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“Though we have taken various measures to reduce the cost price for the end user, it will be a technologically advanced instrument,” claimed SCL Chairman BK Modi. He said this product will prove that India is not only equipped to give the best of technology but even the cheapest at most competitive prices. Also, he didn’t rule out the possibility of prices of such phones going down further.

The new voice-only phone was exhibited at a global expo in Barcelona in Spain Monday and evoked tremendous interest among mobile service providers from around the world, Modi said. The phone does not offer a screen but will provide excellent voice clarity. An audio program would announce the digits that are dialed to prevent errors. A Braille version will also be simultaneously introduced to benefit visually challenged users.”Spice got nearly 40 MSPs inquiring about it at the expo itself.

We have tied up with one Indian MSP to provide the phone as a package deal.”The service provider’s name will be announced along with the phone launch in April this year. Designed in India by Spice Corp Ltd, the new phone is being manufactured in China in partnership with Spice’s Chinese partner. Available in a range of attractive colours and compact and lightweight design, the phone will be compatible with all types of SIM cards currently available in the market and function on most connection types.

Opera Software has announced an initiative with Tata Teleservices to provide Opera Mini on its upcoming BREW-enabled handsets. The browser will be made available first on the Huawei C2900i, a mass market BREW-enabled handset. This is the first delivery of Opera Mini on a BREW-enabled handset and marks Opera’s entry into the Indian market. According to Gartner India’s mobile phone market is set for a period of rapid growth, with revenue from cellular services expected to jump by more than 18 per cent year on year for the next five years. Indian mobile data revenue is expected to outpace that of voice services and contribute to about a fifth of total revenues by 2011, doubling year on year.

A report by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, (TRAI) the Indian telecom industry watchdog, suggests that the number of Indian consumers connecting to the Internet via mobile handsets has more than doubled in just over a year - to 38 million from 16 million. Mobile web browser Opera Mini, will provide users with access to the Web on the go. Opera Mini will also support local language Web sites such as BBC Hindi, Dainik Bhaskar and others and will include bookmarks, secure access to e-mail and online banking.

LG’s 5 megapixel camera phone the KU990, called the Viewty, has made an appearance at this year’s GSMA Mobile Asia Congress 2007 held in Macau. The KU990 follows in the footsteps of the popular iPhone-like LG Prada. This candy bar styled phone has a large 3-inch LCD touch screen with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels and sports 256K colors. The Viewty has a Flash UI (user interface).The LG KU990 has an inbuilt memory of 100MB and also supports external memory through microSD cards. It’s also 3G enabled with HSDPA for faster connectivity. Speaking of connectivity it’s also Bluetooth v1.2 enabled with A2DP compatibility and USB v2.0. The main feature of course is the 5 megapixel, auto-focus camera with a Xenon flash.

The KU990’s camera is also equipped with anti-shake image stabilizer and face-tracking software and even manual focus should you wish to get a bit more ‘professional’ with it. What the Viewty also incorporates is an application that allows users to upload videos to the net to sites like YouTube and there’s another photo editor application for making changes to images shot through the camera. The best part about the camera is its ability to capture 120 frames per second. There’s also a VGA camera located in the front for video calling.

There’s no doubt that Sony Ericsson phones are the new in-thing. From being just another mobile manufacturer, it has risen to be a formidable competitor to Nokia and others. Perhaps the only problem with SE phones is that you can’t always trust them to be consistent. Take the K810i for instance. As an upgrade for the K800i, it’s a sorry attempt. But as a standalone device it’s brilliant, at least in certain aspects. Before anything else, let’s talk about the form factor.

Speaking of the design of the K810i, SE has taken big strides in making its phones look like no other. In many instances, they managed this by compromising on ergonomics. The K810i, for one, has tiny rounded keys that look uncomfortable. (I, however, liked them.) They are evenly spaced and are big enough to hit accurately with only one eye open. Having said that, I won’t deny the keys look rather ugly! At 106 x 48 x 17 mm, the phone is quite bulky and causes a rather alarming looking bulge in your pocket.

I feel the 3.2 MP camera is one of the reasons for this excess flab. So you need to decide what is it you really need before you pick up this handset. If you look closely, you will see two keys just above the 2-inch TFT screen on either side of the earpiece. These are camera shortcuts that enable direct access to the pictures clicked. For navigation the phone is equipped with a five-way joystick, which is quite responsive.

Today announced a fundamental shift in the mobile handset industry by launching the world’s first modular mobile phone, supported by variety of ecosystem partners. Along with the handset, the company will also make available a variety of modu and modu mates. The jackets are nothing but ’shells’ that phone fit into, giving them a completely different look. The first modu products will be available sometime in Q4 2008. Modu has tied up with mobile network operators (MNOs) such as Telecom Italia’s mobile division TIM, BeeLine (VimpelCom) of Russia and Cellcom in Israel, along with mainstream consumer electronics manufacturers who will develop modu mates such as MP4 players, digital photo frames, cameras and DECT phones. One of the first such partners is car multimedia and navigation leader Blaupunkt.

Lifestyle, entertainment and fashion brands – including the Universal Music Group – are also part of the modu ecosystem, partnering with modu to design stylish and customized modu jackets. Dov Moran, modu’s CEO and founder, said, “The mobile phone industry is ready for a revamp. There are hundreds of handset models on the market: the trouble is that as a consumer you can only have one at a time and you are usually tied to a long and expensive contract. modu is challenging that with a solution that offers freedom, boundless possibilities and the opportunity to change your phone without it costing a fortune.”

LG Electronics unveiled some new products and future technologies at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It officially launched the LG-KF700, a new handset with an optimized user interface that makes use of touch technology. Other handsets from LG featuring touch technology included the convenience oriented LG-KF600, the slim and stylish interactive touch-lighting LG-KF510, and the professional level camera phone-equipped LG Viewty.

Combining three separate input methods, the LG-KF700 provides easy access to multimedia features, which includes a full web browser, digital audio and video players, and handy widgets. The high-res 3-inch full touchscreen LCD provides an optimized interface for watching video content. A shortcut dial on the rear of this 3G, HSDPA-enabled handset offers an easy and intuitive way to switch among applications. There’s a sliding alphanumeric keypad for calls. Other features include a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, support for microSD cards, Bluetooth and USB connectivity.

Those of you who are also into audio will have surely heard of a big name in the biz – Mark Levinson. This audio equipment manufacturing company has teamed with LG mobiles and developed what they call the LG: the Rhapsody in Music. So it’s a long and odd name for a mobile phone, but according to the company it should speak for itself.

The most obvious fact about this device is that it of course should have a Kick-Ass music player. Other specs include Bluetooth (possible with A2DP) 1GB of internal memory and external memory support and a 2 megapixel camera. This LG slider also has a navigation wheel under its screen, so following in the footsteps of the and yes, the ever popular Apple iPod.

Hungama mobile has announced the launch of Media Magic, the first company to offer an aggregation and retail platform for legal content for mobile users in terms of games, apps, movies and music all in an offline format. What they are offering as of now is the chance to watch some of your favorite movies on your mobile phone using a proprietary Movie Magic video player application. This player is specifically designed to play only the videos that Media Magic provides. To ensure that this service is evenly distributed and accessible to all mobile phone users, Hungama Mobile and Media Magic have tied up with chains like Cafe Coffee Day, The Mobile Store and other outlets around the country to provide this content to users for a fee.

One can also simply purchase a Media Magic memory card, for just the price of the card and install the software. However videos and other content will be locked and require an activation key, hence the fee. Each retailer will have access to this unique password using which they would be able to download content on client’s handset from the company’s server through their PCs. The customized software developed by Media Magic is also handset specific to ensure that the content is optimized for the customer handset as all handsets models have different screen sizes and specifications. The software will also manage the retailers account in real time and will work quite like the prepaid card system which the retailer can use to top up his account as and when required.

The global mobile handset market ended 2007 with a bang, recording shipments of more than 300 million devices in the fourth quarter, according to a report released by Friday. While year-over-year growth for 2007 slowed, the 334 million handsets shipped during the holiday season set a new industry record and was an increase of some 15 percent over the previous quarter. Shipments in 2007 totaled more than a whopping 1 billion units at 1,144.1 million, representing 12.4 percent in overall growth.

Growth in 2008 and beyond will look much different, however, IDC said. Double-digit gains are a thing of the past from now through 2012, the research firm said, and growth will slow with the market reporting single digit increases.”Over the last three years, growth in the industry during the holiday quarter has fluctuated from 18 percent to 30 percent, and this past quarter we saw it drop to 11.6 percent,” said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.”The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic. We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008 and most likely for years to follow,” he continued. The big winner in 2007, however, was Samsung.

The Korean cell phone maker, previously ranked No. 3, owned the No. 2 spot for the third consecutive quarter, making it the No. 2 vendor for 2007 and displacing Motorola. Good business practices, its Ultra line platform, strong marketing and a wide spectrum of device offerings were significant keys to Samsung’s success in 2007, Reith told the E-Commerce Times.”They’ve really got a lot of things together, and they’ve had an excellent year, not just from a shipments perspective. They’ve managed to keep profitability up — that’s the big thing they have over Motorola. You can drive shipments out the door like crazy, but if you don’t keep an eye on costs and profitability, you’ll end up exactly in the situation Motorola is today,” he explained.

LG Electronics posted full-year sales of more than W40 trillion for the first time in its history (US$1=W953).The Korean electronics giant said Wednesday it recorded W10.91 trillion in sales and W380.9 billion in operating profit in the fourth quarter of last year, including the performance of its overseas operations.

The sales figure is an all-time quarterly high, and the operating profit slightly outperformed market expectations. The company posted full-year sales for 2007 of W40.85 trillion, an increase of 11.2 percent from 2006. Operating profit was W1.23 trillion, up 46.2 percent year-on-year. The performance was driven by the firm’s cell phone division, which posted W10 trillion in annual sales and recorded 8.5 percent growth in operating margin.

In just the final quarter of last year, the cell phone division posted sales of W2.92 trillion, up more than 10 percent year-on-year, and saw its operating margin increase 8.8 percent. LG’s display division posted W3.97 trillion in sales and reduced its perennial operating deficit to W10.9 billion. The company expects the display division to earn a profit this year, an LG Electronics executive said. LG Electronics aims to achieve US$50 billion in sales this year, a 10 percent increase from 2007. It lowered its forecast for the foreign exchange rate from W900 per U.S. dollar last year to W885 this year.