During its N8 developer event, which took place in London yesterday, Nokia demonstrated some of the key features of their upcoming Symbian^3 handset. This included, for the first time on a real device, a preview of the new Ovi Store client. The new Ovi Store client has been redesigned to make it more attractive and easier to use. Read on for some exclusive images and preview comments.
I hope the industry are paying attention to yesterday’s launch of the Blackberry 9800 Torch. This was the new Blackberry, the next step up in the portfolio and even at a mid-range price, is being perceived as the flagship device. With a new version of the operating system paired with solid, but not stunning, hardware choices in the processor, screen and memory department, the reaction has been similar to that of Nokia’s N8. Some thoughts from me below.
One we all missed last week, but Nokia have released an updated version of their application suite for Ramadan. Following on from the acclaim of the 2009 release, this year Nokia have gathered everything under a single application. When we talk about Nokia reaching out to customers, this is a wonderful example. See below for details.
What’s the most used internet application on your Symbian phone? It’s likely that the web browser is going to feature quite highly if we were to have a survey, and the huge number of eyes that mobile websites can gather is only going to grow in the future. That makes it one of the growth areas for online advertisers, and the capabilities of Symbian-powered smartphones should help drive innovation and help grow the market for everyone involved. My thoughts below....
Canalys has just released a limited set of numbers for smartphone sales in Quarter 2, 2010, showing Nokia with a leading 38% marketshare across the world, with actual sales of its Symbian-based smartphones up 41% year on year. RIM's Blackberrys were second in terms of smartphone marketshare, with 18%, while Apple was at 13% worldwide. Android-powered smartphones made up a lot of the 'noise' in the analysis, split across a multitude of manufacturers, but showing very siginificant growth, as you'll see from the table below.
Sales of mobile phones in Q2 this year are up over 19% compared to last year (reports ABI Research). There are some slight changes, with Nokia and Samsung dropping share slightly, in part due to re-organisation for Nokia and the prevailing economic conditions hitting Samsung. The launch timing of the iPhone 4 hasn’t helped Apple, who also dropped market share. Mind you, with all sales up, that’s still more handsets sold by each company compared to the raw numbers from Q2 2009.
You've seen the 'pinching and zooming' adverts for many (non-Symbian) smartphones, showing lightning fast manipulation of full desktop-class web page renders, with new pages 'coming down' in a matter of seconds. "It's the Internet in your pocket" say the promos. And, from my own observations, for many people this is utter pie in the sky. Out in the real world, mobile coverage and bandwidth falls diabolically short - which partly helps explain the popularity of a certain proxy-based web browser that works on everything and enables not the 'real web', but more 'looks and feels a lot like the real web, but isn't really'...
The smartphone is making an audible difference to the world (writes Clive Thompson at Wired). He’s spotted that his mobile phone bills are dropping, and there’s one obvious cause. he’s not phoning people as much as he used to, and what calls he is making are not lasting as long. It’s all to do with the rise of social networks and smartphone connectivity, "This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways."
We recently reported that Furtiv had announced new beta version plugins for Nokia Share Online. Futiv have now announced that the current wave of plugins are now officially available, for free in the Ovi Store. In total this now means that Furtiv offer Share Online plugins for YouTube, Facebook, TweetPhoto, Picasa Web Albums, TwitPic, Dropbox, MySpace, Orkut, yfrog, img.ly, LinkedIn and Flickr. See Furtiv's publisher page on the Ovi Store for more details.
Location based tools on your smartphone aren't always about the check-in. Sometimes they can be for information and discovery as well. Locago harnesses multiple sources of information (including user generated contet) and puts these layers over a competent mapping and routing tool. Let's take a closer look at it.
What’s the best game in the Ovi Store? Nokia asked last week with ten games to choose from, and the result are available. But in a lovely nod to their ability to spot a top game, the write-in "others" category provided the runaway winner with 36% of the vote. The winning garland has been placed on Angry Birds, available for the N900. Which isn’t that surprising given that (a) it’s a runaway hit on the iPhone and (b) the N900 version sold six times as fast as the iPhone version!
You may recall last week we pointed out Nokia’a Conversations Blog post crying out the virtues of the keyboard. Keeping the karmic balance, this week sees the touchscreen side of the debate step up to take a swing at the arguments. And then there’s Tomi Ahonen’s take on the debate.
Many years ago, everyone thought that Instant Messaging (IM) would be a big winner on the mobile platform. That’s turned out to not be the case – the winner in the field of short form updates has been the status message on Facebook and the broadcasting nature of Twitter. So what happened? And are the same mistakes being made by the current slew of location-based apps that are the so-called 'next wave of innovation'? Read on...
In this feature, I've been taking a long hard look at the top-end smartphones in the Symbian powered world over the last three years, pointing out their flaws and frailties, and - where appropriate - pointing out what should have been done to fix things up. Yes, Symbian has been cracking along with record momentum in the mid-tier, with Nokia trouncing the iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones in terms of raw unit sales, but Symbian's partners have been scoring rather a lot of own goals in recent times. And what of the 2010 Symbian^3 crop, such as the imminent Nokia N8 - will these suffer a similar fate? I'm optimistic...
Spurred on by his reviews of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro and Samsung i8910 HD, David Gilson looks at the huge investment Nokia has made into providing an Ovi service layer - it seems that, whatever Ovi's detractors might say, the absence of this service layer on non-Nokia hardware is desperately noticeable. He also wonders whatever became of Symbian's Horizon project - as good a starting point as any for getting applications out to all Symbian smartphones.
