The Skype experience will be part of the address book of the Nokia N97, enabling presence – seeing when Skype contacts are online – as well as instant messaging. Nokia N97 owners around the world will also be able to use 3G and WLAN to easily make and receive free Skype-to-Skype voice calls, in addition to low-cost Skype calls to landlines and mobile devices.“Making Skype available everywhere through mobile devices is essential to fulfilling our vision of ‘enabling the world’s conversations’,” said Scott Durchslag, Skype’s Chief Operating Officer. “Collaborating closely with Nokia to preload and integrate our software onto their devices will benefit the many Nokia customers who already use Skype, as it makes Skype easily accessible and simple to use on the go. It will also bring Skype new users who love Nokia’s Symbian S60 experience.”

“With more than 400 million Skype users worldwide, the integration of Skype on Nokia Nseries mobile computers is a significant step in bringing converged Internet experiences from the desktop to the world’s most advanced mobile computer,” said Jose-Luis Martinez, Vice President, Nokia Nseries.

Samsung said in a statement its “Blue Earth” solar-powered model had a touch screen and was made from plastic taken from used water bottles. It did not give pricing information or say when the phone would go on sale.

Samsung also launched two phones with 8-megapixel cameras, the Ultratouch and OmniaHD, and two music phones, the BeatDJ and BeatDisc.

Adobe, which makes Acrobat, Flash and Photoshop software, plans to bring a full PC version of its Flash video player to smartphones next year, but has no imminent deal to announce for Apple’s influential iPhone, it said.

With such a move, Adobe will allow developers to design visually rich software that works on smartphones just as it does on computers — eliminating the common and frustrating experience of files appearing in garbled form on phones.

The company will be previewing its Flash Player 10 for smartphones at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest annual gathering.

Smartphones with Flash Player 10 running on Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Nokia’s Symbian S60 platforms should be on the market next year, said David Wadhwani, Adobe’s platform business chief.

He said Adobe was still working with Apple on an iPhone version but would not be announcing anything on that subject at this week’s show.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any new information to provide,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “We don’t have anything to announce at the show on that topic.”

Adobe, which revolutionized the way video, pictures and documents could be viewed and edited on the Web — helping the rise of sites like YouTube — has already shipped its pared-down Flash Lite video player in almost 1 billion mobile phones.

Last year, almost 40 percent of all new mobile devices shipped contained Flash Lite, and Adobe said it expects to ship another 1.5 billion in the next two years.

The move is a further step by the search giant into the mobile phone market, where Apple Inc has encountered success with its iPhone.

Developers such as Electronic Arts Inc have been anxious to expand sales of their mobile phone games to the Android Market, which has been limited to free applications until now.

Google said in a statement on Friday that consumers will have to pay for the applications via its Google Checkout payment product.

Google’s Android Market will initially carry paid applications from developers in the United States and Britain, with plans to allow developers in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Spain to participate later this quarter.

In Kenya and Turkey, millions of people use phones to send money or access their bank accounts; in Japan, more than 50 million people, or about half of all cell phone users, already carry phones capable of serving as wallets.

The technology for paying with cell phones by flashing them near reading equipment in stores or on public transport is ready, and the initial feedback is good, said Mary Carol, head of mobile in Visa Europe .

“Trials show that consumers overwhelmingly like it,” Carol said. “The biggest problem has been the business model.”

It will also take at least until 2010 before phones equipped with such technology are widely available, and the financial industry and telecom operators need to agree on some kind of revenue and role split, industry executives say.

The meeting of the two industries will be one of the key topics next week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.

“Both — the financial sector and telecom operators — want to own the relationship with the client, this is one of the hottest issues,” said Juha Murtopuro, chief executive of Valimo Wireless, which provides cell phone identification technologies.

Murtopuro and other industry players said they expect a compromise to be eventually found, with solutions to vary from market to market.

But the ingredients are already there, given the number of consumers already owning both a mobile phone and bank account.

“Consumers are customers of multiple parties. This is something very typical also in our core industry,” said Art Kranzley, chief technology officer at Mastercard .

EMERGING MARKET OPPORTUNITY

For many consumers in emerging markets, their first banking transactions will likely be done through cell phones.

“All the pieces are coming into place for mobile banking to transform the way some 1.5 billion people get banking services in emerging markets,” said Elizabeth Littlefield, head of CGAP, a policy and research center seeking to improve financial access for the world’s poor.

In Kenya, 5 million people have signed up in less than two years to use Safaricom’s M-Pesa service, which enables people to send money to each other.

CGAP said M-Pesa is 45 percent cheaper than other transfer services, with 83 percent of users seeing a “large negative impact” on their lives if they did not have the service.

In Turkey, some 2 million transactions — most of them cash withdrawals from ATMs — were made last year using Turkcell’s mobile service.