Vodafone plans 3G expansion in Oz

Vodafone has announced a New Year`s resolution that will be music to the ears of long-suffering regional Australian mobile phone users. It has promised to spend up to AU$500 million on a next-generation mobile broadband network that will cover 95% of the Australian population by Christmas 2008.

Vodafone Australia CEO Russell Hewitt says the mobile carrier will make a national mobile broadband network its "number one priority for 2008", reports ZDNet Australia.

The carrier is evaluating proposals from equipment manufacturers Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei for the build-out of HSPA and radio equipment for the new network.

Surging demand for Nintendo DS and the Wii handheld games consoles spurred a 46.1% jump in underlying sales at specialist retailer Game Group and helped the new owner of Gamestation shops to shake off a warning that margins had come under pressure, says Times Online.

Shares in Game Group rose almost 3%, despite its alert that gross margins would fall by up to 3.25% over the full year, following an increase in hardware sales against higher-margin software sales.

Shares were up 7.5p, at 250p, in early trading in spite of concerns that a weakness in Nintendo`s supply chain would lead to a shortage of the consoles at UK retailers during the crucial Christmas sales period.

While Google`s Linux mobile phone platform, Android, has been stealing the spotlight, another longer-standing mobile Linux group is also moving ahead, reports PC World.

The Linux Phone Standards Forum, comprising Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista and Access, completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification, it announced on Monday.

The group released half of the specification in June and has now added components including application programming interfaces for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging and presence functions, as well as new user interface components.

Tablet computing is a small pond, and it`s now home to a big fish: Dell. The Texas-based PC maker is introducing the Latitude XT Tablet PC, its first product in the category, says CNet News.com.

Though it`s just one notebook, Dell`s entry is sure to cause a stir. It`s a modest niche of computing that has not really gotten off the ground yet. And the interest of the second-largest PC maker in the world can`t help but have an impact on the market.

"It puts the product in limelight," said Richard Shim, PC industry analyst with IDC. "It has potential to bring down pricing on key components that are being priced at a premium."