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Quite a few people are complaining about Twitter’s decision to stop updates via SMS in the UK because it was proving to be too costly. (Actually it is a decision that impacts everyone who is not in US, Canada or India.) Sarah Lacy says they should stop whining. Instead they should check out this new service, Zygotweet, that will allow you to buy credits (between 4-to-5 p per message), and get your tweets to your mobiles.

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Mobilize — Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow

Now that was fast! T-Mobile which had sued Starbucks last week over the coffee chain partnering with AT&T and offering free WiFi has settled with the Seattle-based coffee giant. The terms of the settled were not revealed, though I think the iPhone 3G launch might have made AT&T push some buttons and get this whole thing resolved. We are hardly surprised by this out of court settlement: 53% (62 out of 111 votes) of the respondents to our poll basically picked “out of court settlement” as a likely outcome.

Qualcomm has spent 8.3 million pounds ($16.2 million) buying 40 MHz of L-band spectrum in the U.K., which the company could use for its MediaFLO mobile television or other two-way wireless data services. However, the wireless chipmaker’s overseas shopping spree might end at the borders of continental Europe.

That’s because the EU is encouraging its member countries to adopt the DVB-H standard. Lucky for Qualcomm, those cheeky Brits decided to keep the auction open to a variety of mobile standards. That gives Qualcomm a chance to keep selling pricey intellectual property licenses for its proprietary MediaFLO technology. With all the vendors choosing the open LTE standard, it has to find some way to goose those royalties.

AT&T reported solid earnings this morning, with income of $3.5 billion on sales of $30.7 billion for the first quarter. Like last quarter, wireless revenue drove growth, but U-Verse data looked pretty good too. As Om wrote yesterday, AT&T affirmed that it’s on track to add 1 million U-Verse subscribers by the end of 2008. At the end of March AT&T counted 379,000 subscribers for the IPTV service with 148,000 net adds in the quarter. Maybe when AT&T files its 10-Q we can see what the U-Verse churn looks like.

If you’re a security company like Radware, it’s your job to find and create patches for vulnerabilities, but it’s also your job to poke and prod in the hopes of finding some newsworthy exploit to get your firm’s name in the paper. Radware struck media gold with its findings of a vulnerability in the iPhone browser. According to Radware, the iPhone Safari browser version 1.1.4. is vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack after a user clicks through spam email or spam texts that could crash the browser or the phone.

If you’ve ever tried to use one of those carbon footprint calculator web sites, then you’ll likely understand why mobile entrepreneur Andreas Zachariah would try to build a better way. Zachariah has been working on a java-based mobile application called Carbon Hero, which uses GPS location info to automatically monitor your transportation. Earth2Tech has the full story.

Incumbent Telecom New Zealand may soon start offering Apple’s iPhone in the country of New Zealand, reports Telegeography. While nothing has been set in stone, company officials are hinting at the iPhone coming to their network. TNZ recently finished building a new $241 million GSM/EDGE network on the 850 MHz frequencies. TNZ also has an EVDO network. Other international carriers that sell iPhone include o2 (UK), T-Mobile (Germany), and Orange (France), though people continue to buy and unlock the iPhone in large numbers.

Having been excoriated for its poor customer service and monumental financial losses, Sprint is reaching out and trying to make amends. It’s offering up an online chat with its chief marketing officer, John Garcia, who will field questions about Sprint’s Simply Everything unlimited plan, the Xohm launch, as well as other ideas submitted by the audience. The chat will run from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. ET (8:30 a.m.- 9:30 a.m. PT) on Monday March 17th, and it will be accessible at www.buzzaboutwireless.com. Garcia is going to need the luck of the Irish to make it through this one, I bet.

Merrill Lynch analysts suggest that because of a strong euro and looming price wars, Deutsche Telekom might make a bid for beleaguered Sprint and add it to its T-Mobile USA unit. In theory it may seems like a wonderful idea. In reality, if this deal happens, then it is going to be worse than a Las Vegas wedding after a night-long binge! The combined company will operate four different kind of networks — iDen, CDMA, WiMAX and GSM. Did these analysts forget that the iDEN-CDMA integration has been one of the major reasons for Sprint-Nextel’s troubles?

The $99 unlimited calling plans might be great for some of us who yak-a-lot or even small businesses, but the Telecom Expense Management Association (TEMIA) thinks that these new unlimited flat-rate cellular plans are a bad idea for large corporations because a “well managed corporate pool plan of voice minutes would average between $50 and $70 per user, whereas these unlimited flat-rate plans are being offered at a fixed rate of $99.”

Apple’s iPhone might be leaping up the smart phone charts, but don’t tell that to the guys from Symbian, who saw 77.3 million Symbian OS phones shipped during 2007, up 50 percent from 51.7 million units in 2006. The number of handsets with Symbian OS stood at 141 at end of 2007. The company is feeling pretty bullish, mostly because of its expansion in hot Asian handset markets like China & Japan. Nokia and others are doing their part to add more interesting handsets to the mix, as we noted yesterday.

CBS Mobile chief Cyriac Roeding speaking at a conference in New York lamented about the utter complexity of the mobile ecosystem and the problems facing mobile advertising. His quotes are just money: “How do we expect anyone to take this seriously as an advertising device… So let’s make it simpler–let’s talk about usability, let’s not talk about the next 15 menu items, and let’s not try to copy another medium … If you are trying to make this the next online page, you will fail…because this is a new medium in its own right.”

CEO change has had no impact on Motorola’s fortunes. Their handset business continues to spiral downward and is turning into a downright disaster. Fourth quarter 2007 mobile phone sales slumped to 40.9 million units vs 65.7 million in 4Q 2006. Mobile division sales were down 38% year over year, with mobile devices business reporting an operating loss of $388 million. And it isn’t over: first quarter 2008 is going to be worse, with forecast for further market share losses. In comparison, other divisions including Symbol seem to be doing well.

Jaiku, the Helsinki, Finland based start-up that makes a lifestreaming client for mobile phones just launched a new version of its clients, which has some nifty enhancements. Contact list and conversations-as-threads have received a makeover.

The visually rich contact list that displays their buddy icons and their real time presence. You can also broadcast status based on the “ringer settings.” Nokia S60 users can also share their phone-based calendars to notify others of their upcoming events and availability. Time to dig out the N95 and download this app.