The study, based on data from AdMarvel Open Audience Network, uses information collected from users of the Opera Mini mobile web browser. It compares the habits of Android users with the habits of iPhone users, Windows Phone users, Blackberry users as well as users of other feature phones.

It was found that Windows Phone users were the most likely to visit email and communications sites – even more than Blackberry users. This would go on to suggest that similar to Blackberry device, Windows Phones were popular with the business community. These users were also most frequent visitors to news & information, politics and business & finance sites.

Users of the Android OS were likely to be the most educated. This suggestion is based on the fact that Android users are the largest group in the Education category, which includes websites for universities and general education.

iPhone users were found to be least likely to view music, video and media sites, whereas Android users were most likely to visit sites in that category.

It was also seen that Android users are the least likely to visit social networks from their browser – presumably preferring to use free apps to access the social networks.

Percentage of users exceeding the average use

Apple acquired a feature called ‘Siri’ from voice recognition software provider, Nuance, last year. Siri is personal assistance software, with the added benefit of voice control.

Siri will function like a mobile search engine, and will take oral instructions from the user, through voice recognition technology.

When a voice command is issued to the iPhone 5, it will reportedly go through services such as Yelp, OpenTable and others to provide the required information or service to the user.

While voice recognition services and voice activated search have been around for some time, Siri will be the first mobile search service that can do more than just deliver search results. That in itself, could give search giant Google sleepless nights – this innovation by Apple could mean a considerable setback to their business.

It is, of course, a known fact that so far, voice-recognition-based services have faced several problems, such as distortion caused due to background noise and inability to handle even slight changes in voice modulation. However, it is bound to be only a matter of time before such obstacles are overcome. If Google intends to keep their place in the mobile search market, it would be essential for them to start working on this matter at the earliest.

Nielsen has also corroborated this information in the USA. According to them, the average amount of data being consumed by users is higher than ever before.

In particular, users of iPhones and Android based phones are consuming very high amounts of data.

The average smartphone user consumed 435 MB of data per month in the first quarter of 2011 as compared to only 230 MB per month in the first quarter of 2010. That is an increase of 89%.

The report further reveals that the top 10% of users are consuming 109% more data than they did last year, while the top 1% of users are consuming 155% more data than they did last year.

It is also of interest to note that those using Apple’s iOS consume an average of 492 MB per month, while Android users are consume an average of 582 MB per month.

In spite of this huge jump in data usage, the revenue generation of mobile operators continues to remain more or less static. This is because the cost of data consumed has gone down quite drastically from 14 cents per MB last year to the present 8 cents per MB.

A recent report had also pointed out a similar trend, wherein, the projected revenues of mobile operators are likely to reach $1 trillion by 2016, but their handling costs will go up at an even faster rate, thus leading to a financial disaster, if corrective steps are not taken soon.

While each operator will have to take individual decisions about what would best serve their purposes, it might boil down to them having to gradually discontinue unlimited data plans, which are very popular at present, and instead introduce usage based structured plans in the near future.

Update: US mobile operators are already resorting to the uninnovative approach of limiting mobile data use. Verizon will introduce tiered pricing on July 7. While this might be a good way to limit damage quickly, it leaves plenty of room for a smart start-up to offer unlimited packages and win public favour quickly.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

A survey conducted by Greystripe the brand focused mobile ad network has recently revealed that two thirds of moms are using their smartphones to help them with their shopping.

The survey was conducted by them over a period of three months between November 2010 and February 2011 across 239 women with children. It has shown that 66% of the women surveyed made use of their smartphones while shopping.

• The commonest use of the smartphone was to locate the nearest store in the area. 45% of the women did this.
• 36% of the women used their smartphones to compare prices of commodities in different stores.
• 31% of the women used their phones for new product research.

Apart from this, women also used their smartphones to save money by downloading coupons through their Android or iPhones. The phones were also commonly used for shopping lists and to look up new recipes.

Dane Holewinski, director of marketing at Greystripe said “The majority of moms with smartphones are using those devices for their day-to-day tasks especially shopping, making them the ideal target for advertisers.”

Similar surveys carried out by others have shown somewhat conflicting results. A mobile shopping survey across 1600 women last year showed that 94% of them were interested in mobile shopping and mobile marketing.

During the same time frame a survey conducted by SheSpeaks found that only 10% of women had downloaded any apps related to shopping and 62% were not even interested in doing so.

In fact, studies conducted recently have indicated, that not only a large number of users already use smartphones, but a sizable portion of the rest plan to start using one within the next 3-6 months.

Several mobile operators have also announced that they intend to launch app stores in the near future. This will make it easier for users to download the apps they want.

Some of the popular manufacturers such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry already have their own app stores. As would be expected, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS are the most popular among the users of smartphones.

Not only do users of iOS and Android OS download more apps, they also use each of these apps more frequently than users of other smartphones.

It has been found that users of Apple’s iPhone have an average of 48 apps, while Android OS users have 35 apps and Blackberry RIM users have 15 apps on their handsets. Additionally, 68% of iPhone users and 60% of Android users access their apps frequently everyday, while only 45% of RIM users do so.

In order to improve their odds, other manufacturers must keep in mind that they need to encourage their developers to come up with good apps, by keeping the process of app certification simple, as well as providing them with transparent revenue sharing systems as incentive.

Developers on the other hand, should keep in mind that a good app is one, which is not just interesting at first glance, but continues to hold ones interest and provides some valuable service or facility.

This is certainly good news for the industry, as it means that music downloads to mobile handsets are expected to more than double in value within the next 5 years, from $2.4 billion in 2010.

The music industry had been going through a very lean phase for the last several years due to the rampant prevalence of online piracy. After the introduction of P2P file sharing, people tended to avoid buying records and CDs from the market, and just downloaded the music illegally.

In order to fight this piracy, companies like Apple introduced iTunes in 2003. People could now easily and legally download the music in the form of ring tones, ring back tones, full track services and music videos by paying for it.

While PCs with MP3 players were earlier required to download the music, the recent technological advances made by the handset industry have now made mobiles the most popular tools to download music.

In fact, according to the Juniper report, the sales of the iPhone will soon exceed that of the iPod because of this. Google has also gone into the mobile music business with the intention of making their Android OS more popular than Apple’s iOS.

Whether this saves the music industry as we know it, or seeds a revolution where record labels become obsolete or have to redefine their business model in order to effective monetise music downloads by consumers without worrying about piracy eating into their revenues remains to be seen.

Although the Android operating system was first made with the intention of using it for mobile phones, it is now being used in other devices such as netbooks and tablets PCs.

Victoria Fodale, an analyst at ABI Research, has estimated that by the year 2015, the Android Operating System will be the base for 33% of Linux-enabled smartphones.

According to Fodale, one of the important reasons for the sudden growth in the popularity of the Android, is its flexibility, as it can easily be modified to suit different products.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the Chief Executive of graphics chip supplier, Nvidia says, “The good news is that we finally have an operating system to unite behind.” He further says, that Windows is not suitable for tablets, as it is too big and has too many features.

In quite a contrast to Huang’s opinion, however, computer and device makers, Asus have announced that they will be launching a Windows-based tablet next year.

One should not forget that Android has yet to globally overtake the popular Apple OS X operating system, which is used in the extremely popular iPhone and iPad. With Apple having sold 1 million iPads in just four weeks after it was launched, manufacturers have realised that there is a great demand for tablets and they will surely try to cash-in on that demand soon.

Intel, Nokia and Samsung have also announced 2 Linux-based operating systems, “bada” from Samsung and “MeeGo” from Intel and Nokia.

As of now, the updated service is available only in the U.S.A. on the iPhone and on Android devices.

When a user views the results of a search query, tapping on a button to the left of the search box on the search results page will reveal the new search options menu. When the user selects one of the items in the menu, the search results get refined, just as is done on regular search.

The expanded search options menu will make the paid and organic search results slide to the right side of the screen. The user can still interact with the results by panning right.

New options, such as News and Products, have also been added to the menu.

Google has promised to roll out the updated interface on other devices and in other locations as soon as possible. They will also offer more options soon.

While speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Google’s Steve Lee hinted that a new version of Latitude would be available shortly. The updated version will allow users to access information and data about where they have been. Access to this information will be restricted to the user only.

Contrary to initial reports, the geo-location service is doing pretty well, TechCrunch reports. Latitude has 3 million active users. This is especially significant when compared to competitors, Foursquare and My Town, which have 1 million and 2 million users respectively.

In fact, 8 million people that have signed up for Latitude since its inception. It is believed that this year, Latitude grew 30% each month. The current growth of Android and Blackberry is no doubt helping fuel this growth.

Google hopes to have several third party mobile applications working through the Latitude API in the near future.

The new Place Pages for Mobile will provide relevant information about places of interest in a given neighbourhood, to people on the go. Apart from giving the exact location of a shop, hotel, restaurant, tourist spot or any other business, the service will also provide a lot of detailed information about the place, including opening times, users reviews, ratings and images of the place.

As with the regular Place Pages, the mobile Place Pages can be accessed by clicking on the relevant location pinpointed on Google Maps.

Instead of including a mini map within the place pages, Google requires users to instead have to click on a ‘map’ button, which isn’t really smart for a mobile interface where fewer clicks are always better.

At present, the new Place Pages for Mobile are only available on Android-powered handsets and the iPhone and iPod in the U.S.A.

Interested users can view the service through a google.com search on their smartphones. They then have to click on the relevant local business listing on the search results page.

Google is sticking far too many fingers into the mobile pie to leave any mobile provider comfortable. They’ve stomped over other mobile search engines, mobile operators, mobile application platforms, even mobile operating systems and are developing their own Operating System which will compete with the Apple Mac OS.

These facts do not seem to have gone down well with Apple, and undisclosed sources revealed to BusinessWeek that for the past few weeks, Apple has been in talks with their one-time arch rival, Microsoft, which is also a rival of Google.

The talks have been centered around the possibility of making Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, the default search provider on the iPhone.

If the deal between Apple and Microsoft is finalised, users will have to actively change the settings on their iPhone, if they then wish to use Google as their search engine.

At present, Google’s position as the default search engine earns them a considerable amount of money from mobile search advertising on the iPhone. This revenue is then shared with Apple. Needless to say, Google would lose out on this revenue if it is replaced by Bing.

If Bing does become the default search engine on the iPhone, Microsoft will not only get a higher market share in mobile search but will also earn significant revenues from mobile search advertising on iPhones.

Realistically, though, even if Apple and Microsoft could put aside years of rivalry, which is still going strong (look at the I’m not a PC, I’m a Mac ads!) and strike the deal, one wonders how long it will last, especially since Microsoft is also believed to be working towards making its own smartphone.

Add to that, speculation that Apple might try to develop its own search engine definitely precludes any relationship with Microsoft, as the last thing Ballmer and company need is more competition in search from yet another major rival.

Mobile devices are predicted to “Eclipse the PC” next year. While the report does not actually predict the death of the Personal Computer, it does say that the mobile Web will grow, to the extent that it no longer remains subservient or secondary to the PC. Mobiles will become the primary source of Web browsing for many.

It is expected that the number of mobile Web users will cross the 1 billion mark in 2010, while the number of PC users will be around 1.3 billion. The growth rate of mobile devices will be 2.5 times that of the PC.

The growing numbers of smart phones, such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Google Android powered devices, along with good mobile operating systems, are responsible for this explosive growth.

200 million more smart phones are expected to hit the markets in 2010.

IDC also predicts that the iPhone, which currently has about 1,00,000 applications, will have about 3,00,000 applications by the end of the next year, while Android, which has just 10,000 applications will have 50,000 to 75,000 applications by then, further boosting the mobile Internet.

Google’s open operating system, Android, will also provide stiff competition to the iPhone.

The typically over-hyped Apple tablet, which they have called the ‘iPad’, and Microsoft’s own tablet device, which is expected to launch in the coming year as well, will further contribute to this growth.

The BBC reports that Tesco will now be one of the retailers for the iPhone handsets along with Vodafone and Orange.

While Orange has already started selling the iPhone, Vodafone expects to start doing so early next year. In the meantime, a spokesperson for Tesco has said that they hope to be able to start selling the iPhone in time for Christmas. They have also said that their prices will be “competitive”, although no figure has been disclosed as yet.

O2 had an exclusive deal with Apple since the launch of the iPhone in 2007. The deal expired in September this year. During this time they were able to lure subscribers from other service providers and reported having sold more than 1 million iPhones.

Tesco Mobile’s iPhone offer will be a joint venture with O2 and they will sell the iPhone with contracts as well as on pay as you go tariffs. The handsets will be sold through their retail outlets and through their website, Tesco Direct.

All the new operators selling the iPhone are offering the 3G as well as 3GS handsets.

Competition between various operators might prove beneficial for consumers, in the long run, as it could trigger off a price war once the hype surrounding the devices wears down a bit.

The competitors of O2, Orange and Vodaphone, have lost no time in jumping into the fray, and both have now got permission to sell the iPhone in the U.K. in both the 3G and the more recent 3GS models.

Although neither of them has set any specific date from which they will sell the phones yet, Orange is expected to start selling the iPhone before the end of this year, while Vodaphone is likely to do so in the beginning of the next year.

While Vodaphone says that they will sell the iPhone mainly to their existing customers, O2 had used their exclusivity deal to attract a lot of new clients. In fact in February 2009 itself, O2 claimed to have sold over a million handsets, thus generating a lot of new clients for themselves, including luring away some of the customers from other networks.

O2 now has an exclusive deal to ell the Palm Pre which is a competitor of the iPhone. This handset will be available from October 16 onwards.

While neither Orange nor Vodaphone have yet specified the price a t which the iPhone handsets will be sold by them the competition between the three service providers is bound to prove beneficial for users.

The report says, “The emergence of devices such as the iPhone and HTC Dream (G1) that deliver truly compelling Internet experiences has generated discussion of which Web consumers will use on mobile – mobile Web sites or HTML sites.”

This question is what must have encouraged AdMob to undertake this survey. The survey was based on data collected from ad requests on their own vast network of about 7,000 mobile websites and 1,600 apps, and also from details provided by Gartner.

According to the findings of this report, smartphones have a smaller market share compared to other handsets, but they still account for almost 3 times the usage compared to the usage by other handsets.

Some of the findings of the survey are listed below.

While the iPhone OS holds only 8% of the market share, it is responsible for 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML use.

The Android OS has even less than 1% of the smartphone market share but it generates 3% of the mobile web requests and 9% of HTML requests.

On the other hand the Symbian OS which holds a huge chunk of the smartphone market share – 52%, carries only 36% of requests for mobile web usage and a mere 7% of HTML usage.

The survey also found that 24% of requests made from the U.S. were made using a Wi-Fi network. The iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony PSP, HTC Dream (G1) and HTC Dash are the most popularly used Wi-Fi handsets.

The study concludes that overall, mobile Web sites are used far more on smartphones than HTML sites on those phones which operate on the RIM and Symbian operating systems.

Google continues to top the list, growing in value from $86 billion last year to $100 billion in 2009, which represents a growth of 16%. Google is followed by rival, Microsoft, which climbed up one position from last year with a current value of $76.2 billion – also up 8% over last year.

Yahoo! has fallen from number 62 last year to number 81 this year, and its value has also fallen, from $11.5 billion to $7.9 billion.

Other technology brands in the top 10 are IBM at number 4 with a value of $66.6 billion, Apple is at number 6 and is valued at $63.1 billion. China Mobile is placed at number 7, with a value of $61.2 billion, and Vodafone, which is a new entrant in the top 10 list, is at number 9, with a value of $53.7 billion.

Mobile operators have seen brand value rise, for the most part. O2 and AT&T have especially benefited from the launch of the iPhone, both seeing double-digit rises in brand value. The top 10 mobile operators by brand value are:

Among the non-technology-based companies, General Electric (GE) has taken quite a beating, as the brand’s value has fallen from the number two position last year, to number 8 this year.

Ten of the companies in the top 25 list are from the technology sector. Further down the list is Amazon at number 26, AT&T at number 28, Cisco at number 30 and eBay at number 54.

Quite surprisingly, the value of some of the brands has gone up substantially this year, in spite of the effects of the worldwide recession, which only goes to show that good companies can do well even in tough times.

In the UK, brand value for some of the brands in the list has fallen. Marks & Spencers, in particular, has seen a 48% fall in brand value over the past year.

The 10 most valuable brands in the UK are as follows:

Blackjack players need to keep track (count) of the number of face cards, aces and 10s played from the deck, as against cards of a lower value, in order to judge their chances of winning the game, and bet accordingly. Card counting, per se, is not illegal in Nevada, but using any kind of device to do so is illegal and carries severe punishment.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board has warned casinos, through a circular dated 5^th February, regarding the Blackjack Card Counter, which is an application for iPhones and the iPod Touch that is available on the iTunes Application Store for a mere US $1.99. Installing this application makes it very easy for gamblers to count cards, and thus cheat the casinos.

The application can be set to quickly switch to the “Stealth Mode” where it looks as though the phone has been switched off because the screen is shut off, but the card counter is still functional, and can be used by pressing keys on the screen.

Under Nevada law, using a device to count cards is an offence punishable with imprisonment between one to six years or a fine of up to $10,000 for the first offence.

Gambling regulators in California first found this device being used by customers in an Indian Casino and informed the concerned authorities.

This application was developed by Australian, Travis Yates (webtopia.com.au), who says its demand has gone up several times after the National Gaming Control Board issued the warning.

Another similar application is available in the App Stores. It is called “Card Counter” and costs $2.99.

While this application is certainly not new – Windows Mobile and Yahoo! Mobile already have similar services – it is reasonable to expect that due to the sheer popularity of Google and the simplicity of the process, a lot more iPhone users are now likely to use Google Search on their handsets.

Google will also combine this service with the iPhone’s GPS capability, to pinpoint the user’s location and the locations of various advertisers, reports Wired.com. However there is a downside to the voice search service. Search terms have been entered into the system in a typical American accent and hence the search procedure fails if the search words are spoken by people with different accents.

Given the diverse accents spoken in the U.K., the voice search function has quite “confused” the system. According to the Telegraph, when the word iPhone was spoken into the handset, using various British accents, the results ranged from Einstein, MySpace and Bonfire to Gorillas and Kitchen sinks!

A hilarious situation by itself, one might say, but one that was certainly never intended by Google.

Price plans for Vodafone mobile start at £25 per month. Users will be able to access up to 500MB per month, so long as they adhere to the ‘fair usage policy’, which means that teenagers who download too much music or video could get barred from using the service in the future.

In the past, Vodafone users had to buy their Internet access bundle separately for £7.5 per month, and they could only use a maximum of 120 MB per month. Mobile service provider O2 also provides similar services to its iPhone users, but Vodafone will be the first company to offer free Internet access to all users irrespective of the type of handset they use.

This move is expected to fetch them a larger share in the mobile market, which is already over-crowded. Vodafone’s head of mobile Internet and content services, Al Russell says, “Many people already have phones that can browse the internet, so they do not need to buy new ones.”

Until recently, mobile Internet access tariffs were steep and limits on the amount of data one could access made consumers vary of mobile Internet services. Most users are also not familiar with the usage of mobile phones to access the internet.

However, Russell says that the staff at Vodafone stores and their helplines will explain to their clients how their handsets can be easily used to access the Internet, and that now they would not have to worry about the costs either.

This announcement comes around the same time that Vodafone signed deals with Apple to sell iPhones in Australia, India, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Portugal, Czech Republic, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

Although there had been no official announcement about the launch of such a facility by AT&T, visitors to the iPhone section of the site noticed mention of the availability of WiFi access through AT&T’s network of over 17,000 hotspots, which include Starbucks coffee shops, Barnes & Noble book stores and airports.

MacRumors.com reports that iPhone users were provided with a customized portal to enable them to access Wi-Fi services for free, by just entering their mobile number on a specially formatted page.

However, just a short while later customers who had previously used the free service, said that the service had been disconnected at the same places where it had earlier been available. Customers stated that they were now being asked to provide a username and password for the same facility that had been available for free a few days ago. AT&T’s iPhone site was also updated to remove mention of the free mobile Internet access.

While AT&T has chosen to remain silent about the issue, it is assumed that the service has been temporarily discontinued as they have not updated all their hotspots with this facility, but once that is done the service will resume. Speculation is also rife that the next iPhone version will not be tied in to a specfic operator, which would explain why AT&T sees the need to differentiate its offering and provide free WiFi to its iPhone customers as an added bonus.

Brandz Top 100 identifies the most powerful brands in the world. The ranking is based on results from a survey conducted across 1,00,000 people and financial data from the ranked corporations.

Google’s total brand value has increased 30% and is now estimated to be worth around $86 billion. Peter Walshe, global account director at Millward Brown says, “Google’s rank has been driven by fantastic financial performance and equity value.”

Microsoft did not fare badly either, ranking third, with a 29% increase in brand value. Yahoo!, however, fared very badly, being one of only four brands in the technology sector to lose brand value. The Yahoo! brand fell 13% to make it worth just $11.5 billion.

The top five brands, Google, General Electric, Microsoft, Coca-cola and China Mobile (in that order), are therefore the same as last year, and each company has increased its estimated value by 15% to 39% in the year.

Apple is a new entrant in the top 10 list at number 7. Its value is $55.2 billion up a whopping 123% from last year, when it was at number 16. The jump in Apple’s brand value has been largely owing to the success of its new products iTouch and iPhone.

Mobile Operator, Vodafone, was the top ranking British brand, up 12 places from last year, with a 75% increase in value to $36.9 billion. It was followed by Tesco, HSBC, Marks & Spencer and Barclays in the ranking of the top UK brands.

Overall, the mobile sector showed the strongest growth in brand value, followed by technology, personal care, fast food and luxury. Porsche topped the ranking of brands with the highest brand momentum, while Louis Vuitton had the highest brand contribution.

Download Brandz Top 100 2008 Report

According to the report, Skype will be teaming up with mobile operator 3 from the end of November. They will release a fully integrated mobile phone that will mean free mobile to mobile phone calls for anyone swapping networks.

This should be good news for 3. Providing free mobile to mobile calls from anywhere in the world, in association with Skype, could cause all the other operators enormous pain.

Rattling the competition

Speaking to the BBC, Per Lindberg, a telecommunications and IT analyst at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort said, “Whether they win market share depends completely on their competitors’ reactions.” He thinks a move such as this could prompt all the operators to cut their prices, “If Vodafone or Telefonica move to ‘all-you-can-eat’ then the situation may change.”

Skype’s phone could even be a threat to other new entrants such as Apple’s iPhone or Google’s rumoured GPhone. Sprint Nextel could also take over Vonage and integrate VOIP services into their products even more seamlessly than Skype can.

Three is the mobile business of Hong Kong based Hutchison Whampoa, better known in Asia and the USA for Hutchison Telecom and the Harbour Plaza hotel group. Skype was acquired by Ebay back in 2005 for $2.6 Billion. Recently, though, Ebay was publicly dissatisfied with Skype’s performance, when it was forced to announce to shareholders that it would have to pay an impairment charge of $900 million because it had over-valued the group.

If the Skype – 3 deal delivers on promise, it could prove to be a turn-around point for Skype as well as the sagging VOIP industry on the whole.

BBC Report: Skype teams up with 3

iPhone’s UK launch comes in time for the holiday season, and is accompanied by a $200 price cut in the USA to drive further sales over Christmas. Carphone Warehouse, the UK’s biggest handset retailer, will sell the phone in partnership with O2.

Apple will sell the iPhone in Germany via T-Mobile and in France through Orange. The release date for these countries is set to coincide with that in the UK. The partnerships were all selected based on the potential coverage and network size.

The feature set that will be made available in the UK is nearly the same as that in the US, except for the availability of visual voicemail, European language keyboards, quick access to currently playing tunes, use of firmware version 1.1.1 and the ability to turn off EDGE roaming.

While 3G access will not be made available till 2008, according to Steve Jobs, the O2 iPhone will provide free WiFi access to UK users through 7,500 hotspots powered by Cloud.
Google, meanwhile, will definitely launch its own-brand handset, dubbed GPhone but has yet to finalize the handset’s specifications, OS, production contractor and operating partners, according to sources at Taiwan handset makers who spoke to DigiTimes reporters.