Daily Marauder

WIRELESS

There are no official statistics available as how well the iPhone sells after Apple started offering it in the Japanese market. Now Softbank Mobile, one of Asia’s biggest tech companies and the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan, thinks sales need a boost and decided to give away the hardware basically for free. (http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/26/iphone-not-selling-well-in-japan-now-available-for-free 2/26)

How much overlap is there between your Facebook “friends” and the real contacts in your mobile phone’s address book? If those two world’s align and you have an iPhone, you might want to check out a nifty utility called Photo Phonebook (iTunes link). It finds the matches between the people in your iPhone’s contact list and your Facebook friends and downloads their Facebook profile photos. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/26/import-facebook-photos-into-your-iphone-contact-list-with-photo-phonebook 2/26)

Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app. (http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/02/26/im-wars-aim-for-iphone-grows-up-gets-paid-version 2/26)

Google has made its Android Market app store off-limits to those who bought an unlocked version of its G1 handsets as the company moves to prevent them from accessing copy-protected applications. Anyone who pays $25 to join the Android developer program can buy the unlocked hardware, which typically costs $400. Macworld/IDG News Service (2/25)

Thanks to the spike in mobile internet use and the push toward mobile TV services, U.S. mobile advertising search, SMS and display revenues will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, up from a nascent $160 million in 2008, according to The Kelsey Group, a division of BIA Advisory Services. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 81.2%. (Cynopsis 2/26)