He is is ex-Morgan Stanley executive Peregrine Riviere who reports to chief financial officer Roger Taylor.

Riviere will be responsible for institutional and retail investor relations as well as management of key reporting periods and industry analysis for The Carphone Warehouse Group.

Rashad Arif 24 of London Road pleaded not guilty to stealing the Nokia 8210 handset valued at 80 from Nazia Jabeen on August 21.

Philips says the Bluetooth chipset market is expected to reach shipments of 35 million this year and should surpass 500 million in 2006.

Bluetooth wireless technology grew dramatically last year said Joyce Putscher of industry analysis firm In-Stat/MDR.

The market is seeing major volume traction this year.

The Dorset-based accessory distributor which was appointed as sole accessory supplier to Dixons and Woolworths earlier this year expects to begin supplying mobile phone accessories to 3s retail outlets in December. This will be followed by deliveries to 3s appointed retail partners.

We will be distributing accessories to 3s retail outlets towards the end of the year Kondor sales director Stephan Ziegler told Mobile News. There is no official start date as yet. We are very happy to have received the appointment he added.

Meanwhile Kondor is celebrating winning a Dixons supplier excellence award 2002 for best supplier in the sub- 10 million sales category.

Kondor chief executive Malcolm Benson picked up the award from Dixons chief executive John Clare at a glitzy awards ceremony hosted by the consumer electronics group at the London Hilton on Park Lane last month (the venue of the Mobile News Awards on March 27 next year see story right).

Hamse Dahir (20) of Harrow Road Kensal Green West London pleaded guilty at Horseferry Road Court to attempting to dishonestly obtain a Nokia by deception from The Links Baker Street store on September 11 this year.

He was remanded on bail until October 29 for pre-sentence reports. Magistrates warned him that all options of punishment including imprisonment will be considered.

Nokias 7210 and 6610 handsets had been refused accreditation by the network after failing to meet O2s standards despite being passed fit for sale by Vodafone and Orange (Mobile News November 25).

Now after carrying out the relevant software changes the handsets are deemed to be up to scratch and available for sale.

We have carried out the work that O2 requested and we are shipping the updates across this week said Nokia spokesman Ray Haddow.

Haddow said part of the problem related to an mmO2 product called Homezone which was unique to German users. An O2 spokesman said the problem was to do with dropped calls.

It will be first available to Orange customers. The myG-5 has a console-type cross-shaped keypad and an 101×80 pixel colour screen.

It supports iMelody 1.2 Midi and Wav audio formats has musical hi-fi ringtones and built-in hands-free. IN-FUSIOs downloadable games engine – ExEn provides a one-click games catalogue feature. The phone has been fully optimised for mobile games written in Java.

It is shipped with the game Wallbreaker already embedded. A further nine colour games will be available for download including the first 3D game for mobile phones – Mission 3D. Once games have been downloaded they are available for playing off-line.

A player management platform will enable Orange to monitor game activity manage competitions integrate billing and alert players of new games and updated features.

But O2 claimed the handset suffers from a software fault and says it is waiting for Nokia to fix the problem before resuming testing.

Nokia spokesman Ray Haddow insisted the failing wasnt a serious problem and that the 7210 has been passed by other networks.

Every product that comes on to the market is tested by networks on an individual basis he said. Different operators have different parameters because of the different servers they use and the different structure of their networks.

He conceded: It is true that there is a problem with the 7210 and O2 network but it isnt an insurmountable one. The implementation of software during the approval process can be difficult but it is nothing to be worried about. He went on to say: There will be updated software in later models but this is natural.

The product was launched in Vodafone retail outlets last Friday and the network said it experienced no problems during testing and was happy to launch the product.

The handset has been available at The Link on the Vodafone network for the past two weeks.

The Link managing director Nick Wood said that the chain had experienced no problems running the product on Vodafone and would not consider removing the handset from its shelves.

We take the view that if Vodafone has passed it we are happy for it to go out he said.

Of course we will not release the product on O2 until the network certifies it. O2 said it was not appropriate to comment on the nature of the problem while it was being fixed.

The number of companies exhibiting this year was around 1000 down from 1685 last year and 2337 in 2000. This years show was attended by 125000 people.

Nokia showed its first EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) handset the Nokia 6200 claimed to support data speeds of up to 118000 bps. The 2G/3G tri-band handset has an XHTML Web browser and MMS and works at 900 1800 and 1900 GSM frequencies. Nokia also launched its 6340i which operates on the US TDMA AMPS and GSM systems. A camera phone the 7250 is described as the companys second imaging phone for the US market.

Nokia also came up with an interesting GPS-enabled handset the 3585i which is designed for both analogue and digital (GSM 1900) networks in North America.

This colour CDMA handset has a series of exchangeable covers with embedded electro-luminescent graphics that pulse in time with the ringer. It also features integral support for Global Positioning System (GPS) location-based services.

Several companies launched 802.11g-standard wireless devices at Comdex Fall. While 802.11b supports wireless data speeds of up to 11 Mbps 802.11g pushes the speed to 54 Mbps as well as adding a more robust system to cope with interference.

The WiFi Alliance (a consortium of firms that support 802.11) backed this claim of a five-fold speed hike and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that the software giant was fully committed to 802.11 (WiFi) technology.

On the Bluetooth front Denmarks Nextlink showed a digital version of its popular Bluespoon headset with 10 hours active use battery life. Pricing will probably be around 200 when the unit becomes available early next year.

NatSemi showed a 710 gram super PDA called the Geode Extended Office (GXO) the same size as a framed 5×7 inch photograph. It is 0.9 inches thick and supports both Bluetooth and 802.11b W-LAN technology. It has a bright six-inch TFT display with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels – five times the resolution seen on a Pocket PC.

Other features include an onboard 10Gb hard drive and a colour camera.

Nokia along with Matsushita (Panasonic) Microsoft Motorola SonyEricsson and Openwave said they had cracked the problem of cross-model MMS.

The companies were busy showing off what they called Multi-vendor MMS Interoperability at the show even though the problem of cross-network MMS has yet to be solved.

Matsushita (Panasonic) announced it is now working with Nokia on exchanging MMS messages between both companies handsets as well as PDAs and multimedia terminals.

But this was not due to Breslin said Mainline managing director Andrew Boden.

Breslins predecessor Sara Stilliard will take over as interim sales and marketing director. Stilliard held the top marketing job before Breslin joined. Boden said that she was the architect of Blueprint.

Chris Breslin asked to leave because he wasnt producing results. Things didnt work out as we would have liked. He didnt get what he wanted out of the role and we didnt get a return on our investment said Boden.

Breslin was a former head of global marketing for Shell Gas.