Mikael

Read speed is very important when using contactless payments in public transport and the NFC technology still isn't fast enough to be used in the London Underground, an executive from the local transport authority said at the Open Mobile Summit conference in London on Tuesday.

Transport for London (TfL), which handles public transport in the U.K. capital, has been working on making NFC work for a long time. The company conducted tests in 2007 and 2008 using one type of Nokia phone and NFC was a big hit with users, according to Shashi Verma, director of customer experience at Tfl.

The rest of 2012 will be very challenging for smartphone makers as they struggle to find ways to differentiate their "black slabs," Richard Kramer, managing partner at Arete Research, said during the opening address at the Open Mobile Summit conference in London.

Smartphone sales will total between 750 million and 800 million units and add up to over US$230 billion during 2012, according to Kramer. However, Apple, Samsung Electronics and HTC are the only vendors making money, he said.

Mobile technology will play an important role for Facebook as it tries to find new sources of revenue, but building its own device doesn't make much sense since competition in the smartphone market continues to be very tough, according to analysts.

Mobile users already represent a big chunk Facebook's traffic. At the end of March, Facebook had 901 million monthly active users, and 488 million of those used its mobile products. In April, the number of mobile users surpassed 500 million.

LG Display has introduced a 5-inch full HD LCD panel for smartphone displays -- the highest resolution mobile panel to date, the company said on Monday.

The widescreen panel is based on AH-IPS (Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) technology and has a 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution or 440 pixels per inch (ppi), according to LG.

Google-owned Motorola Mobility has infringed a Microsoft patent related to SMS messaging, according to a ruling in the Munich regional court, which also dismissed a second case related to a localization patent.

As a result of the regional court judge's ruling, Motorola Mobility must now take a license under Microsoft's Android licensing program, stop using features invented and patented by Microsoft, or stop selling infringing products in Germany, a Microsoft spokeswoman said via email.

ZTE has successfully completed a hand-over test between two different versions of LTE, allowing operators to more effectively use their spectrum in a way that is seamless to the end user, the company said on Thursday.

The test was carried out using a network from ZTE and a dual-mode USB modem from the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI).

VMware has acquired Wanova, a developer of software used to centralize and simplify image management on physical and virtual desktops, the company said Tuesday.

The combination of VMware's virtual desktop platform View and Wanova's cloud-based management and recovery product Mirage will help expand the operational benefits of central image management, wrote VMware's Scott Davis, CTO for VMware's End User Computing business unit, in a blog post.

Google has finally closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and will now start working on new devices while keeping Android open, it said on Tuesday.

It has been about nine months since Google announced it planned to acquire Motorola Mobility for approximately US$12.5 billion. Google was finally able to close the deal after Chinese regulatory authorities approved the deal on Saturday.

Vodafone reported a 12.7 percent drop in net profit for the year to March 31, blaming economic conditions in Europe.

The operator reported revenue of £46.4 billion (US$73.4 billion) for the twelve-month period, up 1.2 percent on a year earlier, while group net profit fell 12.7 percent to £6.96 billion, it said Tuesday.

Mobile operators that want help keeping their subscribers happy can get it through a new managed service from Alcatel-Lucent, the company said on Monday.

It is no secret that mobile operators are working hard at finding ways to handle growing data volumes. But they also have to know when users suffer from performance problems related to overloaded networks, which is where Alcatel-Lucent's new Managed Service Quality and Assurance comes in.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has upgraded its management console, allowing IT staff to use it to administer security protocols on the Elastic Load Balancing service, the company said in a blog post.

IT personnel can now manage the listeners (which detect client connections), SSL certificates and SSL ciphers for an existing Elastic Load Balancer from within the AWS Management Console, according to Amazon. The functionality has been available via the API and command line tools, but many users wanted to be able to use the console to configure these settings, it said.

The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), version 7, is targeted for release in the second half of 2013, Red Hat said on Tuesday, as it also celebrated the tenth anniversary of its enterprise OS.

Red Hat aims to release a major new version of its OS every three years, and updates about every six months, according to Jim Totten, vice president and general manager at Red Hat's Platform business unit.