This week Ericsson and STMicroelectronics combined their wireless chip operations and City Telecom walked away from the Singapore NGN.

The new $3.6 billion mobile chip JV will carry out research and design cellular tech and has four of the big five handset-makers as customers.

A month out from the announcement of Singapore’s next-gen network project, Hong Kong’s CTI walked away, giving no reasons for its exit. Its remaining partners StarHub and M1 took on a Qatar government fund as a new partner.

Following complaints about poor 3G reception and dropped calls, Apple issued an iPhone patch, though it declined to specify what the patch was for. Now users have discovered that the MobileMe syncing service lacks encryption.

Cable firm Comcast, who last year was caught secretly slowing down customers’ P2P applications, now plans a 20-minute time-out for bandwidth hogs.

Yahoo and Intel plan to build widgets that will bring interactivity to the TV, based on a new chip Intel is hoping to sell to TV-makers. Intel unveiled Nehalem, its new memory-processor chip line, promising more power and a smaller energy footprint.

Hackers hunted down online documents that purportedly prove a Chinese gymnast was under-age. NBC said its online Olympics coverage had boosted its TV viewing numbers.

Japan launched its first home-designed and built satellite. So did Iran, although US intelligence officials said the satellite delivery failed.

Japan’s Hong Kong consulate network suffered a security breach following a hack into KDDI’s servers. Idea Cellular launched in Mumbai.

The FCC approved the HTC Dream, the first handset powered by Google’s Android platform. Palm launched its new TreoPro smartphone. 

US consumers are buying fewer mobile phones but are paying more for them. British figures show users are starting to abandon fixed-line broadband in favor of mobile. More than a third of new US PC buyers are dumping Vista in favor of XP.

HP beat third-quarter expectations, despite a 14% fall in consumer printer sales.

Aussies are being scammed by advanced fee fraud schemes to the tune of A$36 million ($31 million) a year. The latest security threat: an attack that hijacks the PC clipboard and installs a hard-to-delete web link.

Optus compensated corporate customers for a major network outage.

And Nokia offered to load Lonely Planet guides onto mobile phones at 7.99 euros ($11.77) each.

Source:telecomasia.net