China mobile subscriber total rises to 853 million in the month of January (Reuters)

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China's largest mobile carrier, China Mobile, said that its total mobile subscribers rose to about 589.3 million euros in January, including 8.9 million subscribers to 3 G.

China Unicom, mobile subscribers Total No. 2 mobile carrier of the country, is increased by 169.7 million for the month, including $ 15.5 million subscribers to 3 G.

China Telecom has said that its total mobile subscribers rose to approximately 94.1 million in January, including 5.4 million subscribers to 3 G.

(Reporting by Christina Lo; (Editing by Gangadhar Daga)

Heavyweight mobile trying to finalize 1Gbps Mobile Standard

Top laptop makers in the world came together this week to finalize a version of an advanced mobile communication standard that would increase the speed of data transfer to 1Gbps, an organizer of events said on Monday.

About 800 people, from companies like HTC, Nokia and Samsung Electronics, we will agree on final terms for the standard Advanced Long Term Evolution (LTE-advanced) in a meeting of the 3GPP standards body in Taipei this week.

With speeds up to 1 Gbps, the technology is ideal for those who download audiovisual file on their handsets, said Wen-sheng Feng, Director of wireless communications with a laboratory under the event sponsor, Taiwan government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute.

LTE-Advanced machines will also give you another way to communicate with one another, for example allowing them to connect sensors for detecting changes in air temperature that may signal a fire or a burglary and then passing messages to emergency personnel, such as search and rescue teams, Feng said.

This type of data transfer is expected to help with earthquake relief.

"Mobile voice technology is advanced enough already, so this time it's all data transfers," said Feng. "We tried to achieve LTE-Advanced out there for some time, and in Taipei, we expect to confirm a release".

The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, has adopted rules LTE-advanced and WiMax derived WirelessMAN-advanced for its programme IMT-Advanced define future mobile networks. It is said that both are substantial improvements in current wireless systems.

After Friday, the standard Advanced LTE will be ready for manufacturers of smartphones and network equipment design, Feng said, as participants at the Conference this week to discuss patents and licenses technology-related offers.

Intel looks to reshape the chips for mobile devices

Looking into his crystal ball where trends are leading, Intel hopes to strengthen the capacity of System-on-chip to greatly improve the safety and functionality of mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets.

The company is looking to implement specialized graphics accelerators and hardware levels to protect mobile devices, said executives of the company. Intel is laying plans to integrate sensors and accelerators to measure temperature or air quality or speed, distance and location.

The advent of mobile devices has given rise to the movement-and environment-related applications which may not be useful on fixed devices such as PCs, said Dadi Perlmutter, vice President, Intel Architecture Group during an interview last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Integrated sensors and mobile accelerators will feed real-time data that could help users make decisions and organize schedules, Perlmutter said.

"[Users] would love to have a lot of context information. A context may be measuring speed or temperature measurement, "said Perlmutter.

Intel researchers are already developing an array of sensors to smartphones-type measuring air quality. A mobile toolkit delivers carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone sensors to measure air quality and the objectives of that common people encounter toxic gas.

But adding sensors, security and hardware accelerators is a multi-year effort of integration and must be balanced with the power of assistive devices and software, Perlmutter said.

For smartphones and tablets, Intel currently offers integrated chip--also called System-on-chip--which include CPUs and cores for separate functions such as media encoding and decoding. For example, the chip Intel low power Trail Oak Tablet includes a separate CPU and an accelerator that allows devices for playback of 1080p high definition video. But the company wants those characteristics within the CPU chip, which shrinks as it could happen.

The key to cramming more features inside CPU is to add more transistors, which could make the more functional, said Shekhar Borkar, research fellow at Intel.

"It's all about integration," said Borkar, adding memory, cache, and floating point units--that once resided outside--have been integrated into the CPU over time.

Intel updates every two years a new manufacturing process and invests billions to improve its factories. The company later this year will begin to produce chips on the 22 nanometer manufacturing process, which are faster and more power-efficient chip made using the current 32-nm process

Intel has already said it would add 3 G and 4 G mobile radio for future chip, and last month completed the acquisition of wireless units of Infineon, from which you will get the radio technology. The company is also in the process of acquiring the security vendor McAfee, which will help melt the hardening of hardware and software to protect mobile devices from internal and external threats.

The company hopes that integrates multiple functions, helps take market share from arm, which currently dominates the smartphone and Tablet PC markets. In addition to Oak Trail, Intel Tablet chips this year expects to ship the chip Medfield for Smartphone.

In future CPUs will be unrecognisable compared to what they are, today, said Perlmutter, responsible for designing future Intel chips. He said that a CPU is not known as a "central processing unit", but as a "central unit" platform. He said that Intel made great progress with the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, which is the first time that the company has put a CPU and graphics processor in a single chips.

"Is sort of an expansion of integration [of] CPU and GPU. If all goes to one device, and new features, new opportunities to come, "said Perlmutter.

Mobile devices are now also targets for hackers and Intel is focused on bringing more security elements to ICS that enable you to not only authenticate users, but also to isolate and resolve attempts to steal information. If a device is largely determined by the software, it is easy to break the system as information transferred through memory, CPU or chipset could be easily accessible, Perlmutter said.

Smartphone personal information are stored and used for bank transactions and information must be protected, Perlmutter said. Integrated security hardware could store passwords or adding voice, fingerprints, eye pictures or images to identify users. Beyond user authentication, security chip could encode data transferred via wired or wireless networks.

In addition, the company is pouring money into research as attempts to chip mobile to refine and develop software for the best viewing experience. There is a growing demand for high-quality graphics on mobile devices with multiple users, games and movies in high definition.

The company bundles of graphics chips with its processors, which made the biggest seller in the world of graphics. But Intel has been criticized for lower quality compared to rivals Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, which offer better graphics capabilities in their chips for PC and mobile devices.

Intel has taken steps to improve the graphics chip with his Tablet PC Oak Trail, which includes an Accelerator for playing high-definition 1080p video. The company is looking to move features like the ability to protect the movie streaming from PC chips into mobile chip.

Intel is also creating software tools that allow for interactive graphics, such as 3D images that can react to human gestures, said Borkar. There are already some programming frameworks such as OpenCL and DirectX 11 that exploit CPU processing power and graphics processors, but Intel hopes to learn new programming models that achieve throughput computing and blur the lines between the CPU and graphics processor, Borkar said.

Intel last month announced that it would invest $ 100 million in U.S. universities over the next five years looking for drive around areas including graphics. It is launching a new research centre called the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing bring more realistic and interactive 2D and 3D graphics experience for users on PCs and mobile devices. Intel is working with eight U.S. Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, the University of Washington, Harvard, University of California at Davis and the University of California at Irvine.

Borkar, Intel said research plans are not set in stone, and that it would be better to leave the options open on what kind of chip and programming models would emerge in the future.

"The hardest part with research is ... what you look like eight years from now?" Borkar, he said.

The dark side of the Mobile World Congress 2011

Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 9283.
Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 8814.

Everybody always wants to know the big story out of a major conference like Mobile World Congress, which ended last week in Barcelona.  

I can't purport to be the sage who knows for certain the big story for an event where 50,000 visitors attended, with more than 1,500 vendors showing off wares amid numerous press conferences and interviews. But I'll give it a try.

My colleagues and I noted many new smartphones and tablets with a heavy emphasis on Android machines. For the most part, those new smartphones and tablets seemed little more than variations of earlier versions announced at CES in January or in recent weeks, all of them basically still being reactions to the Apple iPhone smartphone or the Apple iPad tablet.

Saying that doesn't mean that Apple does everything right, but the updates by Apple competitors focus mainly on multi-core processors or bigger or smaller screens.  To vastly generalize, most of the competing smartphones are pushing above 4-inch screens, while the tablets seem to be either about 7 inches or nearly the 9.7-inch iPad size, some going above 10 inches.  (For smartphones, I liked the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone a lot, based on a quick look and feel, but confess that I didn't get to play with most of the others announced.)

Instead of focusing so much on new smartphones and tablets at MWC, I heard and reported on some frankly disturbing comments by vendor executives, especially from Research in Motion but also AT&T, Nokia and Microsoft.

RIM's  Hampus Jakobsson, a director of strategic alliances for RIM and former head of TAT, a cutting-edge interface design company, gave a 15-minute address where he criticized smartphones, tablets and other devices for interrupting us too much, keeping us from interacting with  our communities of workers and friends.  He even suggested that maybe RIM devices shouldn't have games running on them. 

"We're not talking to each other, but talking to devices," Jakobsson said.

It almost seemed as if Jackobsson were setting up RIM as the device maker that would somehow use its BlackBerry smartphones and its coming PlayBook tablet as a kind of interruption gate-keeper or administrative assistant. 

Maybe in the future we will set our devices to partially shut off and automatically guard against interruptions when we enter a certain room like a boardroom, conference area or movie theater or when we decide to set aside time to talk to a spouse, a child or a boss. We can do that ourselves manually today, but we don't always.

It would be easy enough to pre-set a phone to detect a location where an intimate or important conversation should take place, with a voice call sent to voice mail or all texts and e-mails given some sort of answer with a priority given to certain information to pass through something serious, such as a fire in the building.

RIM has a lot of experience with enterprise workers, and uses its BlackBerry Enterprise Server to help IT shops guard against unwanted apps and uses on company devices. BES is also an effective way to wipe a device clean if it is lost, so that valuable corporate data is not stolen.  The issue of company policies on personal property has become more complex as RIM and other vendors see more workers bringing their own devices to work, where company information can be stored but where the IT shop has no automatic right to access.   

Given RIM's history in the enterprise, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Jakobssen would worry about how to keep devices from interrupting us from important tasks.  But my main reaction to his thesis is that most consumers of today's smartphones and tablets are really quite in love with the technology itself, both their hardware and the ability to download apps and interact with them.  Yes, they do take up our attention, especially for younger users, and consumers seem totally obsessed with them, but is that any different from the American consumer's obsession with the automobile?  You see people wanting to sit in an exciting sports car, and to be driving the car for the comfort and fun it represents, not just to have it as a functional alternative to taking the train or bus.  

I don't see any vendor slowing down the incessant rollout of new smartphones and tablets, trying to find the magic pricepoints and service deals that will attract the most buyers. RIM might be coming to grips with its declining market share with smartphones and fishing about for a new marketing appeal with the "interruption" theme (if it becomes a theme), but it probably won't be very successful in doing so unless RIM has some pretty amazing ideas for cool new devices that also control interruptions.

The same could be said for Microsoft, which has launched Windows Phone 7 on the marketing and TV ad theme that its interface allows a smartphone user to get into applications and out again with minimal time and trouble, so that we can all get back to our lives and the people in our lives. (Their ads are cute and do resonate.)

Still, I personally haven't found a Windows Phone 7 smartphone from HTC, the Surround, that I'm using on a review basis all that much faster to use than other smartphone devices I've owned or tried.  The maps functionality was amazing and useful in Barcelona for finding meeting places and restaurants, but the Windows Phone 7 active tiles for people and other groupings on the home screen just seem, well, confusing.  Microsoft seems to be trying to attract the younger, socially connected ultra-multi-tasker, while purporting to also put their lives more in their control.  I don't know whether that capability lessens the phone's control over one's life or just adds to it.  The jury is still out on whether that concept matters that much.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES introduced a coming upgrade to Windows Phone that would  add MORE capabilities to the phone.  If you can connect a Windows Phone gamer in XBox Live to a gamer using Kinect in a living room, as Ballmer introduced, you have arguably added a social connection, but something in me thinks Jakobsson would call it, instead, an interruption. (Unless your main object in life is gaming.)

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop spoke several times at MWC, with a striking number of references to the sophisticated and sleek hardware design elements that future Nokia devices running Windows Phone will have, given the new Nokia-Microsoft partnership. I kept wondering if the partnership will produce winning, cool and exciting designs that allow users to do more and more with a Windows Phone smartphone, or if they will be phones that give users more control over their lives or both.  Maybe the two themes aren't contradictory and maybe it ultimately doesn't matter.  

AT&T's CTO John Donovan also spoke at MWC, introducing the notion that personal information needs to be cloud-based and that there will be fewer devices carried by users in coming years. We will be able authenticate on a friend's device and activate all our contacts and other information in the cloud, he said.  While he may not have intended it, his comment seems to repudiate the value of all the new devices that are shown regularly at all the mobile and wireless shows and that AT&T sells every quarter.

Maybe we are eventually going to see fewer devices and devices that give us more control of our lives, but I am not predicting that Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Apple and even RIM, will want to sell fewer devices for many years.  It is also safe to predict that device makers will try to make it possible to do as much as we can on smartphones and tablets and other devices over ever-faster networks.  If that causes confusion and chaos for sellers and buyers alike, it will, and we will all simply adjust.

At the close of MWC, I had a simple dinner with a man and a woman from Montreal, both reporters, and their roommate in a rented Barcelona apartment who is a designer from Hungary.  The man from Hungary was in his mid-30s and only gave his name as Roman. He (naturally) asked me what was the BIG story from MWC.  I, and my reporter friends, started to describe all the things one could do with quad-core processors announced for new smartphones running over faster LTE networks.  But he seemed unimpressed, saying, "Why do I need a quad core?  I just want to put my phone in my pocket and keep it quiet. All the phone designers just seem to be selling to 17 to 25 year olds."

So maybe Roman should meet Jakobbson.  But I think the other 95% of the world will still be excited by the iPhone 5 come June, the same way many of the teenagers in my high school liked the latest Malibu, Corvette or Mustang. Nobody could afford to buy those cars, but they wanted them.

Gameloft: Mobile game development could hit seven figures (Appolicious)

Last week, mobile game maker Gameloft has released StarFront: collision, later in his thin veneer take on the popular PC strategy game StarCraft franchise. StarFront to $ 6.99 for the full version and has great graphics, sound control, a lot of missions and online multiplayer support for up to four players.

Gameloft is known for the level of Polish puts in its mobile games (even if the concepts are not very original), and its games, it becomes very clear: make StarFront was not an undertaking economically.

Pay for Gameloft, though. Its games are constantly getting great reviews and a lot of good press and are often considered as some of the best in their genre available on the Apple platform for iOS. They usually "New and notable Apple" section on the iTunes App Store and get featured as the game of the week--StarFront currently holds both these honors now. And Yes, it's a pretty great game.

But Gameloft is already seeing the mobile space and the App Store, in particular, becoming a bit flaky. Is a study of big-time, making the games to multiple platforms, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Google Android, and works more on the traditional model of a study of play. The mobile platform, on the other hand, has been opened and not enough tested that extremely small developers have been able to make a big splash with tight games, small, simple. And many of these games have been at extremely low prices

According to VP of Gameloft publishing worldwide, Gonzague de Vallois, developers will struggle to maintain the level of premium games if prices continue to remain so low. Could mean larger developers moving out of space or abandoning their games bigger, or it could mean a change in the entire system that leads to an increase in prices that could eliminate many smaller developers.

Speaking to the Pocket Gamer at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, de Vallois these costs for developing titles of quality furniture--at least for Gameloft--are already increasing, while the consumer is always used for triple-a titles like those created by large companies like Gameloft game, Electronic Arts and Capcom for bargain-bin price--$ 0.99, actually.

Gameloft is by boat is a precarious. On the one hand, and other major games publishers are creating premium games for the iPhone. Most new games of great Gameloft are bigger than many other iPhone and launch games for the price of $ 6.99. That accepts implicitly its games out of competition with things like angry birds--users looking to buy StarFront at least know something about video games. Angry birds, meanwhile, draws people that aren't necessarily the players and its low price point is a part of this.

But de Vallois thinks that Apple and other developers must do more to highlight premium purchases and push away from the App Store present a picture of mobile gaming that should be super-cheap, small and mostly forgettable. He remembered the Christmas sale of EA in 2010, the company slashed an enormous number of its games up to $ 0.99 for the holidays, partly to boost sales and partly to grab waiting for a huge portion of the Top 10 charts of App Store while they were frozen for about a week. Apple has approved the sale, and Gameloft thinks it's the wrong move. Here's a quote from de Vallois in history of Pocket Gamer:

"This is what we have to go forward because the new generation of games, there will be booting is evidence of seven digits. It is not profitable to sell these games at 99 c. we have a bit of time before giving the power of PS3, but yes, will increase the cost. Will reach 30, 40 million as Black Ops? Not tomorrow, but maybe some day. "

It is an interesting point, to be sure. Something to keep in mind, however, is that Gameloft could be regarded as a member of the "old school" gaming developers. Makes games for iOS which are like video games--in fact, actually takes video games ' other concepts, such as StarFront and turns them into iPhone games--but you could argue that really doesn't do mobile games.

Games for mobile phones are more akin to the offerings of titles such as Ninja fruit and cut the rope, or The Halfbot blocks Cometh. Developer of blocks, Halfbot, is only two guys. The games that these developers are not really as the types of games that you get on other systems--they're a bit unique in their concepts and presentation at the mobile space. That's not really the kind of games Gameloft, EA and Capcom create (although this is not always the case). Larger developers are making games for players of video; smaller developers are creating them for iPhone owners. That is a great distinction.

Research firm IHS has recently announced that the mobile app is a market of $ 2.2 billion, with Apple dominates the 82 percent of it and games that make up just better than half of the total volume. That makes the mobile gaming a billion dollar market now, according to Pocket Gamer.

Boils down to a difference of markets for Gameloft. The company must recognize that people want to sell video games--standard players who happen to own and like to play on a smartphone--is not huge as a demographic as the casual crowd, or you must find a better way to market to those players are less well paid in video games. But it is doubtful that Apple is going to change things, because they're pulling the 30% market share of iOS 1.76 billion dollars, if they come from StarFront or angry birds.

Success of the App Store was built largely on accessibility applications--is unlikely going to change. If Gameloft wants to keep producing its triple-a titles, high cost, is going to have to live with that, or find a way to make the random phone player in type of player who can appreciate and spend lots of time, with a title more involved as StarFront.

Femtocells, Wi-Fi to Play growing role in mobile networks

Some people may still discuss the value of femtocells, but the tide has turned: in 2010, the number of femtocells worldwide has exceeded the number of macrocells, according to the Femto Forum.

Femtocells are small base stations that site operators in homes or businesses to improve coverage and capacity for users. While there is still some debate about whether femtocells or Wi-Fi is a better choice, most experts are now saying they will work together the two technologies.

"We're seeing that fleeting competitive pitch," said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum, an association to support the sector femtocell. Now, many creators femtocell are including Wi-Fi in their products. In this way, end users can attach to Wi-Fi network for data services and use the connection of the mobile phone for the voice. Ubiquisys is a company that has introduced the new femtocells that include Wi-Fi during the Conference.

"Network community is a one or not," said Steven Glapa, senior director of field marketing for Ruckus Wireless. "We will Have ' femto and WiFi and all added together will address the problem." Ruckus makes Wi-Fi access points that operators can integrate in their WANs.

Towards the end of last year, the number of femtocells in the United States has reached 350,000, exceeding for the first time the number of macrocells there, said Saunders. Worldwide, there are 1.7 million femtocells in use than 1,2 million macrocells said.

The timing is right for even more growth of femtocells because many operators are upgrading their networks to LTE, the next generation mobile technology. At the same time they realize that users want to consume an increasing quantity of data. Femtocells can help increase the capacity for operators, but deploying femtocells requires planning of radio frequencies. It is easier for operators to plan femtocells in new networks, rather than add them to an existing network.

"[LTE femtocells] won't be new devices that are deployed years after the network is built," said Todd Mersch, Director of product line management at continuous Computing. NTT DoCoMo is an operator that has been explicit about femtocells in his work of network upgrade plans, he said.

Femtocells can also help those who are struggling with finding new sites to their base stations, a pursuit often expensive. Femtocells are physically much smaller than a base station, so you can hang in many types of paths. "They can disappear in a building," said David Swift, product marketing manager at Alcatel-Lucent.

Still, for some operators, sticking with Wi-Fi instead of femtocells. T-Mobile late last year said that many of its Android phones would ship with a software that allows people to use Wi-Fi to make calls and send SMS and MMS messages. That offload traffic from mobile network T-Mobile and move the drawback of backhaul to Wi-Fi network.

T-Mobile invested backend system from Kineto four years ago that allows you to manage the use of Wi-Fi, including counting the minutes of use over Wi-Fi connection against the plan of the Subscriber. They could have made the choice to stick with Wi-Fi easier but a company Executive said it was a clear choice.

"Femtocells have a math problem and a problem of customer service," said Joshua Lonn, Director of product development for T-Mobile. From the point of view of investments, purchasing femtocells T-Mobile would cost tens of millions of dollars, he said. Many customers of T-Mobile already inexpensive Wi-Fi router that can serve as an extension of coverage. In addition, most are now smartphone with Wi-Fi.

In addition, femtocells can be difficult to install, he said. "They are a pain to set up and a network optimization," he said. "Wi-Fi are robust. Why do something complicated like femto?

The disadvantage of currently using Wi-Fi is that users are still actively enable Wi-Fi on their phones before using it. But both Kineto and Ruckus they talked about work happening internally and in standards bodies to make roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Nancy Gohring covers phones and cloud computing to the IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @ idgnancy. E-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com, Nancy

IPWireless Mobile TV show out of new generation on IPad

At Mobile World Congress, chip maker IPWireless is demonstrating a new technology called the Integrated Mobile Broadcast (IMB), which will allow operators to offer mobile TV on tablets and smartphones like Apple's iPhone and iPad and Samsung's Galaxy and Galaxy card.

Of these devices, the Galaxy Samsung with IMB integrated. The Samsung Galaxy S is equipped with a fake out, who the receiver IMB built into it, and Apple products have a receiver that is connected to the docking connector on the bottom of the device. The goal with these last two products is to expand the number of products that users can watch transmissions IMB, according to Keith Dewar, vice president marketing of IPWireless in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The technology is now being in the United Kingdom from O2, Orange and Vodafone with a total of about 200 users.

The adoption of IMB will result in better picture quality than the streaming TV on existing 3 G networks, said IPWireless. The image quality has demonstrated at Mobile World Congress doesn't suffer from the pixelation that makes video on 3 G networks. Also the picture looks surprisingly strong, even if the resolution is only 320 x 240 pixels. A change of channel takes a couple of seconds, and the first image appears distorted briefly before it settles.

In addition to TV, IMB can be used for any service that mostly downloads data to the user, in the process of making efficient use of bandwidth available to operators.

IMB sends usage data of spectrum reserved for services of TDD (Time Division duplexing), which uses a channel for sending and receiving data alternately. The operator can configure your network to use the spectrum available for sending data to the Subscriber, which is a good fit for transmission services. The most current 3 G networks send data to and from the Subscriber using separate channels, which do not allow the same flexibility.

Many European operators TDD spectrum has received some, when they were awarded 3 G licences. In total, more than 150 operators across 60 countries covering more than half a billion Subscribers just requested 5 MHz spectrum-TDD needed to implement IMB, IPWireless.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

Google CEO talks up Mobile potential

Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday to talk up to Android OS for tablets and phones, in addition to giving nods Chrome, search and YouTube.

Schmidt said that there are 300,000 devices Android enabled daily and 150,000 apps in the Android app store--a number that has tripled in the last nine months. Developers now start with mobile applications because that is where the growth is, he added, saying that sales of smartphones exceeded sales of PC last quarter.

There are a number of trends at work, Schmidt said: cloud computing, that was present for a long period; the fact that the devices are packing in more and more power; and the fact that the networks are increasingly powerful. About 98 percent of mobile phone operators offer speed of megabytes per second, he said. What is important to LTE, the latest technology for mobile broadband, you will create the opportunity for another set of applications that we can only imagine, Schmidt said.

One of these new applications Android demonstrated by a Google employee on stage is Movie Studio, an application built for tablets that allows users to edit videos. The demo showed how a user can drag a title to an image and also reorder items in the timeline of the video by dragging and dropping. You can also add a pan and zoom effect, and by pinching two fingers can zoom video in photo.

Schmidt said that the growing penetration of mobile phones offers hope to communicate with people around the world that are currently not connected online and solve some of the world's biggest problems, including terrorism and global warming.

Refer to competitor Google in the browser war, Schmidt said that there are 120 million active users of chrome.

Meanwhile, the YouTube video site of the company remains a force to be reckoned with: Schmidt said that 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute for the site. Its revenue doubled in 2010, he said, and Google is monetizing the professional content.

Schmidt has refused to be drawn on a question from the audience on Android fragmentation, a concern for some developers.

NVIDIA Quad-Core Mobile processors coming in August

[Image: Nvidia]Ah, remember only six months ago when we were anticipating super fast dual-core mobile? Ben Nvidia and Qualcomm have been moving quickly--Tuesday, Nvidia not only announced but has demonstrated its new quad-core mobile processor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The new processor, nicknamed "Kal-El" (Superman Krypton name, by the way), is expected to ship in August and tablets from smartphones by 2011. This announcement came just a day after rival mobile computing that Qualcomm has announced that its quad core processor, a cooled 2.5 GHz Snapdragon, will be shipping early in 2012. Boom headshot, Qualcomm ….

NVIDIA demonstrated Kal-El in action at MWC, showing how allows up to two times faster than dual-core processors.

NVIDIA has also demonstrated Kal-El running CoreMark. Kal-El received a score of CoreMark 11,352--about twice the performance of Nvidia Tegra 2, who received a score of CoreMark 5840.

The new processor also contains the new GeForce 12-core processor and Nvidia says is already out in the wild--in a blog post on Tuesday, Michael Rayfield said that customers are "get samples now and they're planning production in August".

Rayfield also gave us a look at Nvidia's roadmap for the coming years: faster processors made each year until 2014. Processors are currently codenamed "Wayne", "Logan" and "Stark," and "Stark Rayfield says" will feature 75 x improvement in performance over the Tegra 2.

"You might ask, what on earth can be done with almost 75 x improvement in performance over 2 Tegra that Stark will in 2014?" Raymond notes.

Hopefully allow us to fly around in our clothes iron and slash people with our hand adamantium claws?

Apparently it doesn't matter what you can do, because "our customers and partners have already indicated that they are confident that they can use whatever we give them."

Follow Sarah on Twitter (@ geeklil) or on Facebook

Get your GeekTech on: Twitter-Facebook-RSS | Tip us

Speed, and to increase the role of Wi-Fi Mobile

Error deserializing body of reply message for operation ' Translate '. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This percentage may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 8769.

Wi-Fi looks set to play a growing role in mobile networks even as LTE and other new cellular technologies with higher capacity are deployed.

Several networking vendors are using this week's Mobile World Congress as a launchpad for hardware and software designed to make carriers ' Wi-Fi networks faster and easier to use. While an enhanced version of the IEEE 802 .11n standard is being introduced to mobile operator gear, companies are also unveiling software for carriers to shift their subscribers from cellular to Wi-Fi networks automatically.

Cellular companies have offered their customers access to Wi-Fi hotspots in cafés, restaurants and retail stores for several years. In the U.S., for example, hotspot operator Wayport AT&T acquired in 2008 and now has about 20,000 hotspots. T-Mobile USA also has an extensive network of hotspots, and Verizon Wireless offers many as well. AT&T has recently started equipping larger areas, such as New York's Times Square, with outdoor Wi-Fi.

These networks can give subscribers a place to get faster Internet access while getting the network off the cellular handsets. Femtocells, the small cellular base stations being deployed in homes and some outdoor areas, are another alternative. But with the growing numbers of cellular-equipped smartphones and tablets in consumers ' hands, nearly all of which have built in Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi infrastructure is expected to become even more important.

The new carrier WiFi technologies are hitting the market just as mobile operators start to upgrade their cellular networks to a new generation of equipment that offers more speed and capacity itself. Many carriers around the world have deployed or have committed to rolling out LTE (long-term Evolution), while some are using WiMax and others turning to HSPA + (High Speed Packet Access Plus), 3 g technology that can deliver a comparable boost in speed. But the demand for Wi-Fi is expected to keep growing despite these gains.

"LTE is not going to be the answer to all the mobile traffic that's out there," said analyst Daryl search School of Current Analysis. "Operators are going to have to look at multiple routes to get users onto the Internet." He compared to mobile network to an interstate highway, where lanes that are added to ease congestion tend to quickly become jammed themselves. Just as a complete transportation system requires side roads and public transit, many mobile networks will require Wi-Fi, search school said.

On Monday, Cisco introduced its first line of the IEEE 802 .11n access points for outdoor service-provider networks, the Aironet 1550 Series Outdoor Wireless Access Point series. Last week, Marvell and Atheros Communications both unveiled chips for mobile phones, being shown at MWC, that can use a form of 802 .11n with two streams of packets.

Major chip makers, including Atheros, are already supplying single-stream 1 chips for smartphones. While 11n Wi-Fi boosts theoretical speed to as much as 150 bps (bits per second) with just one data stream, 2 x 2 MIMO (multiple in multiple out), which is also available in the Cisco access-point line, takes the new technology up to 300 m bps. That's only a theoretical speed, but Atheros claims its new chip will be able to achieve 170 m bps in the real world.

That's far more throughput than mobile operators are offering, even on current networks using so-called 4 g technologies. Verizon, for example, says average users can get between 5 m and 12 m bps bps on its LTE network. MIMO can also extend the range of a Wi-Fi network, allowing either bigger hotspots or fewer access points to serve the same area.

Doubling the capacity of a given hotspot with 2 x 2 MIMO increases the chances that, for example, a large number of people in one area could watch videos on their phones via their Slingbox at home, said Farpoint Group analyst Craig Mathias. "Your ability to do what you want to, when you want to do it, goes up," Mathias said.

But the real breakthrough in getting cellular subscribers on to Wi-Fi networks wherever possible may be putting them there automatically, eliminating discovery and login processes that in some cases have been quite complicated. Cisco, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ruckus Wireless and other vendors used MWC to introduce products for seamlessly fusing cellular and Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Nokia Siemens designed its Smart WLAN Connectivity Solution to handle functions such as authentication, policy control and traffic management for both cellular and Wi-Fi networks. That can simplify management for service providers and allow subscribers to roam onto hotspots as easily as they go from one cell to the next. Cisco's new access points include the company's Next Generation Hotspot technology, which is designed for carriers to automatically log subscribers on to Wi-Fi networks and set up encrypted connections.

Ruckus Wireless introduced its Ruckus Wireless Services Gateway, which can interface with existing systems used in cellular networks for client authentication and policies. The gateway can automatically configure client devices for access to Wi-Fi networks at the time of service activation, so the users don't have to sign on every time they use services at hotspots, according to the company. Ruckus also unveiled an element management system designed to let carriers centrally manage tens of thousands of Ruckus access points and hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi clients.

The new roaming mechanisms play into the way carriers are now deploying Wi-Fi, interspersing it with cellular coverage, said analyst Loren Shalinsky Dell'Oro Group.

"They can actually have an area of coverage that has both wireless LAN and the cellular network," Shalinsky said. In these environments, the key is to be able to steer phones smoothly to the most appropriate network at a given time and location, he said. The new tools should make that easier for carriers, Shalinsky said.

Better management of Wi-Fi networks may also enhance the operator's services and business model, he added. In the past, users who found hotspots and logged on to them were simply going out to the open Internet, even if the hotspots were carrier-supplied, Shalinsky said.

"Your service provider didn't really know what you were doing with your phone anymore," he said. Lacking that insight, they couldn't tailor services to subscribers ' needs at hotspots. More information could mean, for example, better location-based services, even though new forms of targeted advertising might come along with that, Shalinsky said. "They're trying to provide a service that you want."

The biggest challenge in this kind of integrated cellular and Wi-Fi experience is implementation by the carriers, analysts said.

"They're making progress," said analyst Jack Gold of j. Gold Associates. "It's actually a hard one to do." What the carriers are striving for is being able to shift users over both without logging in and without interruption, he said.

"The switching isn't that hard, but if you've got a half-second lag in there ... people notice that, and they don't like it," Gold said.

As implementation work continues, it's clear that cellular devices will keep tapping into Wi-Fi.

"Here we are, improving the capacity and the overall performance of cellular, and yet the vendors of components and the handset manufacturers still feel that Wi-Fi is a requirement," Farpoint's Mathias said. "I think that's very telling."

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @ sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's email address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

Warm, powerful smartphone tablets: Mobile World Congress 2011 begins officially

Largest largest wireless telecommunications show in the world, Mobile World Congress, is only the beginning here in Barcelona, Spain, where this week, dozens of new handsets and tablets will make its debut. Every February, thousands of journalists, people in the industry and enthusiasts gather at the Fira de Barcelona to find out what the hottest upcoming smartphones, tablets and apps will be in the year to come.

Before the show officially kicked-off also Sony Ericsson has already announced his game of Xperia phone (aka the "Playstation"), the game Samsung unveiled the Galaxy card 10.1 smartphone's Galaxy II and LG announced a 3D smartphone and Tablet PC. We are looking forward to seeing more tablets, possibly including one from HTC and of course more phones 4 G with dual core processors. The show officially opens today and runs through Thursday.

(See: adapter Samsung Galaxy 10.1: first look and Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Gaming Phone: Hands On)

Most news from Mobile World Congress Europe impacts before and the United States at the end. For example, last year HTC has introduced a new line-up of Android phones that debuted in Europe in the first place, but then came to the United States under several different names and slightly tweaked specifications.

But the show is not entirely Europe-centric; some really big news that has affected the entire industry have been announced here. Two years ago, the second Android phone, the HTC Magic (known as the myTouch States) made her debut, and last year, Microsoft announced its new Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Mobile World Congress draws people, as well as companies from around the world. For example, in a Japanese aircraft carrier Docomo occur, RIM Blackberry and Ireland-based developer app. In terms of scale Mobile World Congress is great about how CES--except for just about every stand is a showcase something mobile-connected.

LG will make an announcement this morning and HTC will hold their press conference tomorrow morning. Check back here for exciting news from both of these companies as well as more news and hands-ons straight from the show floor.

ITU wants to help the Government to avoid the bottleneck Mobile

Whitespace devices, LTE, femtocells, Wi-Fi automatic handover, optimized backhaul networks: wireless operators already distributes a wide range of techniques to increase the speed of the flow of data to our Smartphones, and equipment manufacturers are showing many more at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

But all this still won't be sufficient to ensure that the data continues to flow, as the number of Smartphone rises from 500 million to almost two billion by 2015, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations.

ITU wants Governments to act now, additional spectrum licenses for mobile communication networks and making it easier for operators of fixed networks intended to roll out fibre links that mobile operators need to connect to the growing number of mobile phone base stations.

"Mobile operators have invested billions to upgrade and improve capacity and performance of their networks, but in some cities with a high rate of use, as San Francisco, New York and London, we're seeing more users frustrated by chronic problems of network outages," Secretary General Mr Hamadoun Touré ITU warned Friday.

If help more government intervention is questionable: for the city of high-use Touré CITES, Governments are already well ahead of the pack.

One of the strategies that he suggests, forcing TV stations to switch to digital transmitters more efficient, freeing up spectrum for other uses, has already been adopted in the United States and United Kingdom. In 2008, the Government of the United States to auction former analogue TV spectrum in the band 700 MHz and Verizon Wireless has already started to offer its mobile broadband service LTE (Long Term Evolution) in New York, San Francisco and other cities.

The United Kingdom too has analog TV transmitters turned off (France will follow suit this year) and is the roll-out of fibre-optic connections at home: as many as 600,000 Uk homes could be connected to fiber later this year.

While analogue TV spectrum was an easy target, other frequencies may be released for mobile communications. For convenient mass produce mobile telephones and modem, but the same frequencies must be available on all continents. This availability is decided at the World Radiocommunication Conference, a three-week event intergovernmental-long, organized by the ITU every three or four years. The last WRC ended on November 16, 2007: the next begins on January 23, 2012, in Geneva, and mobile operators will undoubtedly keep a very close eye on the debates.

Peter Sayer covers open source software, the legislation on intellectual property and General technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and suggestions of news to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.

YouTube partners with LG Mobile 3D Videos

YouTube is working with LG Electronics to make it easier for users to capture 3D images and videos on mobile devices and load directly over the Internet with the new LG smartphone 3D Optimus.

Optimus 3D, that uses the Android mobile OS, Google has a double lens for capturing video and 3D images. Videos can be uploaded directly to YouTube through a dedicated YouTube videos 3D application, said a spokesman Nanako Kato, LG.

4.3 inch touchscreen Optimus 3D also allows users to view images in 3D, and video without the use of glasses.

"The new partnership is part of a broader push into 3D entertainment from LG and online video community in the world", the company said in a joint statement. "YouTube and LG partnered to allow delivery and sharing of 3D video on mobile devices in a way that makes it simple and easy for consumers."

YouTube has started to provide a place for 3D video in July 2009 in the 3D Gallery of YouTube and also sells special 3D glasses on the site.

Partnering with LG takes mobile 3D video, making it easily loadable and easy to share.

LG Optimus armed with a 1 GHz 3D OMAP4 dual core processor from Texas Instruments, Dual-Channel memory so that users have enough power to work on 3D video on the laptop. People can share 3D videos and images through a range of wired and wireless connectors, including HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Additionally, DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) certified network.

Screen without 3D glasses on 3D Optimus was made with a parallax barrier technology applied, that raises a number of slots on the front of the LCD screen that block the light in a way that ensures a user left and right eye see different images, creating the illusion of depth of the 3D image.

LG Optimus Pad tablet also has a built-in 3D camera, but its 8.9-inch touchscreen is not made for viewing 3D without glasses. Pictures and videos taken with your camera, 3D can be observed on 3D TVs or shared on the Web via YouTube 3D, LG said.