Moody’s Investors Service became the second of the big three credit ratings agencies to downgrade Nokia following the vendor’s poor Q2 results, noting that ‘a return to profitability in the Devices & Services segment on the back of smartphones with the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system is by no means assured’. Moody’s decision followed on the heels of a downgrade by Fitch Ratings, but Standard & Poor’, has not yet commented on Nokia’s most recent results. All three made downgrades in the light of Nokia’s Q1 numbers.
Amazon is capping use of the browser on its Kindle ereaders, which have 3G access included in the price, to 50Mbytes a month. This does not affect downloading of books, or Wi-Fi. Amazon may be trying to limit the fees it has to pay carrier AT&T, or encourage users to move to its Fire tablet, but a primary reason is probably to stop users taking advantage of a hack which allows the ereadeer to act as a free mobile hotspot.
ZTE has won a contract worth $281.5m for the largest share in China Telecom’s 2012 CDMA Purchase Project. The vendor will provide its Uni-Ran solution plus services in over 220 cities of 27 provinces across China. ZTE says this will gain it a cumulative share of 43.5% of Telecom’s CDMA network. IDC says the Chinese supplier is now the world’s number one CDMA provider, with 32.6% worldwide market share as of the end of 2011.
It seems increasingly likely that Microsoft plans to bring its Office suite to Apple’s iOS mobile platform. Recent job adverts have sought Outlook and Powerpoint software engineers to work on the ‘design, implementation and testing of new feature work to be part of Microsoft’s next move on the Mac and on iOS’.
Qualcomm is getting serious about its wireless power charging technology and has signed a series of partnerships. It has announced deals with Renault and Delta Motorsport to support a trial of its Halo WEVC (wireless electric vehicle charging) system in London this year. The aim is to evaluate the commercial viability and gain user feedback.
Apigee, which recently took over the platform of the operator driven WAC (Wholesale Application Community) has raised $20m in new funding to fuel the growth of its API services platform. New investor Focus Ventures led the round, with existing backers Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures also contributing. Apigee, founded in 2005, has raised $72m to date.
Intel is working with Google to complete a port of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) to x86 Atom-based smartphones and tablets. Intel-based handsets are currently running Android 2.3 and are due to get release 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as an update, though there are no timeframes for either upgrade yet.
Small cell chip vendor Mindspeed is to cut 15% of its workforce, or about 80 jobs, as part of a costcutting exercise. It aims to reduce expenditure by $13m a year as it refocuses its business on wireless following the acquisition of femtocell chip pioneer Picochip. This will mean a defocus on the wireline applications space, where many of the cuts can be expected to fall. Mindspeed’s main activities going forward will be small base station SoCs, broadband CPE processors and the analog market. The reductions will be spread across R&D, sales and administration, especially in wireline areas such as core network VoIP. The layoffs will reduce Mindspeed’s operating expenses to roughly the level they were prior to the acquisition of Picochip. A charge of $4m to $5m will be incurred but the company aims to return to pro forma profitability in the first half of its fiscal year, after making a net loss of $6.85m in its most recent quarter on sales that were short of analyst expectations. For the current quarter, the firm expects sales to be between $33.32m and $35.45m, between zero and 6% down on the fiscal third quarter.
RIM is to launch an LTE version of its BlackBerry PlayBook on July 31 with Bell Canada, according to an internal Bell document seen by MobileSyrup. The gadget will have a 7-inch touchscreen with 1024×600 resolution, 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1Gbyte of RAM, 32Gbytes of storage, 5-megapixel rear camera and 3-megapixel front camera.
Qualcomm’s first quad-core Snapdragon chip has arrived in a tablet, the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity, though at $1,300 this is likely to appeal mainly to professional developers. The slate includes the new APQ8064 Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor which is chasing the first quad-core ARM-based chips to find their way into mainstream mobile devices – the Tegra 3 from Nvidia and the Samsung Exynos 4 Quad.