During the recently ended CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless announced that their phone recycling and refurbishing program, HopeLine, has seen a double-digit increase in phones collected since January 1st, compared to the first two months of 2008. As a result, the carrier expects to see more than one million phones collected by the year’s end.
Late last year, Verizon Wireless gave consumers the option to download a postage-paid mailing label from its Web site, enabling them to send old wireless phones, batteries and accessories to HopeLine for recycling. The company also increased distribution of its HopeLine envelope, giving customers who purchase or upgrade phones online a quick and easy option to recycle their old phones as soon as the new one arrives. These efforts led to a 44 percent jump in mail-in donations in the first two months of this year.
For the record, since its introduction in 2001, HopeLine collected more than 5.6 million phones and turned that into nearly $6.5 million in support for victims of domestic violence and the agencies that support them.
Nicely done Verizon – we can only hope other operators will follow with similar initiatives.
At the CTIA, Kyocera (NYSE: KYO) Corporation announced the formation of Kyocera Communications Inc. (KCI), as a “next step in the global integration of Kyocera’s wireless device business.” The new company will be headquartered in San Diego, and will comprise the combined sales, marketing and service functions from Kyocera Wireless Corp. (KWC) and Kyocera Sanyo (OTCPK: SANYY) Telecom Inc. (KSTI), to better manage those functions for all Kyocera- and Sanyo-branded wireless devices in the Americas.
From the official release:
KCI’s formation is the latest step in the global integration of Kyocera’s communication equipment product segment, a segment that began in 1979 in Japan. Looking to expand globally, Kyocera purchased the wireless handset business of Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) Inc. in 2000 and created KWC from its assets. Then, in April 2008, Kyocera acquired the wireless handset business of Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. (Sanyo) and created KSTI from Sanyo’s North American team, which was headquartered in Chatsworth, Calif. On January 29, Kyocera announced that the global coordination of Kyocera’s communication equipment product segment will take place at the company’s product-line headquarters in Yokohama, Japan. Within the new structure, KCI will be Kyocera’s wireless sales, marketing, customer engineering and service operation for the Americas, representing virtually all products from the communication equipment product segment. Meanwhile, the remaining portion of KWC will focus on engineering, working closely with its counterparts in Yokohama.
Eiichi Toriyama, who joined Kyocera in 1972 and has spent 37 years in sales and marketing, has been appointed as president of KCI. Commenting on his appointment and on the company’s restructuring move, Toriyama said: “There is great strength in the combined global forces of Kyocera and Sanyo’s mobile device groups and KCI represents the new face of this unified business for the Americas. Not only are we streamlining duplicated functions within the organization, but also we are creating synergies with unified, complementary product and technology roadmaps that will ultimately benefit our customers.”
CTIA Wireless 2009 wasn’t an especially stunning show, but Will and I run down the main device releases from Samsung and HTC, followed by an interview with RIM Manager of Developer Relations Mike Kirkup on their App World launch. I’ve been hearing some anger from abroad about the UK, Canada, and U.S. limitations on the App World, nevermind the 1.0 bumps expected in a product launch. Still, App World is overall a good thing for BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), and we all wait with bated breath to see how it evolves. We’re going to have another go at giving away those Z.buds – just leave a comment and you have a shot! This week’s poll has to do with restriction on Skype for the iPhone imposed by carriers. Are Wi-Fi-only versions of the software fair, or should the carrier protect their role as a service provider rather than just being dumb pipes?
Sprint (NYSE: S) and Palm (NSDQ: PALM) didn’t exactly hit CTIA Wireless 2009 in full force. Neither company had any real booth presence at the wireless conference show in Las Vegas, but that didn’t stop them from showcasing some impressive new WebOS applications for the Palm Pre.
We had already been given demonstrations of Sprint’s Sprint TV and NASCAR applications for the Palm Pre, but Palm has a few more applications lined up for the Palm Pre’s launch.
Palm showed off the Fandango, Pandora, FlightView and the PalmOS Classic emulator on the Palm Pre. More notable than all the demo’ed applications’ intuitive designs was how well all the applications were integrated into the WebOS. Taking advantage of the WebOS’s ability to multi-task applications in the background, all applications are capable of actively alerting the user to any changes, regardless of what application they are currently using. Browsing the web? Pandora will pop up and let you know which new track is playing. Ordering a movie ticket? FlightView will pop up to let you know you’re flight is delayed.
At CTIA Wireless 2009, LG brought Michael Bay to Las Vegas to help announce a special-edition LG Versa. The special-themed LG Versa was aimed at promoting the upcoming Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen movie. After three separate press-event delays, Bay finally arrived at the LG booth, only to spoil LG’s party.
The highlight of Bay’s appearance was supposed to be LG’s Versa handset, but the PR-challenged movie-maker managed to blurt out that “I don’t know anything about mobile phones. In fact, look at my phone — it’s a thirty-nine dollar Samsung.” That single remark tainted LG’s entire promotional event. LG Mobile’s President Juno Cho attempted a bit of damage control by trying to offer Bay an LG phone to use. Bay, proving that otherwise inept individuals can make spectacular movies, responded to Cho’s offer by saying that “all my contacts are in the other one.” Talk about a one-two punch to knock out a press event.
To recap. Michael Bay was in LG’s booth with the intention of promoting the LG Versa. Instead, Bay managed to plug competitor Samsung while simultaneously raining on LG’s parade. We have to wonder what the behind-the-door conversation between LG’s people and Bay’s people sounded like. It might be safe to assume that the entirely clueless Michael Bay won’t be invited near any future LG Mobile press events.
During the recently ended CTIA in Las Vegas, Truphone announced that it is entering the U.S. market in a big way. More specifically, the company launched its Truphone Business offering and the Truphone Channel Partner Program in the States.
We’ve already covered Truphone Business in the past, when we’ve talked about the service for the UK market. I’ll only repeat that we’re talking about a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) application that enables business users to make low-cost international phone calls.
At the same time, they announced the Truphone Channel Partner Program to recruit partners to sell and distribute Truphone Business to companies throughout the U.S. As part of the program, resellers are offered generous commission plans according to a tiered structure, as well as a range of sales incentive schemes, co-marketing funds, and a wide variety of marketing support materials.
Additionally, the channel program offers sales and marketing training modules, dedicated channel managers to support partners’ sales teams in addition to secure and easy to use customer management tools to make all order entries, adds, changes, deactivations and trouble ticketing seamless and instantaneous.
Celio, the company behind the popular REDFLY mobile companions/terminals, has recently announced a public beta of the new REDFLY Mobile Viewer PC software for Windows XP and Vista. The software is designed to allow compatible Windows Mobile smartphone owners to use their mobile apps at full size on their PCs — i.e. send and receive SMS messages and emails in a full-screen window.
Four different resolutions are supported — including 800×480, 800×600, 1024×600 or 1024×768 — giving just enough space to conveniently do your “mobile thing” on a full blown screen…
Enough said – if you own a Windows Mobile-powered smartphone, you gotta try this. Hop over to Celio’s website and look for the download link. You won’t regret – trust me!
At the CTIA, PCD showed an interesting handset called TXT8030. What’s interesting about it is the bottom part of the device which rotates (similarly to the Nokia 3250 XpressMusic) — on one side there’s a full QWERTY keyboard, while the other one has music control keys coupled with big speakers. Moreover, we’re talking about a low-end CDMA phone here, which prides itself with 2.2-inch screen, 1.3 megapixel camera and a microSD memory card slot.
In a nutshell, it’s a perfect device for young people who mostly use their phone for texting and some music playback. Size wise, the PCD TXT8030 measures 4.5×2.4×0.5 inches. Release date is unknown and so is the pricing…
They might get a bad rap for cheap phones, but ZTE is bigger than you think – number 6 worldwide, though you might not be too familiar with them since they only have three handsets in North America, and they’re on metroPCS (NYSE: PCS). ZTE is working to crack the tough nut of the U.S. market after seeing plenty of business back home in China and abroad in Europe, but based on some of the phones they were showing off, ZTE has a reasonable shot at some market share.
Out front, ZTE was showing off some concept tech, like a slider with tiltable speakers called Xer, two USB modem watches (Rotta and Agate),and an MID with a removable power button dubbed Pure. Of their, y’know, actual phones, the D300 looked absolutely awesome, with its brushed aluminum face and sharp lines. The D300 just a simple CDMA flip, but apparently it one a design award of some sort. The D92 looked pretty cool, with letter keys in between the standard numpad – it landed on Telus not long ago. Samsung might still be working on Blue Earth, but the ZTE Solar-S312 at least has the charging part of that equation already implemented and ready to go.
On the higher end, they’ve three Windows Mobile devices (like the E810 and U990) that, if priced right, could be a cheap alternative to the upcoming HTC Snap. Talking with ZTE was actually really interesting since they’ve got so much stuff that might actually be finding its way to our shores, but combined with their transition from feature to smart phones, they’ve got an uphill battle.
First off, the headline might be a little misleading. Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE), for whatever reason, didn’t have an official exhibitor booth on the CTIA Wireless 2009 showfloor. The Japanese-Swedish phone maker has been going through a bit of a rough financial-patch recently. How that plays into the company’s decision to forgo any physical presence in the Las Vegas Convention Center isn’t clear – we’ll let you put your own spin on it.
We had a chance to handle the Sony Ericsson T707 and the Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman phone during the event. While the T707’s gimmicky gesture-support failed to impress, the W995 Walkman phone more than made up for it with solid build-quality and a slick slider mechanism. Unfortunately, the W995’s styling exudes that been-there-done-that feel that we just couldn’t shake – it’s like we’d seen this Walkman phone before or something…
We’re all still waiting on pins and needles for the Sony Ericsson Idou to launch late this year or early the next. Peruse the gallery to keep your mind busy as we wait for the Sony Ericsson Idou to go live!
Well, that was underwhelming. 
