RIM To Launch Music Service

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is making plans to roll out its own music streaming service that will work across its mobile devices, according to people familiar with the plans.

The new service is likely part of an attempt by RIM to improve its BlackBerry Messenger service as it competes with the mobile media platform strengths of rival Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Android.

RIM is in late-stage negotiations with major labels, including Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony Corp’s Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Group. The new service is expected to be announced by Labor Day in the United States, September 5.

RIM has been enhancing its BlackBerry Messenger offering, popularly known as BBM, since announcing its “social platform” at last September’s DevCon event where it unveiled the PlayBook tablet computer.

A RIM spokeswoman declined comment on the report but said BBM is one of the largest mobile social networks in the world.

RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones have been hit by a sharply declining market share in the United States, even as the company has expanded sales in other parts of the world, partly because of BBM’s popularity.

Analyst Matthew Thornton at Avian Securities said he doubted the music service would attract new users but might help the company keep its existing BlackBerry customers interested.

“I just don’t think trying to replicate Apple is really going to change their situation near term,” he said.

“For RIM it’s going to be the new OS 7 product first and foremost … and then it’s about QNX and making that transition.”

RIM has just launched an updated operating system on three new touchscreen devices intended to catch up with the technical specifications of Android and other rivals. The company plans to launch the first BlackBerrys using the QNX software, used on its PlayBook tablet, early next year.

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Best Buy Stuck With TouchPads

Best Buy is sitting on a boatload of 200,000 HP Touchpads and wants to send them back to HP.

According to Allthingsd, Best Buy stocked its warehouses with around 270,000 HP Touchpad tablets. However, the retailer has been unable to sell the tablets and has only sold at most 25,000, even with a $100 discount, so Best Buy is requesting that HP take back all of the unsold devices.

Furthermore, it is being said that things are so bad that HP EVP Todd Bradley might have to go to Best Buy’s headquarters and plead with executives to exercise patience. It appears that the Touchpad is suffering from poor sales in many stores across the country, with Wal-Mart also said to be an unhappy camper.

Update…HP will stop making the HP Touchpads…….

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VoIP Ideal Platform For Controlling Botnets

Botnets and their masters can communicate with one other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and exchanging data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.

This gives the botmasters — whose top goals include remaining anonymous — the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable cellular phones, say researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk-assessment firm Security Art.

Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.

In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.

In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognize patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.

The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.

During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry, representing the botmaster dialed in over the public phone network to the same conference call.

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iPad Rivals Have Better Chance In Europe

Would-be rivals to Apple’s iPad have a better chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to drop prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Apple’s relatively small retail presence in Europe — with 52 stores compared with 238 in the United States — offers a chance to the likes of Samsung, Acer and Research in Motion, Forrester said.

But their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain. Forrester said emerging challengers from China and Taiwan would likely step in soon with cheaper offerings.

“There is this opportunity for iPad challengers, but the competition is very fragmented. Competing with Apple will require a different approach from what we’ve seen so far,” said analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, the author of the Forrester report.

Apple still has the tablet-computer market almost to itself after launching the iPad a year and a half ago. It has sold close to 30 million iPads, whose prices start at about $500.

Forrester expects Apple to sell 80 percent of all consumer tablets in the United States and 70 percent in Europe this year.

It expects 2011 worldwide tablet sales to reach 48 million units, with half of those sold in the United States, 30 percent in Europe, 15 percent in Asia and 5 percent in Latin America.

Forrester surveyed almost 14,000 online adult consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain, and also interviewed product strategists from manufacturers, telecommunications operators and retailers.

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RIM Unveils New BlackBerry Torch Phones

Research In Motion on Wednesday unveiled two more powerful versions of its touchscreen BlackBerry Torch, hoping to buy time until it can introduce a radically new software package in its smartphones.

The new smartphones, along with a Bold upgrade unveiled earlier, are part of what the Canadian company called its biggest global launch ever as it seeks to claw back North American market share losses from Apple’s iconic iPhone and a slew of devices running on Google’s Android software.

The three touchscreen phones, running on the new BlackBerry OS 7, each boast an improved screen display and pack a 1.2 GHz processor from Qualcomm, the most powerful ever for a BlackBerry phone. All three devices will launch with carriers globally by the end of August, RIM said.

The browser for the new phones is 40 percent faster than the original Torch, RIM’s last major phone launch which hit shelves almost a year ago.

But since co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis has already promised “superphones” next year using the QNX-based operating system running RIM’s PlayBook tablet
computer, analysts are looking beyond the launch.

“This is a necessary product refresh in advance of the big bang that we hope and expect will happen with QNX-based phones,” said CCS Insight vice-president of research John Jackson.

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RIM Cuts 11% Of Workforce

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd plans to slash approximately 11 percent of its workforce to curb costs as it struggles to compete against Apple Inc and Google Inc.

The announcement of 2,000 job cuts on Monday came a month after the Canadian company acknowledged that it would reduce headcount for the first time in a decade.

One analyst said the job cuts were slightly deeper than expected but were key to RIM’s recovery from a slump triggered by product delays and intense competition from Apple’s iPad and iPhone as well as devices powered by Google’s Android software.

RIM’s U.S.-listed stock, already near multi-year lows, was down as much as 2 percent before the market opened. It was trading down 1.8 percent at $27.40 on the Nasdaq
just before the open.

“This is not totally unexpected. I think the size of (the cuts) is a little bit bigger than what they were intimating before,” said Jefferies & Co analyst Peter Misek. “I think this is obviously realigning the cost structure to a new growth, or sales, reality.”

RIM said one-time charges from the job cuts were not included in its outlook for the second quarter or for the full year, and it would explain the financial impact of the cuts when it reports second quarter results on September 15.

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nVidia’s Tegra 3 Coming To Smartphones

It appears as though Nvidia’s next generation quad-core Kal-El (Tegra 3) quad core SoC will also show up on smartphones too. Originally, it was believed that the SoC would only support the ever growing tablet space.

Inside sources have confirmed that projects are already underway and that Tegra 3 aka Kal-El smartphones will be make a debut as well.

Nvidia had hoped to get a lot of play out of Tegra 2, unfortunately the chip was not as embraced as Nvidia had wanted. Even though the Tegra 2 SoC did manage to get a few design wins.

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HP To Debut 7-Inch Tablet In August

The 9.7-in. TouchPad debuting on July 1 from Hewlett-Packard (HP) will be quickly followed by a 7-in. tablet from HP in August, according to an anonymous source.

Taiwan Economic News on Friday cited an unnamed subcontractor for Inventec Corp., a PC manufacturing company in Taiwan, for information about the smaller tablet. The story said Inventec has “received big-ticket orders for tablet PCs from HP,” for both the 9.7-in. TouchPad and a 7-in. model launching in August.

The announced TouchPad runs WebOS, but no other details were available on the 7-in. model.

Inventec and HP have so far not commented on this story.

HP has not announced a 7-in. tablet, although that form factor is becoming fairly common alongside tablets with screens close to 10 inches in size.

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Mobile App Locates Cheaper Prescriptions

Medco Health Solutions and Verizon Wireless teamed up last month to release a mobile application that aids smartphone users in locating places where they can buy the lowest-cost prescription drugs.

Verizon stated the new Medco Pharmacy mobile app can also identify potentially harmful drug interactions based on Medco members’ medication histories.

Medco, which provides pharmacy services to more than 65 million customers, said its pharmacy mobile app is available for BlackBerry and Android smartphone users. It provides information about out-of-pocket costs for any prescription drug and lower-cost options specific to a person’s prescription drug plan, even if a patient is being treated by several doctors or fills prescriptions at many different pharmacies.

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iPhone Gaining on Nokia’s Dominance

Apple’s iPhone is moving closer and closer  to Nokia’s top spot in smartphones globally, according to first-quarter 2011 results reported by IDC on Thursday.

With the iPhone in the second spot, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion dropped to third after finishing second a year ago, IDC said. 99.6 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter, out of 372 million mobile phones overall.

Nokia sold 24.2 million smartphones in the first quarter, holding on to its global smartphone lead despite announcing that it will move from Symbian to Windows Phone as its main smartphone operating system in next few years, IDC said. Nokia “may find itself in danger of ceding market share as the competition ramps up,” IDC said.

Apple shipped 18.7 million iPhones in the first quarter, IDC said, a new record for a single quarter, “and inched closer to market leader Nokia, with fewer than 6 million units separating the two companies,” IDC noted.

Apple also had triple-digit growth in the U.S., with the Verizon Wireless CDMA iPhone 4, and in greater China.

RIM, while down from second place where it was a year ago, remained in third place from the fourth quarter of 2010. The majority of RIM’s shipments are older, lower-cost devices, IDC noted, a trend that will continue in the second quarter.

Samsung finished fourth in smartphones for the first quarter, with 10.8 million smartphones shipped, while HTC finished fifth, with 8.9 million shipped.

Samsung grew the most of any vendor for the first quarter — 350% year-over-year. Samsung has a multiple-OS strategy and sells mostly Android smartphones, including Galaxy S phones, as well as Windows Phone 7 and Wave devices.

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