Communications News

NEW YORK - Tracfone Wireless, the country's largest provider of "prepaid" cell phones, is quietly testing a new service that appears to be a response to the fierce price competition in the prepaid market.

WASHINGTON - State officials appealed to members of Congress on Wednesday to give states a new tool to control illegal cell phone use by prison inmates and quickly ran into protests from the phone industry.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As the iPhone becomes a popular mobile gaming device, large game publishers with deep pockets are going head-to-head with smaller developers who found early success on the Apple Inc phone.

A Texas senator is crafting a bill that would allow prisons to use jamming technologies that would prevent prisoners from using contraband cell phones.

Taiwan's largest book store operator and one of its biggest mobile phone service providers have teamed up to promote e-books on the island. They plan to launch an e-book service and e-reader by the second quarter of next year.

European antitrust investigators believe a cartel in the market for LCD screens extends around the world, a European Commission official said Tuesday.On Monday Philips and its former subsidiary LG Display confirmed that both are among a handful of firms charged by the Commission with running a cartel in the market for LCD screens used in a range of devices including PC monitors, mobile phones and iPods. "We are cooperating with the authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Japan," said Jonathan Todd, the Commission spokesman for competition matters in a telephone interview.The Commission charged Philips and others in May with running a cartel, one of the most serious forms of antitrust abuse under European competition law.Philips denied involvement and said it would "vigorously oppose" the allegation, in its profits statement for the second quarter of the year, released Monday.Most of the LCD screen cartel probes came to light in 2006, when Philips, Samsung and Sharp confirmed they had been approached by antitrust regulators. Last November in the U.S. LG Display, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes pleaded guilty to cartel involvement and paid a combined US$585 million in fines.Samsung is cooperating with the Commission's cartel investigators but it won't confirm if it received charges, according to reports that also say that Sharp denies having been charged by the Commission. Neither company was immediately available to comment.Cartels are not subject to criminal law in Europe, as they are in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. However under civil law the Commission can fine companies up to 10 percent of their global annual sales.The companies charged in May have two months to submit a written response. They are also entitled to request an oral hearing with the Commission's antitrust division.

"Bummer," that about sums up the communal groan twittered round the Internet last night when Take-Two let slip it was delaying BioShock 2 until 2010. I was busing back from London to Oxford battling a fickle Virgin Mobile USB wireless connection when the bad news blipped into my laptop's RSS reader.

Microsoft planned to announce on Tuesday that it will start accepting applications for its Windows Marketplace for Mobile on July 27 and confirmed that not all existing applications will be available at the store.

San Francisco - Scoring a customer win for Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform, Volantis Systems on Tuesday is announcing that its Ubik.com online service for building mobile Internet sites will use Azure for storage.

Wirefly's latest cell phone survey reveals that, at least when it comes to mobile phones, size matters.

Developers looking to create apps for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile will have their chance later this month – and those creations will eventually be available on Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 devices.

If you have an HTC smartphone running Windows Mobile 6 or Windows Mobile 6.1, you may want to think twice before connecting to an untrusted device using Bluetooth. A vulnerability in an HTC driver installed on these phones can allow an attacker to access any file on the phone or upload malicious code using Bluetooth, a Spanish security researcher warned Tuesday.

India had 109.7 million rural mobile subscribers at the end of the first quarter, up by 18 percent from 93.2 million users in the fourth quarter of last year, the country's telecom regulator said on Monday.

WiMax subscriber growth slowed in the first quarter, and the emerging wireless technology will continue to struggle at least through this year, a survey by research company Maravedis indicates.

AT&T and Nokia on Monday announced the Nokia Surge. The companies are touting it as a socially supercharged smartphone empowered over AT&T's 3G network.

Nokia's new Surge smartphone for AT&T Wireless is designed specifically for the U.S. market – and a younger demographic.

LG Electronics has joined its rival mobile-phone makers in launching its own online store for applications. The Seoul, Korea-based company and world's number-three handset maker will launch the beta version of the app store on Tuesday.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's central bank has established rules on paying for goods and services and making other financial transactions through bank accounts associated with mobile telephones.