The major obstacle to Apple would be price. Without considering cost as a problem, the total amount of customers intending to buy an iPhone would jump to 53 percent. The recent survey is however representative of a small part of Chinese society, because most people are relatively poor and affluence is concentrated mainly around a few cities big cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Main competition for Apple is represented by Nokia. Although negligible on the smartphone market of the United States, a quarter of the 3G buyers in the Chinese survey claimed they would buy a Nokia phone next. Primary advantages brought by Nokia would be, according to the survey, reception, reputation, service, price and battery life. On the other hand, the iPhone is preferred for the interface, Internet and media features, as well as for social status.

Other deals like the merger of Verizon and Alltel have forced the acquiring carrier to divest some cellular licenses at least, in order to allow a smaller carrier to buy them and this way improve its network. Mandating price limits or roaming agreements, or even net neutrality terms would be other options the FCC could adopt. This kind of terms can be limited to a number of years, assuming that they would not be necessary later.

Considering the AT&T-T-Mobile deal, the former mentioned that it was confident the takeover estimated at $39 billion would be approved and used a patriotic approach to impress the FCC. Some of its promises have been to spread LTE to 95 percent of the population, to create new jobs and to improve the use of wireless spectrum for future broadband. Some critics have said that LTE could get additional coverage regardless that the merger would consolidate spectrum, and also that claims related to strong competition were false, as Sprint, US Cellular or other competitors had much smaller sizes.

Attempts of pushing the deal through would spur on FCC regulation in its process of reaching a final decision. At the CTIA opening keynote, Genachowski said that a vote on data roaming was expected at the commission’s meeting on April 7 and that he would insist for lower rates of roaming and required roaming agreements. Advocates of this idea have argued that the current situation would let companies like Verizon and AT&T shut out their rivals by either negotiating unfair roaming rates or simply refusing a roaming deal.

In order to encourage competition in the wireless marketplace, the agency has considered as well to allow some of the smaller players to merge their bids against offers from larger companies.

According to a recent report in The Register, Three UK, the local carrier, has supposedly voiced worries that it may be forced out of the market if it doesn’t obtain an adequate share of the new spectrum, because it already lacks any spectrum in sub-1Ghz bands. In order to ease such issues and preserve a minimum of four main competitors in the market, Ofcom is planning to limit the spectrum ownership by any single company.

Ofcom will most likely hold the auction sometime in early 2012 (probably before the first half of the year), but it is still unclear if the agency will meet the initial objectives.

They scanned users’ brains when cellphones were held to the right and left sides of their heads for as long as an hour and over two test days. Subjects of the tests did neither speak into their phones nor listen to conversations. The phones were left off on one of the test days and muted on another in order to make impossible for the users to know if the devices were powered on or off.

The results of the tests indicated an eight to ten percent rise of the glucose metabolism in brain regions close to the active antenna of the cellphone. According to Dr. Nora Volkow, one of the researchers involved in this study, the change was comparable to what happens in glucose metabolism in the visual zone of the cortex when a person speaks. Dr. Volkow was cited in a report published in the Wall Street journal.

Volkow said that the study shows clearly that the human brain is sensitive to electromagnetic radiations produced by cellphones. However, she added that it is impossible to know, as a result of this study, whether these radiations cause harmful side-effects or not.

The topic has been intensely debated since the very beginning of widespread cellular use. Reports still are not unanimous in saying that negative consequences such as cancer could be determined by the use of cellphones. San Francisco recently began to require the mandatory labeling of radiation levels which are emitted by various handsets, but the CTIA initiated a lawsuit against the legislation. The CTIA is a trade organization which represents both carriers and cellphone manufacturers.

The FCC is testing devices to guarantee compliance with SAR levels considered safe by the agency. The FDA also considers that existing information cannot be used to draw conclusions related to negative health effects due to cellphone radiations.

The study has been published a few days ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Product developers will be enabled to test and launch their creations more quickly and will not have to worry about testing or certification, mainly when being in the initial deployment phase. All the modules will equally have FCC certification. It is also possible for developers to collect, share or control data from other BUGs on the network by using the new web application named BUGswarm.

AT&T has warned that a final certification is still needed on its network for products made with Bug Labs modules. If changes are performed in volume production additional testing could be asked.

Included in the Connection Kit will be an AT&T SIM card, access to the Control Center of AT&T, run by Jasper Wireless. The prices of the hardware are not known yet.

The mentality was similar behind excluding multitasking and copy-and-paste of text from the first release. Sullivan said that they had to choose between doing more things and doing fewer things really well.

Microsoft’s timing may complicate the launch as Apple is believed to make a CDMA iPhone that would be ready for shipping around the same time or before a CDMA Windows Phone 7 device could be available. Sullivan did not confirm whether another US carrier besides AT&T would get Windows Phone 7, but there are leaks about T-Mobile models coming from LG and HTC.

Microsoft has officially scheduled the presentation of Windows Phone 7 at an October 11th event, but there are doubts the first phones could reach the United States before November.

The handset will have a 1GHz OMAP CPU and a memory of 512MB. A built-in memory of 8GB as well as a microSD memory card will be also bundled with the phone. The display is 3.7-inch in size and has a resolution of 854×480 pixels. The device sports a QWERTY hardware keyboard and a five-megapixel camera. Users can share their data connection with other Wi-Fi equipped devices, up to five of them, as a 3G Mobile Hotspot feature is native in android 2.2.

The price and ship dates for the Motorola Milestone 2 handset in overseas are still unknown and will be revealed at a later date.

The infrastructure builder of the network has not named customers yet for DFCA but has outlined that software, more than hardware, would achieve much of the necessary work.

The implementation of the DFCA could be helpful in alleviating the congestion due to the ever growing number of smartphones, which triggered slowdowns in the United States on AT&T’s network, but was also supposed to cause problems on O2 in the United Kingdom, SoftBank in Japan as well as in other networks including large numbers of users owning Android devices and iPhones. In many cases, voice is overtaken by data and here is where DFCA or equivalents intervene by re-prioritizing networks without needing to add equipment immediately.

AT&T and other carriers do not use Nokia Siemens hardware for their networks and therefore would not perceive uniform benefits without having to change hardware.

Bada hasn’t changed and still centers the Social Hub, which is an area pooling e-mail, messages and status updates from all contacts in only one area.

Both the Wave 2 and the Wave 2 Pro are expected to start shipping in August, targeting Russia and Southeast Asia. Even if no other countries have been mentioned, the handsets offer quad-band GSM and EDGE support, being able to work in most of the countries, if unlocked.

The new software product allows developers to take full advantage of all the features of the Palm Pre. The developers admit some potential bugs exist and they are supposed to be fixed. Some install problems also exist. To install the software unlock onto the Palm Pre devices, users need to have Windows XP or Vista.