Tuesday, May 29, 2007

 

Nokia to sell TD-SCDMA phones in China next year

A Nokia official disclosed the company expects to start selling handsets for China's homegrown 3G technology in the first half of 2008, according to a Reuters report.

Beijing extended early this year the pre-commercial testing of the TD-SCDMA standard to 10 cities from the original five. Analyst perceive the extended trials as a soft launch that favors local firms.

Maintaining its "technology neutral" stand and providing an open market for different technologies, the China government also approved the use of the European 3G standard—W-CDMA. The industry, however, is still waiting for the official launch of 3G licenses in the country, which the government has repeatedly stated would be available in time for the 2008 Olympics.

Source: EE-Times

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Monday, May 28, 2007

 

RF switch enables seamless enterprise mobility

In order to become 802.11n compliant, Motorola Inc. has introduced what it claims the industry's first RF wireless switch that bridges the gap between Wi-Fi and RFID, future RF technologies and indoor and outdoor wireless networks. The enterprise-class RF switch supports location, management and security services. The RFS7000 can accommodate Motorola and third-party vendor services, providing seamless enterprise mobility indoors to large businesses requiring a WLAN.

It is capable of supporting 256 802.11a/b/g access points and enables a new switch clustering concept, providing redundancy and high-performance scalability for up to 3,000 access points, Motorola said.

The RFS7000 is part of Motorola's end-to-end enterprise WLAN product suite, which comes under the company's MOTOwi4 portfolio of wireless broadband solutions and services that complement IP networks.

The RF switch's "locationing" capability enables real-time tracking of Wi-Fi devices and active tags. With this service, businesses have the ability to locate employees for safety or track high-value and mission-critical assets. In a healthcare setting, locationing services could be used to track crash carts, transfusion pumps, defibrillators, and portable X-ray and dialysis machines. Locationing can also be used to find and track inventory for customers.

Motorola's integrated management suite, comprised of a LAN planner and mobility services platform, is a set of tools to help enterprises centrally plan, deploy, manage and secure their RF infrastructure and environment, said the company. The integrated wireless intrusion protection system solution detects and locates rogue devices, protecting the network against denial-of-service attacks. The sensor-based system also provides compliance reporting and advanced forensics, as well as monitors, detects, protects and prevents intrusions to a wireless network.


Source: EE-Times

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

Motorola patents solar charging tech for cell phones

Motorola has patented a technology which it claims will make it possible to recharge the battery of mobile phones through solar cells embedded within the LCD. The company claimed that it has rectified the problem of getting enough light to the solar cells to recharge the battery.

If Motorola were to successfully go to market with such a product, then the company would effectively eliminate the need to recharge a cellular phone's battery through a separate transformer that plugs into an electrical socket. The phone would always be charged.

Motorola believes it can get 75 per cent or more of the light entering through the front of an LCD to the solar cell by using a different type of liquid crystal. By switching from nematic crystals to cholesteric or polymer disbursed, Motorola says it can eliminate the use of a metallic reflector that's used in LCDs to illuminate the screen. The use of such reflectors reduces the amount of light that could reach a solar cell to less than 6 per cent, which is insufficient to recharge the battery.

While technologies addressing the problem have been patented before, Motorola's invention is a "more commercially acceptable solution," the company said in the patent.

"Relatively ordinary and cost-effective LCD technologies can now be utilised successfully to provide an acceptable display and nevertheless provide an acceptable level of light to a stacked solar cell," the company said.

The patent appears to have been awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in April. Motorola was unavailable for comment. Solar cells are used today to power very low-power electronic gadgets, such as calculators.

Source: EE-Times

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Monday, May 21, 2007

 

China opens market for rival 3G standards

In order to improve China's homegrown 3G standard, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) approved the use of European and American 3G mobile phone standards, which rival the homegrown TD-SCDMA, according to Xinhua.net report. According to analysts, by adding Europe's WCDMA and the United States' CDMA 2000, the Chinese government has opened an open market for different technologies.

Yang Peifang, secretary general of the ministry's telecommunication economist panel confirmed that all three standards—TD-SCDMA, W-CDMA and CDMA2000—will be used in China. Yang added that the introduction of the other standards would even help improve China's homegrown 3G standard.

According to analysts, by adding Europe's WCDMA and the United States' CDMA 200, the China government has maintained its technology neutral" stand and opened an open market for different technologies.

However, the country's 3G development depends primarily on strong demand for mobile data processing functions involving multi-media solutions and internet connections. It's four major operators—China Netcom, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom—have started training 3G talents, and making technological preparations for a smooth transition from the existing mobile to 3G.

China's TD-SCDMA has passed a series of tests organised by the ministry last year. A ministry report stated that base stations and handsets based on the homegrown technology are all qualified after three years of tests.

The China government has repeatedly stated that 3G mobile services will be available in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics . While analysts say that the homegrown standard will most likely get the first licence, MII vice minister Xi Guohua, said the government will decide on how many 3G licences will be issued and it will be up to the operators which standard they want to use.

Source: EE-times

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

 

Nokia scores $2.5B order from China Postel

Nokia Corp. announced that it has signed a partnership with China Postel Mobile Communication Equipment Co. Ltd, where the China company will purchase mobile devices from Nokia valued at approximately $2.5 billion. The two companies have also agreed to deepen strategic ties, particularly on network channel development, as they both make bilateral resource investments.

"I believe that our partnership will continue to bring new energy to the Chinese mobile phone market," commented David Tang, VP of Nokia.

Tan Xinhui, president of China Postel, said, "Over the past few years, we have been pursuing new ways of working with operators, mobile phone manufacturers, and consumers in order to enhance our competitiveness. We hope to have a fundamental role in the development of the Chinese mobile phone market."

As a subsidiary company of China P&T Appliances, China Postel has become a provider of mobile phones and is actively involved in China's telecom service industry. With a comprehensive distribution network for both products and services, China Postel has a market share of over 30 percent in 2006. Since the collaboration between Nokia and China Postel began in 1998, China Postel has distributed over 37 million Nokia mobile phones across China.

Source: EE-Times

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VoIP code supports handset protocols

VoIP products are following a trend familiar in electronics: Everything is getting connected to the Net, getting smarter, going mobile and moving toward mass consumer markets.

In a sign of the times, software developer D2 Technologies Inc. has upgraded vPort, its VoIP software for OEMs, to support multiple service protocols and classes of systems, including cellular and cordless phones. Version 1.3 of vPort, which runs on ARM and MIPS architectures, has also been ported to three additional VoIP processors.

"VoIP is maturing, adding new device types, and it's going mobile. This is enabling new user scenarios," said Doug Makishima, D2's VP of marketing.

The vPort code now comes in separate versions for gateways, desktop phones, cellular handsets and cordless phones. "Previously, we had to customize a single product for every OEM system," Makishima said.

In tandem with the release, D2 announced that China's E28 Ltd is using its software in a dual-mode cellular/Wi-Fi handset. The code runs on an ARM9 applications processor that's part of the handset's Texas Instruments Omap chipset.

The offering supports separate, proprietary VoIM protocols for services such as Google Talk, Gizmo, MSN Messenger and Yahoo's IM system. The company claims it can complete a full-duplex G.729AB call for about 90MHz maximum on a typical ARM or MIPS processor.

The vPort software requires less than 800Kbytes of flash and less than 1.5Mbytes of DRAM in the VxWorks environment.

Source: EE-Times

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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

 

Nokia first to offer energy-saving alerts on mobile phones

Nokia Corp. announced the first mobile phones that feature energy-saving alerts to encourage consumers to unplug the charger once the battery is full.

Starting with the new Nokia 1200, 1208 and 1650, the alerts will be rolled out across the company product range, in a move that could save enough electricity to power 85, 000 homes a year.

"Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket," said Kirsi Sormunen, VP of environmental affairs at Nokia. "We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers."

The alerts are one of a series of environmental initiatives that mobile manufacturers, led by Nokia, agreed to take action on this year. The Finnish company is the first of these manufacturers to implement the alerts into its products. The new models are targeting high volumes of sales in fast growing markets like India, China and Latin America.

The alerts are the latest in a series of energy-saving initiatives from Nokia. Last year, the company's newest range of chargers was awarded an Energy Star by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States for their energy efficiency. The chargers, in use since 2005, exceed the EPA standards by using 50-70 percent less energy than the Energy Star requirement, and also meet the European Union standards.

The company has set ambitious goals to further reduce the energy consumption of its chargers. By 2010, it aims to have reduced by an additional 50 percent the amount of electricity a charger consumes while still plugged into the mains but not the phone.

Recently, major companies announced plans to become more environment-friendly. Apple's Steve Jobs detailed plans for a 'greener' Apple, while IBM Corp. disclosed plans to make its data centers more energy efficient.

Source: EE-Times

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