Varun Krish | Fone Arena

The Hutch Saga continues

The rumors have started again. Reports suggest that the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa group is believed to be considering a sale of its telecom business. The sale might include Hutchison Essar as well. Hutch has postponed its IPO in India so many times.

Vodafone has shown interest in taking over Hutchison Essar. Its willing to offer upto 13.5 Billion Dollars for the deal. Reliance is reported to have teamed up with Blackstone Ventures and is willing to offer upto 15 Billion Dollars.

Its interesting to note that Vodafone has an 10% stake in Bharti Airtel� which is valued at� close to 1.4 Billion pounds. But� there is a no compete attached to this deal.

We still need to wait and see the turn of events.

[ibnlive ]

Google phone under works ?

Google and Orange might be in the middle of a multi billion dollar deal to bring out a device which might be the Google Phone. Google apps will be mostly preloaded on the phone. Gmail Mobile app is already a big hit. A Gtalk Java client is also under development some folks say. Google has been embracing the Mobile ecosytem recently.Google mobile Maps and Google Mobile Local are also there. Google has always shown some interest in Location based services.

Google is already offering SMS alerts in India for its Calendar service.

This phone is expected to be launched in 2008.

Lets wait and see.
Via [GigaOM]

New Consolidated Mobile Phone Price List page

We are pleased to announce that we have added a new consolidated price list page where you can find the latest prices of all phone available in India as on date.

Please update your bookmarks to point to

http://www.fonearena.com/mobile_phone_pricelist.html

Mobile Phone Price List

This is a great time of the year to shop for a new phone.

Mobiles with Dual Screens coming soon

You might have seen so so many phones with dual displays. Like a normal internal display and a smaller external display. But an article throws insight on a recent innovation by a Korean inventor. Its a Dual Lcd for the internal display as you can see in the image below.

It also looks like a fold able display. Would be exciting to watch if any of the mobile manufacturers entice this idea.

via [Aving]

Reduce your mobile bills

This is a great website I have come accross recently.Texas-based technology-enabled business value services provider, Trilogy, has developed a portal YourBillBuddy.com. Its currently in Beta and free for use. If you are an Airtel subscriber like me, or have an ebill available from your operator head straight to YourBillBuddy.com and upload the same. Even if your Ebill pdf is password protected , the service is smart enough to validate the same.

Once you upload the bill, within seconds the site analyses your bill and gives you a break up of your usage viz. Local Voice,STD Voice , SMS, Data and Roaming

The Current Networks supported are : Airtel , Reliance, Hutch, Spice, Bsnl and Tata Indicom

The service is certainly a laudable one.

Nokia announces 6300, 6290, 6086 and 2626

Nokia today announced 4 new mobile phones at the Nokia’s annual Capital Market Days at Amsterdam.The list includes 3 mid-range models – 6300,6290,6086 and an entry level model- 2626.All four models are expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

Nokia 6300

Nokia 6290

�Nokia 6086

Nokia 2626

Nokia Lamborghini launch 8800 Sirocco Limited Edition Phone

Nokia and Lamborghini have teamed up for a a limited edition Nokia 8800 Sirocco phone.

The phone features special Lamborghini themes and ring tones as well as a video documentary.

Mostly software and cosmetic changes can be seen in this phone. It also sports Lamborghini made ball bearings in the slider mechanism.

Only 500 of the phones will be made and will only be available from Lamborghini dealerships.

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3 Killer Mobile Apps

Shozhu

Shozu is a free app to upload photos and videos from your mobile phone.

Its supports Flickr, WordPress, Blogger,Youtube , TypePad and a variety of services.

It also offers Contact backups

Its assisted by timely SMS alerts when the transfers fail or when you move out on roaming.

Gmail Mobile

Google’s J2ME client for its free Gmail service is one of the best mobile email clients out there.

automatic pre-fetching of messages
Slick and user friendly inteface
Attachments support for files and photos, viewable and automatically resized to fit the user’s phone

Just goto http://gmail.com/app on your mobile browser to download the client which is about 130KB in size

Continue reading “3 Killer Mobile Apps”

Flickr Mobile version is back

The Yahoo photo-sharing site Flickr has got its mobile version back in place.

http://m.flickr.com/ now works from any smartphone with internet access.

The pages are optimized for mobile access so that you can save your bandwidth costs.

Really worth a visit.

Apple’s iPhone might be out in 2007

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Apple’s iPod like phone which was rumoured sometime ago will be available for purchase in early 2007.

Apple has recently placed an order for over 12 million iPhones.

It might have a 3.0 Megapixel camera and iTunes integration.

Mobile Advertising may offer free mobiles

In a recent statement Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt indicated that he sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising.

This is interesting because the consumer gets to use the handset for free atleast, but there will be strings attached to it ofcourse. You will be expected to view ads on the mobile.

But one good thing is that the future will see the phone prices falling.

Gresso enters luxury phone market

Vertu, Mobiado and Bang & Olufsen seem to be getting competion. A new company named Gresso, based out of Russia has entered the luxury phone market.The Gresso Luxury Phone is made of gold and African Blackwood.

The case of the phone is made from Gold and African Blackwood, which age is more than 200 years. Every Gresso phone is unique and singular. Two identical phones do not exist, as well as in the nature there are no two identical trees.

Initially, phones will be on sale only in Russia.

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FoneArena.com v2.0 Poll

We are glad to inform you that this site is going to get a major facelift in the coming months. Its going to be the most major upgrade since the launch of the site around 2 years ago.


{democracy:1}

Hope to hear from users like please vote for the features you expect.

Do post any feature suggestion and it would be appreciated.

Criticism is appreciated.

Nokia and Bharti Airtel sign contract for network expansion

Press Release
Nokia and Bharti Airtel sign USD 400 million network expansion, managed services contract

Espoo, Finland – Bharti Airtel Limited has awarded Nokia an estimated USD 400 million contract to expand its managed GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks in eight Airtel circles and deploy a pan-Indian WAP solution across its networks.

�

As per the three-year contract, Nokia will provide managed services and expand Airtel networks to cover all towns and cities in the eight telecom circles of Mumbai, Maharashtra & Goa, Gujarat, Bihar (including Jharkhand), Orissa, Kolkata, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh (including Chattisgarh). The network monitoring operations will be carried out from Nokia’s state-of-the-art Global Network Services Center in Chennai.

� Continue reading

Google News for Mobile devices in India

Google Inc. today announced the availability of Google news for mobile devices in India.

Mobile phone users will now be able to search and read the latest headlines from Indian news sources quickly and easily on their web-enabled mobile devices by visiting news listed under

http://www.google.co.in/xhtml

Google news also provides users with the option to browse through quick links to specific news categories such as business, science/tech, sports, health, and entertainment. Only sources whose content has been designed specifically for viewing on mobile devices are displayed, ensuring that users can quickly and easily read the news they want.

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