In All About Symbian Insight 130, we start with an update on the ongoing Conspiracy for Good transmedia project. David Gilson then talks us through his first impressions of the Nokia C6. Rafe reports back from Nokia's N8 Developer Day in London, including details of the new Ovi Store client, which is expected to debut on the N8. Finally Steve leads a discussion on Q2's mobile device shipment numbers. You can listen to AAS Insight 130 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
From AAS's department of the bleedin' obvious come comments from me after looking into data from the last ten years in the Symbian world, looking at screen sizes across a range of form factors and interfaces (including Series 80 and UIQ). Yes, form factors are gradually converging, and yes, screens are getting larger. No real surprise there then, but I thought you might be interested in the charts themselves below...
David Gilson has a theory. It concerns correlating the aspect ratio of a smartphone's virtual or physical qwerty keyboard with text entry speed, on the grounds that one's thumbs have more (or less) work to do, depending on form factor. Read on for his data and the theory in detail - and see if you can help produce more data points with your own device(s).
The 'Best RSS Apps' section of Nokia's 2010 Calling All Innovator competition has been judged and a top 10 Ovi App Wizard apps (actually Web runtime widgets) listed, based on 'Innovativeness', 'Cumulative number of downloads on July 15th 2010' and 'Quality of marketing materials'. They're all covered below, with brief comments and screenshots, in case you should want to look any of them out(!).
NAVTEQ, the division of Nokia that provides mapping and location data services, has announced that its new JourneyView product has entered into a private beta period, ahead of a full launch early next year. The JourneyView product is a combination of 360 degree street-level imagery and links to map and POI content. The private beta is intended to allow developers and other partners to get a demo of the data and help shape the final specification of the product.
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.
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'...
In All About Symbian Insight 129, we start with a number of short items: Angry Birds as a favourite game, Qt on Samsung and Sony Ericsson, Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition. In the second half of the podcast we respond to number of listener questions, from a discussion of how quality impacts on user experience, to how Nokia should market the N8 and the possibility of an Android Nokia device. You can listen to AAS Insight 129 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
TripAdvisor and Nokia have announced a partnership that has two major elements: firstly a TripAdvisor application will be made available via the Ovi Store and secondly the TripAdvisor service will be integrated into Ovi Maps. TripAdvisor is one of the world's biggest travel web sites, it covers more than 1 million businesses (restaurants, hotels, attractions) in more than 70,000 cities. As well as the usual business listing information, typical of such sites, it is well known for its user generated reviews, which number in excess of 35 million. Read on for further details and screenshots.
"No..." "No..." "There he is!". Yes, for some Friday fun it's Capcom Europe's port of the popular children's book series, Where's Wally! How well does an artwork based book translate to the gaming world on your smartphone? Ewan decides to risk a pun and takes a look.
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...
In All About Symbian Insight 128, we open with a round up of recent news including the formation of the Symbian Developer Cooperative, the retail availability of the Nokia C6, news of the i8910 HX7 firmware, and Nokia's Conspiracy for Good. Rafe talks about his experience with Track and Protect and Ewan asks whether Symbian needs a reference device. Finally we talk over Nokia's Q2 2010 results. You can listen to AAS Insight 128 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
As mentioned in part one of my Defining the Smartphone feature from earlier in the week, the very word now encompasses a surprising range of hardware, with some claiming that the older phone-like devices are outdated when compared to the modern capacitive touch slabs and that the former shouldn't even be called smartphones. In this, part two, I attempt to quantify the various attributes of two of the extremes from the smartphone world, I take the latest evolution of Nokia's classic S60 slider form factor, the N86, and pitch it head to head with the current highest rated Android smartphone in the UK, the HTC Desire. Will my own smartphone definition hold water?
