In All About Symbian Insight 122, we share the best of the previous week's news: Expedia hotel booking in Ovi Maps, Nokia 5228, Nokia Notifications and Tesco's Clubcard application. Steve shares his thoughts on the visibility of various screen technologies in bright sunlight, including a hands-on with Super AMOLED, and Rafe explains last week's Symbian Baidu tie up. Finally, the team discuss the launch of the iPhone 4 and the high-end device landscape. You can listen to AAS Insight 122 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Video calling on mobiles has been a reality in most of the world for five years now - and it's been a disaster in terms of take-up rate. Yet Apple comes on the scene with their new FaceTime - video calling - 'feature' and seems to have nailed it in terms of making people want it. Read on for my thoughts on what has the rest of the world been doing wrong and for the use case that Apple has, quite correctly, identified and exploited.
Nokia have published their “Sustainability Report” for their activities in 2009. As well as highlighting their position as a “World Technology Supersector Leader” by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, it draws attention to a reduction of CO2 by 12% since 2006, and achieving their energy savings target for 2012 three years early.
Around 36 hours ago, Apple unveiled its latest iPhone 4 to the world - excellent build materials on it, but I believe that they - and Nokia - and others - are missing an important trick: what happens when you take your oh-so-portable smartphone out into the world. A world where the birds are singing, the people are smiling and the sun is shining. And you can't see a blessed thing on your smartphone's display. Returning to a theme from exactly a year ago, I compare some recent device displays to prove a very, very important point.
A post on the Qt blog explains that Nokia is planning to move Qt towards a more open governance model. The move would see the community having shared control over decisions about Qt and its future roadmap. It follows on from the move to the LGPL license and opening up of the Qt contribution process last year. The planning for the move is at an early stage, but the Qt team are keen to have an open discussion with the community about the details and implementation of an open governance model.
In All About Symbian Insight 121 we share the best of the previous week's news: SEE 2010 dates, Nokia E73 Mode, Nokia Bike Charger and more. The team then briefly discuss the marketing messages around the Nokia N8, before moving on to some commentary on data rates and the data crunch. Finally Rafe reports back on some of the NRC demos he saw as part of Nokia's recent 'Open for Ideas' event. You can listen to AAS Insight 121 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
The Symbian Foundation today announced the Symbian^2 platform is being used in four of the seven Symbian based handsets announced by NTT DoCoMo a few weeks ago. The F-07B (Fujitsu) went on sale on May 21st; it features a dual orientation screen (swivels from portrait to landscape) and a 12 megapixel camera. The SH-07B (Sharp) went on sale a week later; it features a 12 megapixel camera with full HD video recording and is partially waterproof. The F06-B and F-08B will go on sale later in June. These are the first Symbian^2 handsets to ship worldwide.
Crack open the Symbian powered NTT Docomo smartphones and you’ll likely find a chipset by Japanese manufacturer Renesas. In the future, that might be true of more Symbian powered devices, as the company has announced they are now part of the Symbian Foundation, bringing their "advanced mobile chipset technologies and expertise to the Symbian ecosystem."
The initial website for this years annual Symbian show recently went live. They reveal that SEE 2010 will take place in Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage on the 9th and 10th of November. On the site you can find the basic information about the event and register your interest in attending as well as find out more about sponsor and speaker opportunities. SEE 2010 could be the venue for the first substantive look at the new UI of Symbian^4 and will set the scene for the Symbian ecosystem as it moves towards what is likely to be very busy 2011.
Yesterday saw a major strategic agreement between Nokia and Yahoo!, detailed in our news feature, with Nokia essentially providing Ovi Maps to Yahoo! users and Yahoo! taking on the burden of providing Mail and IM to Nokia users, both in the medium term. Initial reaction to this has been generally positive, though not everyone thinks the alliance is a good idea. I thought I'd round up a selection of quotes, reproduced below... For more AAS analysis of the agreement, we'll be tackling the subject in the next Insight podcast.
Fired up by the discussions in the Phones Show Chat podcast, one of my listeners, Andy Weekes, took the time to write in a veritable essay on his experiences (ok, mainly frustrations) with Nokia, Symbian and the current competition. Some of his points are very valid, others more arguable, but you'll hopefully enjoy his essay and my (inline) responses below. Comments welcome, some of these topics could run and run!
More stats breakdowns are now in from the smartphone world in Q1, 2010, this time courtesy of Gartner, linked below. Are we in danger of information overload?(!) In line with other reports, the smartphone market is broken down, worldwide, by operating system, with sales of Symbian-powered smartphones up a whopping 35% year on year, though market share is down 4.5%, due to the way the overall market grew even faster, by just over 48%. More numbers below.
The Shazam application is becoming more visible in Symbian, what with over a million downloads through the Ovi Store, and preloaded onto a number of Symbian devices either out of the box (5630) or through the firmware update (the 5800) and it’s paying off for the company. The “what is that tune I can hear” application has now indexed over one billion songs, and the user base is 75 million.
I was asked a very good question last week: "Why do you stay with Symbian when there's a world of wonder with iPhone and Android?" I have to admit to finding a number of positives in these other platforms, sometimes accompanied by positives in their hardware, but it's true that I do keep coming back to Symbian as the OS powering my smartphone-of-choice. Investigating my own leanings and trying to justify them, here are the top 10 reasons why I stay with Symbian.
