Yesterday Nokia quietly released an update to its C5-00 smartphone, in the form of the C5-00 5MP. The variant replaces the original 3.2 megapixel EDoF camera unit with a 5.0 megapixel EDoF unit. Other changes include additional internal memory (50MB to 270MB) and RAM (128MB to 256MB), and an increase in weight from 89.3g to 95g. The C5-00 5MP will go on sale in Q3 2011.
Nokia today announced a raft of updates coming soon for many S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition phones (listed below), giving them an updated version of the browser (Web v7.3 - the same as Symbian Anna), updates to Ovi Maps and the addition of emoticons for use in SMS and MMS messages. The browser update is the most significant and should breathe life into many older Symbian smartphones.
Both Engadget and Mobile Burn have been given previews of the next version of Windows Phone 7, installed on real world hardware. Mango will be the variant of Windows Phone that will power Nokia's first handsets in partnership with Microsoft. There's been a lot of people pointing out missing features and wondering what the OS would look like at the end of 2011, and with the caveats that these are still developer builds, these previews should help a lot.
There is a fascinating series of essays from long-time PDA and smartphone expert Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity, looking at the increasingly thorny issue of who will pay for the ever-growing amount of mobile bandwidth that's being demanded of our phone networks. Here's part 1, part 2 and part 3 (in part quoted below), well worth a read over your morning cuppa.....
I just couldn't resist another short link of interest, to the May edition of the Nokia Creative N8 awards, if only because the winners that get picked are nothing short of jaw-droppingly stunning. I've included one of them below, but please click through to the awards themselves for the full rundown and comments by James Burland. And all taken on a phone, remember...!
Following on from last week's episode, which focused on roaming, here is the ninth episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This week episodes focuses on Nokia; we look at its current situation and consider what next for Nokia? 361 Degrees is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian.
Nokia's Ovi Store is continuing to grow at a rapid pace; it recently passed the 6 million downloads per day mark and now contains more than 48,000 content items, with approximately 1,000 news items being added each week. Symbian phones make up approximately 75% of the downloads (4.5 million), with Series 40 accounting for most of the remaining downloads (1.5 million). A total of 1.8 billion content items have been downloaded since June 2009.
A video of an internal meeting where Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, shows off Nokia's first Windows Phone device, has been leaked on the Internet. The phone, which is codenamed Sea Ray, is running Windows Phone Mango and has a design similar to the recently announced Nokia N9. The leaked video is available on technet.hu, an independent technology website, which is based in Budapest, Hungary.
There's a fascinating piece over on Nokia Conversations at the moment about a pilot study on how solar power can be 'harvested' to power the next generation of phones and smartphones across the world. We've already got a number of solar powered mobile chargers, the next step is surely to start adding the photo-voltaic cells to the backs of phones themselves?
Nokia has announced that it plans to integrate its NAVTEQ business with its social location (Maps) services and operations. The new Location & Commerce business unit, which will be headed by Michael Halbherr, is tasked with developing the next generation of social location products and services for consumers. It will also continue with NAVTEQ's traditional activities of building platform services for device manufacturers, developers and service providers, but will look to more fully integrate Nokia's deep data assets around consumer behaviour and related community data.
Nokia Social 1.3, whose official appearance in the Ovi Store was reported on here, has formally 'graduated' from Nokia Beta Labs, according to a blog post today. Apparently it won't also appear in Nokia SW_update on current devices until Symbian Anna is released, presumably for technical reasons, so grab it from the Store instead for now. Interestingly, Nokia Social 1.4 was teased, including better Facebook integration and performance, plus automatic contact linking and smoother kinetic scrolling.
Following on from the intial announcement, Nokia and Accenture have announced they have finalised an agreement for Nokia to outsource Symbian software development and support to Accenture. As part of the agreement 2,800 Nokia employees, 200 less than originally cited, will transfer to Accenture when the deal is closed in October.
Nokia has the announced the dates for its big annual conference. Nokia World will take place on October 26th and 27th, at the ICC Excel venue in the East of London. The event will include keynotes, an experience (demo) lounge and developer focused activities. The timing of Nokia World makes it a likely candidate for the announcement of the first Nokia Windows Phone device, but we also expect to see other device and service launches.
The Qt Labs Developer Blog has just announced an update to the Qt SDK. In a case of good timing, the Qt team have released Qt Creator 2.2.1, which is mainly a bug fix release, at the same time as integrating support for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Support for MeeGo Harmattan comes on the day that the N9 was announced at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. Read on for more details.
Nokia made a number of important announcements today at its Nokia Connection event in Singapore. The Nokia N9, a MeeGo Harmattan smartphone, was announced. Equally important was the announcement that Qt would be at the core of bringing applications to the next billion users, indicating that Nokia intends to bring Qt to its mobile phone devices. Nokia also announced three new Touch and Type Series 40 devices.
