Gartner's latest survey of the the mobile marketplace shows the growth of smart-phones continuing, with a worldwide increase in the order of 16%, but with a particularly large jump in the US market. Total Q2 sales were 32.2 million, and reflecting the recently released Symbian figures, Nokia retained the largest market share (47.5%), but with slower growth than others in the market.
Pre-order information on Expansys suggests that Nokia's Comes with Music handsets may have a premium of around £70-£85. Comes with Music gives you unlimited music downloads for a year (and the right to keep that music at the end of the year). However it is must be noted that these prices should be considered speculative and subject to change. Read on for more details.
In All About Symbian Insight #38 (AAS Podcast #91) Rafe and Steve chat about where the Nokia N96 lines up, firmware updates to the Nokia N95 and N95 8GB, look forward to Comes with Music announcements and touch on Symbian's Q2 results. The main part of the insight covers the newly released Samsung I8510 and our first impressions of its 8 megapixel camera.
Samsung will be taking up Nokia's offer to bring the last of the Symbian Shares under the Finnish roof (reports Reuters). With Nokia now in receipt of acceptances from all the shareholders, they will gain 100% control of the company, and will be able to implement the Symbian Foundation plan, and we suspect a major reorganisation of the Symbian staff.
...In which I am impressed by a couple of examples of superbly 'joined-up' applications from the iPhone world. Can the Symbian ecosystem compete? What advantages does the iPhone have to help the creation of joined-up apps and is there hope for similar software for S60 users? Comments welcome - can you think of any similarly impressive Symbian examples?
As you may have already seen, Google has launched a new web browser for Windows PCs called Chrome. According to their comic PR site, it's based on the WebKit open source browser engine, which is also used as the browser engine in the Symbian S60 browser and OS X Safari browser. WebKit currently powers the default browsers on Nokia, Samsung and Apple smartphones as well as Macintosh computers, and Google is taking it onto Windows PCs as well as its own Android. It seems there's now a potential for WebKit to dominate almost every major computing platform, could this be game over for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer?
Symbian's report on their business in the second quarter of 2008 makes some good reading. The Headline number of shipped Symbian OS units is an impressive 225.9 million units over 249 different models, and compared to Q2 2007, there's been an increase in sales for that period of 5%. Digging a little deeper, the royalty received peer unit has dropped from an average of $4.30 to $3.40, leading to an 18% drop in income from royalties.
In All About Symbian Insight #37 (AAS Podcast #90) Rafe, Steve and Ewan chat about Nokia's new Nseries devices - the N79 and N85. Also in this Insight: Steve reports back on his Samsung G810 experience, there's discussion of Sync on Ovi and how it points the way for three pronged future of Nokia's service platform.
In the fourth and (probably) last part of my series investigating whether a Windows-using S60 user should consider switching to an Apple Mac, I look at tethering, installing applications, backing up and updates. I also sum up my Mac experience and end up perched in a painful position right on top of a fence...
Thanks to Rita for pointing all of us to Wapedia, something I'd totally forgotten about but which seems now to be much better and really useful. It's a low bandwidth, regularly converted version of the full Wikipedia site and it works really well in a mobile browser. Here's the full write-up by Rita over at the Symbian Guru site.
Utility developer Warelex has produced Wi-Fi enabled versions of its popular Mobiola Screen Capture, Mobiola Web Camera and Remote Control applications, claiming that the new connection method is "much better for presentation and frame rate". In addition, there are two new applications that I'd not heard of: Mobiola Headset and Mobiola Headset for Skype which (as they sound) make use of a S60 phone as a PC headset. Also worth noting is that Warelex is now part of SHAPE Services, another established Symbian OS developer.
S60 followers in virtual world Second Life might want to visit the Nokia Island today as the August edition of the 'Nokia Connected Worlds' virtual meeting is being held at 11am SL time (7pm UK time). Running for three hours this month, with a discussion of various social networks opening the event, followed by the Virtual Business Panel, with music from DJ Ren Diqui for the final hour and after part.
You might recall the discussions over Scott Foe's look at the future of gaming from the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. Well now you can see the whole talk online via the online video service, Vimeo. There's a number of areas that the article glossed over, so here's your chance to see Foe's unfiltered thoughts.
iPhone 3G owner and blogger Tarek Esber has had enough of Apple's device and has gone back to an S60 phone. Here he lists in articulate detail the nine reasons why the S60 device is superior for his needs. An interesting read (via this week's Carnival of the Mobilists)
Yesterday's N79 and N85 launches were different in that there was no physical event - the whole thing was virtual. Leaving aside the preview day and annoying leaks, does the use of a virtual launch represent a successful new style for Nokia? Ewan thinks so and was quite impressed, reckoning that Nokia has found their own 'voice'.
