More Q3 2009 phone sales figures have appeared, this time from IDC, tabled below and looking purely at the Western Europe market. In summary, the market grew 5% year-on-year, with over 46 million handsets sold. Smartphone sales weren't quite as strong, with touchscreens now making their way into the traditional 'feature phone' space. Nokia's still the market leader, at 35% (down 1%), and Symbian OS still leads the smartphone platforms at 48% marketshare (though down from 59% in Q2). More details below.
So what do you do when you're one of the targets of the network operators in France? This week I saw round the technology labs at Orange France to see a few minutes into the future. Under the guidance of Communications Director Eric Barilland, the “Orange Apartment” was my home for a few hours. Read on....
Sony Ericsson has been through its ups and downs over the last few years and Ulf Wretling as been with the company through them all. In this interview, I talk to Ulf about the challenges of a increasingly crowded platforms portfolio and the role of developers in the company’s future. Read on for the full interview.
There's a nice rant by Ricky Cadden here, referring to Unohtaneet Sync but meaning Ovi Sync, the SyncML-based system that syncs your Contacts, Calendar and Notes up to Nokia's servers in the cloud. The 'Unohtaneet' bit means 'Forgotten' in Finnish, in case you hadn't twigged, and Ricky handily rants about several aspects of this key Ovi service which seems to have been left trailing by Nokia over the last year or so. Attention needed, Nokia, methinks.
We regularly link to the Carnival of the Mobilists here on AAS, which always has something interesting in terms of generic mobile reading. Carnival 203 not only is worth a look but is also, thanks to Nokia's free Mobile Web Server software, hosted ON a Nokia S60 phone. Of course, with all this publicity, Antoine Wright may well decide that doing so was a bad idea for her his data bill, but no pain, no gain... Let's hope she stays within Wi-Fi coverage!
I'm repeatedly called a Nokia 'fanboy' in various comment threads by a small but determined set of Samsung i8910 HD-owning zealots*, and I'd like to respond with my own objective thoughts on the state of this Symbian flagship. Read on for what's good and bad about the i8910 HD (Omnia HD in some markets), along with a number of relevant links for further reading.
Necessarily a brief post, but I thought I should let people know that after the slightly botched release of Google Maps v3.3.0, with many people caught out by a crash when trying to use Layers, the big G has made available a bug fix, v3.3.1, from the usual m.google.com mobile web site. Grab it if you had a problem you haven't been able to resolve by using the 'Reset' menu function?
Ovi Prime Places, a free service which allows businesses to add their details and meta data to Ovi Maps, has been quietly launched by Nokia. Ovi Prime Places should help improve Ovi Maps PoI (point of interest) database and related location / place search. For businesses it is an opportunity to reach 'users on millions of devices'. Read on for further details.
Not Symbian, but hopefully of interest to any ex-Psion or ex-Nokia Communicator users, it seems the general form factor has been revived, with a new startup, PsiXpda, with photo below, offering a clamshell high spec, QWERTY-driven part-PDA, part-laptop. And, impressively, far from being vapourware, it's available next week. See below for links and details.
Live this morning are The Phones Show 96, embedded below but of only tangential interest here perhaps, featuring an extended news, an introduction to the Nokia N900, a user story taking in iPhone, Nokia N97 and HTC Hero, and AAS's kevwright giving his Top 10 iPhone apps. Also live is Phones Show Chat 15, the hour long weekly audio podcast, in which Tim Salmon and I talk about our Nokia N97-centric (seemingly) universe(!), about Podcasting, about the Nokia E72 and about implications from Nokia's Capital Markets Day.
One of the big selling points about the original Nokia N95, N86 and 5730 XpressMusic (among others) has been that they have hardware music controls. So, while pocketed, or while in another application, or even with eyes closed in bed at night, you can still skip music tracks, pause podcasts, and so on. But with the new breed of touchscreen phones, you're out of luck in this department. Or are you? From (arguably) the "AAS dept of the bleedin' obvious", see my How to: Control music and audio on your touchscreen phone without touching it.
During Nokia's Capital Markets Day event, held yesterday, a few screenshots showing Symbian^3 were shown off as part of Kai Öistämö's (Nokia EVP, Devices) presentation. While the big Symbian UI rewrite will not happen until Symbian^4, there are still some significant changes in Symbian^3. Read on for further details and commentary.
In All About Symbian Insight 97 (AAS Podcast 161), we discuss the release of Qt 4.6 and why it is important (Symbian and Maemo support, Qt Mobility APIs). We answer a range of user questions ranging from Ovi Suite for Mac, through N86 firmware and E72 software, to discussing what's the best current imaging phone. You can listen to AAS Insight 97 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Last month NTT DOCOMO premiered its winter 2009 collection of mobile phones consisting of 19 different models. Among these are 9 Symbian phones, which are being featured on the Symbian blog today. Features range from a 12 megapixel camera, through separating parts and being waterproof to smell-o-phone, and more. However unless you're in Japan, you'll probably never see them. This may change in the future as both DOCOMO and the manufacturers are interested in expanding to markets outside Japan.
Opera continues to improve on the recent first beta release of Opera Mini 5 (Java) and Opera Mobile 10 (native C++) for Symbian OS. Beta two sees numerous bug fixes, and the addition of a Download manager and Opera Link - which allows you to sync your bookmarks and browser settings to other Opera installations on your desktop or second smartphones. Point your phone's browser at m.opera.com/next for the new version.
