FLO TV is dead, Long Live FLO Data?

As predicted Qualcomm have killed off their FLO TV service in the US which uses Qualcomm's Media FLO technology (you could buy an adapter for Android and other devices that was a radio receiver and some decode bits that allowed you to watch Media FLO channels on your phone).

What this means for the UK is still uncertain, as Qualcomm paid a considerable fee for a national license to run their Media FLO services.

Now Qualcomm are pushing to utilise the spectrum for data offload from existing mobile networks and this may be a winning strategy, though in Europe there's already spectrum coming available in 2.6GHz (a BUG chunk) as well as the old TV channels etc.

Qualcomm invested heavily in Media FLO technology and buying spectrum, which many believed was a white elephant and has been proved to be so. There's probably going to be a fire-sale of spectrum now.

Stardoll Party

Last night (07/10/10) in the depths of central London (well Jalouse in Hanover Square), Stardoll held a party for with various bands and singers throughout the evening including Kym Mazelle, Robbie McDade and The Kixx.

A jolly good time was had by all and Mr Paul Clarke took some great photos.

Thanks to Joan Lockwood for the invite.

Samsung drops Symbian

Following on from the announcement by SonyEricsson that it would not be producing anymore handsets based on Symbian to concentrate on Android, Samsung has also announced it's dropping Symbian and will be developing new handsets based on Android and Windows Phone 7.

This must be a blow for Nokia who are still pushing Symbian and hoping that Symbian^3, now open sourced, would be a competitor to Google's Android and Apple's iOS and to some degree Microsoft's WP7 though earlier version of Windows Mobile haven't been too successful.

Nokia have a confused approach and are utilising MeeGo (their joint Linux venture with Intel combining the best features of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin) as their smartphone operating system, though Symbian^3 also offers smartphone features (though can also be cut down as a dumb OS for cheaper phones).

Though Nokia are still dominant in the phone arena, selling 1.4m phones per day, it's a costly exercise to keep development teams for MeeGo and Symbian when no-one apart from Nokia is using them and Android is becoming the default OS for smartphones (apart from Apple's iOS which they are unlikely to license to other phone vendors).

Maybe Nokia should drop MeeGo, move to Android and admit Google have won and just develop Symbian as a 'dumb' OS for the non smartphone market.