It's not like Nokia was dominating sales in Japan anyway -- far from it. So it's not too big a loss to walk away from its near 1 percent market share when it's sitting atop a (dwindling) 40% 39% share globally. According to Nokia vice president Timo Ihamuotila, "We have judged that we cannot continue to invest in product development just for Japan amid the current tough economic conditions." Nokia will continue to sell its luxury Vertu branded phones though, presumably on that MVNO Nokia is rumored to be rolling out this spring.

So Nokia has a 40-odd percent stake in the world's handset market. You know where that insanely high number isn't coming from? Japan, where the Finnish giant holds less than a 1-percent share of phone sales as it competes against domestic models from Sharp, NEC, Fujitsu, and others who've traditionally ruled over FOMA with an iron fist. We think that we can probably chalk that up to the simple fact that Nokia doesn't produce many (okay, any) wide VGA flip phones with one-seg TV tuners, but they're thinking bigger -- way bigger -- to the tune of a self-branded MVNO that'd operate on NTT DoCoMo's expansive network. A Japanese paper is reporting that the virtual network will launch next spring, initially with high-end models designed to establish name recognition in a market where it currently has none; Vertu is just starting to set up shop over there, so we're assuming they don't mean ridiculously high-end, but high-end in the sense that the spec sheets won't get laughed right out of town.

[Via Unwired View, thanks Robin of Loxley]

With acquisitions frequently come layoffs, and Virgin Mobile's submitting to that ages-old tradition today by announcing a workforce reduction of 45 folks in its New Jersey and California offices -- a total of about 10 percent of its 400-strong team. With the closure of the company's Helio buy, it makes sense that there'd be some redundancy, and indeed, the company cites Helio along with its transition to an IBM-contracted IT infrastructure as the justification for the layoffs. The move comes despite Virgin Mobile USA having post a strong quarter, so while Virgin appears to be in solid shape, they're making like most of corporate America and battening the hatches for a presumably brutal '09.

We know, you're just dying to say this is a complete shock, but we're here to inform you that it's not. If you'll recall, Cox dug deep to snatch up a decent block of spectrum in this year's 700MHz auction, and it even went so far as to promise a differentiated product that would eventually integrate with its other content and services. Sure enough, it's keeping its word. After spending $500 million on wireless capacity in its markets, president Pat Esser says it's time to turn things on. By relying on Cox's own 3G network (along with Sprint's, initially), the carrier will offer up an undisclosed amount of handsets that will "include a network address book that automatically synchronizes with home PCs" and allow remote programming of one's DVR. Furthermore, users will be able to access e-mail and voicemail that they receive at home right on their mobile, and ideally, subscribers could watch TV shows right on their handsets. Get ready for an awkward new rival in the wireless space beginning, um, anytime now.

The deed is done, and Virgin Mobile is wasting no time giving its fresh acquisition a giant bear-hug to welcome it to the family. Helio is now "Helio by Virgin Mobile," tagged with the line "Plan To Have It All" -- hopefully a nod to the fact that Virgin plans to keep Helio's offerings distanced from Virgin as a higher-end, feature-rich carrier that can compliment Virgin's typical lineup of ultra-cheap prepaid goods. To kick things off, Helio is now offering an upgrade to its $80 A La Carte plan, boosting the 1,500 included minutes to a limitless bucket -- nice, we'll take it -- and Virgin is stealing some of Helio's mojo to offer the Shuttle, a new handset marketed under the Virgin name that'll integrate Helio's Buddy Beacon service. Just stay on track with the Ocean 2, fellas, and everything's cool by us.

For some reason, we're quite taken with the Peek email-only handheld, and Gadling's followup review of the love-it-or-hate-it device mostly reinforces that positive impression. The squared-off, Ideo-designed unit did its one task admirably well, sending and receiving emails using T-Mobile's network with only slight delay, and the OS is minimal and easy to use. Sure, at $99 and $20/mo it's still way too expensive for the typical gadget nerd who's already packing a phone data plan and maybe a data card as well, but if you're trying to keep things on the prepaid tip or looking to get a Luddite friend or relative on the mobile email bandwagon, the Peek is certainly worth a second, uh, peek.

Japanese MVNOs aren't exactly novel concepts, but Japan Communications has an angle for its new virtual network that most don't: an interconnect agreement. The deal with provider NTT DoCoMo differentiates it with so-called wholesale MVNOs in that these guys will actually own some of their own infrastructure to hook into the network, which in turn gives them the freedom to offer whatever hardware they choose without NTT's explicit permission to do so. They're really playing up that angle, too, coming out of the gate swinging with a ZTE-sourced broadband dongle -- not exactly the stuff of handset dreams, but they're looking to offer a who's-who of smartphone wares in the future, culminating with a possibly Android offering down the road. Theoretically, that could end up making Japan Communications the first Japanese carrier with an Android set in its midst, but with NTT DoCoMo a charter member of the Open Handset Alliance, the odds are pretty slim.

[Via IntoMobile, image via ITpro]

The sad part of Virgin Mobile's Q2 earnings story is that it lost customers (to the tune of some 111,000), saw ARPU slide from $20.97 to $19.32 year over year, and watched its profits get halved over the same period to a slim $3.5 million. The happy part? Hey, at least they're in the black, and we're sure they'd rather break even than hemorrhage cash the way virtually all of their MVNO brethren have. At any rate, the company thinks that it'll turn things around heading into '09 with the addition of Helio to its portfolio, which it confirms will be leveraged to offer "new data services and feature-rich handsets" -- both concepts that bare-bones Virgin isn't accustomed to offering in the States. The Ocean 2 would be a nice way to kick off that plan, would it not?

Sure took long enough, but it looks like Qualcomm is finally getting around to... uh, getting around to its pet project MVNO that's been on the back burner for the past year or so. The company's CEO says the delays in launching can be chalked up to the fact that it didn't want to be the primary investor in LifeComm; those issues have finally been fleshed out (read: there's money flowing in from other sources) and it'll be announcing a chief along with a concrete business model in September. Details are still exceedingly scarce on exactly what LifeComm intends to do, but it seems that it'll focus on providing specialized phones that help users manage health conditions and / or improve their well-being, and both enterprise environments and individuals will be targeted as potential customers. The MVNO debacle has stretched far and wide the past couple years, yes, but with a unique focus like this, Qualcomm could still have a breadwinner on its hands.

[Via Phone Scoop]

We figure that you've already made ten jokes in your head by now after reading the headline -- you know, about how the phones come in thirty pieces, have diabolical names like "Kramfors," and look like they belong in dorm rooms -- so we're going to spare you and get straight to the point for a change of pace. The furniture empire's UK division has launched an MVNO on T-Mobile's backbone (not to be confused with those little Ikea Mobile kiosks in the US) that follows its sofa mantra to the letter: cheap and simple. It's a prepaid service that requires an initial £10 (about $20) investment, and if we had to guess, the phones themselves are probably about as basic as they come. Would we buy a Samsung "Ektorp"? Hell yeah, we would.

Money-losing companies with interesting technology and a small, if rabid, customer base still frequently tend to sell for healthy chunks of change -- especially in the wireless space. Look at Trolltech, for example, the mobile Linux company that never really made any money, yet somehow managed to be acquired by Nokia for its talent and IP, which apparently carried a value of over $150m. We know Helio was burning cash on a whole 'nother level, but that doesn't entirely explain why SK Telecom was so absurdly desperate to dump their $500m investment. At a $39m acquisition price, SK didn't just lose its shirt -- it lost that, the shoes, and then the pants. You know, the pants with a half-billion dollars in them.

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The concept of exchanging voice minutes for obligatory ads pushed to handsets is a business model still very much in its infancy, but Blyk -- which currently has a live MVNO in the UK and plans to launch in the Netherlands later this year -- must be feeling good about its chances right now, because it has announced a planned expansion into the German, Belgian, and Spanish markets next year. Key to the service's success is recognition by advertisers that customers actually give a crap about the highly-targeted marketing material being pushed to them; Blyk claims that click-through rates are rockin', which is probably providing the impetus for the planned expansion. We're still not so sure we'd trade 217 text messages and 43 voice minutes a month for the privilege of being blasted with spam targeted promotions, but if they're somehow able to boost the allowance into the range of a typical plan and maintain profitability, they could be sitting on a gold mine.

[Via mocoNews]

So there's really no telling what's up with Helio as an MVNO, but there's plenty going on with the Ocean 2 handset. Just yesterday we noticed a spy shot of the elusive mobile, but unfortunately, the video in which it was captured from had been conveniently removed. Today, however, a whole host of new vids have surfaced over at HelioCity, one of which actually shows the unit while gaming. Check 'em out while you still can in the read link below.

[Via phonemag]

It ain't over until it's over, but we just got word that Helio store managers received notification this week that the axe is finally falling: (at least some of) the nationwide chain of retail stores will be shuttered during Virgin's takeover of Helio. As we've heard, "there is no 'merge' in this merger," so it sounds like after this year's big executive reshuffle, SK Telecom is bailing on their half-billion dollar enterprise a big way. No word if the fabled Ocean 2 will make it -- or if Virgin will even let Helio customers keep their phones.

Alongside Helio -- more or less the last man standing -- the great MVNO goldrush also dies. Unfortunate that besides Virgin and a few local and M2M providers (like Amazon's Whispernet), pretty much no one was able to make it work. Then again, no one ever never said making cellphones and running any kind of carrier was easy.