Voice Discounted, data embedded, TV Finnished

18 eurocents per mn, Alles Klar. klarmobil.de is mobilcom's latest vehicle to claim more customers and lower even more their revenues. Because subscriptions are up (4.55M end of June) but overall turnover down (-8% vs Q2 2004). So the operator communicates on a growing EBITDA per customer... New owners Texas Pacific Group obviously wanted to add sexier assets to their kolossales spectrum... up for sale but when and to whom ?

At last, 3G starts being embedded in laptops : Dell are working with Cingular on UMTS and should add HSDPA Q1 2006, and in the cdma2000 family, with Verizon on EV-DO (along with HP & IBM-Lenovo). W-CDMA and EV-DO proved their reliability and MNOs shouldn't miss the window of opportunity before the WiMAX - WiBro wave.

Nokia waited for the 2bn mobile sub mark to announce handset #1,000,000,000, so that stupid analysts can praise their 50% market share. Less stupid : the choice of Taiwan for a new R&D center devoted to 3G. The Mobile Services Development Center (MSDC) is a JV with the Institute for Information Industry and the perfect bridge with mainland China. This side of the Thames, Nok-Nok are about to start their Oxford DVB-H trial with Ariqva (see Row vs wideband), but 02 customers won't pay for the TV service... the aim of the game remains to duplicate an easy experiment everywhere across Europe and lobby regulators, not to validate the potential of a commercial service. And working with Microsoft definitely changed the way Nokia annouce future products : I cultivate the buzz far in advance (i.e. 4Gb Nokia N91 will combine W-CDMA and WiFi and laminate iPods) and I postpone the launch because of Redmond's embedded bug-and-glitches function.