I’ve just found this JupiterResearch’s release, which suggests that mobile consumers are not that likely to buy a mobile video content.

With 11% of mobile phones which will be sold this year sporting video playback capabilities, it’s logical to expect that companies will compete to sell this kind of content to consumers. However, Jupiter’s paper says that only a single percent of subscribers will actually pay for a mobile video subscription. Furthermore, 25% of consumers in a Jupiter survey showed interest in watching mobile video on their phones. Of those who did, live TV was the top choice of content, followed by full length movies, short video clips and pre-recorded TV shows.

Related to that. One should keep his eyes on the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as they’ve recently started to sell movies on their iTunes store. Apple, being the trendsetter, may be the company which will push consumers toward the mobile video. We’ll see…

Fossil, Inc., a leading innovator of watches and fashion accessories and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) are partnering to roll out several lines of Bluetooth enabled watches. In that sense, Fossil will introduce the ABACUS MobileWear and FOSSIL Caller ID watches and Sony Ericsson will be introducing its own line of jointly developed products. All watches will seamlessly link to most Sony Ericsson Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones.

The first such watch is MBW-100, which has sleek lines, classic looks, a distinguished presence and represents a first as a mainstream Bluetooth fashion accessory from a mobile phone supplier. Crafted from high quality stainless steel with a silver facia, the analogue watch will go on sale globally during Q4 of 2006 with a guideline retail price of approximately 300 EUR. Read the full article »

The new mobile travel software from Shopqwik.com allows you to save time by booking a holiday in a traffic jam, or paying the London congestion charge over breakfast. Shopqwik.com’s service means the user can book flights, hotels, car hire, beach resorts and pay the London congestion charge, all at the press of a button.

For the first time in Europe, the Shopqwik service allows users to make complete bookings without wasting time on a maze of call centre options or trawling through websites. It takes just 90 seconds to book a flight from start to finish and two key presses to pay the congestion charge. With flight details and a reservation ID for check-in all accessed via the phone, Shopqwik users can just grab their passports and go. Read the full article »

A new report from visiongain indicates that 13% of US users currently access dating services from their mobile phone. The non-mobile Internet dating still leads with the remaining 87% of users. These figures show that dating services and other community based websites are starting to make the transition to mobile and are now being more frequently accessed through the mobile channel.

It’s hard to imagine that people actually chat from their cellphone keyboard. If you’re a dating service user, smartphones with integrated QWERTY keyboards like Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61/E62 will certainly give you an advantage.

Full article on Cellular-News.

The W958c Walkman phone is a GSM/GPRS variant of the stylish W950, and has been developed specifically for Chinese market. It is equipped with a large 2.6″ touch screen for simple navigation through music genres, playlists, individual songs or music albums. The W958c is Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE)’s second Symbian v9.1, UIQ 3.0 based handset for the Chinese market, the first being the recently launched M608c.

With a 4GB flash memory, the W958c Walkman phone can store up to 4,000 songs. It’s quick and easy to get these onto the phone in the first place, with transfer speeds of music from PC to phone of approximately 3 minutes per gigabyte. And thanks to the graphic-rich interface on the Walkman 2.0 player, it is simple to navigate around the music library by song, artist or playlist. It is also possible to search visually by browsing through downloaded album covers. Read the full article »

With its new powerful features, Nokia N95 brought many things for the developers as well. First of all, unlike any previous Nokia (NYSE: NOK) device, N95 use Symbian OS v9.2 S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (FP1).

Oren Levine from S60 Multimedia Blog compiled a short list of the most important additions of N95 for S60 developers. I’ll just mention the support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) and the new Content Listing Framework API. Read more.

Introducing S-Tris 2, a freeware Tetris-like game powered by Clickgamer’s mobile game engine Edge. As the follow-up of their highly popular S-Tris title, this new game features an additional “maniac” game mode, submittable highscores and customizable options and key mappings. The game can be downloaded for free.

All Symbian OS platforms are supported, including S60 (including 3rd edition), Series 80 (Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Communicator), Series 90 (Nokia 7710) and UIQ (including UIQ 3).

Users of the popular Digg site would be happy to know that they can now access Digg from their cellphone. Digg Java Mobile is a free extension of the popular social news site.

Highlights:

• Story filtering based on Digg categories.
• It’s fast – stories are compressed before being sent to the device, reducing traffic cost by around 80%. Plus, stories are cached on the device to speed up user experience.
• Users can either view stories immediately on their mobile device, or bookmark the story.
• Digg Java Mobile works on 790+ devices.

The mobile Digg application is still at an early stage, but it’s working perfectly as far as I can tell. Digg users will certainly like to give it a try.

Users of the popular Digg site would be happy to know that they can now access Digg from their cellphone. Digg Java Mobile is a free extension of the popular social news site.

Highlights:

• Story filtering based on Digg categories.
• It’s fast – stories are compressed before being sent to the device, reducing traffic cost by around 80%. Plus, stories are cached on the device to speed up user experience.
• Users can either view stories immediately on their mobile device, or bookmark the story.
• Digg Java Mobile works on 790+ devices.

The mobile Digg application is still at an early stage, but it’s working perfectly as far as I can tell. Digg users will certainly like to give it a try.

Take this chance to meet other prominent developers, down a beer or two and have a good time celebrating UIQ 3’s first birthday. As space is limited, only the first 100 members to register can attend. You’ll also be able to listen and talk to some of the driving people behind Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE)’s position in smartphones and some of the most influential figures in the industry.

Read the full article »