In 'Mobile Development - For Everyone', our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor talks to Amer Hasan, Senior Manager, Apps & Developer Programs at Vodafone, about Betavine's £20,000 widget competition. The article explains how Vodafone sees widgets reducing the barriers and costs of development and the importance of open standards in choosing which widget platform to use.
Sony Ericsson today posted its Q1 2009 results and they make for grim reading. Sony Ericsson lost EUR 358 million in the first 3 months of 2009 and shipped 14.5 million devices, a 35% year on year decline, and gross margin dropped from 29% to 8%. The numbers were not unexpected and Sony Ericsson is moving to restructure the business, but it will take time.
Lee Williams, writing on the Symbian Foundation blog, shares a few photos on Symbian ^1 (effectively the current version of S60 5th Edition) running on an 'off the shelf Intel Atom based motherboard'. The Intel Atom is one of the processors regularly used in netbook computers. The concept highlights the flexibility and maturity of Symbian platform and demonstrates that there could be potential areas for it to be used beyond mobile phones. Read on for further thoughts.
Nokia today released its Q1 2009 results. Nokia had net sales of EUR 9.3 billion, down 27% year on year and down 27% sequentially (down 24% and up 25% at constant currency). Nokia sold 13.7 million converged (S60) devices, down from 14.6 million in Q1 2008 and 15.1 million in Q4 2008, of these 5 million were Nseries and 3 million were Eseries. An individual device highlight was the 5800 which sold 2.6 million units. Nokia's industry outlook sees similar device volumes and market share for Q2, but expect overall conditions to improve in the second half of the year
Nokia's application store, Ovi Store, is now accepting content from developers, and will launch in May. In our latest developer feature, Richard Bloor speaks to Eric John, Director of Media Product Marketing for Nokia Services, to discuss the developer proposition offered by Ovi store. There's questions on operator billing, supported content types, platform support and more.
Yesterday marked 'day one' of the Symbian Foundation. This announced the commencement of the beta testing of its new web site and that 81 companies have applied for membership (50 of which are first time endorsers). The new logo of the Symbian Foundation was also unveiled: Symbian, in stylised letters, underlain by a yellow heart. Read on for more.
Ricky Cadden, on Symbian-Guru has published an interview with Symbian's David Wood, covering all aspects of the Symbian Foundation set up, plans for the future and much, much more. This has been a big week for Symbian, it's 'Week One' for the Foundation and there will be some in depth coverage coming from Rafe very shortly.
Lots of people now have flat-rate data plans for their phones, but these plans usually aren't flat-rate when you're in a foreign country. Using data while abroad has traditionally been very expensive, but the EU is now trying to introduce caps on data roaming charges. Under the plan, data roaming charges would be capped from July 2009 at 1 euro per megabyte, falling to 50 cents per megabyte by July 2011. These are caps so phone networks could charge less of course, but they could not charge more.
There's more from Symbian Foundation's David Wood here, talking about the steps needed to get to a working SF phone, including a couple of the clearest 'picture speaks 1000 words' diagrams I've seen in a long time.
More Carnival of the Mobilists goodness over here this week, in Carnival 166. Always good to read - the posts help round out one's mobile industry knowledge!
On Tuesday Nokia announced it would be 'streamline operations in several units and functions'. Approximately 1,700 employees will be affected, mainly in the UK, USA and Finland. While the economic environment and Nokia's longer term cost-cutting plans are largely responsible, Nokia says some cuts are a result of the Symbian acquisition.
Nokia will be holding a four-hour question and answer event for publishers and developers interested in the upcoming Ovi Store on-phone content shop. The registration link and more details are available below.
Any set of figures which show Apple gaining in the smartphone race (up 300% year on year) are bound to be heavily commented on in the USA-dominated tech media, and Gartner's Q4 (and general 2008) worldwide sales figures are no exception. Definitely worth a skim though. Symbian OS still dominates the world, powering 52% of the world's smartphones, but the lead is down 6% from the previous year. RIM continues to rise with the Blackberry OS and the iPhone is on the up and up too. In terms of manufacturers, Nokia sold 44% of all smartphones last year, roughly the same (60 million) as in 2007, with RIM and Apple clocking up 16 and 8 million respectively. The leading Windows mobile handset maker, HTC, was a distant worldwide fourth, with only 4 million.
You have to hand it to David Wood of Symbian Foundation, he sure knows how to whip up and manage an OS release schedule. Here he publishes the timescales for the next few releases of Symbian Foundation OS, which make interesting reading. Of note is the numbering system (though don't get too tied up on the way Symbian OS 9.5 runs S60 5th Edition Feature Pack 1 which will become Symbian^2, and so on) and the mammoth software engineering exercise that will be keeping no less than five major OS versions all in planning/development/release all at the same time. A recipe for disaster or a masterplan that will result in world domination? Comments welcome!
A while ago we asked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation if they had an online OPML directory of their podcasts. They replied they didn't but would make one, and true to their word it has just gone live. You can now browse and subscribe to all CBC podcasts on your S60 device by adding the directory address http://www.cbc.ca/podcasts.opml to your Podcasting application. We will be publishing a more detailed article about this later, but for the moment see our previous article on how to add directories to the S60 Podcasting application (the link also has the URLs for the BBC and NPR podcast directories). Also see our guide to podcasting on the Nokia 5800.
