Gartner may have beaten Canalys to the Q2 smartphone sales figure stories, but there's still plenty of interest in Canalys' version of events. The headline numbers are similar to Gartner's, with Nokia in the lead with 44% of the market, RIM in second place with 21% and Apple in third with 14%. From a platform point of view, Symbian OS powers just over half of all smartphones sold across the world, though this market share was down 8% year on year. RIM and Apple's OS both gained share, with Windows Mobile being the big loser, with its market share almost halving year on year.
Yesterdays news of the Nokia - Microsoft alliance around enterprise software and services has been generating a lot of interest. One of the interesting side stories is that Nokia's Symbian phones already have an outstanding Office compatible software suite, in the form of Quickoffice, which ships with every current Nokia Symbian phone. Quickoffice have released their own statement today noting that its Symbian business represents only a portion of its overall business and that it will ship on 200 million Nokia Symbian phones before Microsoft's product is even released. See below for comment and their statement in full.
More interesting data from the smartphone world analysts. See below for the full table of data, but essentially Nokia's world market share is down 2.4% year on year, to 45%, despite shipping over 3 million more units, a total of 18.4 million smartphones. RIM improved slightly to 18.7% market share, while Apple is now in third place at 13.3% market share. Notable is the fact that Nokia still outsold RIM, Apple, fourth-place HTC and fifth-place Fujitsu combined, so as ever, it's business as usual at Espoo. In terms of worldwide platform/OS market share, Symbian OS was down 6% at 51%, RIM was up at at 16%, iPhone OS up at 12% and Windows Mobile was down at 9%. Android's share was under 2%, showing how far this has to go to make a serious impact.
In the last few days there has been considerable comment, invariousmediachannels, on some of the changes that are set to be introduced with the Symbian^4 release, including the breaking of backwards compatibility due to the retirement of AVKON and introduction of Orbit, which we first reported on back in May. With Symbian starting the process of communicating the changes to developers, and with renewed discussion online, it is worth revisiting the subject. Read on for further details.
Offscreen Technology have just released a touch enabled version of Elements, their periodic table application (it's available in the Ovi Store). Making best use of the letterbox screen size of the 5800, the app presents the always useful periodic table of elements, nicely colour coded to keep elemental groupings together, as well as allowing you to tap through on each element to gain additional information.
In All About Symbian Insight 81 (AAS Podcast 143), we share the news that Ovi Files is now free to use and talk about its potential uses. We follow up with discussion of the latest Google software updates, the most notable being the addition of Layers to Google Maps. There's comment on Apple's recent result, Accenture acquisition of Nokia's Symbain Professional Service unit and answers to some listener questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 81 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Candid insight is hard to obtain during the initial phases of an acquisition. Accenture’s purchase of the Symbian Professional Services group from Nokia is no exception. However, a little digging does indicate that from Accenture’s perspective this deal is about more than gaining access to Symbian skills. Read on.
Nokia today announced that it is acquiring certain assets of cellity, a small privately owned mobile software company. cellity's current services, which are focused around managing and syncing contacts between different web services, will not be transferred to Nokia; rather Nokia will acquire the cellity team to strengthen its own 'competencies in the area of social networking'. Read on for more.
In All About Symbian Insight 80 (AAS Podcast 142), we discuss Nokia's Q2 results and the announcement of the Nokia Surge. We follow up with news of Symbian's Horizon program, before talking about the latest set of software updates for the N97. Finally we answer some questions from our listeners. You can listen to AAS Insight 80 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Last Friday, Nokia and Accenture announced that they had entered in to an agreement for Accenture to acquire Nokia's Symbian Professional Services unit, which is 'responsible for Symbian OS customer engineering and customer support'. Effectively, the unit provides technical expertise, in the form of a service consultancy, to companies from across the ecosystem: mobile operators, silicon vendors and device manufacturers. Read on for more.
Following a successful event in 2008 (see our report here), Vodafone's Betavine labs have announced another Over The Air event, to take place on the 25th and 26th of September at Imperial College, London. Betavine will be joined by Lonely Planet and OMTP to present the 24 hour hacking and coding event, where new ideas are presented in the first few sessions and everyone else starts a single day burst of coding to present their ideas and hacks.
The Symbian Foundation today announced the first details of Symbian Horizon, an application-publishing program, which aims to reduce the barriers developers face when taking their products to market and thus increase the profitability of creating Symbian applications. Symbian Horizon will place applications in a number of partner app stores including Nokia's Ovi Store, Samsung's Application Store and AT&T's MEdia Mall, effectively acting as an application publisher on behalf of developers.
Nokia has released their Q2 2009 results. Profits were down 66% year on year, but this was ahead of market expectations. Nokia cut its prediction for H2 2009 profitability and market share for 2009, which has driven down its share price. However the underlying results are encouraging, given the economic climate, although some concerns remain in the high end of the market. Converged devices sales (smartphone) were up at 16.9 million, compared with 15.3 million units in Q2 2008 and 13.7 million units in Q1 2009. The 5800 shipped 3.7 million units, while Eseries and Nseries shipments were 4.7 and 4.6 million respectively.
The Symbian Foundation today announced it is establishing a new office in Japan. The aim is to improve its support for it Japanese members (who include the operators NTT DOCOMO and Softbank Mobile and the manufacturers Sharp and Fujitsu) and bolster engagement with the developer community. The Symbian Foundation also have offices in London, San Fransisco and Helsinki.
