Vodafone is always keen to find handset partners that are willing to create phones largely to the carrier’s specifications, which means working with phonemakers that are smaller and more malleable than Nokia or Samsung. It has mainly succeeded at the low end, but now RIM may prove the tame vendor Vodafone needs to create a superphone to its own requirements.

The importance of the RIM-Vodafone partnership, to both sides, was highlighted when Vodafone’s global director of terminals, Jens Schulte-Bockum – one of the most influential people in the mobile world – turned up at the London launch to talk up the device. He took clear credit for the Storm’s design, and told the audience that Vodafone had invited RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to come to a half-day workshop last summer, and “basically shook him and said ‘Mike, we want a real breakthrough innovation that helps us to reposition RIM from a pure enterprise tool into the consumer space, to the heart of the consumer space’.” Duly shaken up, Lazaridis confirmed to the event that “Vodafone initiated it [Storm]”.

The device is now out in public, trying to make itself visible amid the hailstorm of excitement surrounding Android G1, iPhone 3G, Tube, LG Renoir and Dare, and so on. It supports GSM/HSPA and CDMA in dual-mode, switching automatically between the two networks for international roaming. This is particularly important given that the initial exclusives are for Vodafone and its US joint venture Verizon Wireless, helping the carriers market international roaming across their incompatible networks.

The product will be in stores in November, in time for the key holiday purchasing period. Among its differentiators is a new technology called ClickThrough, an alternative to haptics for touchscreen feedback (Lazaridis said haptics made him feel he was being “electrocuted”). The device is likely to be in the $150-$200 range in the US, with 18-month or 24-month contract, putting it up against G1 and Instinct, and rather below the ’superphones’ like RIM Bold. In Europe, there should be more opportunities to get a Storm for free, given the intense competition for customers’ mobile data contracts.  Vodafone UK says it will offer the device free for customers who sign for a two-year contract with a £35 ($62) per month data tariff.

Storm has a 3.25-inch screen, just smaller than the iPhone’s 3.5 inches, and is designed to be more rugged, which adds about 16% to its weight compared to the Apple rival. Other potential negatives are lack of Wi-Fi – which RIM says is an unnecessary drain on battery life, and less in demand now that 3G offers wide coverage and flat rates. There is no physical keyboard  though the software can emulate a qwerty keyboard or cellphone keypad.

True to its heritage, RIM does seem to have conquered the major challenge for touchscreens, their inadequacy for heavy email or texting users – even without a physical keyboard like Omnia has. The Storm has a built-in accelerometer to automatically rotate the screen depending on whether it is being held vertically or horizontally. Other features include 480×360 screen resolution, and a display that already improves on the quality of the Bold’s, plus four shortcut keys (Talk and End, Back, and BlackBerry menu), and a microSD slot (up to 16Gb) behind the back cover. There is 128Mb of flash memory, and 1GB of on-board memory; full HTML browser, but no Flash; Bluetooth 2.0 with support for stereo Bluetooth headsets and dial-up networking; and GPS plus BlackBerry Maps. The Storm is the first BlackBerry to showcase the new operating system, release 4.7, which offers a long overdue update to the user interface.

Already newspapers are reporting that Comes with Music has no operator deal in the UK, where it was first launched, last Friday. Nokia could argue that it was quite happy with an exclusive with Carphone Warehouse, but of course it would love an operator deal and says that it is working on one in time for Christmas.

It has been widely bandied about that Nokia is insisting on a profit sharing deal with the operators, but not as far as we know, and this should be based on copying the business model of Universal Music and the Microsoft Zune MP3 player in the US. In that deal some $100 of the sale price of the device is given to the music label. It has been widely reported that Nokia is offering £31 for the music labels shared between them, so it may well be true that it is negotiating for some of the operator’s service revenues to help pay extra for the music service. So far UK newspapers have concentrated on worries about artists really getting enough money out of such a deal.

But this is exactly the same business model that Apple iPhone operates, a high priced device, subsidized with a share of services revenues, on an untried handset, which has no background history in reliability, resilience and battery life, compared to the know how of the biggest handset maker on the planet. Okay the device is cool, but is that enough?

A second reason is that the cellular operators will experience increased network traffic if they support unlimited music downloads, which they reason might cripple their networks for little significant extra revenue. Again not really a reason. The iPhone has brought several million new customers to AT&T in the US, and there the music has to be paid for and most of the revenue all goes back to Apple with the bulk of that going to the record labels. In fact AT&T has talked publicly about the huge surge in iPhone traffic that has slowed its network in the past few months.

But of course European networks are better built out and better tuned for high speed data traffic, so this is not going to be such a problem here. And there is every chance that an operator taking an exclusive on the XpressMusic 5800, might steal a huge amount of market share and cut its churn in half and make a lot of money that way.

Perhaps the real problem for the UK operators is encouraging Nokia to continue to think that its future lies in being a mobile internet services provider, while operators are concerned this will detract from their own services. While they cannot ignore Nokia’s handsets, they are uncomfortable at the Finnish giant’s intention of delivering services from its Ovi web portal, since this conflicts with cellcos’ own efforts to run and brand software stores. Some have spurned phones with Ovi services, while others have come to compromises where Ovi is just one option alongside the carrier’s own portals. Comes With Music has reignited the debate and in the UK launch territory, hence it going live without a carrier partner.

O2, which of course has the added conflict of interest of having the iPhone exclusive, has expressed grave doubts about Nokia’s latest move and says it will continue to monitor the progress of the free download offering. Apple on the other hand is seen as no threat since it is already leading the online music market, and the kudos can only add to its exclusive operators partners. However once that exclusivity expires, surely its deal is the same as Nokia’s except not as attractive as the music still has to be bought.

There’s a chance that Nokia will sign up with several operators in time for Christmas but it will probably need to prove Comes With Music’s popularity in the market first, before many carriers sign up. A recent study by market researchers at TNS Technology revealed that people aged 16 to 64 want to download 64 music tracks a month, which in conventional stores would cost about £600. The Carphone Warehouse offer is not yet on the XpressMusic 5800 but instead on the XpressMusic 5310 for just £130 a year. If the payment to the labels is right at £31 (published first in the Guardian) then it means that the device is really costing £100. A year ago this device alone cost £179.

Many Nokia fans will be waiting until early next year for the 5800, but from October 16 impatient music fans can grab a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic or N95 8GB Comes With Music Edition handset. It’ll also work on PCs using Nokia’s software.

As well as detailing information about the G1 which we already know about - it has a 3.2 Megapixel camera, three points of interface (the touchscreen, the tracker ball and the QWERTY keyboard) fast HSDPA access - the press kit, actually more of a training package for sales teams, reveals the following information:

• The G1 will be available on any of the T-Mobile Flext or Combi plans.

• Unlimited internet browsing is made available by signing up to T-Mobile Web ‘n’ Walk Plus for an additional £10 a month on top of your tariff.

• A GoogleMail account is required to use the G1.

• The G1 comes with the following Google applications out of the box: Google Talk (IM) GoogleMail, Google Calendar, Google Search and Google Maps.

The information about the tariffs and the £10 Web ‘n’ Walk Plus was interesting as it got us thinking about the cost of the handset. T-Mobile have already hinted that the G1 will be available free for anyone who takes out a £40 tariff with unlimited browsing, so does this mean that you can sign up for a £30 Combi tariff on 12 months and take the £10 unlimited browsing and still get the G1 free or not? Does the contract have to be 18 months? And does the tariff have to be £40 a month or more before you add on the unlimited browsing or after?

The G1 launch pack contained little on the release date of the phone, other than that it would be available “before Christmas” sometime during “Q4 2008″. But we already know that it’s coming out on the 31st of October - aka Hallowe’en.

The Renoir, more officially known as the KC910, will debut in the UK and other European countries this month through multiple operators. It is a slim (under 14mm) touchscreen handset that matches the much vaunted eight megapixel camera in Samsung’s recently launched i850. The camera, and therefore imaging and video applications, are the key focus on the Renoir (the name chosen because of the famous painter's skill with light). Like Nokia with the N95/96, LG is surrounding its megapixels with fine photo features, putting clear water between its handset and the iPhone, which has only managed a mediocre camera. The Renoir will sport Schneider-Kreuznach certified optics, a Xenon flash, auto and manual focus, sensitivity up to ISO 1600 and geotagging. It also boasts a first in phones, the Touch Shot feature, which allows the user to focus on any object simply by touching it on the screen, with the shutter firing automatically once the finger is removed, reducing shake.

Other features include HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity plus Assisted-GPS. It is the successor to the Viewty, a image/mobile TV optimized model.The handset will ship in main European territories this month and in east Asia, Latin America and Russia in November, with China and the Middle East to follow in January. North American launches do not seem to be on the agenda.

What has not yet been previewed is the user interface for the Renoir, and this element is increasingly vital in differentiating a smartphone, regardless of its hardware gizmos, from its rivals. LG should benefit from the increasing importance of the UI, since it has invested large amounts of R&D in this area, and drawn on the experience of the highly advanced Korean mobile internet market. LG famously put a touchscreen into a mainstream smartphone before Apple did (and had some legal actions against the US company over alleged pilfering of technologies from the LG Prada touchscreen handset).

LG has had an uphill battle establishing its brand outside its traditional strongholds of CDMA and Korea, but has made major breakthroughs in Europe in the past few years, as operators like Vodafone look for the next big web optimized gadget. Worldwide, it regularly swaps places with Sony Ericsson for the fourth/fifth positions in the handset rankings, and like its larger rival Samsung, has Motorola in its sights.

Unlike Nokia which has acquired Navteq, and Google with its Maps services, Sony Ericsson does not have a global provider for local attractions and has decided that this is making a different here in the UK.

In the past Mobile Commerce has provided mobile local search systems relating to specific UK locations through strategic partnerships with Thomson, Multimap, The Press Association and The AA.

The “Near Me” service is implemented through a simple Java download, which will be factory installed on the C905 and provides users with detailed information on local businesses, amenities, venues and events, all based on the handset owners current location using GPS.

Sony Ericsson will provide the application for free, and it will point to cinemas, clubs and other entertainment listings and over 11,000 recommended venues for eating and drinking plus the whereabouts of 1.9 million businesses, all optimised for Multimap mapping.

The lookup includes, name, address and phone number in a clock to call format, and more detailed information such as film reviews, prices and show times for entertainment venues an of course a map.

David Hilton Head of Marketing, Sony Ericsson UK & Ireland, said: “Creating a Java application with best of breed content was a key objective to showcase our GPS handsets to our prime target market. Following an extensive market search we selected Mobile Commerce as our application partner and we are delighted with the ‘NearMe’ application and have already defined a roadmap of enhancements to bring even more functionality and choice to our customers.”

Paul Petiem, senior director of engineering at Adobe, confirmed at the 'Flash on the Beach' conference in the UK last week that-  his company was working on an application to enable Flash playback on iPhones - but then poured some cold water on the announcement, by reminding us that the iPhone is a closed platform, and so ultimately it will Apple's decision - whether or not to approve Adobe’s application.

Currently, the iPhone is unable to load web sites running Flash animations, audio, video or games and this always figures in the top three complaints against the handset, which would seem a good motivation for Apple to adopt the Adobe software. But given the two players’ past history and their mutual wish to lead the mobile web industry on the video front, the Mac maker may prove stubborn. Only six months ago, Apple chief Steve Jobs slammed Flash in front of a shareholders’ meeting, saying that it was too slow on the iPhone, and that the mobile optimized Flash Lite was “not capable of being used with the web.”

The Flash player would compete with games sold through the iPhone App Store and Apple has recently shown itself very willing to reject third party applications that compete with its own - like iTunes - or conflict with its own software strategy in any way. The company has recently been accused of being anti-competitive for rejecting applications submitted to the App Store on the grounds that they “duplicate” the handset’s features.

And opening up to Flash would go further than just supporting a rival’s application. So far, Apple has been rigid in its ban on application runtime environments on the iPhone operating system. If it made the concession for Adobe, it would be setting a new precedent that would significantly change the iPhone SDK rules. Meanwhile, Adobe has its own challenge to get Flash working acceptably on the Apple device, since its performance on the Mac OS X has generally been considered poor compared to the PC.

The Tube has been hotly anticipated as Nokia’s first foray into the touchscreen format pioneered by LG and Apple, though the Finnish vendor has played down the significance of the interface, especially outside the US - but accepted it needs to cover every format, to ensure its chances of a US carrier deal or significant direct sales. Nokia said that the estimated retail price was $279 before taxes and subsidies, which could mean anything in the retail space, from nothing in a post-pay contract, to; well $279, which translates right now to around £220. Given that its other XpressMusic format phones, which is the family the Tube is launched under, were around £180 to start with, that seems reasonably competitive with similar phones and the iPhone.

What makes it aggressively competitive is that you won't have to pay a penny on music for at least a year, and can have your choice of millions of tracks from the Nokia Music Store. Anyway Nokia’s scale means it will have room to move on pricing for some operators.

Nokia is following its usual approach of keeping a decent margin and positioning its handset by desirability of the associated services and features - in this case music and video capabilities and the Comes With Music offering, not price alone. On the other hand, it has to keep a clear price differential with the more highly specified N96 ’superphone’.

Nokia said Comes with Music, “looks set to mash up the world of mobile music,” and we have to agree. Comes With Music gives users a year of unlimited, free music and they can keep whatever they have downloaded once the 12-month subscription period ends. It will then cost more to add more tracks or they can buy another subscription period. The move is Nokia’s biggest push into the internet services market to date and will challenge Apple’s dominance of the digital music market, as well as Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow, which is tied into its powerfully branded Walkman phones. Sony Ericsson itself has just opted into an “all you can eat” subscription service, called PlayNow Plus, launched last week in conjunction with the UK's Omnifone, although this has a monthly charge of around £8 a month, and only allows you to keep up to 300 tracks at the end of the subscription.

Initial reviewers of the Tube 5800 generally liked its sleek design and we’ve looked in detail at one of these XpressMusic phones before and were impressed with just how light and feature rich they are. The touch screen interface is also said to be stronger than the recently launched Android G1 from T-Mobile based on a HTC design.

The touch screen has lots of ways of accelerating shortcuts and contains a virtual alphanumeric keypad and a virtual Qwerty keyboard. Critics have poked some fun at the pen stylus which apparently is aimed at some Far East countries where handwriting recognition systems will be added.

But we think there is more to this than that, because Nokia has used a “resistive touchscreen” technology (much cheaper than the capacitance touchscreen technology using on the iPhone) it will take a lot more pressure to use the touchscreen and perhaps that is what the stylus is really about. We know that Nokia has a resistive touch screen product in the past which it did not pursue (2005), which used a stylus and perhaps it is drawing on that experience.

The 5800 is only “among” the first to support Comes With Music, and Nokia will offer that on many of its other devices, we would anticipate the remainder of the XpressMusic range, for instance.

The 5800 phone has most of the features of other music phones such as the top of the range Walkmans from Sony Ericsson - a graphic equalizer, 8GB memory which Nokia says stores 6000 tracks, and it supports all the main music formats and plays the music through surround sound stereo speakers

The screen is 3.2 inches (just a bit smaller than the iPhone) and operates in widescreen 16 by 9 aspect, plays and records video at 30 frames a second, through a 3.2 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, just like the lens in the Nokia N95 and N96.

Nokia boasts it has one touch connectivity to Share on Ovi, Flickr, or Facebook. The titles in you music playlists can be shared through Bluetooth, MMS or online sharing, which means that people with the same phone can just download them because they will be free with the device. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic supports 60 languages worldwide, covering 90% of the world’s population and Nokia added four new music accessories including a new Bluetooth headset and three new stereo headsets.

It must be remembered that in 2007, Nokia sold 136 million music-enabled phones, so one with a touch screen may worldwide become the “poor man’s” iPhone and do exceptionally well.

This little willy burp is the product of one Mase90, an intrepid on the old Web 2.0-sphere who customised the basic boring beige Nokia BH-503 headset as part of Nokia’s Music Almighty Headset Competition.

The Comp is totally fuckin Trotsky - anyone can enter, all animals are equal and shit, right? Get your synapses over to nokiamaheadsetdesign.com and show ‘em what you can do.

You can squiff up a number of Nokia products including the BH-903, 501, 604, as well as the aforementioned BH-503 with a variety of tools using the Flash customiser (basic as) or any of the downloadable PDF, Maya and PostScript templates (Mexico).

Get your mates to vote for your design by the end of the year and it could be included in the Top 10 headsets which make it through to the final. These 10 are then cut down to 5 by a panel of mobile phone gurus, who will then turn the remaining five into actual headsets.

PC makers, operators and chip providers all lined up to back the move, this week including 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone - which includes operators serving 760 million customers, around a quarter of the global cellular market.

“Mobile Broadband is like a home or office broadband connection with one crucial difference: freedom. Freedom from hot spots, freedom from complexity and freedom from security concerns,” said Michael O’Hara, CMO of the GSMA. “Today, 16 of the world’s largest technology companies have committed to change the way people get online forever. This commitment is manifested in a service mark that we expect to see on several hundred thousand notebooks in the shops by the holiday season. The Mobile Broadband badge will assure consumers that the devices they buy will always connect - wherever Mobile Broadband is available - and that they can expect a high standard of simplicity and mobility.”

Members of the initiative have committed a media spend of over $1 billion during the next year between them to push the idea in the hope of creating a $50 billion service revenue market.

Given the involvement of Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba it is likely that the other major PC makers, notably HP, will be forced to play ball at some point, which could make this a slam dunk despite Intel’s long term desire to be the main provider of chips which talk to Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular all through a single software defined radio. Intel has been saying for three years that this was the right solution, but has been unable to deliver that vision fast enough, but now the cellular community wants to take the decision out of Intel’s hands. Qualcomm in particular has a chip that will speak to either UMTS or CDMA 2000 networks in all of their data flavors and is certainly one of the movers behind this play.

The GSMA is also aiming this fairly and squarely not just at laptops, but also at machine to machine applications, and once again, it was a Qualcomm chip that facilitated the creation of the Amazon Kindle book reader in the US, which downloads ebooks during inactive periods over the Sprint EV-DO network. Similar services are now being designed for Europe and the UK.

The GSMA statement suggested that previously unconnected devices - from cameras and MP3 players to refrigerators, cars and set-top boxes would be the next step after this campaign.

Virgin Media will be launching a single 18-month mobile broadband contract, which will allow users to connect to the web on the go for just £15 a month. As far as we know, there is no set-up fee, and the cost of the USB modem is included in the contract; there is a 3GB monthly download limit.

No official word on the top download speed available to customers, but seeing as Virgin Mobile piggybacks off of the T-Mobile network, out guess is that the Virgin Media mobile broadband service will do the same, and therefore the speeds ought to be around 4.5Mbps, the same as they are with T-Mobile’s closest equivalent service (Plus USB Modem Stick 24 Months).

“The launch of our Mobile Broadband product means UK consumers can now get all of their broadband needs from the UK’s leading broadband expert,” said Neil Berkett, cheif executive of Virgin Media. “Virgin Media already provides the fastest broadband in the UK over our fibre optic network and now customers can enjoy our broadband both at home and when on the move.”