South Korea’s LG Electronics said Tuesday it has signed an agrement with YouTube, the world’s biggest video-sharing website, to develop a mobile phone which can upload and play videos.
“LG Electronics will unveil the mobile handset that fully supports the YouTube service for the first time in Europe in the second half of this year,” the South Korean firm said in a statement. LG will enable users to upload, view and share video clips or user-created content.
YouTube is the world’s most popular online video-sharing website with some 70,000 videos posted and more than 100 million people logging on to its website every day. You Tube also has a mobile service.
LG’s Prada Phone (the KE-850), has a touch-screen interface similar to the iPhone.
LG began selling 3G handsets called “Google phones” with software installed for directly using the Google service last month. The phone offers one-click access to Google’s search engine as well as Google maps and Gmail.
Google acquired YouTube late last year for 1.65 billion dollars to strengthen its video-linked online advertisement business.
LG’s WiMax phone, the KC1, runs Windows Mobile. A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but one might assume that Sprint and Clearwire, soon to be the world’s largest Mobile WiMAX operators, would be prime candidates.
Meanwhile, Reed Hundt, a former chairman at the FCC and vice chairman of Frontline Wireless, says the iPhone demonstrates the need for a faster new network. “The iPhone is like the guy who invented the Ferrari and found out he was selling into a country of dirt roads,” Hundt said Monday.
Frontline’s plan would allocate 10 MHz of the 60 MHz available in the 700MHz band for shared use in addition to 12 Mhz in the public service band. The 10 MHz could be auctioned to anyone agreeing to operate a wholesale wireless broadband network and build a shared, public/private network. That plan is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalists.
The Oregonian tested the iPhone using Portland’s free WiFi cloud being built by MetroFi. It worked…sort of.
Pop out the SIM or put an inactive SIM, and your iPhone works pretty much like a contract-free WiFi-enabled iPod, says The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Shoppers may have taken home as many as 700,000 iPhones over the weekend, according to Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey. Steve Jobs has sought to use the connection to the iPod business, which pulls in about $10 billion in revenue a year, to reach his goal of selling 10 million phones in 2008.
Apple started selling two models of the iPhone, priced at $499 and $599, on June 29. The most expensive iPhone model could deliver profit margins of more than 55 percent, according to iSuppli, which examined the components.
Samsung supplies the iPhone’s applications processor and its memory. The CPU is partially based on Intel’s XScale, which was sold to the Marvell Technology Group in mid-2006. According to iSuppli, Samsung has $76.25 worth of semiconductor content in the 8 GB version of the iPhone, giving the company a 30.5% share of the product’s hardware cost—the largest total of any single supplier.
Infineon supplies the digital baseband, radio-frequency transceiver and power-management components, which amounts to most of the cellular communications portions of the iPhone. Other suppliers that popped up in the iPhone include Marvell (Wi-Fi chip), Balda (touchscreen module) and CSR (Bluetooth chip).
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