According to Carl-Christian Buhr from the Digital Agenda for Europe, the ill fated SYMBEOSE open source project, proposed six months ago, has been quietly cancelled, to noone's surprise, given that Symbian itself is back within Nokia's control and is no longer open source. Apparently, no money ever changed hands, either... making the whole initiative something of a damp squib.
Just a couple of weekend links of interest. The Ovi Store publishing team has announced that application update notifications are coming this week in an update of its Ovi Store client, v2.8, initially for Symbian^3 phones only. Quote below, we'll cover this more when v2.8 actually appears. In other news, the folks at phoneArena have pitted the Nokia N8's camera against those in the LG Optimus 2X, the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S II. Suffice it to say that the N8's unit acquits itself very well, but kudos to the feature compiler for the work that's gone into this detailed comparison.
Following on from the first, second and third episodes, here is the fourth episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This 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. The fourth episode features discussion on NFC - what is it, what does it do and what are some of the issues surrounding its deployment.
Kevin Fury, over on his blog, has some interesting thoughts on what Microsoft are up to in the mobile space. Building blocks such as the Windows Phone OS, Nokia's hardware and manufacturing expertise, the voice and IM handling of Skype, what does it add up to? The supposition (also echoed in part by Dave Winer) is that the major technology firms are gearing up for a confrontation with the mobile carrier networks.
Following on from the IDC figures earlier this month, we now have Gartner's analysis and considered opinions, focussing on mobile operating systems and ecosystems, summarised and quoted below. Symbian-powered shipments were indeed now behind Android, but still retained 27% of the entire new smartphone market.
Japan's NTT DOCOMO has announced it summer 2011 collection of mobile devices. Out of twenty-four devices six are based on Symbian^2. They includes devices in the STYLE series (SH-11C and F-10C), PRIME Series (SH-10C and F-09C) and SMART series (F-11C). Also announced is the Fujitsu Loox F-07C, which dual boots Symbian (phone mode) and Microsoft Windows 7 (PC mode).
Nokia announced today that it will change its service branding from Ovi to Nokia. This will see the services change from Ovi Service to Nokia Service. For example, Ovi Maps to Nokia Maps. The transition will begin in July and is expected to be completed by the end of 2012 and Nokia says that the rebrand will have no impact on planned updates and improvements to the services.
Following on from the first two episodes, here is the third episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This 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. The third episode features a debate about app stores - are they the best thing since sliced bread or a break on the pace of innovation?
Microsoft today announced plans to acquire Skype, the Internet communications company, for US $8.5 billion. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of both companies and, pending regulatory approval, is expected to be completed later this year. The acquisition sets the scene for closer integration between Skype and Microsoft products, including Windows Phone. Given Microsoft and Nokia's recent tie up, it seems likely that future Nokia products may ship with Skype integration out of the box.
You've got to envy Mike Macias. Like many of us he has a Nokia N8 - but he also works in Long Beach, California, with some fabulous good weather and also the opportunity to photograph things on a huge scale. Boats, cranes.... and sunrises. Here he documents trying to capture the latter especially, though look back in his Flickr stream if you get a moment and you'll see plenty of other fine N8 camera phone photography. The downside of Mike's job? He often has to work some rather odd hours!
IDC has released its set of smartphone shipment figures for Q1 2011. They show that just under 100 million smartphones were sold last quarter. Nokia led the way with 24.2 million smartphones, followed by Apple (18.7m), RIM (13.9m), Samsung (10.8m) and HTC (8.9m). All manufacturers had increased shipments year on year, but by widely varying amounts. Nokia was the weakest (+12%), with RIM (+31%), Apple (+114%), HTC (+229%) and Samsung (+350%) all showing stronger growth.
Nokia's Chairman, Jorma Ollila, is to step down next year, reports Reuters. At Nokia's Annual General Meeting, held yesterday, Ollila, confirming what he said last September, announced that he would stand down in 2012 and that the search for his sucessor has already started. Ollia was CEO of Nokia from 1992-2006 and became the Chairman in 1999. He recently oversaw the appointment of Stephen Elop as the new CEO of Nokia, replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.
Following on from last week here is the second episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This 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. The second episode covers the recent Connected Creativity event, which explored some of the themes around the future of television and media consumption.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer appeared on stage at RIM's BlackBerry World to announce a partnership between the two companies to bring Bing services to Blackberry devices. Bing Search will be deeply integrated into the platform and Bing Maps will become the default mapping service. In part, this will make BlackBerry device a de facto part of the Microsoft-Nokia location services ecosystem.
Coming from S60 5th Edition's touchscreen keyboard, which had no intellgence whatsoever, the capacitive/predictive/correcting keyboard in Symbian^3 seems like a revelation, even if there's no multitouch yet and even if some of the defaults are wrong out of the box. But it's interesting to note that there's a still a way to go, as evidenced by this terrifically interesting piece on the team behind the intelligent virtual keyboard in Windows Phone 7. Can some of the lessons learned here help the team tasked with improving the Symbian virtual keyboard?
