HTC, Telef'onica ink smartphone deal

HTC and Telef'onica made an exclusive deal at the World Mobile Conference Congress in Barcelona to lower the price of smartphones, reports Mobile Business Briefing.

The HTC Smart will be available in Telef'onica's operations in Germany, Ireland and the UK from April. The smartphone will enable users to customise their phone using widgets.

Steve Alder, vice-president of devices at Telef'onica Europe, says: “We will be selling the HTC Smart at less than half the cost of smartphones today. This will enable us to address new markets, particularly the 16- to 22-year-old group, where smartphone penetration is low.”

Broadcom is anticipating the convergence of Ethernet-based wireless and wireline networks with a DSL chipset that comes with its own production-ready reference design platform and firmware, states Electronics Weekly.

The multi-line digital subscriber line (DSL) terminal chipset and reference design uses ADSL2+/VDSL2, vectoring and channel bonding technologies to increase the capacity of Ethernet-over-copper.

Broadcom claimed rates can approach 1Gbps for the BCM96519 multi-line DSL chipset. Greg Fischer, VP and GM of Broadcom's broadband carrier access business, says there's a move toward the IP-based convergence of wireless radio access and fixed broadband access networks.

Skype Mobile will be rolled out to Verizon wireless phones in March this year, says TMCnet.

Skype Mobile will give smartphone users with data plans a new way to call around the world, through 3G smartphones including BlackBerry and Android smartphones.

John Stratton, executive VP and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless, says: “Skype Mobile adds great value because we're effectively giving customers with smartphones and data plans the option to extend their unlimited calling community to hundreds of millions of Skype users around the globe.”