As a big fan of the long running Desert Island Discs radio programme, I was interested to see that its entire archive is now up for grabs in smartphone-friendly form on the Web, with over 500 of the shows fully downloadable in MP3 form. Thousands of guests, tens of thousands of music picks and a huge amount of auto-biographical chat, all in MP3 form. Screens and links below. Download and enjoy.
Nokia and Accenture today announced plans for a strategic collaboration, which will see Nokia transfer its Symbian software activities to Accenture. As a result, around 3,000 Nokia employees will transition to Accenture. Accenture will then provide Symbian-related development and support services to Nokia. In the future, Accenture will also provide future smartphone ecosystem services around the Windows Phone platform to Nokia.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you've ever considered developing applications and selling through the Ovi Store, then you might like to read a blog post by Sebastian Brannstrom (@Teknolog). Sebastian is the author of the now de facto podcast agent "Podcatcher". In the post he explains why he put Podcatcher on the Ovi Store, and shares some of his sales data. It's an interesting read with some very unexpected results. Read on for more.
The Qt labs team has just announced the release candidate (RC) for its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.1. This follows from its recent beta release. The final release, following this RC, will allow developers to take advantage of all the latest Qt features and submit Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store. However, it should be noted that Qt 4.7 will not support S60 3rd Edition, which sadly, but predictably, points to a deprecation of that version of Symbian. Read on for more details.
I was interested to see that the Nokia N8 made number three in ZDNet's "My top 5 smartphones", as listed by Matt Miller in his regular column. It's an American site, of course, so the number one pick is something we've never even seen in the UK, the HTC Thunderbolt, while numbers two and five aren't exactly widely available. But the N8 slots in quite happily at three, with the iPhone 4 at four.
Every month I tell myself that I'm not going to add the N8 photo awards as a link of interest and then every month one of the winning entries blows me away so much that I simply have to write about it. The '1st' pick this month is quite simply staggering - I've included a cut down version below so that you can nod your head and agree with me. This was captured on a phone? Here are the rest of the winners and other info.
There's a fascinating look, from Laptop magazine in the USA, embedded below, at a new solar charging technology from Wysips. Using an ultra-thin (less than 100 microns) photo-voltaic layer on top of the usual smartphone touchscreen, it can deliver up to 250mW of power. Although it's unlikely that such a layer could eliminate the need for traditional charging, the extra top-up factor could well double effective battery life. The technology will be launched officially in 2012 and may be in devices within a couple of years.
A definite link of interest of for all Nokia users is the Nokia Support Videos channel on YouTube. We’ve posted before about support videos having been posted for individual phones. Now though, Nokia have compiled all of these into a well presented, cover flow-like, custom YouTube page. Digging further into the standard YouTube video listings reveals support videos for other Nokia devices such as the E72 and N900.
