Nokia has released their Q3 2009 results, reporting an operating loss of EUR 426 million, but this was primarily due to a write down in the value of Nokia Siemens Network. Nokia's device and service division's profits were EUR 785 million, up 3% from the previous quarter, but down 50% year on year. Converged devices sales (smartphone) were down slightly (though up year-on-year) at 16.4 million, compared with 15.5 million units in Q3 2008 and 16.9 million units in Q2 2009. As such, converged device volumes were, perhaps, lower than expected.
NAVTEQ would literally like to take you for a ride at SEE. Along with the usual activities, NAVTEQ Network for Developers (NN4D) will be giving developers the opportunity to gain an insight into how NAVTEQ gathers mapping and location information.
Symbian OS-related content in Phones Show Chat, programme 8 out this afternoon, includes Tim's view of the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic and on Data Security, plus we chat about syncing the N97 to Google and GooSync. I then mull over firmware version numbers, show Tim how to enter special characters on a non-qwerty phone, and pick BBC iPlayer as my 'app of the week'. All this and more in PSC8!
'furtiv', a startup that creates social media solutions for mobile devices, has released a beta of their technology showcase, which allows you to use Nokia's Share online application to upload to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Picasa. This effectively adds one click upload to each of these services to the Gallery/Photos and Camera applications. The service works with most recent Nokia Symbian devices (Nokia Share online 2.0 or higher required). Read on for further details.
Nokia today released betas for Qt 4.6 and Qt Creator 1.3, both of which include Symbian support. Qt is Nokia's cross platform application and UI framework, which is set to become a key developer offering in the Symbian and Maemo platforms. Qt Creator is a cross platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Qt developers.
From the Nokia N900 to the HTC HD2, I'm seeing a groundswell of opinion turning against smaller, slightly simpler smartphones - but I contend that what you're seeing and reading isn't even close to being representative of the mass market and that, as usual (and I know because I'm one of them) the geeks are skewing all the analysis towards faster, bigger, flashier...
In All About Symbian Insight 90 (AAS Podcast 152), Rafe and Steve briefly touch on the Maemo Summit before moving on to a discussion of the relative roles of Maemo and Symbian and the importance of the cost of devices. Steve gives us a run down on the N97 camera glass 'scratch' issue and how to get things fixed (though note that this was before the Care Point trip). There are also answers to a number of user questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 90 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Two scheduled items of interest. There's more generic mobile Tuesday reading over at AORTA today, as Chetan Sharma brings us Carnival of the Mobilists 195. Incidentally, if you'd like to submit an article or blog entry of your own (or to nominate an AAS article for inclusion), the address to email is mobilists@gmail.com. The Phones Show 92 is also now out, with my hands-on video review of the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic and part 2 of my beginners guide to phone security.
You've got to hope that today marks the point at which Nokia started to leave the whole sorry mess of its PC connectivity experiments behind it and moved forward with confidence. Ovi Suite 2.0 is now 'graduated' (from Beta Labs) and will start to be included in phone retail boxes. Here's the full report on Nokia's plans, and don't forget to grab your own copy (.exe link). Does Ovi Suite 2.0 now complete replace what you had before? Comments welcome.
Regular viewers of The Phones Show will know that I periodically run down my 'Top 5' phones in the world. Astute viewers will also have spotted that I haven't done one for a while. The problem is, as indicated by the headline above, that I'm having problems recommending a single phone or smartphone, let alone five of them. Things were simpler a year or so ago, I'd simply pick the Nokia N95 (or one of its cousins, the N95 8GB or N82) and that'd be the number 1 spot sorted. The phone world has moved on though, with greater variety, greater complexity and, yes, greater disappointments. Read on... [updated with extra comments]
It's been some time now since launch, so how well is the Ovi Store doing for Nokia? Is it providing enough applications for end users and a good user experience? Are developers knocking down the web-doors to get listed in the store? Or is it all being hushed up because it's not gaining any mind share at all? I wonder aloud what's going on...
The single biggest form factor for true smartphones in Western Europe in the last five years has arguably been that of the 'Communicator', a term coined by Nokia for its 9000 series, initially running on GeOS and then on Symbian OS 6 and (later) Symbian OS 7 with the likes of the 9500 and (here) the 9300i. Then came the oddball E90 and a slightly more mainstream E75, while Nokia's Nseries picked up some similar action in the shape of the N97. But how do they compare, head to head? Is there a true modern day successor to the Psions and Nokia 9210s of old?
Just live on the interwebs is Phones Show Chat 7 (the companion audio chat based around my video podcast), in which Tim Salmon and I talk about the Nokia 5730's keypad, the HTC HD2 and the Nokia N900 (and other large screen devices), comments on Symbian's place in world marketshare, plus we specify and design our own ultimate smartphone. Available also as a RSS feed and iTunes podcast.
Available for quite a few S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition phones, Vlingo promises web searching, email, text and Facebook status updates, all with voice-to-text speech recognition. But how well does it work in practice? Not perfectly, it has to be said, but it's close enough to make it worth trying out with your voice and in your own use case. Here's my Vlingo review.
