Consumer Electronics

RIM's new CEO, Thorsten Heins, wants the company to improve its product development while also becoming better at marketing, he said during a conference call on Monday.  read more »

Despite the increasing number of imported and highly subsidized Chinese-made mobile handsets, Zimbabwe's only phone manufacturing company, Swav, is gaining ground in the African market.  read more »

As Chinese-made counterfeit mobile handsets continue flooding the African market, the Zambian government has become the first country in the region moving to close all outlets selling the phones around the country.  read more »

Despite a new study indicating that the elimination of value added tax (VAT) on mobile phone handsets in Kenya helped fuel a 200 percent increase in handset purchases, the Zambian government is declining to scrap the VAT on imported handsets.  read more »

Orange launched three Alcatel One Touch phones on Wednesday with dedicated Facebook buttons priced below €100 (US$135).  read more »

Zambia's only mobile phone manufacturing company, M-mobile Telecommunications (M-Tech), is on the brink of closure as it faces growing competition from China.  read more »

While several African countries are battling to block the entry of counterfeit mobile phones and other electronic products from China, Zambia has abandoned the implementation of a pre-export verification system that was aimed at blocking the products from entering Zambia.  read more »

Yesterday evening, Nokia launched the Nokia E6 phone at a "business cocktail" hosted at the Sankara Hotel, Nairobi. The launch was attended by the press and several IT managers from several Nairobi based firms. "With the E6 , you do not have to go off for three days, unless your IT manager wants you to, " said Kenneth Oyolla, Nokia General Manager for East and Southern Africa. For those who are bit behind , the GM was poking holes at Blackberry Service's recent three day outage.  read more »

Research in Motion extended an apology for last week's multi-continent BlackBerry outages last by offering free premium apps and one month of free technical support for its enterprise customers.  read more »

Nokia has underlined the importance of low-cost smartphones and now it appears that the company is developing a Linux-based OS for smartphones that will cost less than US$100 without subsidies.  read more »