What Happens After The MWC?
Ewan continues to ponder on the ramifications of Mobile World Congress. How will the next year or so pan out and who will be the winners and losers? More importantly, in which direction is the smartphone industry heading?
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AAS Insight #13 - First Impressions of MWC
In All About Symbian Insight #13 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss their first impressions of Mobile World Congress 2008. Rafe gives his impressions from the show floor while Steve and Ewan pick out their highlights from the various announcements and cover a variety of news from last week.
Thoughts From The BBC on a Mobile MWC
While the usual web suspects had their tricks ready for covering last week's MWC, the BBC's Technology team of Darren Walters (back at base) and Rory Cellan-Jones (on site reporter) were happily posting away on their BBC blog using an N95 and the latest mobile software tools (such as Shozu) Darren and Rory's thoughts are here and here respectively. And while you read that, I think I need to get a big "Isn't that demarcation?" sticker for the Camera Crew.
1 in 5 of Us Use Phones For Our Mobile Music
Up to 20% of mobile users are listening to music on their mobile. That's the findings of the latest M:Metrics report (via SMS Text News). This sits very nicely with the numbers Nokia have reported for sage of their Music Store - 20% of eligible users have registered with the store. Nokia also report that 25% of that number (ie 5% of the total) use the on-device client; a significant improvement on the 1.1% that M:Metrics report downloading direct to the device.
Behind the Scenes at Playyoo
Playyou, the social gaming network that lets you build your own games (Hmmm, why does that sound familiar) has a nice Q&A on their blog with Kars Alfrink, who does consulting work with them. Partly it's to highlight his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference on Casual Social Gaming, but also about Playyoo's Games Creator software.
Watchout - Possible Gridlock Ahead!
Service after service, app after app, solutions keep appearing to offer media streaming (from our own hard disks or from hosted servers) over the air. But what happens when the masses start doing this and the bandwidth runs out? Is putting all our music online really the best solution? When it comes to media that's truly mobile, you can't beat the old school approach, I reckon....
Mobile World Congress 2008 - The Incremental Show
Mobile World Congress 2008 certainly hasn't been a washout - there have been announcements right, left and centre that are definitely of interest. But there haven't been any slam dunk launches that have got the whole show floor talking, argues Ewan. For those, you'll have to wait until MWC 2009...
1000 Pirate Downloads Is Only Losing One Legal Purchase
Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
It All Sounds LIke Noise To Me (Here Comes Dolby)
Stefan points out the announcement of Dolby Mobile at Mobile World Congress, an audio process to create "rich vibrant surround sound" on a mobile device. It sounds remarkably like a repackaging of Dolby technology that was displayed at CES 2006, but it's nice to see the audio names reaching out to mobile (and putting out a 'we're here in the mobile space' press release into the bargain).
emoze Gets Personal
Push email specialist emoze seems to be improving in all areas. Their free push service has just been extended to anyone with any POP3 account (i.e. no GMail or Exchange needed). And, unlike the GMail dedicated client, this one's native Symbian OS, so it's faster and leaner. Well worth checking out if you've been lusting after push email but didn't know how to get started.
Keep Your Batteries Above The Red Line
After his recent thesis of battery threshold, Steve's now asking why the battery life of a smartphone is getting worse. The recent announcements at 3GSM have only confirmed this to him, and now he's ready to present his evidence. Is your smartphone above or below the thin red line of battery capacity?
Ovi Share demoed
Before you get too discouraged by Ewan's 'sharing' analysis(!), here's a nice (Flash) demonstration of what can be achieved by Ovi's Share (/Twango) - working on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, the slideshow is equivalent to a small book...
What If The Mainstream Doesn't Want To Share?
Is 'sharing' a good marketing angle for the mainstream? In typically controversial fashion, and with a good sense of Web 2.0 in the real world, Ewan isn't so sure. What fraction of Nseries phone buyers, for example, are really going to get to grips with sharing online and geo-tagging?
Symbian OS now powers 7% of all phones sold
Symbian chose to wait until MWC before releasing their own Q4 results for 2007 and the full press release is quoted below. There's also a video webcast to stream if you want to see Symbian's CEO and CFO go through the numbers in person. Standout highlights include the fact that Symbian OS now powers around 7% of all phones being sold worldwide (up from 5%), with just over 22 million Symbian OS-powered smartphones shipped in Q4/2007.
Opera Mini Reaches 100,000 Downloads A Day
No matter how you break it down, having your application downloaded 100,000 times every day is a crazy number, and one worth shouting about. So that's what Opera have done. Opera Mini is the software getting the accolade (on top of last week's upgrade announcement), and the free browser with a proxy rendering client deserves it.
