Company to donate portion of proceeds from sales of its new FutureDial Suite Smartphone Edition PC software to Unicef’s Relief Work in Haiti

SUNNYVALE, CA – Feb 4, 2010 –  FutureDial Incorporated announced today that the company will be donating a portion of its sales of its newly launched FutureDial Suite Smartphone Edition™ to assist Unicef’s Haiti relief effort.

From now until the end of April, $1 from every online sale of FutureDial Suite Smartphone Edition™ PC software will be earmarked by FutureDial for donation to Unicef’s relief work in Haiti. The company also features a prominent banner on its website home page (www.futuredial.com) to connect visitors directly to Unicef’s online donation portal. At the end of April, FutureDial will make the contribution to Unicef from all the accumulated sales.

“We were greatly saddened by the devastating 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti, and the heart wrenching misery and suffering that was left in its wake,” said George Huang, Chairman and CEO of FutureDial. “We wanted to help the people of Haiti, and especially the little children who are in such dire need of medical help. So we wanted to mobilize to help raise money for relief efforts there. Unicef has done a tremendous job of bringing relief to the children and families affected by the earthquake, and we are proud to be contributing to their admirable efforts there.”

Information about FutureDial Suite Smartphone Edition PC software is available on the FutureDial website at www.futuredial.com/en/fdsse.html and the software can be purchased directly from that website page.

About FutureDial

FutureDial is a leading provider of mobile content management software and solutions to mobile consumers enabling phone-to-phone transfer, backup, data restoration, and personalization. FutureDial’s products support audio, video, images, contacts, calendar, and SMS over hundreds of handset models. FutureDial solutions are also used by Tier-1 wireless carriers across Europe and the USA at retail stores, service centers, and warehouses worldwide. For more information about FutureDial and its products, please visit www.futuredial.com 

According to the latest Admob Mobile Metrics Report, December 2008, Android has captured 2% OS Share in the US during two months only;  while the iPhone OS generated 48% of smartphone requests in December, up from only 9% in May. The monthly mobile metrics report by Admob provide insight into trends in the mobile ecosystem, generated from the 6,000 mobile web sites and 400 applications around the world part of the Admob network.

In the same context; Medialets, a New York based mobile advertising start-up, have a chart of Active users in iPhone Vs Android showing a fast growth of Android daily users against iPhone (390% for Android compared to 256% for iPhone). We have contacted Medialets earlier in December ’08, to request more information on the data used in that chart, but we didn’t got any answer until today.

This year, Google employees will receive a version of T-Mobile’s G1 cell phone as Xmas gift Instead of the $1,000 pay cheque bonus. The custom G1 phone will be given to 85 per cent of Google’s 20,123 global staff in the United States, Western and Central Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Japan according to an internal Email sent to Google employees. Small calculations, this save at least $17M for Google !!

An anonymous Googler has passed along a Q&A covering the full details of their oh-so-Dreamy holiday bonus to Gizmodo :

The holiday bonus is a Google tradition. In the past, we have chosen to make this a monetary gift. This year we decided to try something different: on December 19th, we will begin distributing free Dream phones to Googlers worldwide.

A great opportunity to encourage google employees to try the dream phone and dogfood the phones !

Since OHM have a UK address, we ordered the developers edition of the G1 so we could have more interesting experiments and applications for you. It’s $399 USD as announced, but the total is slightly different. First we tried to use our US address to profit from the free shipping, but unfortunately it was not accepted. We will have an extra $42.60 for shipping and handling, that’s a total of $441.6 – still acceptable.

After entering the shipping, now time to finalize order but I just noticed a different total of $527.25. There is another Tax to be paid of $85.65. So the overall price of the developer edition is $399 Tax Free, or to be more precise for US only. There will be an extra $100 or more depending on the country you are shipping to.

The case of UK for example the total will be $527 USD, I don’t know about other countries, but I think the price remain acceptable for us to get a gadget that you can use to test your android applications on real device. Selected specs for Android Dev Phone 1:

• Touch screen
• Trackball
• 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
• Wi-Fi
• GPS-enabled
• Bluetooth v2.0
  • Handsfree profile v1.5
  • Headset profile v1.0
• 3G WCDMA (1700/2100 MHz)
• Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
• QWERTY slider keyboard
• Includes 1GB MicroSD card (can be replaced with up to 16GB card)

Just a reminder that the G1 Dev phone is available in 18 international markets, including the US, UK, Germany, Japan, India, Canada, France, Taiwan, Spain, Australia, Singapore, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Hungary (free shipping in the US only).

Check android project page for more information on Devices availability for developers. Android Dev G1 could be ordered from Android market.

Update : We have information that the G1 Dev Phone cost $537 USD for France ($95 taxes and $42 shipping)!

If you are subscribed to our RSS for news updates you probably won’t notice that our website have completely changed since last week. Now it’s more simple, clear and easier to find the information you are looking for. It is also more like a magazine ! I would like to thank Adii for his great webdesign work. We spent last week on testing the new design and improving different aspect of the website.

We are currently working on the video and podcast section, which will be enabled in the next days. A new job board for Android jobs is now available for US-based Android Jobs only, but it will be expanded to support more countries late in this year. A mobile edition of the OHM is also available, and that you might consult already from your mobile device at the same address openhandsetmagazine.com.

This is not everything, because we have also moved our server to a new Dual Quad-Core Xeon, 1GB DDR2 ECC 667 RAM, 30GB on SAS/SCSI, and 10Mbps Dedicated Unmetered. You will notice the difference if you visited our website last week and today. The server is used only by our network partners and serving hundred thousands of unique visitors daily, including OHM readers.

Hope you enjoy the new OHM and let us know if you have any suggestion or topic you would like to read.