Nokia's Bad Call on Smartphones

Frank Nuovo, the former chief designer at Nokia Corp., gave presentations more than a decade ago to wireless carriers and investors that divined the future of the mobile Internet.

More than seven years before Apple Inc. rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen—all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad.

Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal

Former Nokia designer Frank Nuovo says the company had prototypes that anticipated the iPhone.

"Oh my God," Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. "We had it completely nailed."

Consumers never saw either device. The gadgets were casualties of a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.

Nokia led the wireless revolution in the 1990s and set its

India's Aircel carrier begins selling iPhone 3GS with annual data plan for $236

Apple's aging iPhone 3GS, which sells in the US for "free" when subsidized by an expensive AT&T contract, is now being sold in India outright for just $181 (9,999 Rand), when paired with year long, prepaid unlimited data plan that costs just $55. 

The new offer, which Aircel promotes as "unbelievable," supplies either "unlimited" 3G data (tethered from 3.6 Mbps to a rather slow 128Kbps after a fairly reasonable 2GB monthly data use) or a 2G plan that includes unlimited 2G data, 1000 minutes of talk and 2500 SMS per month. 

The new prepaid option is somewhat comparable to a new prepaid plan available in the US, tied to the brand new 16GB iPhone 4S or 8GB iPhone 4. Cricket Wireless began offering the two models in the US in June for $500 and $400, respectively, with a $55 per month "unlimited" plan that also slows down after 2.3GB of use.

In the US, iPhone plans have largely remained identical over the last five years even as new carriers Verizon and Sprint have partnered with Apple to sell the phone. Outside, however, carriers in other countries have tried different plans.

In some countries, including Japan, subscribers pay full price for iPhone hardware but pay it off in monthly installments as they use it, in addition to their lower service plan fees. 

In other markets, carrier subsidies are much lower, allowing cheaper smartphones to offer a greater price gap, undercutting the more premium-priced iPhone options available. 

Apple continues to experiment with its carrier plans, particularly in cheaper prepaid plans like those now being offered by Aircel in India and Cricket in the US. 

Sprint's prepaid subsidiaries Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile were both rumored to soon begin offering a similar plans to Cricket.

Within the last quarter, Apple has also added eight new regional US carriers offering slightly cheaper, conventional post-paid plans, including nTelos, Alaska Communications, GCI, Appalachian Wireless and Cellcom in April and Kentucky's Bluegrass Cellular, California's Golden State Cellular, and Kansas' Nex-Tech Wireless in May.

Apple plans smaller, cheaper iPad to take on Google's Nexus 7

Apple plans to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad by year-end to help maintain its dominance of the tablet market, two persons with knowledge of the plans said.

Apple plans to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad by year-end to help maintain its dominance of the tablet market, two persons with knowledge of the plans said.

The new model will have a screen that is seven to eight inches diagonally, less than the current 9.7-inch version, said the sources who asked not to be identified. The product, which Apple may announce by October, will not have the high-definition (HD) screen featured on the iPad that was released in March, said one of the sources.

A smaller, less expensive iPad could undercut the ambitions of Google, Microsoft andAmazon.com to gain traction in the advancing tablet market, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach.

The new device will probably have a price closer to Google's Nexus 7 tablet and