From AAS's department of the bleedin' obvious come comments from me after looking into data from the last ten years in the Symbian world, looking at screen sizes across a range of form factors and interfaces (including Series 80 and UIQ). Yes, form factors are gradually converging, and yes, screens are getting larger. No real surprise there then, but I thought you might be interested in the charts themselves below...
Nokia’s blog has picked out five applications for your smartphone that will make your time at the summer music festivals just that little bit better. But only five? Surely there are more than that? Ewan Spence dons his blue suede trainers and heads online to find the top apps for music lovers. Power and bandwidth aside, what else do you need?
David Gilson has a theory. It concerns correlating the aspect ratio of a smartphone's virtual or physical qwerty keyboard with text entry speed, on the grounds that one's thumbs have more (or less) work to do, depending on form factor. Read on for his data and the theory in detail - and see if you can help produce more data points with your own device(s).
Nokia's social media outreach initiatives continue apace. Today, from 6 pm (UK time), Niklas Savander, who recently became Nokia's head of sales and marketing, will be answering questions submitted to his Twitter account @NiklasatNokia. The Nokia Conversations Blog has invited everyone to ask any Nokia related questions they may have. Answers will come back via Twitter or via video.
During its N8 developer event, which took place in London yesterday, Nokia demonstrated some of the key features of their upcoming Symbian^3 handset. This included, for the first time on a real device, a preview of the new Ovi Store client. The new Ovi Store client has been redesigned to make it more attractive and easier to use. Read on for some exclusive images and preview comments.
I hope the industry are paying attention to yesterday’s launch of the Blackberry 9800 Torch. This was the new Blackberry, the next step up in the portfolio and even at a mid-range price, is being perceived as the flagship device. With a new version of the operating system paired with solid, but not stunning, hardware choices in the processor, screen and memory department, the reaction has been similar to that of Nokia’s N8. Some thoughts from me below.
The 'Best RSS Apps' section of Nokia's 2010 Calling All Innovator competition has been judged and a top 10 Ovi App Wizard apps (actually Web runtime widgets) listed, based on 'Innovativeness', 'Cumulative number of downloads on July 15th 2010' and 'Quality of marketing materials'. They're all covered below, with brief comments and screenshots, in case you should want to look any of them out(!).
One we all missed last week, but Nokia have released an updated version of their application suite for Ramadan. Following on from the acclaim of the 2009 release, this year Nokia have gathered everything under a single application. When we talk about Nokia reaching out to customers, this is a wonderful example. See below for details.
The Register’s Top Ten Essential Symbian Apps makes for a good list. I’m sure we could argue that there are some apps that should be there which aren’t, but that’s always the fun of these lists. The question might be what are your top ten apps? Let us know in the comments.
Rafe's at Nokia's N8 Developer Launch event at The Century Club in London today and you can follow his thoughts and reporting via the official @aas Twitter account. The event aims to "provide an introduction to Qt and the Nokia N8 - complete with live developer workshops at all levels and an opportunity for some hands on time with the device itself." Not that Rafe's a stranger to the N8 - see his extensive hands-on gallery here, but we're sure he'll come back with some interesting new titbits anyway. More links and a pic below.
NAVTEQ, the division of Nokia that provides mapping and location data services, has announced that its new JourneyView product has entered into a private beta period, ahead of a full launch early next year. The JourneyView product is a combination of 360 degree street-level imagery and links to map and POI content. The private beta is intended to allow developers and other partners to get a demo of the data and help shape the final specification of the product.
What’s the most used internet application on your Symbian phone? It’s likely that the web browser is going to feature quite highly if we were to have a survey, and the huge number of eyes that mobile websites can gather is only going to grow in the future. That makes it one of the growth areas for online advertisers, and the capabilities of Symbian-powered smartphones should help drive innovation and help grow the market for everyone involved. My thoughts below....
Canalys has just released a limited set of numbers for smartphone sales in Quarter 2, 2010, showing Nokia with a leading 38% marketshare across the world, with actual sales of its Symbian-based smartphones up 41% year on year. RIM's Blackberrys were second in terms of smartphone marketshare, with 18%, while Apple was at 13% worldwide. Android-powered smartphones made up a lot of the 'noise' in the analysis, split across a multitude of manufacturers, but showing very siginificant growth, as you'll see from the table below.
Sales of mobile phones in Q2 this year are up over 19% compared to last year (reports ABI Research). There are some slight changes, with Nokia and Samsung dropping share slightly, in part due to re-organisation for Nokia and the prevailing economic conditions hitting Samsung. The launch timing of the iPhone 4 hasn’t helped Apple, who also dropped market share. Mind you, with all sales up, that’s still more handsets sold by each company compared to the raw numbers from Q2 2009.
You've seen the 'pinching and zooming' adverts for many (non-Symbian) smartphones, showing lightning fast manipulation of full desktop-class web page renders, with new pages 'coming down' in a matter of seconds. "It's the Internet in your pocket" say the promos. And, from my own observations, for many people this is utter pie in the sky. Out in the real world, mobile coverage and bandwidth falls diabolically short - which partly helps explain the popularity of a certain proxy-based web browser that works on everything and enables not the 'real web', but more 'looks and feels a lot like the real web, but isn't really'...
