The FCC and the FTC said they plan a policy forum March 23 and a technology expo April 23 on efforts to curb illegal robocalls and caller ID spoofing. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai views blocking unwanted calls as a top priority (see 1802210032). “They are the number one consumer complaint at the FCC,” Pai said Wednesday. “We’re committed to confronting this problem using every tool.” The workshop starts at 9:30 a.m. at FCC headquarters, the expo 10 a.m. at Pepco Edison Place Gallery, 702 8th St. NW in Washington.

An October FCC order on hearing aid compatibility (HAC) and volume control on wireline and wireless phones takes effect March 30 (see 1710240062 or 1710240058), said a Tuesday public notice. The rules include a requirement that within three years, all HAC wireless handsets include volume controls.

Mobile device manufacturers should take a more comprehensive approach to recording security update information, said FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Senior Attorney Lesley Fair Monday. Recordkeeping should include more information on security update support length, update frequency and update acceptance so manufacturers can “learn from experience,” she said. Her comments support recommendations made in an FTC report last week. Fair said the report analyzed: Are consumers getting the patches they need to protect against critical vulnerabilities? Are companies timely deploying those patches? Why do so many devices go without critical patches? CTA and CTIA didn't comment.

Without a “marketing spend” to revitalize its name, Sony will remain a niche brand in smartphones, said IHS analyst Ian Fogg in a Mobile World Congress recap. Sony has been “a genuine leader” in new mobile technologies in recent years, but “it has failed to convert technology leadership positions into market leadership,” Fogg said. Sony bowed at MWC the Xperia XZ2 smartphone with a 5.7-inch, 18:9 display and 4K HDR video recording, a first for a phone, and a 5-inch version of the phone with a 1080p display. It also launched the Xperia Ear Duo, open earbuds compatible with Android and iOS. Sony’s 2017 mobile market share was 1 percent vs. 1.1 percent the year before with shipments of 13.7 million, said IHS. Sony has improved its design “but not enough to stand out in the market,” Fogg said. Sony’s innovations in the 2018 smartphones will “set the tone for the smartphone market for the next few years,” said the analyst, saying other smartphone OEMs will deliver similar capabilities in the future, including “copying Sony’s 4K HDR video capture.” The CE company reached the market first with 960-frame-per-second slow-motion video capture last year, which Samsung came out with last week in the Galaxy S9, and Sony was first with on-phone noise cancellation, high-quality audio formats and the first 4K display, Fogg noted. “But Sony has failed to market these features to consumers and use these differentiated features to re-grow its business."

AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo and Orange formed the Open Radio Access Network Alliance, a “carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next generation wireless systems.” ORAN combines the C-RAN Alliance and the xRAN Forum, the companies said. It's “committed to evolving radio access networks -- making them more open and smarter,” they said Tuesday. “Real-time analytics that drive embedded machine learning systems and artificial intelligence back end modules will empower network intelligence.”

The FCC is publishing in the Federal Register Wednesday a notice with effective dates for part of new rules for wireless emergency alerts, approved by commissioners in January (see 1801300027). The major parts, including requirements for more accurate geo-targeting of alerts, don’t kick in until much later. Effective April 29 is language saying carriers participate in the WEA program “in whole” when they agree to “transmit WEA Alert Messages in a manner consistent with the technical standards, protocols, procedures, and other technical requirements implemented by the Commission in the entirety of their geographic service area, and when all mobile devices that they offer at the point of sale are WEA-capable.”

Global sales of smartphones to end users totaled 407.85 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 5.6 percent decline from a year earlier, said a Gartner report. It was the first year-on-year quarterly decline recorded since Gartner started tracking the global smartphone market in 2004, the company said. Replacement smartphone users are “choosing quality models and keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones,” and that contributed to the decline, said Gartner. Of the top five global brands, only Huawei and Xiaomi had Q4 sales increases, said the report. Samsung’s sales fell 3.6 percent to 74.03 million phones, and iPhone sales declined 5 percent to 73.18 million, it said. Apple finished Q4 with a 17.9 percent global unit share in smartphones, second to Samsung’s 18.2 percent, it said. The two companies finished Q4 a year earlier virtually tied in unit share at 17.8 percent each, it said.

The FCC needs to move with care as it examines ways to fight contraband cellphones in correctional facilities, said the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We share the interest of the Commission in protecting the welfare of facility administrators, law enforcement authorities, and the general public,” the groups said. “Mandates for hard kill switches and proprietary technology will create new security vulnerabilities, and the lack of judicial review within the kill switch process will violate established protections for due process.” If "a device is misidentified as contraband and subsequently disabled, the owner of the device will be permanently deprived of their device without any warning or explanation,” said the filing in docket 13-111. Chairman Ajit Pai said recently he will appoint a task force to look at technological solutions (see 1802080035).

X-Rite and its Pantone subsidiary are working on an end-to-end mobile system that embeds color management technology in a smartphone for color matching. It will combine an ams 11-channel spectral sensor and optical components packaged together in a module that can measure color of objects in a noncontact manner and compare them to Pantone’s cloud-based color reference system, they said. The module, designed to fit in the back of a smartphone, allows consumers, brands and retailers to identify and share product colors “with a higher degree of color confidence,” they said.

The iPhone captured a record 51 percent share of global smartphone factory revenue in Q4, with Samsung a distant second at 15.7 percent, said Strategy Analytics in a Thursday report. The firm estimates global revenue climbed 8 percent in Q4 to reach an all-time-high of $120 billion, it said. Average selling prices (ASPs) surged 18 percent in the quarter to $300, it said: “The smartphone industry has managed to increase massively its pricing and revenues, despite a recent decrease in shipment volumes.” The firm credited “solid demand” for the iPhone X as driving Apple’s strong share performance in the quarter. “Apple now accounts for more revenue than the rest of the entire global smartphone industry combined,” it said. “Apple generated three times more smartphone revenue than nearest rival Samsung,” and seven times that of Huawei, it said. The iPhone’s ASP is approaching $800, “almost three times higher than the overall industry average,” it said.