3 Italia watching is something that all mobile TV pundits have been doing for the past year or so due to it being first to market with DVB-H in Europe, and an update was promised at the Mobile TV World Forum in London from rival Telecom Italia senior program manager for TV Gian Paolo Balboni, who himself is something of a 3 Italia watcher.
He confirmed that there are 500,000 to 600,000 mobile TV enabled devices in the Italian market, but would not go into details over which ones were supplied by leading mobile TV rival 3 Italia and those supplied by Telecom Italia and Vodafone.
He also said that 600,000 is simply the number of phones 3 Italia has put into the retail chain, and not the number of customer sign ups that it has achieved. Recent reports and estimates circulating the show, put Telecom Italia Mobile at just 10,000 mobile TV customers and Vodafone in Italy at just 5,000. Both sell the same Mediaset provide combination of mobile TV services.
To add to its onslaught in Italy, which is certainly stealing market share from the two larger incumbents, 3 Italia also launched this week the X-Series, which had been launched earlier in the year on the UK promising to launch it across Europe.
It offers new devices which can take Skype mobile voice, offer Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Windows Live and Flickr on the web in a single bundle, and is based around flat priced cellular broadband. The combination of IM, e-mail, web browsing, VoIP and photosharing for an upgrade price of just €9 a month. Interestingly 3 Italia now claims 7.2 million Italian customers, and when it launched DVB-H it only had 6.8 million.
Customers of X series can make unlimited calls from their mobile using Skype, have unlimited access to the Internet and messaging services from Yahoo! And X-Series devices incluee Nokia N95, Nokia N73, Nokia E65, LG U970 and the TVphone LG U960.