LAS VEGAS: Yahoo!, the internet media company, chose the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to launch version 2.0 of its Yahoo! Go online application suite for mobile phones, which features a smart new ‘carousel-style’ interface designed to make it much easier for mobile phone users to access online information.

The application, which is device specific, will initially be available on Motorola’s flagship Motorazr maxx V6 and MOTORAZR V3xx handsets and will be available for about another 70 mobile devices from leading phone makers shortly.

Marco Boerries, in charge of Yahoo!’s Connected Life broadband division, said the service would be available for at least 400 mobile phone models by the end of the year and that it was also lining up deals with mobile carriers in the US and elsewhere to pre-load the software onto their handsets.

Yahoo! Go has widgets enabling Yahoo! email, location-based local information and maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, weather, photo sharing and search.

Las Vegas: For many of the companies attending the annual Consumer Electronics Show here, it is all about ’speeds and feeds’ and bragging rights. The ‘biggest’, the ‘fastest’, or just the ‘best’.
This time around Sharp, the Japanese electronics group, has placed a pretty big opening bid by unveiling "the world’s largest LCD TV" - a 108-inch giant that convincingly nixes the idea that LCD technology can’t match the rival plasma when it comes to size.

The eye-popping Sharp display is 66 per cent larger than Sharp’s previous flagship Aquos LCD TV, a 65-inch model that wowed the CES audience last year. No news yet though on the price.

Nice move by UBS. The Swiss bank installed a Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 side-by-side at its Global Media and Communications Conference in New York this week.

Interestingly, while the PS3s graphics wowed the Wall Street types attending the conference, Nintendo’s awkwardly named Wii ( pronounced Wheee) was undoubtedly the most popular, thanks principally to its motion sensitive controller.

On the basis of an entirely unscientific sampling, the Wii was attracting about twice as many players as either the PS3 or the Xbox 360 - despite its rather clunky graphics. The most popular games incidentally were tennis and golf simulations, both making excellent use of the Wii controller.

The evidence keeps building that Nintendo has an unexpected holiday hit on its hands with the cut price Wii, which costs half the price of the top-end PS3.

US phone companies have been losing access lines to cable rivals (and to a lesser extent, VoIP companies like Vonage) for the past few years. But could the trend be slowing?

Richard Lindner, AT&T’s chief financial officer, says he believes the access line losses have reached a plateau. "Cable companies tend to make big penetration gains in the first year and then tail off," he told his audience at a Credit Suisse Media and Telecoms conference in New York.

"Our expectation is that 2007 will not see an increase in access line losses."

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Sony finally has something (good) to shout about. Apparently US sales of the Sony Reader - a paper-back sized electronic book reader with a six-inch screen - are well ahead of expectations despite the Reader’s relatively pricey $349 price tag and some annoying niggles.

The Japanese electronics giant, plagued by laptop battery recalls and component shortages that have forced it to scale back sales projections for its next generation PlayStation 3 console, says the Reader has been flying off the shelves. "It is much more successful than we expected," said Stan Glasgow, president of Sony Electronics’ US operations.

The Reader, which weighs 9-ounces and can hold up to 80 books in its electronic memory, was reportedly championed inside Sony by Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive.  Sir Howard is also believed to have helped persuade publishers to climb on board and make their titles available for download at a discount from the Sony Connect online store.

The success of the Reader comes despite some complaints about the lack of a backlit screen - presumably to save on power consumption - and that electronic page turning is somewhat slow. Sony has already indicated that it is working on further iterations to address these and other issues.

Will computer-based voice communications services like Skype (now owned by eBay) eliminate the need for international carriers? Not anytime soon, according to data preparted by the Washington-based TeleGeography consultancy.

Computer-based Voice over IP (VoIP) is nothing new, but Skype was the first PC-to-PC service to break into the mainstream, attracting millions of users worldwide. Skype had 1m simultaneous users within six months of the release of its first version for Windows in July 2004. By the end of the third quarter of 2006, Skype had 136m registered users, and the number of users online now regularly exceeds 8m.

These users generated about 6.6bn minutes of traffic in the third quarter of 2006, and are on track to make over 27bn minutes of PC-to-PC calls this year. Not surprisingly, about half of Skype’s traffic is international.

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Steve Ballmer and Microsoft put on a relatively modest show for the simultaneous launch of the Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft Office 2007 and a bunch of other new products in New York.

The Microsoft CEO, speaking at an event hosted by the NASDAQ MarketSite in midtown New York, began by acknowledging that the latest version of Windows is more than a little overdue. "I should probably say it’s an exciting thing to FINALLY be here, " he said adding that the new products were "probably the most important since Windows 95 and Office 97."

Both Windows Vista and Office 2007 feature what Microsoft claims are improvements in the interface, ease of access, security and features like search. In particular, Ballmer said one of the primary aims in designing Office 2007 had been to simplify the interface and make it easier for users to access the rich features often buried beneath layers of drop down menus.

Ballmer acknowledged that many IT professionals have complained that few employees make use of more than "15 to 20 per cent" of the features in the current version of Office and revealed that even Bill Gates had had trouble remembering which features were new, and which were old, in Office 2007.

Curiously, given that Vista is being launched for business users two months before the consumer versions go on sale, Ballmer said Microsoft hope that consumers will start using Vista (presumably at home), like what they see and then badger corporate IT departments into upgrading.

So why then were the consumer versions of Vista held back? Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s VP in charge of Office 2007 gave a double barrelled explanation a little later. He said Microsoft had learned from the launch of Windows XP that if you launch the consumer ’sku’ first, it is difficult then to persuade corporate IT departments to accept it as appropriate for for enterprise deployment.

"If we had done the consumer version first we  would never get businesses to take it seriously," he said. Equally importantly, he noted that the extra time before the consumer rollout on January 30 would give the retail channel and PC makers - big and small - time to gear up for the launch and then be able to compete on an equal footing.