With the news now official that Nokia has accquired Dopplr Oy, the company behind the social media atlas site Dopplr, the Finnish company has added yet another small niche service to their diverse range of companies. Dopplr (which allows users to say where they are travelling and see who lives there or is visiting at the same time, allowing for more serendipitous connections to be made) joins services such as Plum and Plazes in Nokia's store chest. Why?
In All About Symbian Insight 88 (AAS Podcast 150), Rafe and Steve talk about the release dates for some upcoming devices and preview the Nokia 5730. Rafe reports back from the Ovi Developer Day and Steve shares news of the latest Nokia 5800 firmware and upcoming firmware for the N86. There's also discussion about the Ovi Store and Vodafone 360. You can listen to AAS Insight 88 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Breaking cover yesterday was the UK's newest MVNO (mobile virtual network organisation), Giffgaff. Piggybacking on the infrastructure of O2, it's going to be publicly available before Christmas and promises to be the first “people powered mobile network.” I sat down with the 'gaffer' of Giffgaff, Mike Fairman, to find out a little bit more, starting with that idea of being people-powered. Read on.
Business Week have released their latest "Top 100 Global Brands" and not surprisingly telecommunications and IT companies are riding high in the list. Nokia is in fifth place and the highest placed non-US company, just behind IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3), while Google has climbed up to #7 while Apple pops in to #20.
Nokia has been named as the world's most sustainable technology company according to the 2009/10 edition of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. Already rated for several years as the leader within the Europe and Communications categories, this year Nokia was also chosen as "World Technology Supersector Leader", making it number one across the entire global technology sector. See below for extracts from the press release.
In a report surely to be widely read by networks around the world, Strand Consulting have summed up the iPhone effect on a network's bottom line, but I think it goes a lot deeper. The standout line is "Not one (operator) has increased its market share, revenue or earnings as a result of introducing the iPhone." But then networks have never been about one product. They've been about offering the right device, to the right people, at the right time, for the right price. Let me explain.
China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), the world’s largest mobile network operator, and the Symbian Foundation has announced "an agreement to collaborate on a series of key initiatives to improve the mobile ecosystem in China and to stimulate the development of the market for CCMC’s locally developed 3G network standard, TD-SCDMA". There's also a new Symbian Chinese website for locals to check out. Some extracts from the press release below.
Red Bend, the company behind the Firmware Over The Air update system in most of the smartphones covered here (with the notable exception of Samsung, which doesn't appear to have FOTA yet), has just announced that its FOTA software is now used by just over half a billion mobile devices worldwide, over 413 different devices. This represents a 60% share of the FOTA-enabled mobile phone market. See Red Bend's site for more information.
In All About Symbian Insight 85 (AAS Podcast 147), Rafe, Steve and Ewan discuss the glut of Nokia news ahead of this week's Nokia World. We cover the Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia 5230, Nokia Money (an under appreciated announcement) and the Nokia N900. There's also some discussion of Maemo 5, service strategy and the Sony Ericsson Satio. You can listen to AAS Insight 85 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, a Maemo 5-powered device. Maemo 5 is the evolution of Nokia's previous generation of Internet Tablets and aims to occupy the space created by the convergence of mobile phones, laptops and the Internet. The N900 features a horizontal slider design with a three line QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5 inch WVGA (800 x 600) touch screen, ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor with 256MB of RAM (and 768MB of virtual memory), 5.0 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, tri-band WCDMA and WiFi connectivity, integrated A-GPS, 3.5 mm AV jack (audio and TV-out), and 32GB of flash storage and a microSD card slot. The N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009 at a cost of €500 before taxes and subsidies. Read on for further details and comment.
You'll know Tim Salmon if you've been around All About Symbian for a while, he's a regular commenter to news stories. And he now joins me in soft-launching a new audio podcast, a companion publication to my main Phones Show video podcast. Phones Show Chat episode 1, the pilot, is up now, with the main subjects being the Nokia N97 and E55/52. Note that it's a pilot and the audio quality is a little rough in places. Measures are in place to drastically improve things for episode 2. Be gentle in your comments, please!
Somewhere there's a bundle of ex-Symbian employees quietly muttering “I told them the way forward was a two-box solution....” What to make of the announcement of the Nokia Booklet 3G (beyond the fact that they're consciously avoiding the term 'netbook', even though every single post, tweet and message about this device is going to call it the Nokia Netbook)? Read on for my thoughts on this new mobile device...
In All About Symbian Insight 83 (AAS Podcast 145), Rafe and Steve discuss the enterprise focused alliance between Microsoft and Nokia and ponder its implications. Steve shares news of Gartner's Q2 smartphone shipment figures, before moving on to first thoughts on the Nokia E55. We then answer some reader questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 83 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
