While the press focus might be on the organisation of the Foundation, the operating system continues to drive forward, as NTT Docomo announce eleven new Symbian OS-powered handsets at the SEE2010 show. This makes 143 models of phone that have now used Symbian for the Japanese network.
Symbian's SEE show (Symbian Exchange and Exposition) takes place over the 9th and 10th of November in Amsterdam. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest photos and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas account on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and photos.
In a conference call this afternoon, Nokia and the Symbian Foundation outlined some major changes in how the Symbian operating system will be managed, going forwards. The Symbian Foundation will still handle licensing, trademark and patent issues, among other tasks, but all governance of the open source Symbian codebase will be taken up by Nokia. It was remarked that the 'foundation' model made perfect sense when there were five companies depending on the OS, but that it made less sense now, in late 2010.
A hugely entertaining read by Tim Ocock (formerly of Symbian) over on Tech Crunch Europe this morning. Ocock’s well placed to comment on “The Successful Failures” of Symbian, as he straddled engineering and management during his time at the company. Starting at the birth of Symbian, right through to his current advice to Nokia and the Symbian Foundation (ditch S40, support your developers with useful API’s and tools, and spend time educating the market and the Analysts), this is one to read over lunch."
Buoyed up by the recent SYMBEOSE funding, there will be a distinct air of optimism at SEE 2010, Symbian's annual two day show, this year in Amsterdam. Rafe will be there on the show floor and reporting on any announcements on the 9th and 10th November. The keynotes look like being more important than ever in the current economic and technological climate - I've already quoted the full list of speakers, moderators and panellists, but listed below are the main keynote speakers - expect to see Rafe and his trusty laptop near the front on the day!
SYMBEOSE, a consortium of organisations, led by the Symbian Foundation, has successfully applied for funding from the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, which is partly backed by the Europe Commission and aims to facilitate public-private partnership for research and development activities in embedded systems. As a result, the Symbian ecosystem will see an investment of €22 million, which will be focused on improving the ease of device creation, improving a number of the platform's core enablers and meeting requirements for future embedded systems.
The cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I have to hand it to Horace Dediu at Asymco. His graph of "sales vs profit per handset" not only shows how profitable some of the major manufacturers are, but also how Apple and Nokia are working completely different strategies in sales.
While it’s not the Q3 smartphones table, the latest numbers from IDC on global phone shipments make for interesting reading. As always, the devil is in the detail and you can argue this is good (or bad) news for any company, but Apple displacing Sony Ericsson will be a cause for celebration at Cupertino, especially as this is the first Top 5 table Sony Ericsson has not been in since this report started in 2004. Nokia is still on top of the pile with 32.4% market share on increased shipments of 1.8%, worldwide.
Possibly of most interest to developers and those 'in' the industry, I wanted to flag up that, despite all recent announcements and speculation, The Symbian Foundation's SEE 2010 event takes place on the 9th and 10th of November at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, billed as "the only event dedicated to bringing the Symbian community together and providing unique knowledge and insight from industry experts". Attendance is free to all, as usual. Some more details below.
If you're a Nimbuzz user, from Oct 31st you’ll no longer be able to access Skype via the orange tinged multiplatform IM client, as Skype have asked Nimbuzz to remove support for their platform. Nimbuzz are naturally upset about this, as it does diminish their offering to customers. Let’s be clear, Skype are within their legal rights to do this, so I’m expecting a lot of noise from Nimbuzz to try and put some public pressure on Skype. Are Skype right to take away their ball to preserve the user experience (and potentially their business reputation) ahead of an expected IPO?
Nokia today made an announcement that clarifies and simplifies its developer and software platform strategy. Nokia will focus on Qt as the sole application development framework across both MeeGo and Symbian, reinforcing and accelerating Nokia's previous commitment to it. Nokia will also develop its own future UI applications using Qt.
The planned and future development of the higher layers of Symbian OS itself will also rely heavily on Qt; Nokia says this will "allow a continuous improvement of the Symbian experience" and, critically, will be compatible with the existing Symbian^3 platform and devices. This will mean that existing Symbian^3 devices will be included in future updates and will receive many of the user experience and application improvements originally planned for Symbian^4. Going forward, Nokia will simply refer to the platform as 'Symbian', without any version specifics.
Nokia has released their Q3 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €529 million, with net sales of €10.3 billion. Nokia's device and service division's profits were €807 million, up 3% year on year. Margins in devices and services were 10.5% (down 0.9% YoY and up 0.9% QoQ). The figures beat market expectations. Converged devices sales (smartphones) were significantly up, at 26.5 million, compared with 16.4 million units in Q3 2009 (up 61% YoY) and compared with 24 million units in Q2 2010 (up 10%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 38%, down 3% sequentially but up 2% year on year.
Since before the launch of the Nokia N95, the handset manufacturers have been pushing the idea that “Location is the next big thing”, not just in mobile but over the whole Internet. With GPS chips being installed into hundreds of millions of handsets; with the Web 2.0 backbone of everyone sharing everything; with developers and the venture capitalists throwing money at the social web... what could go wrong?
It used to be that mobile phone networks were scared of being nothing more than pipes for data and calls, so they added extra features to make them portals rather than pipes. But the increasing number of smartphones coming to market mean they now have another approach to ward off this fear – the added value on top of the Operating System to make the network version of a popular handset 'better' than the stock factory model. But in the process, this creates a handset that's not what the end-user expects, creates user interface discrepancies, and frustrates their own customers as to the capabilities of the device they see talked about online, and the one in their hand. Have the networks forgetten how to balance their needs with the needs of the users?
One novel promotional idea the Ovi guys and gals had a few months back was to produce a promotional magazine in the Issuu 'virtual' format - here's issue 1 of the 'Ovi Guide', from the Spring. Issue 2 has just been released at a whopping 44 pages and, though biased towards marketing Nokia's products, does have plenty of app mini-reviews, plus some useful tips and pointers in it. Moreover, it's glossily implemented, embedded below on this page (if your browser window is wide enough!) and well worth a detailed look.
