Today Nokia announced a new partnership with Microsoft. The essence of the partnership is that Nokia and Microsoft will work closely together on Windows Phone, which Nokia now will use as its main operating system for mobile devices. Both are struggling in the mobile phone industry, and this partnership is a partnership between two dying dinosaurs in an attempt to create a nimble Nokia. Read more

The often misunderstood usage based billing of broadband services

Usage based billing (UBB) of broadband services, where the user pays for the bandwidth consumed, is a misunderstood child. UBB applies the same principles as other utility services (water, electricity, and gas). UBB represents a very different approach to the established flat rate regime in the telecoms sector, where customers can consume as much bandwidth as possible for a flat rate. Read more

CES 2011 was dominated by Android by Google and products based on the licensable ARM processor architecture. Android has been discussed at length, hence today I thought it would be useful to explore some of the implications of what occurred at CES with regards to ARM.

Firstly, ARM is the defacto chip architecture for the fast growing markets for power efficient and compute intensive mobile phones, tablets, and slates. The x86-based chips, made by mainly Intel and AMD, are typically more powerful than ARM solutions, however they also use a lot more power and generate more heat. X86 processors have therefore had little success entering these fast growing markets. Read more