The telephone market is dominated by Slim Telefonos de Mexico A.K.A. Telemex which provides nearly 80 percent of the services, while billionaire Carlos Slim controls around 70 percent of the cellphone market with America Movil.

Dionisio Perez-Jacome, minister of Communications and Transport had this to say, according to one source:

“This is a critical study…that exposes the weakness of the telecommunications sector in Mexico.”

In the year 2008, Telemex had a profit margin of nearly 50 percent, while countries like Canada and the UK only had close to 30 percent. Mexican Government is, in the mean time, trying to increase broadband speeds in mexico, which apparently they feel will soften the blow of thee high prices. Evidently in their opinion broadband speed trumps ridiculous price.

In your opinion, does speed outweigh price or do steep prices steer you elsewhere? Should speed and price equal each other? With this economy who can afford expensive internet anyway? Leave your opinions in the comments section

File this one under silly and unnecessary, the Invoxia NVX 610 being shown off at CES combines a desktop phone with an iPod, iPhone or iPad to make and receive calls.

The NVX 610 is a desktop phone with a port to fit your favorite iDevice in to replace the office phone. The calls are made from the iDevice and can be made to either office or phone contacts. The same is true for incoming calls as the device allows for integration of both contact lists. It uses Skype or SIP to make calls.

The phone’s main selling point is that it features excellent sound quality. The stand on which both phones sit is a speaker that can be used in hands-free mode for conference calls. It also allows the user to listen to all music and sound related apps on the iDevice.

The device can be remotely updated by the company so any and all future iDevices will be supported.

It features two USB ports on the back, one of which is taken by the corded handset. It also has two ethernet ports with one of them being a Power over Ethernet port to power the phone. Also features Bluetooth technology for wireless communication with your iPhone or iPod. It can also pair the phone with a wireless headset, thereby invalidating the need for the handset.

This may be the most needless device I have seen at CES this week. Every device has a market and I’m sure the NVX 610 will find a market. I just don’t see why we need to integrate a smartphone into everything. The NVX 610 represents the pinnacle of needless smartphone integration because it integrates the smartphone with a phone.

Is the NVX 610 a needless product? Are you tired of seeing smartphone integration with every other device? Does it seem useful to you? Let us know in the comments.

With the Galaxy Note, Samsung is trying to split the difference between the smartphone and the tablet. The HD Super AMOLED display measures 5.3 inches – right in the middle of the 3.5-4-inch screens of most smartphones and the 7-inch screens of many tablets. It also comes with an S Pen (i.e., a stylus), that promises somewhat finer control than users can get with a finger alone. The device also sports a 1.4 GHz dual core processor, a 2 megapixel front-facing camera and 8 megapixel rear-facing camera, HD video recording, and 16 GB of internal memory along with a microSD card slot.

While 7-inch tablets have generally done fairly well, Steve Jobs famously said that 10 inches was the bottom limit for an iPad. Anything smaller, he said, would suffer from an identity crisis – too small to be a tablet, too big to be a phone. With the Galaxy Note, Samsung has deliberately created a device with the very identity crisis Jobs worried about, and used that as a selling point. It will be interesting to see how well the device does (at least Samsung is immune to charges of copying Apple on this one). Look for more information as the reviews start to roll in. Meanwhile, check out the video below, then let us know what you think in the comments.

While that may very well be the main reason for Google’s most expensive acquisition to date (provided it gets regulatory approval), there are certainly other factors at play and other bonuses that Google gets with the acquisition.

Henry Blodget at Business Insider thinks the whole thing could be a disaster. “Well, for starters, the deal creates major channel conflict: Google is now competing with its partners,” he writes. “And hardware manufacturing is an entirely different kind of business than Google’s core business. And hardware manufacturing is a crappy, low-margin commodity business. And Motorola is massive–Google has just increased the size of its company by 60%. And the deal appears to be purely a defensive move, not an offensive one. And so on.”

HTC, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson have all lent their public support of the deal. They all pretty much say the same thing: “We welcome it.” I’m guessing the reaction isn’t quite as simple out of the public eye.

Meanwhile, Larry Dignan at ZDNet gives six compelling reasons why it “makes sense” These (in a nutshell) are: “Integration may be all that matters” in wireless, the patents “treasure trove,” TV (Motorola’s set-top box business), Google can likely keep hardware partners “in the fold” at least for now, the deal forces Microsoft’s hand, and Android “boxes in Nokia and RIM”.

The point about the set-top boxes is quite interesting. It’s no secret that Google TV hasn’t quite worked out the way the company hoped, at least as of yet. Could owning Motorola Mobility provide a needed boost to give Google TV more legs to stand on?

There’s also things like:

The Motonav GPS, Modems and routers, and even Baby Monitors. Here’s a look at Motorola’s product page:

Then there’s the various software, like Motoblur, Media Link, Motospeak, etc.

Last year, Motorola Mobility acquired Aloqa, a mobile service that notifies users of places, events, music, movies and other activities based on location and personalization. One has to wonder if Google will do something with this:

Motorola Mobility also acquired Zecter last winter. This was a media sync/streaming company. This could come in handy as the company competes with Apple’s iCloud.

At the time of this writing, Google stock is down 2.58%.

"Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers," says Google software engineer Robin Schriebman. "But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?’"

Google tested the feature internally before releasing it to the public (in the U.S. so far). When users with Google Voice numbers call people, that number will display as the caller ID.

Along with the launch, the company showed off some phone booths it will be setting up in universities and airports. Danny Sullivan got to peek inside one:

The phone booths should go a long way in showing off this feature and familiarizing people with Google Voice in general, which seems to be the company’s real goal.

Clearly there is an interest in making phone calls from Gmail, as the numbers from the first day indicate.