected PNDs that will leverage Qualcomm’s QST1100 chipset. Meanwhile, Motorola recently announced its DH01n device, which combines a personal media player with navigation capabilities.

Motorola’s devices unit might also be acquisition bait for a private-equity company, but with the credit markets drying up, investors are less likely to want to take on such a major and potentially risky purchase.

Buyout firms Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, TPG Capital and Permira are already struggling with their decision to pay $17.6 billion in December 2006 for Freescale Semiconductor, which was formerly owned by Motorola. Freescale is now heading toward a financial morass, in part because a quarter of its business comes from the flailing Motorola, and the chipmaker is high on many financial pundits’ lists as a prime candidate for bankruptcy.

 
 
 
 
Door-to-door salesmen touting 100Mbps connections. Field engineers fighting over permission to wire up apartment blocks. Coffee mornings about ultra-high-speed broadband for the over-60s. House-proud homeowners digging telecoms trenches in a bid to boost property prices.

This is how Europe is being wired up with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), according to some of the more outlandish claims coming out of last month’s FTTH Council Europe conference.

Certainly, operators believe the stakes are high enough to justify unprecedented sales tactics. Laying fibre-to-the-home networks takes time and money. According to various estimates put forward at the conference, passing each home will cost about Eur1,000 (US$1,540) in many of Europe’s cities and towns, and many thousands of euros elsewhere.

The operators are understandably keen to make sure that customers sign up to those connections, especially given that monthly tariffs in the tens of euros mean that it will be many years before they make a complete return on their investments.

There is also evidence that operators that are first with fibre find it easy to attract and retain customers. John Quist of the Dutch incumbent KPN described how 85 per cent of households covered by one municipal FTTH network in the Netherlands converted to paying customers.

“The cable companies and KPN and the other telcos were just wiped out,” he said. Another Dutch municipal network, Neunen, claims 90 per cent take-up, while Sweden’s ViaEuropa claims 78 per cent. One municipal operator said that its FTTH services were so appealing that it did not need to market them to the younger population, hence the coffee mornings for the older generation.

Others are even confident that customers will pay the thousands of euros it costs them to lay fibre to their homes. Malarnetcity in Sweden charges ?2,800 to potential subscribers in houses and Eur300 to those in flats. Denmark’s DONG Energy charges up to Eur1,600, reduced to Eur400 for customers who dig the trenches the fibre will be laid in.

Malarnetcity claims that removing the need to fold the capital expenditure of laying fibre into its wholesale tariffs will ultimately result in lower retail tariffs.

The difference compared with tariffs on an incumbent’s network can be so great that Malarnetcity estimates that even subscribers paying the full ?2,800 can make back their investment through cost savings within four years. The operator also says an FTTH connection increases a property’s market value.

As unlikely as it sounds, there might be something in the municipal operator’s pitch. Malarnetcity claims that 60 per cent of house owners in eligible areas have made such investments, with more queuing to stump up the cash.

The problem for conventional telecoms operators is that there is more at stake than just subscriber numbers. If one operator beats others to wiring a house or apartment block, it will have a monopoly on that infrastructure that will likely last decades. In order to serve these customers, other operators will have to rent capacity at least on their competitor’s in-building wiring, even if they take the risk of laying their own fibre to those properties.

Municipal networks in particular pose a challenge to conventional operators. Driven largely by social rather than commercial motives, these publicly funded projects are spreading from Europe’s northern states to its larger markets, having been sanctioned in France and Spain.

Reggefiber, the owner of the network Quist referred to, already has FTTH infrastructure covering 200,000, or nearly 3 per cent, of the Netherlands’ 7.2 million homes and is expanding. One of its projects, Citynet, plans to eventually cover 450,000 homes in the capital, Amsterdam. Municipal networks in Sweden, meanwhile, pass more than 6 per cent of homes and counting.

The progress of the Swedish networks has already caused the incumbent, Telia, to rent capacity on them, while KPN has agreed to operate a network covering 40,000 homes that Reggefiber will build and own.

Another advantage the municipal networks have over incumbents are their close links with communities. Organising town meetings, door-to-door sales and recruiting well-known local figures as ambassadors for their wares is not much of a stretch for them.

The same cannot be said for incumbents and alternative operators. Although they share the municipal networks’ optimism about the appeal of fibre, they admit that their glossy nationwide campaigns will only serve to annoy customers who can’t access services.

Already, such “legacy” operators in France, Sweden, Norway and Finland have taken to the streets to recruit housing authorities, apartment-block owners and even individual householders to their cause, knocking on every single door if necessary.

I was interested to see that Microsoft has decided to licence Adobe’s Flash Lite player for its Windows Mobile operating system, particularly as Microsoft’s own Silverlight is widely seen as a competitor to Flash.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Finnish handset vendor Nokia revealed that it plans to make Microsoft’s Silverlight web platform available for Symbian S60 devices as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

This is a big deal for Microsoft as it gives the platform much needed credibility in the mobile space. But what does it mean in light of the latest announcement from Microsoft?

Well, given that the vast majority of video available on the internet is encoded in Flash, it makes sense for Microsoft to support this format while it gets Silverlight off the ground properly.

Flash maker Adobe said that installations of its Flash Player for mobile devices grew by 150 per cent in the last year, with more than 500 million devices running the software, while at present, Silverlight is available on exactly zero devices.

People love to talk about what a high growth market China is, and the Informer thinks he may have discovered one of the key drivers behind the bumper handset shipments that the market stimulates. According to local press reports which emerged after last week’s edition went to press, the wife of a handset retailer in the Weifang area of China, seething with resentment after being dumped, gathered the shop’s entire stock of 400 phones, put them on the marital bed, doused them in kerosene and set fire to them. The cost of the bonfire was around $42,000. That’s 400 more phones shipping to China, then - every little helps, right?

Relationship endings are usually fraught, and there was similar tit-for-tat acrimony to be found in Germany this week, where the state Government of North-Rhine Westphalia wants its money back now that Nokia’s moving in with Romania. You may remember that earlier this year, Nokia announced plans to shut its plant in the German town of Bochum, which is in North-Rhine Westphalia, because the costs of operating in Germany are proving a little too high for the Finnish handset vendor.

Turns out that the: “Darling, I’m leaving you” line went down no better in Germany than it did in China and, while the Germans haven’t actually got together and set fire to a load of Nokia handsets, they ain’t best pleased. Calls from trade unions for a boycott on Nokia products were issued after the decision and now the state Government is demanding that Nokia return subsidies it was given on the promise of job creations when the plant was opened.

The amount in question is almost Eur60m. As you might expect, the Finn contests the suggestion, but says the Germans can keep the table lamp they got as a wedding present from Uncle Wolfgang, because Nokia never liked it anyway. It’s likely that Nokia is going to have to make some kind of parting gesture, though, purely for PR reasons. The 2,800 Bochumites who are set to lose their jobs in June probably won’t be buying any more N95s, though.

While we’re on the subject of departures, Motorola saw another senior exec off the premises just after the Informa’s deadline last week. It was the turn of Stu Reed, president of Motorola’s Mobile Devices business to make like a banana, in the same week as marketing chief Kenneth Keller.

While Reed has been credited with a positive reform of the firm’s supply chain which led to cost savings, it’s fair to say that the devices unit is not in great shape. Indeed, CEO Greg Brown took personal responsibility for the handset division a month or so back. And when people leave “effective immediately” it usually involves computer access being shut off and a walk to the door with a burly security guard.

Still, there was a slvr of good news for Moto this week, when it was announced that the firm has re-established its supply relationship with 3G operator 3UK. Roast Moto has been off the menu at Chez 3 for 18 months, but it’s now on the specials board, with 3 promising an “extensive store staff training programme” around the featured handset which - Voila! - is another iteration of the RAZR. This time, it’s the RAZR2 V9.

Gartner handset market analyst Carolina Milanesi told the Informer in September last year that weaknesses in Moto’s WCDMA portfolio were hitting the firm hard in Western Europe, so maybe this is evidence of some graft in that area. Even if it’s not evidence of a much needed portfolio refreshment.

In other handset news, one of the more prominent Apple iPhone hacker groups, the iPhone Dev Team, has showed off a cracked version of the beta 2.0 firmware. This not only allows users to run any application on the device, even those banned by Apple’s App Store, but it apparently means Apple has lost the ability to kill hacked iPhones remotely.

For legitimate developers however, the SDK appears to be pushing all the right buttons. An online poll of telecoms.com readers over the last week revealed that 77 per cent of respondents think the iPhone 2.0 software will give them everything they wish for in the device, with only six per cent who thinking it falls short of expectations.

A further 11 per cent absolutely love the App Store idea, which gets third party apps out to the entire iPhone user audience, and only five per cent who think the control Apple will retain over the content is too much.

Speaking of control, let’s nip over to North Korea, where one and a half months after obtaining the one and only 3G licence in The “Democratic” People’s Republic of Korea, North African operator Orascom has announced that it expects to sign up 100,000 subs as soon as it goes live with its WCDMA network.

A GSM service is still being used by authorised government officials. The Informer’s number crunching chums at Informa Telecoms & Media say that there are currently 5,000 official GSM users in North Korea, giving the country a penetration rate of 0.02 per cent. The new Orascom service will help boost penetration to a whopping 0.4 per cent.

It’s small acorns at this stage. Still, Sawiris won’t be too downhearted. The Egyptian’s firm has mightier oaks; it’s just posted a 180 per cent rise in 2007 net income to $2.021bn, and reckons subscriber numbers had exceeded 70 million by the end of the year. Ebitda rose 20 per cent to $2.043bn.

In the US, troubled carrier Sprint Nextel has unveiled the first handset that can take advantage of its cdma2000 EV-DO Revision A network. Previously users who want access to Rev A data rates of up to 1.4Mbps on the downlink and 500Kbps on the up have only had the option of data cards. The HTC Windows Mobile unit, called the Mogul (good grief), was actually launched in June last year, but a free firmware update will render it Rev. A compatible.

It was acquisition time for Qualcomm this week, which is hoping for the luck of the Irish, with the purchase of Xiam, headquartered in the Emerald Isle. Xiam’s business is personalisation and targeting, and the firm has a platform called My Personal Offers System (MPOS).

The company uses demographic, contextual and behavioural profiling to enable one to one mobile advertising, which Qualcomm will presumably work into its own content delivery ecosystem. The deal was worth $32m.

“Qualcomm’s acquisition of Xiam provides us with advanced content discovery and recommendation technology that strengthens Qualcomm’s services portfolio,” said Andrew Gilbert, executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm Internet Services, MediaFLO Technologies and Qualcomm Europe. “With this acquisition, we are excited to further demonstrate our ongoing commitment to operators, brands and consumers worldwide.”

Qualcomm has made no secret of its desires to invest in European businesses. Last year Qualcomm launched a Eur100m venture capital fund specifically for Europe. Shortly afterwards, Gilbert told the Informer: “That’s a good statement about our Qualcomm’s intentions in Europe. Now we have to spend it.”

Last week Sir Richard Branson was dangling of the edge of an Indian hotel to promote the latest international expansion of the Virgin Mobile brand. This week, he was watching his US operation take a bit of a kicking.

Shares in Virgin Mobile USA had a slump this week after the MVNO disclosed disappointing subscriber gains in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Virgin, which launched its IPO in September, said that it only added 209,669 net subscribers in the fourth quarter, compared to additions of 613,752 in the previous year. The company had forecast additions of around 400,000.

Analysts have attributed the poor customer numbers to the economic downturn, given that all of Virgin’s customers come from the typically cash strapped prepay demographic. Concerns that the slowdown could get worse are likely to have made investors jittery.

At the close of play Thursday, the company’s share price had fallen more than 41 per cent. Nevertheless, the company shrank its net loss, from $45m in the fourth quarter of 2006 to $17.7m in 2007, and revenues increased to $293.5m from $271m. Churn also dropped 0.4 per cent year on year to 5.1 per cent.

Not one to miss a trick in the cheeky/smutty marketing oeuvre that is Virgin’s comfort zone, the Canadian operation put out a new campaign this week featuring booty-mongering former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign on Wednesday this week when he was outed as ‘client number nine’ at a high price escort service.

The ads, featuring an image of Spitzer carry the text: “You’re more than just a number. When you call us we’ll treat you like a person, not a client. Whether you’re #9 or #900, you’ll get hooked up with somebody who’ll finally treat you just how you want to be treated.” It’s all about class, isn’t it.

Qualcomm’s acquisition of Xiam this week struck a nerve. I’d recently been involved in a roundtable attended by a handful of industry players, where the discussion focused on the need to find a way to create, manage and deliver services that can keep pace with the fleeting desires of today’s consumer.

In short, everyone wants services that are easy and quick to connect to. As David King, CTO of IT services specialist LogicaCMG pointed out, operators that make it easy to churn between services will be more successful. A controversial idea for a telco certainly, but clever as well as obvious when you think about it.

However, it’s a concept that easier to talk about than it is to put into practice. The solution will involve collaboration on an industry wide scale.

Operators need to win more trust from the users, so customers feel confident handing over their non-operator subscriptions to the telco itself. This could see users sign up for a third party music service, for example, via their operator, and have the subscription charge for that service tacked onto their mobile phone bill.

This part might actually be easily achievable. The breathtaking growth of social networking and widgets adoption on the desktop has proven that users are happy to plug their personal details and passwords into new applications in a cavalier fashion. Doing all this via a single interface would just make life easier.

But then you need to get the handset vendors to come up with a way for users to easily customise their environments without finding the platform too intrusive. And application developers need to be able to get their apps in front of the users, whatever device they might be on.

Part of the problem is that there is no channel for viral recommendations to spread on the mobile platform at present. There is no way for users to discover content easily. What is needed is an interface for the mobile environment that works for operators in the way that UK broadcaster Sky makes more from having an attractive Electronic Program Guide (EPG) than from content itself.

For developers, this is what makes Apple’s App Store for the iPhone an attractive proposition. It’s the only channel to get an application out, but it guarantees accessibility to that app for every iPhone user out there. The billing system might be two step, you still pay the carrier for mobile usage and Apple for content, but it’s getting there.

Which is why I read about Qualcomm’s acquisition of Ireland-based Xiam with interest. Xiam has a platform called My Personal Offers System (MPOS), which provides targeting and personalisation features to accelerate the discovery of content and individualise the user experience.

But of course, systems like this raise countless privacy concerns. It’s all about finding the balance between the user seeking a recommendation and the operator pushing a recommendation.

As Ovum analyst, Martin Garner, points out: “The mobile phone operators are in a very privileged position with the customer information they hold in that they know what people do, where they do it, how they pay for it and - most importantly - who they are. This gives them better customer data than anyone except the credit card providers and means that they can work towards the holy grail of marketing which is to deliver the right stimulus to the right person at the right time.”

Xiam has an existing and impressive customer list including Vodafone, Orange, O2, Hutchison and Globe Telecom.

But will such platforms be able to weather the privacy concerns? Ad platform Phorm has come under fire this week, after striking deals with UK service providers, Virgin Media, BT and Talk Talk. The system, which monitors web activity and analyses user habits to better target ads, purports to anonymise the data it collects. But a backlash from industry experts and consumers has forced the service providers rolling out Phorm to make the system opt out rather than mandatory.

There must be hardly anyone left at Motorola’s troubled handset unit, given the two latest senior figures to quit the company.

Last week, Stu Reed, president of Motorola’s Mobile Devices business, announced his departure, just days after marketing chief Kenneth ‘Casey’ Keller. Reed and his team are credited with launching a number of key handset initiatives, which Moto said it will continue to expand upon.

Well, with the handset unit effectively running on autopilot, it looks like the plan is to run out - yep, you guessed it - another incarnation of the RAZR. I just got an announcement from 3 UK, which says 3 is to reintroduce Motorola handsets to its range for the first time in over 18-months with the RAZR2 V9. Apparently, this one’s even slimmer and tougher than its predecessors. But didn’t we get over this whole size zero thing already?

C’mon guys, since the heady days of the first RAZR super hit, back in 2005, the handsets division has consistently underperformed, failing to come up with another blockbuster device. Moto’s reluctance to give up on the RAZR kind of reminds me of The Onion story about Gillette in the real razor industry - “Let’s add another blade and take it to five. And another aloe strip. That’s right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather.”

As we already reported, fourth quarter sales at the Mobile Devices division were down 38 per cent to $4.8bn with 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 in its entirety, recorded a net loss of $49m, compared to a profit of 3.6bn in 2006, largely due to the ailing devices segment.

And corporate raider Carl Icahn is maintaining pressure on the company, increasing his holding by 1.3 per cent to 6.3 per cent.
Icahn also intends to nominate a slate of four directors to stand for election at the company’s 2008 annual stockholders meeting. Last year, the billionaire businessman failed in his bid to win a place on the board of Motorola, but he’s still after a seat one way or another. Moto’s already taken his advice on board and is looking to offload its handsets unit, it’s just finding a buyer for the division that’s the trouble.