Samsung (005930.KS) plays on both sides of the mobile device market, making chips for its own devices as well as for those produced by its arch-rival Apple (AAPL). The A5 processor that powers the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 is made by Samsung in Austin.

Like its Chinese rival Huawei, Samsung is investing heavily in mobile processors as a way to benefit from the demand for mobile devices and exercise more control over its own supply chain. Production at the Austin plant is expected to be in full swing by the second half of next year.

Part of Samsung’s investment in the Austin plant will be spent retraining workers from the plant’s memory-chip making division, which was closed last month. The South Korean company currently employes about 2,500 people in Austin, and will add about 2,000 temporary jobs to retrofit the factory during the next year.

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Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel will both use Gemalto’s universal circuit integrated SIM cards in LTE phones. The cards can be updated by Gemalto’s over-the-air platform, which enables servers to recognize when phones are on and send updates to SIM cards, instead of repeatedly pushing information out to phones which may or may not be ready to receive. “We use a new IP protocol that is much more reliable and efficient than SMS,” says Gemalto’s Sebastien Cano, VP of telecommunications. Cano says each of Gemalto’s servers can manage millions of cards, enabling operators to easily update SIM cards with new information, such as which network to connect to when the user travels overseas.

Gemalto says its universal integrated circuit card works with any 3G or LTE device, meaning that customers can use the same SIM card in multiple devices. The card also runs an IP multimedia services identity module, which can be used to enable mobile payments.

Cano says that so far, Gemalto does not have any serious competitors in this part of the SIM card business. Having won Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, the French company is now hoping that AT&T Mobility will follow suit. “AT&T is a SIM card customer and so far they have not acquired (the UICC) but we are in discussions and I have good hopes,” says Cano.

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In addition to leading the RCR Wireless News editorial team, Jason will be responsible for heading up RCR’s efforts at deepening its existing relationships with the worldwide analyst community, driving increased visibility at industry events and launching RCR’s original TV programming.

“Jason’s experience as an industry analyst will allow RCR Wireless News to continue its long history of filtering industry news for our readers while offering unique insights that help its readers to perform their jobs effectively,” said Jeff Mucci, CEO of RCR Wireless News. “Additionally, his experience producing a variety of telecom industry-specific content will allow RCR Wireless News to increase the velocity of its custom programs including webinars, feature reports and a variety of other insights from industry thought leaders.”

Throughout his career, Jason has provided both financial and market analysis related to global fixed and mobile access infrastructure, optical transport, managed/professional services, consumer broadband services and issues impacting network buildouts in rural America. He holds an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Jason will be based in RCR Wireless News’ Austin offices.

About RCR Wireless News
Published since 1981, RCR Wireless News engages and informs readers with breaking stories, analysis, and invaluable industry insight, while connecting technology companies, in person and online, with their industries, their customers and talent using its digital platform, community database and proprietary industry engagement processes. RCR Wireless News, along with its affiliated companies, TelecomCareers.com and ITjobs.net, pairs credible industry information with measurable sales and recruitment lead generation programs to procure customers and talent.

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If you have questions about this announcement, please contact:
Jeff Mucci
RCR Wireless News
CEO and Editorial Director
+1 512 431 8912
jmucci@rcrwireless.com

“We delivered strong third-quarter results, maintaining our focus on operating income and improving our mix of higher-value enterprise solutions,” said Brian Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer. Enterprise solutions and services revenue grew 8% during the past year, reaching $4.7 billion for the third quarter. The company said server and networking revenue increased 13% during the past year, and revenue from Dell-branded storage products increased 23%.

Dell reported non-GAAP earnings of 54 cents per share, higher than Wall Street’s consensus forecast of 47 cents per share. But investors focused more on the company’s outlook for the future, selling Dell stock Wednesday after pushing it up more than 2% on Tuesday ahead of the earnings announcement. Dell said that for the full year, revenue growth will be on the low end of its forecast of 1% to 5%. The company cited economic uncertainty and the shortage of hard drives caused by the flooding in Thailand as reasons for the reduced forecast.

Dell said third-quarter sales to consumers declined 6% to $2.8 billion. Dell’s operating margin in this part of its business was just 2.7%. In comparison, the margins were 9.8% on sales to large enterprises, 10.4% on sales to small and medium companies, and 10.6% on sales to public sector customers.

“Our results this quarter and over the past year reflect a new Dell, one focused on providing our customers productivity-enhancing solutions either developed organically or acquired,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO. “We’re now investing in research and development activities at almost a billion-dollar annual run rate, and our earnings per share is up 86% over the last 12 months.”

A typical Energy@Home system includes an ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) gateway with wireless connectivity using the ZigBee wireless protocol, which allows devices in the home to communicate and cooperate. (Freescale is a founding member of the Zigbee alliance.) The Energy@Home system also includes a smartphone or similar device connected to the electricity meter through a USB ZigBee dongle key, Zigbee-enabled appliances like refrigerators and washers, and smart plugs that allow these appliances to communicate with a home area network.

“Freescale is committed to providing solutions for energy management around the world,” said Bruno Baylac, director of Freescale’s Medical, Metering and Connectivity solutions division. Freescale makes the ZigBee transceiver (MC13226) in the energy gateway processing unit and the i.MX28 chip, which is the gateway’s application processor. Freescale is also helping the consortium in an advisory role.

Weighing in at 1.8 pounds and sporting a 10.1-inch screen and two cameras, the Latitude ST will get seven hours of battery life, Dell said. The tablet includes a stylus and storage silo and can be purchased with a custom dock to connect to a larger monitor, as well as a mouse and keyboard. Powered by Intel’s Atom Z670 processor, the Latitude ST has 2GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage.

Separately, Dell says its Dell Mobile Security for Android platform has been certified by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for information assurance and use on Department of Defense networks. The move could open the door for more use of Android-based mobile devices in the military. Currently, defense networks use BlackBerry smartphones.

DISA certified Dell Streak 5 tablets on the Dell OS, and Dell says this certification will allow the company’s Android devices set for release next year to be rapidly integrated into the military.

None of Dell’s recent news helped its stock price today. Shares were down more than 3% in midday trading.

RCR Wireless News recently caught up with Qualcomm EVP Roberto Padovani, who served as the company’s CTO from 2001 until this year. Padovani was the keynote speaker at The Texas Wireless Summit, where he and many others were excited about the increasing amount of power and functionality that Qualcomm is now able to pack onto a single chip.

During his keynote address, Padovani told his audience that much of Qualcomm’s future growth will come from emerging markets, which are growing twice as quickly as developed countries. Many people outside the US will be getting Internet connectivity for the first time on a mobil device. He said that smartphone sales growth is far outpacing PC sales growth, with 4 billion handsets projected to be sold in the next 4 years, making the smartphone the computing platform of choice for the future.

Padovani said that one of the biggest challenges facing the wireless industry is data traffic growth, which he says will grow 10 to 12 times between 2010 and 2013. He said that video traffic places the greatest demands on networks and that as soon as more than one user in a given place wants to download a certain video, it may be more efficient to broadcast rather than unicast. Padovani said he expects a big announcement soon related to a wireless broadcast network.

Offloading data traffic to the cloud is one solution to the overwhelming data traffic, Padovani said, but for tasks that require high speed processing, the processing needs to be resident in the device. He also pointed out that bandwidth is not limited, and so this must also be considered as more apps and data are offloaded.

Padovani discussed femto cells as one partial solution to the spectrum crunch. He talked about the need for femto cells that can receive as well as transmit, pointing out that femto cells that cannot “hear” will not be able to adapt when they are interfering with macro cells not connected to the femto. Padovani says he thinks restricted access to femto cells does not make sense and will go away. He also thinks femto cells will have integrated WiFi going forward.

Padovani said that “augmented reality” is one of the new applications enabled by Qualcomm’s chipsets that particularly excites him. He looks forward to the day when he will be able to point his smartphone at a sign in a foreign country and the phone will take a picture of the sign and then translate it for him. He also showed his audience examples of animated images stored on the phone and displayed on physical objects.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazardis.”We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.” A core switch failure at a network center in the UK apparently caused the problem, which started in Europe and spread to the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, Canada, and the United States. A survey conducted last week by European price comparison website Kelkoo found that of 1,000 Blackberry users contacted, 19% were considering dumping the BlackBerry in favor of another smartphone.

RIM is also trying to make amends with its enterprise customers. It’s offering them one month of free technical support. Current customers will get an additional month of free service, and those who do not have contracts will be offered a one month free trial.

Wall Street is worried about what the free offers and lost business will cost RIM (NASDAQ RIMM). The stock opened down almost 5% this morning. Aside from the cost of offering free service, RIM may have to pay some carriers who are compensating customers for their days without service. Spain’s Telefonica SA, as well as some Middle Eastern and Australian carriers, have already told customers they will be compensated, and analysts expect them to try to pass these costs on to RIM.

Today’s free app offer may quell some consumer demand for compensation, or it could create even more discontent. The company cautions that the availability of the offer will depend on the type of BlackBerry used, the operating system, access to BlackBerry App World (a free download which is sure to experience heavy traffic) and local conditions and/or restrictions.

Today RIM published an initial list of the free apps that will be available for four weeks starting Wednesday, saying more will be added later. The current list is as follows:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

The iPhone 4S retails for $200 for the 16 gigabyte model, $300 for 32 GB and $400 for the 64 GB model. The new phone unifies CDMA and GSM, giving users the freedom to roam between those two networks. It runs on the same A5 chip that’s in the iPad, and comes with iOS 5.

The most talked-about iPhone 4S feature is Siri, an intelligent assistant that allows users to talk to their phones. Users can ask their phones for help with directions, or for reminders about tasks or calendar items. Siri can also respond to requests for updates on news, weather, sports and stock prices, and it can place a simple call to deliver a message to someone in the contact list.

Although initial sales of the iPhone 4S bode well for the phone’s future, the success of Siri may impact how long this sale boom will last. When Apple launched the phone, Analyst Adam Leach with Ovum research told RCR that Siri could be “another Facetime…. something that makes for good demos, but which few people will actually use in practice.”