In an entirely self-centric link-of-interest, I thought these brief items might be of interest: The Phones Show 111 is now out, with a tour round my Psion collection and a commentary on how these led to the modern Symbian age, and with a feature on getting better photos from your smartphone camera; there have also been three new devices added to my smartphone-choosing Grid; and don't forget the Phones Show Chat audio podcast, about an hour each week - PSC 39 featured Andy Lee, a Blackberry expert, Tim and I were keen to talk to him about comparisons with the Nokia E72.
More stats breakdowns are now in from the smartphone world in Q1, 2010, this time courtesy of Gartner, linked below. Are we in danger of information overload?(!) In line with other reports, the smartphone market is broken down, worldwide, by operating system, with sales of Symbian-powered smartphones up a whopping 35% year on year, though market share is down 4.5%, due to the way the overall market grew even faster, by just over 48%. More numbers below.
The Shazam application is becoming more visible in Symbian, what with over a million downloads through the Ovi Store, and preloaded onto a number of Symbian devices either out of the box (5630) or through the firmware update (the 5800) and it’s paying off for the company. The “what is that tune I can hear” application has now indexed over one billion songs, and the user base is 75 million.
In All About Symbian Insight 118 Ewan and Rafe share their thoughts on a visit to Nokia's design HQ in London, the release of Sports Tracker and memory performance on Ewan's X6. The second half of the podcast features an outside broadcast recorded at the recent #NokiaNav event in Richmond. Rafe and Steve are joined Julien Fourgeaud and discuss the event and related accessories and activities. You can listen to AAS Insight 118 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
I was asked a very good question last week: "Why do you stay with Symbian when there's a world of wonder with iPhone and Android?" I have to admit to finding a number of positives in these other platforms, sometimes accompanied by positives in their hardware, but it's true that I do keep coming back to Symbian as the OS powering my smartphone-of-choice. Investigating my own leanings and trying to justify them, here are the top 10 reasons why I stay with Symbian.
Leah Betancourt is wondering why the location based services so beloved of Web 2.0 people haven’t taken off and been adopted by the general public. The arguments boil down to two areas (“privacy issues” and “where is the value”) and an easy solution doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. More below.
Following on from our review of Gravity Surf on Ovi Gaming earlier this month, developers Synqua games have been in touch to thank us for the balanced review, and to let us know that one of the ideas we posted (controlling the game via the accelerometer) has been implemented. This is the perfect example of how to build up a business in the competitive online world of applications. Let me explain…
Canalys have chipped in with their version of the worldwide Q1 2010 figures for phones and smartphones. Most numbers are similar to the IDC/Gartner ones (e.g. Nokia 38.8% world smartphone marketshare, RIM 19.2%, Apple 15.9%), but there are extra numbers brought out, such as breaking down the different interfaces and form factors. See below.
Nokia has announced a company reorganisation, which it says will increase competitiveness and allow it to deliver innovative products to the market faster. Nokia is planning to introduce a simplified structure for its devices and services business; it will comprise three components: Mobile Solutions, Mobile Phones and Markets. The new structure applies from July 1st 2010. Nokia have also appointed a new CTO, Rich Green, previously at Sun, who has many years of Silicon Valley experience. Read on for further details.
Normally I sit back and take criticism with a fair degree of annoyance good humour - but there's one subject that keeps cropping up and on which I feel that I'd like to defend myself (and the rest of the AAS team): bias. Firstly, there are accusations of bias towards Symbian-powered phones being better, then bias towards Nokia, then bias towards a particular handset - hopefully my paragraphs below may at least stem the tide of accusation for a while...
Not Symbian-related, but hopefully of interest, especially to long time fans of the Nokia Communicator series, is Sony's re-launch of its VAIO P Series, a clamshell sub-netbook that is claimed to fit in a jeans pocket. Details, images and links below, though the fact that it runs Windows may be a dealbreaker for some, I suspect.
Nokia have always talked about how their software and services, via Ovi, are opening up the connected world and the internet to millions of people all over the world – and one of the biggest enablers in this area is the ability for people to use their first email address. Over on the Ovi Blog they’ve highlighted one example in Bangladesh with the Finns rolling out Ovi branded “burger vans” to promote the Ovi Mail service. Read on for some comments.
