Nokia-Intel partnership impacts mobile space

Nokia and Intel have announced a partner relationship that will define a new mobile platform beyond these companies' current offerings, writes Brighthand.

While the outcome of this agreement will be some type of new class of mobile devices, there are several others pieces to the relationship that may impact the entire mobile industry. One of the items spoken about in the shared press release is the collaboration Intel and Nokia will engage in across open source mobile Linux software projects.

They will also continue to work on several smaller projects such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio to provide more commonly-used open source standards across these platforms.

India is moving to block millions of cheap copy-cat Chinese mobile phones and accessories from flooding the market that the handset industry describes as "time bombs" for their often dangerously poor quality, reports Financial Times.

"You have many of these phones behaving like little bombs - just exploding because the battery is bad," said Pankaj Mohindroo, national president of the Indian Cellular Association (ICA), the lobby group representing Nokia and other large handset makers in the country.

The ICA estimates that of the four million to five million handsets imported each month from China, up to one third - or one million to one and a half million - are cheap replicas produced by small shops in southern China.

With Asian mobile carriers already fighting a rising tide of wireless spam, Cloudmark is looking to get ahead of the deluge before it arrives on other shores, courtesy of the long-time anti-spam player's new MobileAuthority service, says InternetNews.

The debut of Cloudmark MobileAuthority comes as the latest sign that mobile spam is increasingly in the spotlight as a growing threat. Earlier this month, US legislators began working on laws to contain a problem that's only forecast to grow over time.

Part of the problem is that, like with e-mail, SMS text messages pose few barriers to entry for would-be spammers.