On Friday Sony Ericcsson announced its Q1 2010 results, which saw the company reports its first profitable quarter since Q2 2008. While sales fell 19%, to €1.4 billion, the average selling price increased to €134 (from €120 a year ago). Bert Nordberg, President of Sony Ericsson, highlighted the positive impact of the company's cost cutting program and the launches of the Symbian powered Vivaz and Android powered Xperia X10.
Nokia are pushing their green ambitions again, and this time are looking to the public for ideas that can help the environment and be used in the mobile world. Come up with the best mobile eco idea, and you could win an example of eco-mobile in the form of a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic device.
The UK virtual network Giffgaff (who we’ve written about previously) has announced the prices of the various bundles to go along with the Pay as you Go standard networks. Alongside that they’ve declared that unlimited really is unlimited… as long as it’s for personal use and you don’t tether the mobile to a deskbound computer.
With the same caveats as always, mobile advertising company Smaato have released numbers on their mobile advertising platform that show Symbian leading the click through rates of the leading mobile operating systems, and performing well above the average rate.
David Gilson looks at Nokia's new C6 and E5 smartphones in the light of the models they either replace or will be compared to. What's outstanding is, naturally enough, the prices, though David goes into significant technical detail in justifying the comparisons and conclusion.
In an editorial double header from Steve and Ewan, we put today's C3, C6 and E5 announcements in their context. Steve explains how they fit into the rising trend of QWERTY-phillia and also set new pricing ground. Ewan argues that today's announcement makes a 'strong statement of how Nokia read the market for people communicating on the move' and how the messaging emphasis underlines the trend that 'you don't just buy the phone, you buy a solution'. Read on for the full editorials.
Last Friday, Nokia announced that it had acquired MetaCarta Inc, a privately owned firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which specialises in 'geographic intelligence solutions'. MetaCarta is best known for its geosearch and geotagging products (e.g. NewsMap, which allows publishers to automatically created a map tagged with their news stories) and has partnerships with a number of leading technology firms. MetaCarta's technology will help Nokia improve its social location services, such as local search.
Our very own Rafe is the author of a thought provoking editorial today over on Nokia Conversations, musing over the future of the (mobile) operating system and covering intelligence, location awareness and social nature. Comments welcome if you think he is, or isn't, on the right track!
Nokia has announced the launch of Comes with Music, its unlimited music service, for China. The service, which will be DRM-free, will be available across eight Nokia devices with a starting price point of €140 (£123 / $187). The cost of music is bundled into the price of the device; subsequently, users can download as much music as they like, with no additional charges, for the duration of the Comes with Music subscription (usually 12 months).
comScore have recently published a couple of press releases which contain interesting statistics about smartphone market penetration and mobile platform market share. For example, people are twice as likely to buy a smartphone in Italy than they are in Germany. Symbian's strong position in Europe is shown by market share figures of 47%, 55% and 74% in the UK, Germany and Spain respectively. The figures provide a contrast to the frequently reported US market share figures and demonstrate the degree of regional differentiation.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In which case it would be helpful if, sometimes, Tomi Ahonen actually did a few diagrams, to keep general article length down(!) His latest missive, "Repeat After Me: The Rival to the Blackberry is NOT the iPhone" is still well worth a read though, aimed at putting some much needed perspective into the tech world's obsession over each month's rather misleading Admob phone-browser-ad stats.
It's all very well making up ridiculous, improbable stories to accompany April 1st each year, but what of the real stories that have surprised us in the past, any of which might well have made a decent April Fools story in their own right? Below, Ewan and I list a number of contenders. You won't be an April Fool for reading!
In our latest video Ian Hutton (Technology Management at the Symbian Foundation and chair of the Feature and Roadmap Council) explains how the Symbian Foundation's roadmap is put together. We learn about how its community driven nature is directed and driven through external package owners and internal technology managers. Ian also talks us through some of the big themes for the next few releases of the Symbian platform including improvements to the user, developer and device manufacturer experiences. Watched as a whole it is also a great introduction to how Symbian is seeking to shape the future of mobile.
Opera have published their monthly look at the mobile web, which even though it has a focus on the Norwegian browser company, is a nice snapshot of growth, both their own and that of the mobile web. From their 50.5 million users, the top countries for Opera Mini, their java based browser, were Russia, Indonesia, India and China.
Nokia and China Mobile recently announced MM-Ovi Store, a combination of the companies respective application stores. MM-Ovi Store will be pre-installed on Nokia's China Mobile handsets and enables access to a diverse range of mobile applications and games.
At the same time Nokia also unveiled the Nokia 6788i, an updated version of the Nokia 6788, which runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 on Symbian and features TD-SCDMA connectivity, a five megapixel camera, 4GB of internal memory and integrated GPS. The 6788i, which will arrive in April, will be the first phone with MM-Ovi Store pre-loaded.
