Nokia today announced that it plans to cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of 2012, as part of the restructuring resulting from its recent strategy changes. The majority of the cuts will take place in Finland, Denmark and the UK. They are part of the previously announced measures to cut Nokia's operational expenditure by €1 billion. In addition, a further 3,000 employees will move to Accenture as part of the transfer of Nokia's Symbian software activities, which was also announced today.
There's an interesting piece over at Gary Moncrieff's blog today that struck a chord with me. He talks about slick applications like SPB Shell, Profimail and Gravity but then explains why he'd rather go with Nokia's built-in solutions for Symbian^3 because they're far better integrated into the homescreen and Contacts. Go have a read and see if you agree.
The agreement for Nokia and Microsoft to work together to create a "new global mobile ecosystem", announced in February, has now been signed. Nokia and Microsoft will now continue to work together, each bringing their own strengths to the table, seeking to combine their complimentary assets. The two companies say that significant process has been made on the engineering of new products and that outreach to developers has already begun.
Nokia has released its Q1 2011 results, reporting an operating profit of €439 million (down 10% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €10.399 billion (up 9% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €439 million, down 10% from last year. Margins in devices and services were 9.8% (down 2.3% YoY and down 1.5% QoQ).
Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were 24.2 million, compared with 21.5 million units in Q1 2010 (up 13% YoY) and compared with 28.3 million units in Q4 2010 (down 14%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 26%, down 5% sequentially and 15% year on year. Read on for more analysis and more details.
Rafe'll be along soon with his own hands-on analysis of the Nokia E6 and X7 prototypes, but until then here's a very interesting little text interview with Chris Probert, the E6 product manager, answering some of the questions that you (and I) have about this new qwerty candybar device, the follow up to the popular E72. The questions cover display brightness, screen size, the lack of an optical sensor, the use of EDoF camera and software compatibility. Worth a read.
At the WIMA conference, currently under way in Monaco, Nokia and Rovio unveiled a preview of Angry Birds Magic, a version of the hit game that will be used to help promote NFC (Near Field Communication). The game, which continues the avian-porcine conflict, has levels that can only be unlocked by touching another NFC phone or NFC tag. The game will be pre-installed on Nokia C7's as part of the Symbian Anna update.
Today, at the Where 2.0 conference, Nokia announced the introduction of a 3D view for the web version of Ovi Maps. The 3D view, which is available for 20 metropolitan areas, uses photo-realistic 3D models to add an additional dimension to the traditional digital map view of the world. In addition, five cities also have a street level view, made up of connected 360 degree panoramic images. The new views are implemented as part of Ovi Maps 3D beta, which requires a browser plug-in to be installed.
As Easter approaches, the time is right for chocolate eggs - but what's this? The eggs have been stolen by those dastardly pigs? Yes, it's the same story, as the Angy Birds need to take back Easter. Angry Birds Seasons has received another update for the April, providing you more levels, more frustration and more physics-based feather-throwing fun.
Ovi Maps 3.7 (3.07) for Symbian^3 devices is now available for testing via the Nokia Beta Labs website. The biggest change is the modularisation of Ovi Maps into four key components: Maps, Drive, Check-in and Guides. Other updates include improvements to search, a redesign for the Places pages, the addition of location-based advertising, integration of weather into the Guides module, new voice files for navigation and easier view switching in Drive mode.
Although in theory linked to Nokia's 'Shorts' competition, N8 owners may be interested in Ari Partinen's nice blog post, "8 expert movie making tips for your Nokia N8", which echoes many of the things I've been saying over the last year and, bar a few small typos, is a nice bookmarkable piece that should improve anyone's N8 video capture.
The wonderfully named Maximiliano Firtman, over at his Mobile Web Programming blog, has been testing Symbian Anna's web browser (on the new Nokia X7) and here reports positively on its speed and interface, but he also raises questions about the relative lack of HTML5 support, supposedly critical for a 2011 browser.
Making a brief appearance on stage as part of the Windows Phone 7 presentation, Marco Argenti, Nokia's head of developer experiences, stressed the partnership of Nokia and Microsoft, but provided no new updates on the progress of the partnership. That’s to be expected, the day was Joe Belfiore’s, and he used it to showcase the new elements of the “Mango” update, likely to form the backbone of Nokia’s Windows Phone devices going forward in 2012.
Nokia announced yesterday that the Ovi Store now reaches up to five million downloads per day. Ovi Store now contains more than 40,000 content items, representing an eight fold increase in the catalogue since last year, with approximately 1,000 additional items being added every week. Symbian^3 devices (N8, C6-01, C7 and E7) are responsible for 15% of daily downloads (750,000 per day). Read on for charts and analysis.
Over on ReadWriteWeb, Mark Watkins takes a global look at the world of the check-in, the act of letting a social network such as Foursquare or Gowalla know where you are. He’s not sure that these location networks are able to maintain their growth or stay as a pure service. What do you think?
The Nokia E6 is finally out of the bag, and with it comes a particular practical consideration for developers. While all other Symbian^3 devices have the same 640x360 (nHD) screen resolution, the E6 stays true to its 4:3 messenger roots, having a screen resolution of 640x480 (VGA). This means that any applications written with the nHD resolution hard coded in will be incompatible with this new E71-style Symbian^3 QWERTY-toting enterprise device. Read on for advice and examples of how to get it right.
