As previously mentioned, the recent Saudi insistence on gaining access to the Blackberry Messenger servers have indeed opened up a can of worms for RIM. Long the secure benchmark in the mobile communication world, Blackberrys are being targeted by many officials in the North African and Middle East areas, and as such is under threat to be shut down if RIM does not comply.

India is the latest country to want access to the encrypted BB communication systems – but they perhaps have a good reason to do so. Remember those attacks on Mumbai in 2008? Those terrorists used Blackberry’s as their primary communication method. Why? Because its encrypted… and cannot be seen by governments.

On Thursday the Indian government will make a deadline avaiable to RIM to comply with, otherwise they also threaten to shut down service to BB phones. For a long time Blackberry’s biggest selling point was the secure communication it granted to executives, but now that advantage is quickly coming to a close. In fact in the past month the German government has banned the use of BB with its politicians and civil servants, and the European Union Commission moved to Apple iPhone and HTC smartphones.

Reuters makes a good point in the fact that China and India are the world’s largest mobile phone markets, and if BB is shutdown in these countries, it can pose a significant threat to RIM.

You might have heard that RIM eventually opened up their communications to the UAE – so it is possible that a similiar situation will occur in India, a country with over 600 million cellular subscibers.

You might have heard by now that Blackberry’s in the UAE will be banned soon if they do not open up their encryption of their BIS servers to the government – well that is the simple explanation, and there is rumours that a few other countries are also wanting to do the same.  They say this is for security reasons, but naturally there are some high profile people out there who do not want their communication to be opened up to governments.

But one should also understand the reason why these governments want – just like South Africa is currently implementing RICA in order to keep track of cellphone users, there are many security reasons for this. Police would like to be able to keep track of certain people or use electronic communication as evidence in court, and I am all for it.

It is for this very reason that I dont know whether RIM’s CEO, Mike Lazaridis, is brave or foolish. In a recent interview with Wallstreet Journal, he says these issues comes down to governments “not understanding the reality of the internet”. He mentions that “everything on the internet is encrypted, this not a Blackberry only issue”. This is of course very true, and I agree that many governments not understanding the internet. Hell, just look at SA.

And then finally he stated – “if they can’t deal with the internet, they should shut it off”. I dont know if he refers here to the internet or Blackberrys, but its a pretty brash statement.

I really hope Blackberry sorts this out, because I have a feeling that more governments will start asking similiar questions. This is a difficult situation for Blackberry – on the one hand they should open up their servers so that governments can access communication logs, and in that way the phones wont be banned, keeping Blackberry clients happy.

On the other hand, if they do open up their records, some Blackberry clients will suddenly feel that their communication is insecure – something that Blackberry has always emphasized in the past.

Lets see how this one plays out.

This morning MyBroadband had an interesting  article about the sales of iPhone vs Blackberry in SA. Despite the success of iPhone worldwide, somehow the handset has reached less than 1% of the SA mobile market. While this low figure is probably more to do with the SA mobile demography, I thought I might look a bit more into it. A user called Filip Chudzinski over at iFun put together a infographic chart with the worldwide cost of unlocked iPhone 4s. Unfortunately SA was not on that chart, so I decided to add SA to it as well, seeing as our iPhones are unlocked as well.

But first off, you might ask how am I able to “project” iPhone 4 prices? Well, this is the current price of the iPhone 3GS in SA. Since the iPhone 3G was launched in SA, the price of the iPhone has not dropped in SA. In fact, it has gotten more expensive. Now we can say this is because of exchange rate, but the Rand is a bit stronger these days, but iStore stills charges a price of R8699 for 16GB or R9999 for 32GB. So, if we assume the iPhone price stays the same with the release of iPhone 4, here is a comparison of worldwide unlocked iPhones. Please note this does not include phone which are network locked, like in the US with AT&T.

It looks pretty grim right? With iPhone 4 there is bound to be some competition however – it is not only Vodacom who is carrying it this time around, lets hope MTN can somehow drop the price somewhat. On the other hand, with the 3GS, the price was suddenly a thousand rand more per model than the 3G.

But lets stay optimistic, competition can be a great thing after all…

Sources:

iClarified (Creative Commons)

iStore iPhone Tariffs

Euro to Rand pricing on 2 August 2010

Thanks to Distimo, we can look at what is the most popular apps in the various appstores of the different mobile platforms – the report covers the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone (with specific focus on in-app purchases), as well as BlackBerry App World (Worldwide), Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for June 2010 in the United States.

Here are the top selling apps by platform:

True to form, the top selling apps on Android remain tools and utilities, which pretty much confirms who the Android phone’s current target market is:

On the iPhone, games dominate the top selling apps. Its clearly the preferred platform for game developers currently.

On the iPad, things look a little more productive. Like in the last report, Apple’s Pages word processor app is the top seller. It seems people are willing to actually pay for apps to make work easier on the iPad.

And then on the Blackberry front, here are the top sellers. The best sellers are themes for the OS:

Some other interesting tidbits out of the report:

The percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the Apple App Store for iPad (10%) than in the
Apple App Store for iPhone (2%). The Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of
applications with in-app purchases available.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
MobiTV (MobiTV), ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup (ESPN) and Tap Fish (BayView Labs).

The most successful paid applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
Guitar Hero (Activision Publishing, Inc.), TomTom U.S.A. (TomTom International BV) and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II
(Activision Publishing, Inc.).

Mirroring the Distimo report covering May 2010, Pages and iBooks, published by Apple Inc, are again the number one paid and free
applications on the Apple App Store for iPad, respectively.

Three out of the ten most popular applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone were published by Electronic Arts.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad entered the top 10 highest ranked paid applications chart in the 6th position. It was the
top grossing application in the Apple App Store for iPad after Pages by Apple Inc.

Nine out of the ten most popular paid applications on the Apple App Store for iPhone are Games, however only two out of the ten
most popular free applications are Games. In the Nokia Ovi Store, seven out of ten of the most popular paid applications are
Games, while only three out of ten of the most popular free applications are Games.

If you want to see the report for yourself, go look at it here.

Via: MBA Online

A joint effort by Cape Town Partnership and wi-fi hotspot provider Skyrove means that Capetonians will now be able to make use of free wireless internet at Greenmarket Square in the city centre.

Henk Kleynhans, CEO of Skyrove says, “Businesses on Greenmarket Square will see a significant increase in the number of people lingering in their establishments, as more locals will schedule meetings outside of the office – or linger over coffee – while they enjoy wireless internet in the cosmopolitan bustle of this 300-year old heritage space.”

The provision of free wi-fi will also certainly be of benefit to tourists, particularly those wanting to access data services on their smartphones while travelling.

The project will run for an initial six months, and individual users will be allocated 10MBs of free internet each day.

Terri Carter, Senior Project Manager at Cape Town Partnership, says promisingly, “We hope to roll out similar projects around the city very soon.”

Local wireless broadband provider, iBurst, has hit back at the broadband war currently being waged by MWEB and other ISPs by introducing a free three-month trial for current iBurst Wireless subscribers.

Starting in April iBurst is to launch free internet access between midnight and 8am to all active iBurst Wireless customers.

The trial is open to both contract and month-to-month subscribers on all iBurst Wireless packages. Subscribers will be able to use the Internet freely between midnight and 8am, with all traffic being zero-rated and therefore not counting towards their monthly bandwidth cap.

Having free Internet access late at night is extremely useful to people synchronizing their online backups, doing large file transfers, for late-night surfing or online gaming.

This service is initially being introduced as a free trial to ensure that iBurst can deliver good customer experience and to test market viability before officially launching it as a value added service, set for July this year.

Broadband provider iBurst has launched iGame Unlimited as a premium open gaming platform for South Africa’s online gaming community.

For only R99 per month, iBurst subscribers using the new iDSL package will have access to one of the fastest, most responsive gaming servers in South Africa, with a host of extra features to make online gaming better, easier and more rewarding. The biggest advantage is that for iGame Unlimited subscribers, all traffic to the iGame server is free—no longer counting towards your normal bandwidth cap.

The iGame platform is open to all gamers in South Africa, connecting via any ISP, and has already become one of the largest gaming communities in the country, attracting gamers of all ages. iGame Unlimited is available exclusively to iBurst iDSL customers to give them a host of exclusive benefits. For players that are not iBurst Wireless customers and want to subscribe to iGame Unlimited, they can pick up a 80 MB iDSL account for only R19/month extra.

iGame Unlimited users not only have uncapped gaming bandwidth, but get preferential status with guaranteed game play even when the servers get busy, will receive priority support on the iGame community, and will be automatic entered into monthly prize pools.

“We recently redesigned our iDSL offering for ADSL users to bypass Telkom’s routing infrastructure and connect directly in to iBurst’s core. This offers gamers a better connection with lower latency (responsiveness) and jitter (consistency). Now, with iGame Unlimited, gamers can play to their heart’s content using one of the best gaming servers around, without worrying about using up their bandwidth,” says Steve Briggs, Executive Head of Commercial iBurst.

iGame is one of South Africa’s most successful gaming communities, with an active community support network provided by Nanogames, and offering a wide range of popular titles. It hosts multiplayer servers for popular PC games like Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty 5: World at War, Team Fortress, Wolfenstein, Quake4, Track Mania and Left 4 Dead 2. Gamers simply require a legal copy of the game and the iGame game server IP address.