Posted on September 17, 2009, at 11:11 am .
RIM has been lobbying very hard to get the Canadian government to intervene in the deal between Nortel and Sony Ericsson. The deal involves the sale of a variety of Nortel’s assets including their LTE operations, which are of great interest to RIM in order to future-proof devices.
The Canadian government has ruled on the issue and declined to review the $1.13 billion sale of Nortel Networks’ CDMA and LTE assets to Ericsson. The announcement was made by Canada’s Industry Minister, Tony Clement, and it closes any possibility of the Canadian government intervening in favor of RIM.
The underlying reasons for which RIM wanted the Canadian government to intervene are vague at best. The Investment Canada Act stipulates that the Canadian government must intervene if the sale of Canadian assets to a foreign country poses some security risk.
“There are no grounds to believe this transaction could be injurious to Canada’s national security,” Clement said Wednesday, adding that Ericsson “has the resources and customer base necessary to bring Canadian innovation to market. … This deal is very beneficial to Canada.”
So it looks as though RIM is going to have to find another way to acquire the LTE and CDMA technology it desires.
[Via]
Posted on July 27, 2009, at 3:05 pm .
On Saturday, Nortel officially sold a portfolio of CDMA and next-generation LTE wireless assets to Swedish Ericsson. While RIM did not enter the Nortel bid officially, they’re still looking for ways to acquire some of Nortel’s technology.
However, we’ve learned today that RIM and Nortel have been in negotiations over other key patents related to the next-generation wireless business “for months.”
On Sunday, RIM reiterated that it “remains interested in acquiring certain Nortel assets,” without providing specifics.
All of this information leads me to believe that RIM will find a way to acquire the CDMA and LTE technology, required to future proof BlackBerry devices and keep costs low but not having to pay royalties for the technology.
The question is: what patents are left to be sold, and will they be enough for RIM’s long term strategy?
[Via]
Posted on August 29, 2008, at 8:58 am .
Indian carrier BPL is now offering BlackBerry Connect on a wide variety of handsets, including the Moto Q9h and the Nokia Communicator. BlackBerry Connect brings all of the back-end goodness like push email, data security and personal information syncing of BlackBerry to other platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile. Clearly BlackBerry services are picking up at a decent clip again since that security mess awhile back, and I think we’re all pretty glad to see it.
(via EFYTimes)
Posted on November 27, 2007, at 9:42 am .
Ronen spotted a fairly technical review of data transfer rates between the BlackBerry 8120, the 4GB iPhone, the Sony Ericsson W910i, and the RAZR2. The times to transfer 4 GB of data from desktop to phone were 23 minutes for the iPhone, 5-6 minutes for the BlackBerry, 15 minutes on the W910i and 19 minutes on the RAZR2. So, why did BlackBerry rock the kazbah?
“The device behind the BlackBerry’s fast transfer rates is the Cypress CYWB0124AB west bridge peripheral controller. West bridge products directly connect peripherals, creating fast transfer tunnels without loading the main processor. Instead of routing files from the computer through the phone processor to the storage device, the west bridge sets up a tunnel running from the computer directly to the storage device.”
Posted on November 21, 2007, at 9:15 am .
We just got wind that a whole bunch of countries in Asia-Pacific will be able to get their BlackBerry jollies on the Sony Ericsson P1i. Some might snub their nose at the thought of using a stylus, let alone straying from their beloved ‘Berry, but this Sony Ericsson deal is packing a 3.2 megapixel camera which doubles as a business card scanner. Nice, but worth losing the keypad over?
Posted on August 9, 2007, at 10:27 am .
ABI’s fed the big companies into its newfangled Vendor Matrix, which one imagines as some giant machine that churns and bubbles and whizzes and clunks along until it dings a little bell and spits out a result, and has put Nokia at the top, with Motorola in second and RIM in third. After listening to a friend in the UK gushing about his new Nokia N95 this morning, it’s no surprise that Nokia’s on top. Criteria for ranking is based on performance in innovation and implementation of products.
In terms of implementation, Nokia has captured 56% of the global smartphone market, which is where they’ve really succeeded since RIM, Motorola and Sony Ericsson have all matched Nokia’s innovation score. While these reports need to be taken with a grain of salt, ABI’s standards are fairly comprehensive.
Check the criteria behind the jump.
Posted on June 6, 2007, at 2:42 pm .
Beatnik announced last week that they’ve come up with a way of crunching audio files down to a tenth of their previous size, making mobile audio downloads accessible to folks below the 3G line. These files can stream in faster than the playback, so they say. The big trick was finding repeated sections of the file and doubling them over on the playback, rather than downloading the duplicate section.
This service will allow more people to buy music, nailing a sweet spot between customers who can’t afford 3G phones but can afford a few bucks for music. It also means that anyone without an iPhone will have a venue for getting their tunes, and won’t have to worry too much about memory capacity. In addition to selling its software to Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and SAGEM, Beatnik’s opening up the doors to network operators, thus skipping the manufacturing middleman. Maybe Beatnik’s unnecesarily dragging out the death of older networks, but hell, anything that brings new service to a wider audience is good business.
