Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Multimedia, Apple

Fresh off an extensive corporate decaffeination downsizing and a scaling back of its foray into music sales, it’s a fair question to ask: just how ironclad is Starbucks’ commitment to rolling out iTunes WiFi Music Store integration across its entire chain? We just happened to notice that the Starbucks page on Apple’s site is at this time stone-cold gone, redirecting to the standard iTunes 8 stuff. You might say “no big deal, Apple’s just playing down an agreement that’s at this time been in place for a full year,” but there’s some other weirdness, too — the company’s iTunes WiFi Music Store at Starbucks FAQ, for example, still references the dead link. The partnership was kinda ill-conceived to start with; getting access to the store meant hooking up to AT&T WiFi, which you wouldn’t normally have configured unless you actually had an AT&T WiFi account. We haven’t heard any official word in this place that the deal is in danger, but really, would anyone be welling up if it fell apart?

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Tags: Amp, Big Apple, Decaffeination, Downsizing, Foray, Itunes, Multimedia, Music Sales, Music Store, Nbsp, Partnership, Starbucks, Weirdness, Wifi

Filed under: Motorola, Android

It goes without saying that any company hooked up with Android’s patron saint — the Open Handset Alliance — has at least a passing interest in actually Makesomething with Android, and in Motorola’s case, we’re plan to go out on a limb in this place and say that, you know, in all likelihood, they were fixin’ to drop an Android build onto a phone or two at some point down the road. Indeed, BetaNews has received a brief, largely unhelpful statement from Moto saying that it “look[s] forward to delivering great products in partnership with Google and the Open Handset Alliance community,” which — in light of the recent Android hiring frenzy alleged on Moto’s campus — is about the minimum amount of disclosure a company could make shy of saying nothing at all. While it probably stings from their perspective to see HTC get all the glory for the first Google-ified phone out of the gate, let’s hope (for their sake, if nothing else) that this stealth-mode, take-our-time philosophy leads to some killer material out of Schaumburg down the road.

[Via Talk Android]

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Tags: Alliance Community, Disclosure, Frenzy, Google, Handset, Killer Material, Likelihood, Member Card, Moto, Motorola, Nbsp, Partnership, Patron Saint, Perspective, Sake, Saying Nothing, Schaumburg, Stealth Mode, Time Philosophy

Filed under: Sagem

Sofinnova’s purchase of Sagem means that the Sagem brand will disappear completely from handsets by the end of the year, Mobile Phone Helpdesk is reporting. Don’t worry, though, you rabid Sagem fans: the manufacturer will still be alive and well, albeit in a definitely less high-profile form as a dedicated ODM. Making phones for other brands is a biz Sagem’s already well acquainted with through its partnership with Sony Ericsson and others, so it should be an easy transition. In the meanwhile, Sagem-branded phones currently planned for release before the end of the year should still “partly come to market,” so get those collectors’ editions while you still can.

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Tags: Biz, Collectors Editions, Fans, Goodnight, Handsets, Helpdesk, Mobile Phone, Nbsp, Odm, Partnership, Sagem, Sofinnova, Sony, Sony Ericsson, Transition