Opera Mini Goes To Windows Phone

Norwegian software maker Opera inked a deal to take over the browser building unit of Microsoft’s Nokia cellular phone unit and reported second-quarter earnings above expectations on Thursday, sending it shares sharply higher.

“We have signed a strategic licensing deal with Microsoft. We are basically taking over the browser building department in Nokia,” Opera Chief Executive Lars Boilsesen said. “This means that Opera Mini will become the default browser for Microsoft’s feature phone product lines and the Asha phones product lines.”

The deal will be profitable from the start, he added.

“All the current user base will be encouraged to upgrade to Opera Mini and all the new phones will come with Opera Mini pre-installed as a default browser. This is a great deal for us. We have dreamed of this for more than 10 years.”

In a separate statement, Opera said the licensing agreement applies to mobile phones based on the Series 30+, Series 40 and Asha software platforms.

“As part of the agreement, people who use the current browser for these phones, Xpress, will be encouraged to upgrade to the latest Opera Mini browser. Factory-new devices will have Opera Mini pre-installed.”

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Will Sprint Cut It’s Staff?

Sprint’s new CEO Marcelo Claure addressed employees for the first time and promised price reductions are coming very soon, according to a report.

Sprint didn’t deny the report of Marcelo’s comments. A spokesman also confirmed Friday that Sprint is “focusing on providing the best value in the market.”

According to the account of Claure’s comments, he told workers, “We’re going to change our plans to make sure every customer in America thinks twice about signing up to a competitor.” The report, which first appeared in LightReading.com, also said that “very disruptive” rate plans are coming this week.

Sprint didn’t dispute Light Reading’s report, but a spokesman said Sprint is not commenting on “any potential pricing plans before they are announced.”

The spokesman, Doug Duvall, said Marcelo held his first all-employee town hall meeting before a standing-room-only crowd. He added: “He shared his passion for his family, work and soccer team and his commitment to leading Sprint. He discussed Sprint’s challenges and pledged to get Sprint ‘back in the game’ by focusing on providing the best value in the market, completing our network build and optimizing Sprint’s cost structure.”

By confirming Sprint wants to offer the “best value in the market,” it’s pretty clear that Sprint, the third-largest U.S. carrier, will soon wage a price war with the T-Mobile, the fourth-largest U.S. carrier that has quickly been gaining on Sprint.

Analysts recently said Sprint’s recent “Framily plan” isn’t competitive in the market, which former CEO Dan Hesse acknowledged in late July before his departure on Monday.

The Sprint Framily plans costs $160 a month for 4GB of data, but comes with overage charges and won’t allow tethering. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has a family plan offered through September that costs $100 a month for four lines and 10GB of data, although each line is limited to 2.5GB.

Hesse had earlier described subscriber plans Sprint was testing that have tiers of data and unlimited data.

According to Light Reading, Claure also told employees that price cuts are needed because Sprint’s network isn’t at the level of performance and reach that it should be. “When you have a great network, you don’t have to compete on price,” he reportedly said. “When your network is behind, unfortunately you have to compete on value and price.”

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FCC Mandates Text-To-911

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted last week to require U.S. mobile carriers and many text-messaging apps to support functionality that allows texting emergency dispatch centers, even after questions about whether the centers will be ready by the deadline.

The commission’s vote requires U.S. mobile carriers and some texting apps to put emergency text-to-911 functionality in place by the end of the year.

Even though the nation’s four largest mobile carriers have all added text-to-911 functionality this year, less than 2 percent of the nation’s 6,800 emergency dispatch centers are ready to receive texts, said Commissioner Ajit Pai. The commission’s action will give smartphone users the impression they can send text to emergency responders, when many will not be able to, he said.

The FCC’s action “encourages the public to dive into text-to-911 functionality, when in reality, there’s hardly any water in the pool,” Pai said. “The order is sure to result in massive consumer confusion, and therefore will endanger, rather than advance, public safety.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler applauded the largest mobile carriers — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile USA — for adding text-to-911 functionality. The agency needs to push other carriers and emergency dispatch centers, called public-safety answering points or PSAPs, to do the same, he added.

“A lot of time of has passed since [the four largest] carriers stepped up and did something voluntarily, and the other carriers serving the consumers of America did not,” he said. “If you don’t step up to your responsibility, we will.”

Smartphone users should still call 911 if possible, but text-to-911 services need to be more widely available, Wheeler said.

The adoption of text-to-911 will let smartphone users contact police and other emergency responders when it’s not safe to talk on the phone, Wheeler said. It will also aid people with hearing or speech disabilities, he noted.

“Texting is now as important a function on a mobile device as talking,” Wheeler said. “Some of those text messages are cries for help.”

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HP Increases SlateBook Pricing

Hewlett-Packard’s SlateBook 14 laptop with Google’s Android OS has started shipping on schedule, but it’s priced at $429, which is $30 more than the company had said it would cost.

The laptop, which has a 14-inch screen and Android 4.3, was announced in June. At the time, HP said it would be priced at $399.

It is available on HP’s website.

The SlateBook 14 was introduced after customers told HP they wanted laptops with Android. The laptop has an interface similar to that on Android tablets and can adjust mobile apps to run on the larger touchscreen. Users will also be able to sync laptop data with mobile devices and vice versa.

The laptop is also for those who rely on the Web for most of their computing, much like Chromebooks. It has a few advantages over Chromebooks, with support for key Android apps such as Skype. Android also boasts better wireless printing support than Chromebooks.

The laptop weighs 1.68 kilograms and offers nine hours of battery life, according to specifications on HP’s website.

It has a quad-core Tegra 4 processor, 2GB of DRAM and 16GB of storage. Connectivity features include 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It also has a webcam, USB 3.0 port and a micro-SD slot for expandable storage.

It could be a strong multimedia laptop with a 1920 x 1080 pixel screen and an integrated graphics processor that can handle 4K video. TVs can be connected to the laptop through an HDMI port.

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Chrome Climbs To Second

Google’s Chrome browser in July broke the 20% user share bar for the first time, according to recently published statistics by Web measurement vendor Net Applications.

But because the browser war is a zero-sum game, when Chrome won others had to lose. The biggest loser, as has been the case for the last year: Mozilla’s Firefox, which came dangerously close to another milestone, but on the way down.

Firefox accounted for 15.1% of the desktop and laptop personal computer browsers used in July, a low point not seen by the open-source application since October 2007, a year before Chrome debuted and when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) was only on version 7.

Chrome had flirted with the 20% mark before. More than two years ago, Chrome’s user share — a Net Applications’ measurement of the unique visitors running each browser — had come close: 19.6%. But Chrome then took a prolonged dip that only began reversing last fall.

Chrome’s July user share of 20.4% put the browser solidly in second place, but still far behind IE in Net Applications’ tallies. IE’s share last month was 58%, down slightly from the month before.

Firefox also lost user share in July, dropping half a percentage point to 15.1%. It was the ninth straight month that the desktop browser lost share. In the past three months alone, Firefox has fallen nearly two points.

The timing of the decline has been terrible, as Mozilla’s current contract with Google ends in November. That deal, which assigned Google’s search engine as the default for most Firefox customers, has generated the bulk of Mozilla’s revenue. In 2012, for example, the last year for which financial data was available, Google paid Mozilla an estimated $272 million, or 88% of all Mozilla income.

Going into this year’s contract renewal talks, Mozilla will be bargaining from a much weaker position, down 34% in total user share since July 2011.

Apple’s Safari remained in a distant fourth place behind Firefox, with a user share of 5.2%, down four-tenths of a percentage point in the last month. Meanwhile, Opera Software’s Opera browser brought up the rear with a small 1% user share.

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eBay Expands Mobile Shopping

Braintree, the payments gateway owned by eBay Inc, is working on removing a hurdle for e-commerce companies by making it easier for customers to directly pay for products on their smart phones.

The company rolled out a set of tools for software developers on Wednesday that allows businesses to deduct payments directly from a customer’s PayPal account.

The developer kit is the first big push from Braintree since it was bought by eBay for $800 million last year to help PayPal, eBay’s payments division, expand its presence on mobile devices.

Eliminating the need for mobile shoppers to type in their credit card details on their phones should help boost sales, Braintree Chief Executive Bill Ready said in an interview.

This is especially critical as consumers spend more time on their smartphones, a trend that is forcing developers to design a “fundamentally different computing experience” for the smaller screen, Ready added.

Braintree processes payments for businesses including car service Uber and online home-rental marketplace Airbnb.

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Salesforce Goes Healthcare

Salesforce Inc, one of the first cloud-computing companies, is turning its focus towards healthcare with new software and services aimed at the largest hospitals.

Salesforce has announced a strategic alliance with Amsterdam-based medical technology company Philips, which it envisions as the first of many partnerships. These companies will announce two new medical applications later in the summer, called Philips eCareCoordinator and Philips eCare Companion.

The software is designed to improve health and cut costs. The apps are intended to be used by physicians to monitor chronically ill patients between doctor visits.

Salesforce said the goal is to make it easier for hospitals to collect and analyze data from medical devices, which patients with chronic conditions often use at home.

“In the United States, care providers are facing increasing demands and decreasing reimbursement,” said Michael Peachey, a senior director of solutions and product marketing at Salesforce.

“We want to improve efficiency for physicians by transmitting patient data in real time.”

Peachey said the Salesforce software meets security and privacy rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA.

In the short term, Peachey said Salesforce intends to develop additional apps with other partners to help doctors and nurses monitor patients from the comfort of their homes.

“It’s an open platform,” he said.

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Microsoft’s Killswitch Incoming

Responding to mounting  pressure, Google and Microsoft will follow Apple in adding an anti-theft “kill switch” to their smartphone operating systems.

The commitment comes at a time when new data shows a dramatic drop in theft of Apple iPhones and iPads after the September 2013 introduction of iOS 7, which included a kill-switch function that allows stolen devices to be remotely locked and deleted so they become useless.

In New York, iPhone theft was down 19 percent in the first five months of this year, which is almost double the 10 percent drop in overall robberies seen in the city. Over the same period, thefts of Samsung devices — which did not include a kill switch until one was introduced on Verizon-only models in April — rose by over 40 percent.

In San Francisco, robberies of iPhones were 38 percent lower in the six months after the iOS 7 introduction versus the six months before, while in London thefts over the same period were down by 24 percent. In both cities, robberies of Samsung devices increased.

“These statistics validate what we always knew to be true, that a technological solution has the potential to end the victimization of wireless consumers everywhere,” San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told IDG News Service.

Gascon and New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have been leading a push to get smartphone vendors and telecom carriers to include kill switches in their products as a way to curb phone theft.

The joint work had early success with Apple but other carriers and phone makers dragged their feet. However, resistance to the idea appears to be dropping as several bills that mandate kill switches make their way through state legislatures and the U.S. Congress.

The bills demand a function that would enable a phone owner to remotely delete and disable a phone if stolen. The function could be disabled by consumers before a theft takes place if desired, but crucially new handsets would be supplied with it switched on by default.

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BlackBerry And Amazon Team Up

BlackBerry Ltd has agreed to a licensing deal with Amazon.com Inc that will let the Canadian smartphone maker offer some 240,000 Android applications from Amazon’s app store on its lineup of BlackBerry 10 devices this fall.

The move allows the Waterloo, Ontario-based company to add a vast array of consumer-focused apps to its devices, while at the same time directing its own efforts toward developing enterprise and productivity applications.

Customers who own smartphones powered by its BlackBerry 10 operating system will now be able to access popular Android apps such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest, Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga on their BlackBerry devices this fall. Google Inc makes Android, the mobile operating system used in more than a billion phones and tablets.

The apps will become available after the Canadian smartphone maker rolls out the upgraded BlackBerry 10.3 operating system, the company said.

The move is the latest by the smartphone pioneer to streamline its focus as it attempts to reinvent itself under new Chief Executive Officer John Chen as BlackBerry phones have lost ground to Apple Inc’s iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s Galaxy devices.

Analysts saw the move as a step in the right direction, but are not sure whether it will help turn the tide for BlackBerry.

“While this will widen the BB10 app ecosystem, the consumer

smartphone environment still remains challenging,” Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um said in a note to clients.

Um views the announcement as a positive for BlackBerry, but said “whether it stems consumer churn remains to be seen.”

Chen wants to remain a competitor in the smartphone segment, but is focused on making BlackBerry a dominant force in machine-to-machine communications. The company’s QNX software already is a mainstay in the automotive industry, powering electronic and other systems in a wide range of cars.

BlackBerry already works with hundreds of large enterprise clients, including corporations and government agencies, to manage and secure mobile devices on their internal networks.

Chen intends to build on those ties and BlackBerry’s security credentials to let these enterprise clients build and customize in-house corporate and productivity applications for their employees.

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Is Apple Now Copying Google

PC Advisor has been going through Apple’s latest iOS 8 operating system and is finding features which appear to be a direct lift from Google. Of course it has to say that Apple is being brilliant and original about stealing the ideas. After it points out that Apple did not invent the music player but it did steal it better than anyone else.

The top 5 iOS 8 features Apple stole from Android include:

Typing suggestions: Start typing and suggested words will appear letter by letter. Hit the correct word and you save the time it would have taken to type the while word and it is a pretty intelligent selection process.

Okay Google: Hotword detection is also the basis of the Google Now Launcher that shipped with the Nexus 5. As long as your phone is awake, saying ‘Okay Google’ wakes up the voice assistant. In iOS 8 Apple has added something similar in the guise of ‘Hey Siri’, the ability to immediately engage Siri simply via a voice command.

Third-party keyboards: Google has long given Android users the opportunity to explore the world outside its own platform. Apple is allowing the same thing on its system now.

Widgets: Widgets have always been part of Android and Apple finally is letting it happen. Of course Apple is not entirely prepared to let you have full control of your device’s desktop. iOS 8 widgets are small app extensions that take up a spot in the Notification Center. Not as good as Android but better than a poke in the eye with a short stick.

Useful notifications: Android has long allowed developers to add up to two action buttons to a notification. So when the message pops up telling you that you have a message you can reply right from the notification, the relevant app opening as required. Now Apple can do that.

While it is accepted that ideas are copied, at least until one of the sides turns into a Patent Troll, what is strange about Apple is that it markets itself as the innovation hub that others follow. It appears that if this was ever true it is not the case now.

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