Sony Ericsson Rika, pimped-out Walkman Version

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The not-yet-announced Sony Ericsson Rika just made its first appearance in luscious red over at justAMP. The Rika appears to be a pimped-out Walkman version of the G705 slider with a front-facing camera and possibly 3g under the hood. More information should be forthcoming soon as a sweet-looking phone like this can’t be kept under wraps for too much longer. One more shot after the jump

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Lg Kp500

Aiming at the midrange market, LG will be bringing full touch handsets to the masses, by introducing their latest LG KP500. Standing at 11.9 mm of thickness, the LG KP500 may be affordable but not at the expense of style.
Borrowing its design from the LG RENOIR , the LG KP500 uses the latest reincarnation of the proprietary LG Flash-based UI. The user interface is thumb-optimized, but a stylus is also provided to assist handwriting recognition. Unlike the LG Viewty however, the stylus here is tucked into the body of the handset itself.
he LG KP500 is not a high-end device, but once again it's feature pack is optimized for affordability. The KP500 doesn't have 3G support, but there's quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for a true world-wide use.
It also has a 3 megapixel fixed focus camera, but there's a 3-inch wide touch screen display with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels to poke around. A microSD memory card slot, stereo Bluetooth, FM radio and an accelerometer for auto screen rotation and gaming completes the tally. A virtual landscape QWERTY keyboard and office document viewer are also present.


Weighing only 89 g, the LG KP500 will land in Europe in October 2008. Its price will be announced later on

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One million users lose Spice after Idea-Spice Deal

MUMBAI: Spice has lost nearly a million subscribers in the past two months after Idea Cellular announced the acquisition of the two-circle operator.

While over 0.35 million subscribers were knocked off the books in July, another 0.63 million gave up the connection in August. With this, the subscriber base of Spice now stands at 3.56 million. it had 4.54 million subscribers in June when the acquisition was announced.

Idea will now have lesser number of subscribers in its books than it must have anticipated at the time of Spice Acquisition. These subscribers were “cleaned up” to conform to the reporting standards adopted by Idea Cellular.

Most telcos remove a subscriber from list in the absence of any revenue generation for six months. However, Spice was following a more lenient criterion.

“This subscriber clean-up is in accordance with the reporting standards adopted by Idea cellular in terms of active and inactive subscribers,” said an analyst. “Most of the clean-up is over and Spice is expected to see subscriber net additions beginning September,” he added.

Idea, which has now rolled out in Mumbai and Bihar (including Jharkhand), is adding over 1 million subscribers every month. With the integration of Spice, its footprint will expand to 15 circles, including the lucrative service areas of Karnataka and Punjab. Idea paid Rs 77 per share and another Rs 19 per share as non-compete fee.

Spice is currently making losses. However, analysts expect that Idea will take not more than three-four quarters to turn around Spice and make it profitable in the two circles. “By acquiring Spice, Idea gets a kickstart in these two circles with a subscriber base of 3.6 million, equivalent to around 13% market share in both service areas.

Further, Idea’s operations in the 900Mhz band shall increase from seven circles currently to nine circles, facilitating scale economies and operational synergies resulting in lower opex and capex,” said the analyst.

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