We've already had the Canalys figures, listed below are Gartner's reports/estimates for the same period, Q3 2009, worldwide. The numbers are very similar (though not for the year-on-year figures, with Q3 2008 looking different, oddly enough), showing Nokia's world smartphone market share at 39%, RIM (Blackberry) at 21%, Apple at 17% and with HTC (50% Android, 50% Windows Mobile) at 6%.
Roy Tanck hits the nail on the head with his observations on both Opera and Gravity. In his thoughts on Opera Mobile (which we reviewed here) he says that "the Norwegian company has made browsing fun again". This follows on from the "much needed sexiness" that Gravity added. The question is whether manufacturers realise this is just as important as an environmentally friendly box or a new wallpaper?
There's an interesting two-part interview, by The Register, with Symbian Foundation CEO Lee Williams in San Francisco, talking with him partly about the possible peaking of the iPhone ecosystem, but mainly about the impending battle between Symbian and Android. There are some nice insights, though you have to overlook a few silly spelling errors by el Reg.
Over the next two day I'm at Nokia's The Way We Live Next event, which 'features presentations and demonstrations from Nokia and our ecosystem partners, showing how Nokia are connecting and building the communities of the future'. You can follow along via our live coverage below or via @aas.
Just a note that The Phones Show 94, programme 94 is now out, featuring extended news, a user testimony (N86), my review of the Nokia E91 N98 N97 mini and a top 10 Android application run down. On a technical note, the MP4 codec used in making the QVGA version for those subscribed to the show (via RSS) on their smartphones has been downgraded to 'MPEG-4 basic', meaning that it should play smoothly on absolutely every phone in existence 8-) Comments welcome if you still have a playback issue!
Started in 2006 by Omar Hamoui, Admob has grown to be one of the leading platforms for advertising to mobile websites. And now it belongs to Google. In a move that costs the Mountain View company some $750 million, they now have acquired a company that is both profitable and has a significant share of the mobile advertising market. The benefits to Google are pretty clear, especially as their advertising operations is one of their key income streams.
Nokia have announced a product recall of around 14 million AC chargers for their phones. The products affected are the AC-3E, AC-3U and AC-4U models, built within a certain time-frame. The potential fault would see the plastic casing working loose and separating, exposing potentially live wiring inside. Full details on the affected units and how to obtain a free replacement can be found at chargerexchange.nokia.com.
With Skype's native Symbian incarnation still somewhat AWOL, it's interesting to see that Nimbuzz has stepped into the breach with their own pay-as-you-go VoIP to traditional number service, dubbed NimbuzzOut. More details and links below.
In All About Symbian Insight 93 (AAS Podcast 157) we discuss the Q3 smartphone figures from Canalys and Rafe explains that Fujitsu and Quic have joined the board of the Symbian Foundation. We move on to a retrospective of SEE 2009 with discussion of the media reaction (which send Rafe into rant mode). We finish with thoughts on N97 PR 2.0 and the closure of N-Gage (sniff). You can listen to AAS Insight 93 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
As we posted earlier this week, Opera has released Opera Mobile 10 in beta form, a full S60-native alternative web browser to the S60 Webkit version. Ewan's been trying it out on some of his favourite sites and here's his illustrated review. Comments welcome. He'll be revisiting Opera Mobile 10 when the app finally comes out of beta.
The third party community support site, GetSatisfaction, is fairly well known. It transpires that there's now an official (as in manned by Symbian employees) Symbian sub-community here, hopefully worth bookmarking should you 'need to ask that awkward question'.... Early days, of course, so the numbers are small but I'm sure it will grow.
Forum Nokia Kevin Sharp has produced a nice summary of Nokia's plans for Ovi Maps in terms of in-building navigation (think malls, airports, etc.), collating material from several recent events, much of it from Michael Halbherr, VP of Social Location. It's a good read, although the paragraph about Nokia collecting 'cell learning' data from our phones gave my privacy nerve a little prod. Comments welcome if you can expand on what Nokia is (or isn't) doing here!
Canalys' Q3 worldwide smartphone sales figures have been published. Headline figures are that the entire smartphone market grew by 4% year on year, with Nokia's S60 smartphone sales growing by 6% year on year and with their world market share now also up to 40%. RIM are in second place worldwide, with 21% (and impressive 40% year on year sales growth) and Apple are in third place with their iPhone with 18% (6.7% year on year sales growth). Down in marketshare are HTC and 'others'. However HTC's figures hides an increase in Android shipment and a decrease in Windows Mobile shipments.
EyeMags, a service for generating personal content applications for mobile phones, has today added support for S60 5th Edition phones such as the Nokia 5800, Nokia N97 and Sony Ericsson Satio. EyeMags, using a web-based creator, allows anyone to create their own cross platform (JME, iPhone and Symbian) 'snackable' mobile content application containing a mixture of text and pictures. Read on for further details.
At last week's Symbian Exchange and Exposition, Lee Williams (Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation) showed, during the keynote, a concept video of what a future Symbian UI might look like. The video shows a typical use case: accepting an invite to a party via Facebook and, the next day, attending the party. There's a glimpse of a new look homescreen, complete with social web integration, navigation and mapping features enhanced by augmented reality functionality. Read on to view the video and my comments.
