Well done to James Burland for not only coordinating the rise and rise of the various Nokia Creative photo awards but also arranging prize sponsorship, starting from this month's Nokia N8 Photo Awards, with a new Nokia N8 for a friend and a large framed print of your winning photo, should you be picked out by James. The N8-shot photos submitted are stunning, really, one is shown below - and that one didn't even win.... Why not get involved?
GoodGuide, a company that rates products for their health, environmental and social impacts, has tested 576 world phones and smartphones, with Nokia making all of the top 26 models in the table, including Symbian smartphones like the C6-00, N8, E72 and E5. In case you were wondering, the bottom of the table is largely made up with RIM Blackberrys.
Sound-clip publishing service, Audioboo, is now available in the Ovi Store. The "Twitter for audio" allows you to record short messages on your phone, tag them with text and pictures. Once uploaded to the Internet, Audioboos can be shared, listened to, and commented on. Already a popular service on Android and iPhone, Audioboo is a welcome addition to the Symbian platform.
There's an interesting editorial over at The Telegraph, quoted below, in which the author questions, as I have done several times, the prevailing wisdom over whether the current craze for 'apps' (for accessing information and services) is a good thing. The editorial starts and ends in the pub, which is a good start to some decent left-field thinking. Why use 'apps' when we have the Web itself? Surely what we need is a better and more intelligent Web?
Please excuse the original story on this address, I was going by item numbers in Ovi Store URLs - it turns out that there isn't a strict one to-one correspondance between URL numbers and actual content items. The store simply now has over 100,000 allocated item IDs, many of which never materialised into content. Watch this space for some fuller Ovi Store statistics.
Somewhat ironic in the light of Nokia's imminent partnership with Microsoft to produce Windows Phone phones ("joining an ecosystem"), figures have been released showing that Nokia's Ovi Store revenues (much of which was from Symbian-based smartphones) were up 719% year on year and ahead of the Google Android Market. More stats below.
Just a heads-up that both my Phones Show video review of the Nokia E7 (also embedded below) and an edition of Phones Show Chat (post-that day) are now live. The former finds the E7 to perhaps be one compromise too many, while the latter sees David Gilson, Tim Salmon, Dan Carter and myself chewing over the Nokia-Microsoft news, plus the usual chit-chat, q&a and so forth. RSS and other links below.
Over on Engadget, Chris Ziegler has grabbed a video Q and A session at Mobile World Congress with Stephen Elop. It’s wide ranging in the ground covered, although given the short time-scale it’s mostly sound-bites and short paragraph style answers. And some questions were outright dodged. Nevertheless, it casts some more sunlight on the decisions of Elop and how the next few months are going to pan out for Symbian, Meego and Nokia.
Two days after its investor-focused Strategy and Financial meeting, much covered in previous stories, Nokia held a more consumer-focussed press conference just before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While the overall message was no different to Friday's event, Nokia did provide some additional details on its short-term Symbian plans. These include a wave of new devices and significant software updates for Symbian^3. [Story updated after Rafe got back from the event]
Nokia has a number of events taking place in and around Mobile World Congress. First up is a media briefing, which takes place on Sunday at 6:30 pm (5:30 pm GMT), second is a Nokia Developer Day, which kicks off at 10 am (9 am GMT) on Monday. Rafe will be reporting live from Barcelona, where MWC is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter account (@aas).
One of the implications of Friday's announcements was that in Nokia drastically reducing further development of the Symbian OS and ecosystem, the future of Qt, its next-gen development platform, was also put into doubt. After all, it's argued, Windows Phone has its own tool-chain and Qt simply isn't needed. Daniel Kihlberg, one of the top guys at Nokia's Qt division, has responded to the uncertainty with a rallying article, of which some quotes are copied below.
At its Strategy and Financial Briefing event today in London, Nokia has outlined its "new strategic direction, including changes in leadership and operational structure to accelerate the company's speed of execution in a dynamic competitive environment". Some more quotes below, but in short this means a reorganisation into "Smart Devices" and "Mobile Phones", and adding a new OS platform to its portfolio, with Windows Phone becoming Nokia's "primary smartphone platform" and Symbian becoming "a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value". More below, and more through the day, of course. Rafe's on the ground, see the other Coveritlive news item.
At a Strategy and Financial Briefing, which takes place at 10 am GMT on February 11th Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected to outline his vision for the future strategy of the company. Rafe will be reporting live from Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel, London, where the event is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter accounts (@aas and @allaboutmeego).
The well known music streaming and recommendation service, Last.fm, has announced that its online radio stations will become a premium only service. This will directly affect users of Mobbler, the only Last.fm client available for Symbian. For some time now, the Last.fm streaming radio stations have been available for free listening, supported by advertisements. Last.fm states on its blog that it has not been practical to support music streaming to emerging mobile markets, based on advertising income. Read on for more.
News reaches us from Norway that Opera, the mobile browser that many people turn to on a variety of mobile platforms, now has 105 million active mobile users every month. Made up of 90.4 million on the (mostly) java-based Opera Mini and another 15 million on Opera Mobile. That’s a huge achievement, so congratulations to everyone in Oslo that worked towards this. In addition, a new bespoke version of each for Symbian^3 smartphones is to be shown off at MWC next week.
