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iZettle iPhone credit card reader works with smart cards

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 2:29 AM PST

Dusan

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Although Square, which recently got the money from Visa, is a neat and compact device easy to carry around, many Europeans may not like it as it doesn’t support chip-based smart cards. Enter iZettle, a Stockholm, Sweden-based company which wants to solve this problem by introducing a credit card reader which does work with smart cards.

Instead of swiping a card, this little device lets you insert them into iZettle to read the chip contents. In that sense iZettle is not plugged on the headphone jack but on the Dock connector, making the device bigger than Square but I guess something’s gotta give.

Unsurprisingly, the company will first launch the new device/service in its own backyard in June with other European countries to follow. iZettle card reader will be offered free of charge, with the company taking a small yet unspecified percentage of the amount processed.

Aside from the regular card processing, users will also be able to share their spending with friends on Facebook and Twitter a la Blippy. The short iZettle promo video follows.

[Via: TUAW]

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Capcom creates a sub-brand called Beeline to focus on smartphone games

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 2:38 AM PST

Stefan

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Want proof that the popularity mobile gaming isn’t going away anytime soon? Capcom, makers of iOS hits such as Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 4, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and Smurfs’ Village, is going to create a sub-brand called “Beeline” that will be “expanding the company’s presence in the burgeoning ‘freemium’ smartphone space.” This is the first time in the nearly 3 decades since the company was founded that a sub-brand was created to focus on a particular sector of the videogame market. Between Smurfs’ Village, Zombie Cafe, and Lil’ Pirates alone there are over 15 million downloads. With Beeline Capcom aims at focusing on casual mobile gamers and by the end of their 2011 fiscal year they hope to launch 8 new games. Capcom will continue to publish games for smartphones using existing intellectual property, because they have to milk the Street Fighter brand for every last penny. Beeline is more for creating new IP, similar to the way that Square Enix opened up a new studio called “Hippos Labs” that they’ve focused for mobile.

What we want to know is when will Sony and Nintendo jump onboard? When are we going to see Mario on the iPhone or better yet see what Shigeru Miyamoto can come up with if he wanted to develop a new game from scratch on the most popular smartphone platform currently on the market? When Sega lost the console wars that took place at the turn of this millennium, they decided to stop making hardware and focus on games. That’s brought Sonic to millions of devices that would have never otherwise experienced our favorite little hedgehog. With sales of the recently launched Nintendo 3DS not going as well as the company had hoped for, are Nintendo executives in Japan finally going to get a clue and start making games for phones?

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PopCap acquires San Francisco-based ZipZapPlay to expand games on Facebook, mobiles

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 1:45 AM PST

Dusan

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Casual games company PopCap Games is acquiring ZipZapPlay, a San Francisco-based social games developer, best known for its titles Baking Life and Happy Habitat. Terms of the acquisition were not released.

PopCap is maker of blockbuster games such as Bejeweled, Zume Blitz and Plants vs. Zombies, and together with ZipZapPlay, it hopes to reaffirm its position as a leading developer of Facebook games (after Zynga and Electronic Arts). Moreover, with the expansion of development capabilities, the company is looking to launch four or five Facebook games by the end of this year.

Under the terms of the deal, ZipZapPlay will operate as an independent studio in San Francisco, though it’s still not clear whether PopCap will keep the ZipZapPlay brand or not.

PopCap has been the subject of IPO talk this year. CEO Dave Roberts said the company — with $100 million in sales last year — could go public “if we think it makes sense.”

In related news, we’ve recently had Zynga acquiring Wonderland Software to establish Zynga Mobile UK.

[Via: TechFlash]

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The CEOs of HTC, HP/Palm, and Nokia are going to keynote at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference

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The CEOs of HTC, HP/Palm, and Nokia are going to keynote at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 1:17 AM PST

Stefan

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Qualcomm has just announced that Peter Chou, CEO of HTC , Jon Rubinstein, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Palm at HP, and Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, will be giving keynotes during the two day Uplinq event scheduled to take place next month in California. What’s going to be talked about at this shindig? We’ll probably hear an update about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, how Brew MP will allow millions of people around the world who can’t afford smartphones to still enjoy the mobile internet, and hopefully something about near field communications. If you’d rather have the version that’s been sterilized by public relations people, here you go: “Uplinq is designed to provide technical and business content and networking opportunities tuned to the needs of the key players within the wireless ecosystem,” said Bill Davidson, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Investor Relations at Qualcomm. “These industry leaders will share their insight and vision for the future of wireless, and attendees will have the opportunity to learn about development and monetization opportunities across multiple operating systems.”

What interests us the most is what Stephen Elop has to say. Nokia and Qualcomm were once embroiled in a court battle that spanned several years, but in July 2008 they kissed and made up. There were rumors that a Snapdragon based Symbian device would come out by the end of 2010, but that obviously didn’t happen. We’re likely going to such a device be released this year thanks to the new Symbian Anna operating system, but the real news here will be Windows Phone. Microsoft dictates what hardware handset makers must use to build a Windows Phone device. As of right now, they’re all Qualcomm powered. You bet Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, is going to be thrilled once Nokia starts shipping their Windows Phone devices later this year and in volume during 2012.

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Samsung launches 3 budget dual SIM feature phones, prices range from $75 to $150

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 12:58 AM PST

Stefan

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Samsung Russia has just announced 3 new dual SIM feature phones that will be hitting the market later this month. First up is the E1182 which has a 1000 mAh battery that promises to deliver 11 hours of talk time and 620 hours (~ 25.8 days) of standby time, and it also packs an FM radio. Nothing else, this thing is strictly budget; it comes in at 1990 Russian rubles or roughly $75. Next we have the E2232, pictured above, and it’s a bit more high end since it comes with Bluetooth, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a microSD card slot. It’ll cost 2690 Russian rubles or roughly $100. And finally we have the “flagship” of the three devices announced today, the C3322. For 3990 Russian rubles or roughly $150 you get a 2 megapixel camera, metal body, 2.2 inch screen, 3.5 mm headphone jack, microSD slot, and Bluetooth. No word on when these handsets are going to come to other countries or if they’ll even leave the former Soviet Union, but with the popularity of dual SIM handsets in places like India and South East Asia we don’t think it’s going to be a long wait for those guys to get their hands on these new phones.

During Nokia’s Q1 2011 financial results conference call Stephen Elop, the new CEO who’s been changing things and recently fired 7,000 people, hinted that Nokia would be releasing more dual SIM models later this year because it’s a highly popular product segment. For a while the Finnish firm was losing market share in India because they lacked any dual SIM models, but they fixed that last year, June 2010, with the launch of their first dual SIM handsets, the C1-00 and C2. The former can physically hold two SIM cards, but only one can be active at a time, while the latter can have two SIMs up and running at the same time. We’re expecting a touch and type dual SIM device to be released sometime in Q3.

[Via: Unwired View]

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IDC: Q1 2011 mobile phone sales hit 371.8 million, top 5 handset vendors lost share to smaller players

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 1:43 AM PST

Stefan

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The bean counting analysts at IDC have just released their tally up of first quarter mobile phone sales, and they’re impressive, but not if you’re in the list of top 5 handset makers. Just how many phones were sold during the first 3 months of this year? About 371.8 million or roughly 2,870 phones per second. “Several notable vendors, including feature phone makers, outpaced the overall market, which contributed to share losses of some top suppliers,” said Kevin Restivo, Senior Research Analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. “The growth of companies outside the top 5 vendors â€" vendors in the ‘Others’ category, such as Micromax, TCL-Alcatel, Huawei, and Research In Motion â€" shows that the overall market is still very much ripe for share gains.”

This “others” category makes up 36.3% of total devices shipped versus 29.7% in Q1 2010; that’s a growth rate of 46.4% year on year versus total market growth of 19.8%. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Apple, and ZTE share the remaining 63.7% space as the top 5 handset makers. Notice two brands missing in that list? Sony Ericsson and Motorola; how the mighty have fallen. Nokia is on top, but they only command 29.2% of the market, and even though they managed to ship 0.6% more devices in Q1 2011 than they did in Q1 2010, they couldn’t keep up with market growth. Next up is Samsung with 18.8%, which is a bit less than their share of 20.7% last year. LG isn’t doing any better at 6.6% versus 8.7% a year later. Apple has 5% of the phone market to themselves, which is an amazing accomplishment as we come close to the 4 year anniversary of the first iPhone. And finally we have ZTE, who more than doubled the amount of devices they shipped in Q1 2011 vs Q1 2010 and now have 2.8% of the market.

How much more share do you think the “others” are going to take up in the mobile industry? According to IDC the “others” take up 41% of the PC space; think about that for a second.

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Leak: Motorola EX130: Qualcomm Brew MP powered, dual screen monoblock

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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 12:30 AM PST

Stefan

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Motorola’s yet to be announced EX130 has just been leaked and while at first glance it appears to be just another feature phone with what we’re assuming to be a poor quality touch screen, a little surprise in the form of a second screen located at the bottom of the device is making us take a second look. The EX130 allegedly runs Qualcomm’s Brew MP operating system, which is a feature phone OS Qualcomm licenses out to anyone with a pocketbook large enough; even HTC has a Brew device out on the market called the Freestyle, available on AT&T. Back to the EX130, it features a 2.8 inch 320 x 240 pixel display, 128 MB of memory, 64 MB of RAM, and a one line monochrome OLED screen at the bottom with a resolution of 96 x 16 pixels. We’re sure there’s got to be a camera in there, somewhere, and while we don’t know whether this thing is for GSM or CDMA networks, there’s nothing holding back Motorola from making two versions that support each respective technology. When will this thing come out? How much will it cost? No clue.

Now about that second screen, this is the second time we’ve seen something like this; the first was the Samsung Continuum. When we reviewed it we were initially skeptical of the second screen providing any real benefits, but after carrying it around for a while it quickly became obvious that having an always on second display you can quickly glance at is a rather nice feature. Will more handset makers start adding this sort of functionality? It’s too soon to tell, but there was a reason clamshell form factor devices were so popular in America for so long. People liked having that second display on the outer shell to glance at.

Maybe it’s time for a come back?

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