Nokia has released in Q2 financial results today. The overall results are positive with increased second quarter earnings driven by strong sales and an increase in market share. Notable numbers for S60 devices include sales of 2 million Eseries devices and 9 million Nseries devices in the second quarter. Individual device highlights includes sales of 1 million E65's and 1.5 million N95's in the same period.
The W3C Mobile’s Web Initiative is here – the standards body are hoping to put together an Open Mobile Web Test Suite, which will be used to measure how effective the support for certain technologies is in various mobile web browsers. It’s an open call for submissions on their website .
Last week Forum Nokia in conjunction with Orange Partner and the Symbian Developer Network launched the Open C Challenge for developers. The competition calls on developers to enter their applications that have been developed using the PIPs and Open C frameworks. There is a $20,000 cash prize pool along with a variety of marketing related prizes.
In this editorial Ewan looks at 3's recently launched Next Portal. The portal lists products in two categories: mobile site and mobile applications. The idea is to make these mobile services easier to find for the average consumer. Ewan takes a first look at the portal and finds promise, but also has concerns over longer term health.
The Nokia Research Center has released the Nokia Computer Vision Library (NCV). NCV builds on Symbian OS on S60 to provide additional imaging related functionality to developers for use in third party applications. The library includes motion sensing from the camera (for use in games), advanced image capture functions (algorithm constructions, panorama) and image post processing functions (morphing, image compositing).
After a hugely detailed and comprehensive beta phase lasting over a year, Python for S60, or 'PyS60' is finally finished, ending up at v1.4. I'm sure there will be further minor updates, but in the meantime, it's stable, signed and complete. I even got spurred on into revisiting my Musician and making it work on far more S60 3rd Edition phones.
According to a report on Gamesindustry.biz, Nokia has now confirmed it will sponsor the Leipzig GCDC game development conference for the third year in a row. Nokia will give a keynote speech, games for the upcoming next gen N-Gage platform will be on show, and there will be N95 phones up for grabs (although as yet no particular phones have actually been confirmed as platform-compatible).
UIQ Technology announced the addition of Esmertec, Penrillian and Scalado to its UIQ Alliance program. The UIQ Alliance program provides pre-approved and pre-integrated services and programs to potential UIQ licensees enabling UIQ Technology to offer a more complete platform offering.
Python for S60 has been evolving steadily over the last year, but v1.3.22, just released, fixes quite a few longstanding issues, including one which prevented proper display of graphical text. Like many other part-time programmers, I can see myself fiddling with Python over the summer - here's the relevant Python discussion board thread and here's the v1.3.22 download page.
You'll have heard of Ajax and Mobile Ajax, in the context of enabling more interactive functionality on mobile web sites. A little bit developer-y, but credit to Ajit and others at Horizon for producing a comprehensive Mobile Ajax FAQ.
Nokia's Mark Ollila, one of their Games executives, is to give a speech at the Game Developers Conference China 2007, which will presumably mention their upcoming Next Gen N-Gage Games Platform that's due to open its doors to various S60 3rd Edition devices this September. GDC China takes place from 27th to 29th August in Shanghai, so it's possibly just a few days before the launch of the new platform.
Symbian have released their Q1 2007 figures, highlights include a total of 15.9 million phones shipped in the first 3 months of the year, cumulative shipments of 126.4 million and cumulative shipments in Japan of 20 million Symbian OS phones.
The BBC News website is running a story about the mobile version of Ubuntu, the popular distribution of the Linux operating system. There's no information on which handsets it would actually run on, if any, and no manufacturers are mentioned. However, Ubuntu for mobiles is apparently due for a first release in October 2007. The BBC has used a stock image of the E61i, but this doesn't appear to have any connection to the story itself.
