The Mobile Fun Blog

Motorola has been fighting hard to reestablish itself as the giant mobile phone maker it once was. The new wave of Android phones – like the Motorola Droid and Devour – prove that Moto’s well on its way back to prominence, but the company’s fight is a long way from over. As such, co-CEOs Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha have voluntarily agreed to take a 25% pay cut for 2010. The move will have the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) co-chiefs continuing salary reductions made in 2009.

Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) wants a piece of the ever growing Indian mobile market. But it don’t want to participate in the upcoming 3G spectrum auction — rather it wants to skip that step and bid for BWA radio spectrum that could be used for WiMAX and LTE services.

BWA auctions are set to begin two weeks after bidding for 3G spectrum ends.

Samsung is on top of the world this morning because it had the most market share in the United States for 2009 and Brand Keys said the company topped its customer loyalty survey for wireless handsets.

While the iPhone, BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) and Android smartphones take up a lot of the conversation, Samsung is the world’s second-biggest handset maker because of its large portfolio of low-end and feature phones. They do make some solid devices, and the study found customers really liked their Samsung cell phones.

When it comes to mobile internet search, alliances are short-lived and loyalties are looser than, well, you get the point. AT&T (NYSE: T) recently kicked Google (NSDQ: GOOG) off the Android-powered Motorola BackFlip, in order to get in bed with Yahoo as the default search engine on the smartphone. Now, T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) USA has up and shuffled Google out the door to make space for Yahoo. The two-year agreement between Yahoo and T-Mobile is apparently no more, and the fourth-largest US wireless carrier is looking elsewhere for mobile search. That elsewhere is Google.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has a new report titled “Change is in the Air: 2009 North American Wireless Industry Survey” highlighting the trend of the mobile industry in the U.S. Here are the highlights:

• Retention: Large carriers invested more than 0 per subscriber in the 2009 survey, which is 30% more than in 2008.
• Prepaid: Due to bad economy, consumers are moving towards prepaid plans. Use of prepaid minutes increased more than 147% in the past four years, from 270 minutes in 2006 to 667 minutes in 2009.

Big Red is being hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging the largest U.S. carrier has been improperly charging non-smartphone users for data.

The new TELUS Motorola Milestone seems to be getting a lot of attention up in Canada these days. The Canadian version of the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Droid is doing well as far as I can tell, no doubt due to the great marketing efforts the Canadian carrier has put forth.

Case in point, a little note I received in my email today from a TELUS (NYSE: TU) buddy.

Following on from my post about the iPlayer arriving on Blackberry (NSDQ: RIMM) devices (see here), here’s some info that has come in about more BBC apps coming to mobile devices. Actually this news is a hangover from Mobile World Congress, but hey, you can’t cover everything all the time, right?!

There’s nothing worse than plunking down a wad of cash and investing some emotional currency into a shiny new Windows Mobile smartphone, only to have it become nearly obsolete a few months later when Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s new Windows Phone 7 Series comes rolling through town. Microsoft knows this, and they’re apparently going to allow certain handsets to be upgraded to Windows Phone 7 at some point after the mobile OS’s launch later this year. The only catch? It’ll be up to Windows Phone OEMs to determine if they want to spend the extra cash in licensing and porting Windows Phone 7 to work with existing hardware.

Sprint is really pushing the green approach. Its Buyback program that gives credit to customers with old phones has been extended to three phones per account. Sprint (NYSE: S) hopes to increase the rate of mobile phone recycling by offering more incentive for customers. That will probably work.