The dispute is now settled said Sendo CEO Hugh Brogan. There is a monetary compensation to Microsoft which has relinquished its four per cent stake in the company and will no longer be a shareholder nor have any activity with Sendo.

Sendo formed a partnership with Microsoft in 2001 to develop the Windows-based Z100 smartphone. At the end of 2002 Sendo said Microsoft took information gained during the development of the Z100 and passed it to Taiwanese company HTC. HTC then developed Oranges SPV in partnership with Microsoft. The doomed Z100 never made it to market.

Just over a year ago Sendo said it was suing Orange as the circuit board of the SPV smartphone allegedly infringed a Sendo patent. The action was dropped after Sendo sold a number of its patents and intellectual property rights to computer company Texas Instruments.

Brogan said: We set out to defend our intellectual property and right the wrongs against us. We would have preferred to have brought the Z100 to market but weve moved on.

O2 says it has lost 2 million in revenues after billing 125000 customers up to two-and-a-half months late.

The network has been migrating customers to a new billing system over the past three years. But it hadnt charged 125000 customers for calls and data transferral beyond their regular monthly fees between July and early October this year.

O2 has advised incorrectly billed customers they will be charged for the discrepancy at a discounted rate. The discount will cost O2 2 million. A payment plan will be offered to people struggling to repay the backlog.

We didnt charge 125000 customers for calls that were made outside of their bundles said a spokesman for O2.

We have now identified the error sent out a letter and offered a 25 per cent discount on those calls as a goodwill gesture. We havent over- or under-billed anyone. We have just been late with processing the bills.

The spokesman said that O2 admitted the gaffe was a random hiccup.

He said: We have fixed the problem and re-processed the bills. It affects less than one per cent of ourcustomer base.

As part of total revenues of 4.5 billion it is relatively small. We admit there was a problem. But it is now fixed. It is a massive three-year programme to migrate everyone on to the modern new system.

We have many customers and there is a high degree of complexity. But we certainly wouldnt expect this to happen again.

O2 expects to complete the migration towards the end of next year.

We want to do something big like the V Festival aimed at that sort of demographic said Nokia marketing head Simon Lloyd.

Its not going to be a purely music event although music will probably play some part. All that is currently under discussion. It will probably be free he added.

Nokias new multi-million-pound sponsorship deal with ITV star search programme The X Factor started on Saturday night (September 4). Its the most Nokia has spent on a single advertising project in the UK. The show is expected to attract nine million viewers.

Were really excited to be associated with one of the flagship shows of ITVs autumn season and the scope of activity weve developed to support the sponsorship really bears this out said Lloyd.

The audience is in a key demographic for us. The show runs to Christmas so our brand and the key products in our portfolio will be pushed at a very critical time.

Nokia has created an X Factor edition of the new Nokia 3220 which will be available at The Carphone Warehouse from early October. The handset features X Factor wallpaper the theme tune as a polyphonic ring tone and two cut-out covers.

A special promotion with CPW offers Nokia purchasers the chance to win thousands of pounds. New handsets will display a start-up message announcing whether the owner has won a share of a 50000 prize fund with the top prize being 25000.

From October Nokia is also running an X Factor-themed promotion in selected Tesco stores and in Nokia-branded retail outlets.

The Nokia 3220 stars alongside the latest handsets in Nokias portfolio in the shows advertising break bumpers. The storylines show how Nokia products including the Nokia 2650 the megapixel Nokia 7610 camera phone the rugged Nokia 5140 and the N-Gage QD games deck all give you the X Factor.

Commenting on the sponsorship deal Lloyd said:

Nokias integrated X Factor marketing campaign also includes a website where X Factor fans can find exclusive competitions plus details on Nokia mobile phones. Theres an interactive TV site too where you can win an X Factor Nokia 3220.

Members of the Nokia handset owners club Club Nokia can win VIP tickets for the X Factor audience.

Multiple tables have been snapped up by all the main industry players including Sagem Samsung Data Select 20:20 Motorola Sony Ericsson Sharp Nokia Siemens Sendo Philips LG The Carphone Warehouse Dextra Pama Elite European Telecom Unique Distribution Mainline Yes Telecom and Hugh Symons plus the sponsoring networks – Vodafone Orange O2 and Virgin Mobile.

See advertisement page 22

Then there is the small matter of network access. It was Meteor Mobile who won the last Ireland GSM licence all those years ago meaning Orange has no network in the Republic. Could it have meant to put the posters up in Belfast?

So says BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) which claims it has doubled its subscriber base to two million in the past 10 months.

RIM president Mike Lazaridis claimed the surge in sales has been due to the number of new BlackBerry devices that have been launched so far this year.

He added that the BlackBerry is the first integrated wireless data product to reach two million users.

It took five years to establish the market and attract the first million.

The fridge-and-phone deal gives customers a Budweiser mini-fridge thrown in with sale of a 129.99 Motorola V220 on Orange.

Its a standard thing at this time of year. We work differently with each independent retailer. Were putting together a promotion with Argos based around the new Pixar movie The Incredibles said an Orange spokesperson.

A Woolworths spokesperson added: Weve done this type of promotion for the past couple of years. Its about delivering a gift item at Christmas and mobile phones are very important to us at this time of year.

Were doing a lot of offers on mobile phones at the moment which include offering other types of electrical goods such as boom boxes televisions sets and so forth.

Any suggestion that the fridge giveaway is a response to the claim by Orange CEO Sanjiv Ahujas that 3G mobile phones overheat to the extent that you can fry eggs on them is coincidental (Mobile News October 15).

Group Telecom was set up by Ian and Andrew Bailey. It ceased trading last month and its final accounts showed it lost 409942 between August 2002 and November this year.

In a report on the companys trading history a director said:

The growth of the business was also hampered by restrictions and lack of support from Nokia for whom (Group Telecom) had only one manufacturers accreditation. This severely limited the size of the contracts the company was able to tender for and was therefore only able to tender for low-volume low-margin retail sales.

The directors report also acknowledges an increase in competition from Far East repair centres which were able to offer lower cost repairs.

Also blamed was a legal row with a third director Angus Davidson who sued the company for unfair dismissal.

This diverted a substantial amount of the directors time from focusing on the business to defending the action added the report. A substantial cost was also incurred in defending this action.

Among the creditors are Customs and Excise ( 70000) Inland

Revenue ( 32000) Unique Distribution ( 3700) and Intec ( 1316).

SUBtv claims an audience of 1.2 million student viewers. The campaign features 3s Japanese style

critter characters in sequences designed to promote 3s messages of we like music and we like sharing.

The videos will appear on plasma screens installed in student unions across the country.

The campaign will run daily in 30-minute lunchtime and evening sessions for 10 weeks

Students will be able to text the screens so that their message will appear on the local tickertape.

The new MVNO offering is launched to business customers only. BT will be responsible for all marketing branding billing and customer service while network airtime and services will be provided by Vodafone.

BT Mobiles portfolio of services will become available to consumers in January.

Steven Evans CEO of BT Mobile said that the MVNO which uses airtime from Vodafone would target customers through large high-street retailers but would resist cheap packages and large dealer commissions.

We are not going to buy market share at any cost said Evans.

We are going to use the high street retailers. We have proven already that we can add customers.

He added: We will look at the value of customers and at the ARPU and we will offer commissions depending on the sale. Ultimately we will define ourselves by the convergence of fixed and mobile.

The significance of today is the launch of BT Mobile on the Vodafone network as an MVNO. Until now we have been acting as a service provider to O2. From today onwards all new customers signing to us will be on the Vodafone network.

An MVNO has a lot more flexibility to differentiate services. A service provider effectively just re-badges a networks services.

Evans reckons that as an MVNO BT Mobile is in now charge of the services that it puts on the table. New service Business Circle lets businesses manage their telecoms costs through a mobile Virtual Private Network (VPN) which links mobile devices to company switchboards and enables calls to company mobiles across the private network to be charged at reduced prices.

BT Mobile customers can also manage conference calls via a mobile handset with new service Confer-ence on Demand and is about to offer business customers BT Openzone Wireless Broadband for a reduced monthly fee.

Evans added: We will be maintaining our existing service provider base on O2 until they reach the end of their contracts and then look to sign them to the new Vodafone MVNO arrangement. We have a whole raft of customers who are between month one and month 24 of their contract so they are becoming available to re-sign all the time.

BT Mobile put on 90000 new contract customers between June and September 2004 bringing its total customer base to 305000. Of the total 145000 are business customers.

As customer contracts expire over the next two years BT Mobile will attempt to re-sign them.

In the six months to September 30 turnover from mobility services nearly trebled compared with last year to 49 million.