SingTel, which is majority owned by Singapore’s investment firm Temasek Holdings, aims to use the acquisition to expand into mobile advertising technology and services and expects to complete the transaction before June, according to a statement to the Singapore Exchange.

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No longer just about using your smartphone to make purchases, mobile payment options are now popping up in transit systems in metropolitan areas, as companies look to gauge consumers’ appetites for buying products while truly on the go.

EBay-owned PayPal has just launched a pilot in Singapore’s subway stations for commuters to buy goods while en route. The experiment, through which eight merchants will offer Valentine’s Day gifts at reduced prices, is being conducted across 15 subway stations across Singapore.

Commuters can make purchases by using their smartphone to scan a QR code on a billboard or poster, and can then pay through a PayPal account. (For those wondering how cell service might work while riding a subway, Singapore has long boasted complete underground coverage, in addition to being one of the most Wi-Fi-friendly cities in the world.)

Earlier this week, New Yorkers learned that they would be able to purchase beauty products while riding in some taxicabs, with just a swipe of their smartphones.

Launched by Glamour magazine as part of a Fashion Week experiment, 50 Manhattan cabs will be equipped with SnapTags from technology company SpyderLynk; according to a Wall Street Journal report, VeriFone, which handles payments for New York City cabs, will power the beauty product purchases, as well.

The experiment was inspired by the virtual stores launched in the Seoul subway system by the Tesco supermarket chain, the Journal says.

While mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular — even the Obama campaign has hopped on board — the companies pushing mobile payments forward are divided on their approach to the technology. Square, for example, uses a dongle that plugs into the iPhone to accept mobile credit card payments; it also offers an app that uses geo-fencing to allow a customer to pay when he or she is within a certain distance from a store. Google’s mobile payments app, Google Wallet, uses near field communication technology to transmit payments.

For PayPal, which recently doubled its mobile payments predictions for 2012 to $7 billion, the emphasis has been on options that don’t require near field communication; which, as my AllThingsD colleague Tricia Duryee points out, can be a limiting factor for adoption.

PayPal says that, aside from a smartphone and an app with bar-code scanning capability, no additional infrastructure — such as an NFC-equipped terminal — is required for merchants, retailers and consumers to participate in the Singapore pilot.

Late last year, PayPal began testing point-of-sale purchasing at Home Depot retail stores, in which a select group of PayPal employees can purchase items by using a PayPal-issued credit card or by entering an account number at the register.

The data center, which is slated for completion in early 2013, will be the third of its kind in Asia, joining two others that will be built in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Google has pledged an investment of $300 million in its Hong Kong data center and more than $100 million in Taiwan.

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This time it’s Indonesia, which is threatening to cut off BlackBerry data services if Research In Motion doesn’t locate a data server in the country as it promised earlier this year.

A bit of background: Back in January, RIM made four commitments to the Badan Regulasi Telekomunikasi Indonesia (BRTI), Indonesia’s telecommunications regulator:

• That it would establish a network of over 50 BlackBerry Expert Centers throughout Indonesia
• That it would work with Indonesian law enforcement to provide lawful access to messages and emails from suspected criminals
• That it would restrict access to pornography on its network
• That it would establish a “regional network aggregator” or server to which Indonesian carriers could connect to ensure they’re getting good data speeds

RIM delivered on all four. But evidently it didn’t carry out the fourth in quite the way the BRTI wanted. It put the data center in Singapore, which is not geographically all that far, but a different country and not nearly as “regional” as the BRTI would like. Aggravating matters further, Indonesia has been asking for a local server for nearly three years.

In other words, the BRTI is not at all happy with RIM right now. Apparently it’s outraged enough that it told IDG it plans to make a local server a precondition of RIM’s continued operation in Indonesia. BRTI commissioner Heru Sutadi told the publication that RIM must provide the local server if it wants to continue to operate its BlackBerry Internet Service and BlackBerry Messenger in the country. If it doesn’t do as BRTI asks, those services could end up being cut off.

Reached for comment, a RIM spokesperson said that while the company has been working closely with the Indonesian government, it has not been advised of any specific requirements extending beyond what it has already done. The statement in full, below:

RIM has been working closely with government bodies in Indonesia , but has not been advised of any specific requirements extending beyond what it has already satisfied in writing to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MOCI) on September 23, 2011.

RIM continues to discuss a new, potential investment in Indonesia that would support the growth and expansion of the country’s software development industry and RIM expects to provide further details at a future date.

On September 23, RIM notified the MOCI in writing that it has fully addressed all of the requests made to it by MOCI in January of this year. This included notification that:

1. RIM has established a network of 50+ BlackBerry Expert Centers throughout Indonesia which are detailed on: http://id.blackberry.com/peaceofmind/location.jsp and provide customers with superior after sales support

2. RIM is working with Law Enforcement Agencies in Indonesia for the provision of Lawful Access as stipulated by national law

3. RIM has completed the establishment of a regional network aggregator. Many Indonesian carriers are now connected, addressing the specific stated concern of MOCI, which applied strictly to the speed of data flows.

4. RIM has established a content filtering system, per the requirements outlined by the government.

BlackBerry continues to provide safe, secure and reliable communications for its users.

Built from the ground up by Google, these three facilities will be the first in the Asia-Pacific region to be fully owned by the company. Google expects them to be operational in one to two years, barring any major hiccups.

The investment comes as demand for Internet services in the region soars and competition between local players heats up.

“More people are coming online every day in Asia than in any other part of the world, so locating data centers here is an important next stage of Google’s investment in the region,” Google said in a statement.

Silicon Valley’s Silver Lake and DST Global of Russia, as well as Chinese private equity firm Yunfeng Capital, are leading a $1.6 billion tender offer for privately held employee and shareholder stock of China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources close to the situation.

Yunfeng, by the way, was co-founded by Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma, as well as other prominent Chinese entrepreneurs.

Along with DST, Silver Lake and Yunfeng, Singapore-based investment firm Temasek is also participating in the tender offer as an investor, but in a smaller way.

The deal, which has been discussed for some time, was signed earlier today and will be presented to its employees in an internal company blog, which will be in Chinese.

To get around persistent foreign ownership issues in China, sources said, DST and Silver Lake are ceding voting control of their stakes to Alibaba management.

If the tender is fully subscribed, that would mean a stake of just under five percent for the group, sources said, and it gives Alibaba a $32 billion enterprise valuation.

The impetus for the tender offer, which begins today, appears to be trying to address a cash-out, paper-rich issue for Alibaba employees.

There are no active secondary private markets in China, as is the case for tech start-ups in the U.S., and there is also no IPO in the foreseeable future for Alibaba. Thus, management has been looking for a way to give its employees and also other shareholders some liquidity.

This tender offer is not a capital raise by Alibaba and is only aimed at eligible employees and shareholders. The purchase of the Alibaba shares is expected to close before the end of December.

It will be done via a special investment vehicle, specifically aimed at this purchase, that includes a spate of investors. Giant Interactive Group, a Chinese online game developer, for example, said it had committed $50 million to the fund.

It’s not clear what the implications are for Alibaba’s biggest shareholder, Yahoo, which sources said is not selling shares in the tender offer. Yahoo’s fully diluted Alibaba 39 percent stake is now worth $12.5 billion in the deal.

That’s discounted due to tax issues and also the inability of the Silicon Valley Internet giant to sell its Alibaba shares.

In other words, investors will likely welcome this higher valuation, but realize a public offering is farther away than ever.

But it is interesting in that it clearly shows a strong relationship between DST and Silver Lake, which have jointly been mulling a possible bid for Yahoo along with Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as I previously reported.

Some will speculate that Silver Lake and DST now have an in with Alibaba, which is important, since a large slug of Yahoo’s market valuation is due to its Alibaba and also Yahoo Japan! assets.

If Yahoo is sold, of course, the disposition of the Alibaba asset is an important part of the deal.

More to come, including the implications for Ma, who has been under siege of late around his spinning out of Alibaba’s Alipay payments service and the noisy battle that later ensued with Yahoo. Yahoo and Alibaba, as well as its other large shareholder, Japan’s SoftBank, settled that dispute earlier this summer.

His involvement in Yunfeng, which is buying the company’s shares in a special fund that Ma is not in, will likely attract some scrutiny, anyway.

Sources said Ma is a minority investor in Yunfeng itself, has no control rights and is not a director. In addition, Yunfeng has no relationship with Alibaba.

In another interesting twist, Alibaba rival Tencent has close ties with DST’s Internet affiliate that used to share the same name, having invested $300 million last year in the affiliate that holds major Russian Internet properties.

I wasn’t surprised that this data–which shows basically everywhere an iPhone owner has been with the phone in his or her possession since iOS 4 was released–is being collected. But it’s important to make one thing clear before we go any further: There’s no evidence that Apple is collecting any information about where you go. It does collect anonymized information on where iPhones go, and it has a number of legitimate business purposes for doing so.

Nor is any of what Apple is doing some kind of newly discovered secret. In fact, it has been documented for some time. (For more on this, read this excellent post by Alex Levinson, an expert on iOS security.) In fact, Apple has been very clear in its privacy policy about what data it collects, and even highlighted the part about location data in a letter to Congress last year.

Got all that? Okay, let’s proceed.

I found the revelation unsurprising because of stories I’ve written in recent years on the new field of academic research known as “reality mining.” I wrote about it for BusinessWeek in 2008 and interviewed two researchers from MIT, both of whom told me that there is a great deal of value–both commercial value and value to society at large–that can come from gathering data on where people go, and also when they go there and who they go with.

The value comes not in gathering that data about you personally, but in aggregating it, basically mixing it all together with the same data about everyone else, until you have huge databases on the comings and goings of millions of people. It’s helpful for a city to know, for instance, how many cars cross a bridge between the hours of 7 am and 8 am, and how the traffic varies by the day of the week. It’s helpful to see how many people drove to the last New York Yankees game and how many people took the subway, and also how bad the crowd congestion was both on the streets and on the trains.

Getting an accurate picture of exactly how many people are involved is tricky. You can try to do a labor-intensive count or you can estimate, but both are messy and subject to error. A wireless phone is a pretty good sensor because almost everyone will be carrying one and each phone identifies itself to the closest cell tower, so it’s easy to count. The value comes not from knowing who was where at any given time, but how many were there.

Wireless phones already play a big role in tracking traffic congestion. If you use a GPS receiver in your car that gives you live traffic information, those green and red lines that appear on the map are often generated by thousands of cars with wireless phones in them, all of them reporting their location, speed and direction of travel. The company that tracks that information, analyzes it and turns it into something useful is Inrix, and its name can be found stamped on the packaging of a number GPS receivers. When yours pipes up to say “traffic ahead” or says it is changing your route because of congestion, it’s because it is getting a live data feed that is generated in part by information gathered from wireless phones. Are you still so creeped out?

But let’s take it a step further and imagine a case where it actually might be useful and not anonymized. Let’s say you’ve caught a really bad flu but it’s in its early stages, so you’re feeling just a little sick and you go to work. The next day you find out you’ve got this year’s super-flu virus. Would there be a public health benefit in being able to look through a record of where you’ve been? Could there also be a benefit from cross-referencing that with data from other people’s phones to find out how many people–and who–has been within close enough proximity to you during the last 24 hours to maybe catch this flu from you? Data gathered from your phone and others could conceivably help arrest the spread of that super flu by giving authorities an accurate picture of how many people are connected in the branching chains of potential infection.

After a while you start seeing patterns, and these patterns can help solve other problems large and small. Does your town need a traffic light at that intersection based on the number of people who drive through it every day? Does your city need to build another subway line because the existing ones are overwhelmed? Reasonable minds can have different perceptions as to the scale of problems. Real, unimpeachable data can only add clarity to the debates.

MIT’s Sensable City Lab has done some fascinating work in this area. Its most recent project has taken the team to Singapore, and I’ve embedded a video below that shows samples of some of the data they’ve gathered and turned into visualizations. Another older video from a 2008 project, The New York Talk Exchange, showing calls made to and from New York, is just as interesting.

Is there a commercial use for this sort of data? You bet. Advertisers will always pay for the right and the ability to reach you in some new and incrementally intrusive way. But that’s just the way that things go, though more often than not, if you don’t like it, you have the ability to opt out or not participate. But people do choose to participate. Ask the eight million Foursquare users why they like voluntarily giving up their live location data day after day. They have clearly opted in because there’s something about that they like, and it isn’t just claiming the mayorship of the corner tavern. And there are probably scores of other commercial uses for the location data on our phones that I’m not imaginative enough to think of.

My point in all this is really simple. Phones have for about a decade had GPS chipsets in them that can keep track of the phone’s precise coordinates–latitude and longitude plus their position relative to a cellular tower. To anyone who is surprised that this data is being collected and even being used I have only this to say: Well, duh! You better get used to it. As long as there’s value in measuring where we go, the phones we take with us everywhere are going to be the device used to do the measuring.

Yes, there needs to be a clear set of rules of the road, and I think the discussion touched off by this round of coverage will help us get to setting those rules. But the data is so valuable, and the potential for benefits are so great, that no amount of consumer outrage is going to put an end to your phone keeping track of where it is.

(Cool Image borrowed from MIT’s New York Talk Exchange)

Last week IBM’s CFO Mark Loughridge, speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference, said about 30 percent of IBM’s revenue will come from growth markets by 2015. Emerging markets accounted for 21 percent of IBM’s sales at the end of 2010, up from only 11 percent in 2000. You may also remember that when I spoke to IBM’s head of cloud computing Ric Telford earlier this year, he said that Big Blue would be adding to its fleet of data centers. The new center will ramp up in April, first offering IBM’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that’s aimed at supporting an environment development and test activities.

BoomTown was out last week on a trip to Hong Kong with Walt Mossberg to scope out a possible D: All Things Digital event, focused on Asia, for this coming fall.

Obviously, Asia, including China, India, Singapore, Japan and Korea, is a key market for tech moving forward for U.S. Web firms, as well as a force for global innovation.

It’s also still a great place for action films, and here’s a trailer for the big movie playing there now–a remake of “The Shaolin Temple,” a kung-fu classic, now simply called “Shaolin,” by veteran Hong Kong action-film director Benny Chan.

Enjoy:

The daily deal site is mulling a strategic relationship with Lashou, which has experienced astronomical growth on par with Groupon.

Sources close to Lashou tell us that since the company launched in March, it has hired 1,500 employees and operates in roughly 200 markets in China.

Most impressively, its revenues are now totaling $3 million per week for an annual run rate of  more than $150 million.

Sources say Groupon may participate in Lashou’s next round of funding, which is on track to give the company a $1 billion valuation. Groupon has already submitted a term sheet, we have heard. A Groupon spokeswoman declined to comment.

The deal could still fall apart.

Groupon has not appeared to have decided on one strategy for entering the market. Other options it is weighing include forming a strategic alliance with Chinese Internet giant Tencent, or even hiring its own staff and working alone.

The Chinese market is known for being difficult to enter, and Groupon is feeling the pressure to get a piece of the action. To be a serious international player without the economic powerhouse is less than ideal as it prepares for a public offering, (which CEO Andrew Mason admits he hasn’t made a decision about yet).

So far, Groupon’s efforts in China have been scattered.

Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, who has an influential blog, has written about Groupon’s approach, saying that it has been relying on a company it purchased in Germany last May to lead its expansion into China, Xinhua reports. The rumor mill is rife with other reports of Groupon’s aggressive attempts to hire employees from other group-buying sites. It also suffered a recent setback when Ren Xin, who reportedly was in charge of marketing in China, resigned to consider other job opportunities.

While not operating yet in China, Groupon does have a presence in Asia. Groupon is in Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and Taiwan through the acquisitions of daily deal sites uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost, respectively.

Much like the U.S., China has tons of group-buying companies fighting to be No. 1. Other successful brands there are Meituan and Nuomi. Lashou has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital from Norwest Venture Partners, GSR Ventures and Rebate Networks. Meituan has attracted capital from Sequoia Capital.

Groupon is in talks with Chinese Internet giant Tencent to form a partnership to accelerate its effort in the critical Asian arena, said several sources with knowledge of the situation.

Terms of the deal are unclear, but sources said that it is likely to involve some sort of co-branded joint venture effort between the two–a key strategic move for Groupon, given the hard-to-penetrate-if-you’re-not-Chinese Chinese market.

More typical for Groupon has been to buy a top local player abroad and rebrand it, such as its launch of Groupon Hong Kong, Groupon Singapore and Groupon Philippines and Groupon Taiwan through the early December acquisition of daily deal sites uBuyiBuy, Beeconomic and Atlaspost, respectively.

Moving into the lucrative international arena, where there are innumerable clones of the dominant social buying service, is one of the big strategic reasons for Groupon’s recent $1 billion funding and also last week’s very noisy IPO toe-dipping.

(How much is BoomTown wishing I could be a fly on the wall to see all those investment bankers courting kooky Groupon CEO Andrew Mason? Memo to Andrew: Act like Snooki from “Jersey Shore” and see how they still slavishly kiss up to you like the soul-sucking suck-ups they are.)

Back to China, where cloning popular U.S. Internet brands has become an art form.

That includes one particularly appalling rip-off (pictured here) in China that looks exactly like Groupon and is actually called Groupon.cn.

(Although you’ve got to be in awe of the complete non-effort to pretend it is anything but a complete shoplifting of the brand.)

But, no matter how much that digital swiping goes on, much of Groupon’s growth recently has been outside the U.S., and the company’s strategic future lies internationally.

Of course, global expansion–especially in the famously difficult Chinese market, where the government favors native companies to an unprecedented degree–has stymied many other U.S. Internet phenoms, from eBay to Google to Facebook. (In fact, for obviously thorny privacy reasons, the social networking site has no presence in China.)

But for Groupon, especially with its public offering plans and need to distance itself from close rivals such as LivingSocial, it is a must-do to reach the deal-crazy and huge audience in China.

Thus, having Tencent as its partner is an obvious plus, given it is one of the biggest Internet services in the country, including its huge QQ instant messaging offering.

In addition, there is a strong link between Tencent and one of Groupon’s key investors, Mail.ru Group.

Mail.ru owns five percent of Groupon, said numerous sources, and Tencent is an investor in Mail.ru, which recently had an IPO.

And DST Global, an investment vehicle that is now separate from Mail.ru–although it shares Russian exec Yuri Milner, who is Mail.ru’s chairman and also DST’s CEO–is also a Groupon investor.

Got all that? As BoomTown has written before: It’s a small and way-too-connected world after all, especially when it comes to the goat rodeo of Groupon investors.

What will be interesting to see is if this makes a difference in China, which has been a consistent black hole for most major Internet companies.

Groupon declined comment, and there has been no response yet to an email query sent to Tencent’s PR group.

A nice little bit of back-to-school marketing for Apple (AAPL), which likely has an eye trained on education sales as the new school year begins.

In a crowded landscape of big media conglomerates constantly trying to get into the Internet’s video industry, Wang sees Bertelsmann’s approach of targeted acquisitions as the way to survive.

Earlier this month Shanghai-based Tudou.com raised $50 million from an investor base including Temasek, the sovereign wealth fund of the Singapore government, in what was the investment firm’s first Chinese information technology deal.

Wang said the new round of funding, which brings Tudou.com’s total capital raised to $135 million, was just the latest advance in what will be a prolonged battle as the media industry consolidates.

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Singapore Telecommunications, known as SingTel, Southeast Asia’s biggest phone company by revenue, held its midnight launch party at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Center. The venue, with its almost concert-like atmosphere, was blasting with loud music, colored lights, fog and even a VIP lounge, where waitresses served hors d’oeuvres such as sea scallops with green olive tapenade.

At the stroke of midnight, SingTel revealed a giant rotating model of the iPhone on stage, along with a flashy pyrotechnics display.

Jacky Heng, 18 years old, was one of the first customers to collect his phone on stage. Heng had been waiting in line since 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

“I already sold off my Nexus One, which had reception problems,” he said. “I’m very determined to get this phone.”

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“Patent trolls are part of the industry today; that’s just the way it is,” he said. “We’ve dealt with them before and we’ll deal with this situation in the same exact way. I’m just very disappointed in this, from a former leader of our industry, that they would do this.”

Benioff’s remarks today echo those he made during a May 20 earnings call, though this time he exercised a bit of restraint and stopped short of decrying Microsoft (MSFT) as a bunch of “alley thugs.”

His message, I suppose, is that Salesforce.com (CRM) isn’t much worried by Microsoft’s suit–though perhaps it should be, given the limited patent portfolio in its defense arsenal and Microsoft’s endgame here. As analyst Rob Enderle wrote last week:

Microsoft wants to set an example and losing isn’t an option. In addition the patents in question are key to being able to defend Microsoft’s existing market making the combination into one of the most important legal efforts that Microsoft is likely to undertake. This means they probably won’t settle, will fund the effort fully, and will do whatever it takes to make it successful. ?

Apple (AAPL) will start accepting pre-orders for both the 3G and Wi-Fi models on Monday, May 10. And on May 28, Apple will begin shipping units in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.

The launch will continue in July when the iPad arrives in nine additional countries: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

Apple has already sold more than one million iPads in the U.S. since the launch of the Wi-Fi-only model on April 3 and the 3G version on April 30. Given these sales figures and Apple’s supply issues to date, it will be interesting to see how the international rollout goes.

[This post was updated at 10:02 to reflect new information from Google.]

So, turns out Google didn’t cancel the Beijing event at which it planned to evangelize its new Nexus One Android smartphone. It couldn’t cancel because the company had never arranged to hold an Android event in Beijing in the first place. Asked to comment on a Reuters report claiming Google’s roadshow was skipping the Chinese capital, a company spokesperson told me that the report is erroneous.

“The reports are incorrect,” she said. “There was not a Nexus One launch event scheduled in Beijing. Google is hosting 3 Android Developer Labs in Asia over the next couple weeks in Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong. These are technical events for developers who want to build applications for Android. We never planned to hold an Android Developer Lab in Beijing, and suggestions that we did plan one are not true.”

And indeed, according to a schedule posted to the Android Developers blog, Beijing was never an Android Developer Lab location, at least not as of Jan. 22, the post’s date of publication.

Elaborating, the Google spokesperson said, “Regarding the distribution of Android phones in China, nothing has changed. Android is an open source mobile platform, so anyone can bring Android-powered devices to market. At this time, we are postponing the availability of Google mobile applications on Android devices from operators in China.”

All of that said, it seems odd and perhaps noteworthy that Google would plan a Nexus roadshow in Asia that includes Singapore, Taipei and Hong Kong, and not include China’s capital city, Beijing.

My original post on the Reuters report below.

Google’s deteriorating relationship with the Chinese government is proving to be a real drag for software developers in the nation’s capital. The search giant has, according to Reuters, canceled the Beijing event it had planned to evangelize its new Nexus One Android smartphone. So while the Nexus One roadshow will stop in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it’s skipping the Chinese capital. Said a source close to the company: “If Google did not have such an issue with the Chinese government, they would have conducted a similar event in China too.”

Google has already delayed the launch of two Android phones in China, though Beijing insists it does not intend to limit use of the operating system in the country.

I’ve asked Google for comment on the matter and will update here if I’m offered one.

UPDATE: Google finally got back to me with a comment on the Reuters report, which it says is inaccurate. The company did not cancel a Nexus One event in Beijing, it explained, because it never planned to hold one there in the first place. And indeed, according to a schedule posted to the Android Developers blog, Beijing was never an Android Developer Lab location–at least not as of Jan. 22, the post’s date of publication.

“The reports are incorrect,” a company spokesperson told me. “There was not a Nexus One launch event scheduled in Beijing. Google is hosting 3 Android Developer Labs in Asia over the next couple weeks in Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong. These are technical events for developers who want to build applications for Android.

Elaborating, the spokesperson said, “We never planned to hold an Android Developer Lab in Beijing, and suggestions that we did plan one are not true. Regarding the distribution of Android phones in China, nothing has changed. Android is an open source mobile platform, so anyone can bring Android-powered devices to market. At this time, we are postponing the availability of Google mobile applications on Android devices from operators in China.”

First, the search giant is bringing out a beautiful, sleek new Android phone, the Nexus One, built to its specifications. Second, it has decided to offer the new phone—and future models—to consumers directly, unlocked, via the Web, and then invite multiple carriers to compete to sell service plans and subsidized versions of the hardware.

One carrier is ready to support the Nexus One on day one: the U.S. arm of T-Mobile, a longstanding Google (GOOG) partner. The new Google Phone, built by HTC of Taiwan, will cost $529 unlocked direct from Google, at google.com/phone. It will cost $179 from T-Mobile online with a two-year contract that will set you back $79.99 a month.

Verizon Wireless (VZ) in the U.S. and Vodafone (VOD) in Europe will sell the Nexus One eventually at subsidized prices that haven’t yet been announced. All of this will take place on a Google-hosted Web site, a much easier way to buy a phone and service than is typical today, and one that promises to further weaken the power of the carriers.

The company also plans to sell the costlier, unsubsidized version to consumers in the U.K., Hong Kong and Singapore immediately. Like Americans who buy this unlocked version, these customers will have to purchase carrier service separately, something they should be able to obtain right away by just buying and inserting a SIM card from a carrier with compatible technology. (This initial unlocked phone won’t work with Verizon or Sprint in the U.S., nor on AT&T’s 3G network, only the latter’s slower network.)

The Nexus One has a larger screen than Apple’s phone, and is a bit thinner, narrower and lighter—if a tad longer. And it boasts a better camera and longer talk time between battery charges.

I’ve been testing the Nexus One for a couple of weeks and I like it a lot. It’s the best Android phone so far, in my view, and the first I could consider carrying as my everyday hand-held computer. It is a svelte gray device with a 3.7-inch, high-resolution screen; a thin strip of buttons underneath for home, back, menu and search; and a trackball.

The Nexus One finally has the right combination of hardware and software to give Android a champion that might attract more people away from their iconic iPhones and BlackBerrys. It has a larger screen than Apple’s phone, and is a bit thinner, narrower and lighter—if a tad longer. And it boasts a better camera and longer talk time between battery charges.

Also, because it will be available on the large, well-regarded Verizon 3G network, the Nexus One could tempt American iPhone users, tired of problems with AT&T (T), to switch.

The iPhone still retains some strong advantages. It boasts well over 100,000 third-party apps—around 125,000 by some unofficial estimates—versus around 18,000 for the Android platform. And it has vastly more memory for storing apps, so you can keep many more of them on your phone at any one time. On the Nexus One, only 190 megabytes of its total 4.5 gigabytes of memory is allowed for storing apps. On the $199 iPhone, nearly all of the 16 gigabytes of memory can be used for apps.

In fact, the $199 iPhone 3GS has roughly four times as much user-accessible memory out of the box, though the memory on the Nexus One can be expanded via memory cards. Apple also has a more-fluid user interface, with multitouch gestures for handling photos and Web pages.

As for the BlackBerry, its user interface looks older and clumsier with each passing day, but it has a beautiful physical keyboard many users love, while the Nexus One has a virtual, onscreen keyboard.

The Nexus One is packed with its own tricks. Its version of Android is essentially the same improved edition as the one that appeared on the Motorola (MOT) Droid back in November. But it has a few new features, including an experimental dictation capability. You just press a microphone icon on the keyboard and start talking, and the words appear. In my tests, this worked only adequately at best, and very poorly at worst, but Google insists it will learn and improve.

The phone also has handsome new visual features, including “live wallpaper,” with waving grass or pulsing colored lines; and a new zooming effect when you want to view icons that aren’t on your main screens. In addition, you can now view miniatures of your five main screens to help you navigate to the one you want.

The Nexus One also has all the key software features introduced in the Droid, including free turn-by-turn voice-prompted navigation.

In my tests, overall, the Nexus One worked very well. The latency I had seen in earlier Android phones is gone, due to a slicker version of the operating system and faster chips. The phone feels good in the hand and the screen is magnificent, with much greater resolution than the iPhone’s.

I like very much the way social-networking information, including status messages, is integrated into the contacts app. One tap on a person’s picture in Contacts lets you quickly choose whether to call, email or message her, or map her address—all without opening the contact card itself.

I also liked the pictures and videos I was able to take with the five-megapixel camera and flash, which I preferred to my iPhone’s camera. You can even view a photo slideshow or listen to music when the phone is in the optional desktop dock.

But there are some downsides to the Nexus One. Like all Android phones, it relies too much, in my view, on menus that create extra steps, including some menus that have a built-in “more” button to display a secondary menu of choices.

I also found the four buttons etched into the phone’s bottom panel sticky and hard to press. In addition, although the Nexus One claims seven hours of talk time versus five hours for the iPhone, most of its battery-life claims for other functions are weaker than Apple’s.

For instance, Google claims just 6.5 hours of Wi-Fi Web use per charge, versus nine for the iPhone, and 20 for music playback versus 30. Google claims this is because, unlike Apple, it allows the simultaneous use of third-party apps, which can drain the battery faster.

In addition, the Nexus One, and other Android devices, still pale beside the iPhone for playing music, video and games. The apps available for these functions aren’t nearly as sophisticated as on the Apple devices.

Finally, the iPhone is still a better apps platform. Not only are there more apps, but, in my experience, iPhone apps are generally more polished and come in more varieties.

But, with its fresh phone and bold business model, Google is taking Android to a new level, and that should ramp up the competition in the super-smartphone space.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100105/googles-nexus-one-is-bold-new-face-in-super-smartphones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090521/microsoft-sweeps-2009-patent-infringement-awards/ http://allthingsd.com/20090521/microsoft-sweeps-2009-patent-infringement-awards/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 20:22:32 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=18103

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090521/microsoft-sweeps-2009-patent-infringement-awards/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090521/latest-microsoft-patent-describes-method-of-losing-patent-infringement-suits/ http://allthingsd.com/20090521/latest-microsoft-patent-describes-method-of-losing-patent-infringement-suits/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 14:29:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=18050 2009 is proving to be a year of dubious distinction for Microsoft in patent litigation. On Wednesday the company was ordered to pay $290 million to Toronto-based i4i for willfully infringing its patents. Seems Microsoft used some of i4i’s XML technology in Word 2003 and, though it was apprised of its violation, used it in Word 2007 as well. Said i4i lawyer Douglas Cawley: “E-mails from Microsoft show they knew about the patent and infringed to make i4i products obsolete.”

The $290 million verdict is the second-largest patent jury award this year, the largest of all–coincidentally, I’m sure–being the $388 million verdict against Microsoft won by Singapore’s Uniloc in April over an infringement of its security technology. Then, as in the i4i case and most other patent rulings that haven’t gone its way, Redmond responded with incredulity, claiming it couldn’t have possibly infringed on the patent because the patent is invalid. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” said David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman, in the company’s now boilerplate statement on such matters. “We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090521/latest-microsoft-patent-describes-method-of-losing-patent-infringement-suits/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20080826/one-undersea-cable-to-find-them-one-undersea-cable-to-bind-them/ http://allthingsd.com/20080826/one-undersea-cable-to-find-them-one-undersea-cable-to-bind-them/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:05:52 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=3902 Who would have thought that a search company that began as a Ph.D. research project back in 1996 would someday become a behemoth of such bandwidth-consuming appetite that it would require its own high-bandwidth undersea communications cables? Earlier this year, Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build a new multi-terabit undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan. And now it appears the company is planning at least two more. According to TeleGeography, Google (GOOG) is part of another consortium of carriers hoping to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system that would connect Japan with Guam, the Philippines island of Luzon, Hong Kong, southern Thailand and Singapore. The company is also said to have held exploratory discussions with a number of South African telecoms about jointly building another new subsea cable connecting to Africa. Why such interest in undersea optic cables? Google would likely claim the volume of data it needs to move around the world requires the kind of capacity they provide. But there’s another reason as well. Fast, reliable connectivity encourages people to use the Internet more. And that’s good for Google’s overall business. “Google wants people to pay as little as possible for access,” a source familiar with the company’s plans told ITWeb. “In fact, they don’t really care if it is totally free, because it is good for them in the long run.”

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