Carnival of the Mobilists 159 is now out over at the Mobile Broadband Blog, but of course my eagerness to link to it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that two of my articles are featured.....(!) As always, a good source of general reading, especially if you're snowed in, like most in the UK today...
In All About Symbian Insight 58 (AAS Podcast 111) we talk about the recent release of Quickoffice version 6, Rafe reports back from Betavine's birthday bash, and Steve talks about T9Nav. The team then moves on to discuss Samsung S60 application compatibility, followed by a few thoughts on the capacitive versus resistive touch debate.
If you own (or have been eyeing up) a Nokia N95 or N82 (or similar, e.g. the 6220 Classic) but also hanker for iPhone multi-touch and App Store goodness, then you might be interested in an editorial of mine over at All About iPhone (still no relation!) in which I muse on the possibility of letting both a camera-centric Nokia smartphone and Apple iPod Touch play to their strengths in order to complement each other nicely. Please use the comment thread over on AAI etc. if you violently disagree(!)
More stats out recently, this time from ABI Research, showing worldwide phone market share for 2008, just about the grandest metric of all, even if it does include devices right down to bargain basement level. Nokia tops the list again, with a world share of 38.6%, while Samsung reached 16.2%. Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG are hovering at around 8%, with newbies RIM and Apple getting to 1.9% and 1.1% respectively. I wonder where we'll be at the end of 2009? Predictions on a postcard....
The CEO of Research in Motion, Jim Balsillie, has admitted to the Washington Post that the recent release of the Blackberry Storm was buggy, and they knew it. Pushed out to make sure it was in the shops for Black Friday – one of America's biggest day for consumer electronics sales – after the planned shipping date in October was missed. And he ominously warned that shipping with imperfect software was the future of electronics. He's right – and let me explain why.
Nokia Experts, which is authored by AAS friend Matt Miller, is a new site which will focus on Nokia's high-end mobile device offerings. There's a review of the 5800 on the site and I'm told a launch competition is coming shortly. Matt also blogs for ZDNet on their Smartphone and Cellphone blog, which we've linked to regularly over the last few years.
Nokia today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire bit-side GmbH. Bit-side is a small (39 employees) software and service development company that is privately owned. Nokia say the acquisition will help speed up its mobile development for Nokia Maps. Bit-side is known for its imaging (Panoman) and entertainment applications (Marble Revolution). It is also the development house behind a number of well received mobile applications including Plazes for the iPhone and Pixelpipe for Android.
Kudos to W Seto from Forum Nokia for rolling up his sleeves and knocking up a WRT (Web RunTime) widget for our phones that links into Google's excellent Translate service. Although the latter is quite useable on S60 Web, this widget adds copy and paste support, as well as source language auto-detection.
In All About Symbian Insight 57 (AAS Podcast 110) Rafe reports back from the UK launch of the Nokia 5800 launch at Nokia's flagship store on Regents Street, London. The team discuss Q4 finanical results from Nokia and other consumer electronics company before Ewan updates us on two recently announced N-Gage games and Steve highlights Jomtris.
There's a surprisingly crammed full Carnival of the Mobilists up here, number 158, at VoIP Survivor. Lots of interesting bits and pieces on the wider mobile world...
In this, part 11 of my long running series, I look at a specific positive from the presence of large numbers of megapixels in a camera-toting smartphone, i.e. image flexibility. And I discover yet another use for your convergence device: as a microscope! With copious examples of 'Megapixel Microscopy', I'm hoping to fire a few more imaginations with this one....
A lot of people want to watch video on their phone but find some video converters to be a bit confusing and overcomplicated, or they don't work properly. If you're looking for a "converter for dummies" that works with S60 devices you might want to try Nokia's rather overlooked Internet Tablet Video Converter. It's available for both Windows and Mac, it's totally free, and should work with all current S60 devices despite its Linux tablet heritage. It seems to work especially well with the Nokia 5800 as it has the same 16:9 screen shape as the tablets, and a somewhat similar resolution too.
Just a quick link of interest - 'Renegade Fanboy' has produced a well thought out analysis of Ten Mistakes that Nokia Made in 2008, calling it an 'automated wake-up call', and drawing on links and articles from around the world. More hits or more misses for Nokia in 2008? This one could run and run....
Just in case you're not already subbed up with the QVGA or VGA RSS feeds, you might like to note that The Phones Show 74 is now up, featuring an abbreviated video version of my Nokia E63 review, my six-monthly pick of the top 5 phones in the world, plus demos of StyleTap for S60 and T9Nav. Oh, and '10 things I hate about the Apple iPhone'. No, really!
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (CEO) and Rick Simonson (CFO), discussed Nokia's smartphone strategy during today's Q4 earnings call. Nokia intend to further expand S60 on Symbian OS to new categories and market segments as well as continuing to push it on to lower cost devices. As a result they are expanding the S60 investment when compared to Series 40. Furthermore they believe the combination of Nokia's five services (Ovi) with a larger portfolio of such devices will see a change in the definition of smartphone. Read on for more details.
