'As Live' from the 2008 Symbian Smartphone Show, here's All About Symbian Insight no. 44, hosted by Ewan Spence, with Rafe Blandford and Steve Litchfield; guests include (but not limited to ) Nigel Clifford, Stuart Clark, Andrew Grill and James Whatley. 40 minutes long and plenty of gossip, info and fun...
Lee Williams, currently the head of S60 inside Nokia, will become the Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation in the new year, the ten initial board members of the Foundation have announced on the second day of the Symbian Smartpone Show. His experience in running what till now has been one of the largest components of Symbian OS will be vital to the new organisation and the support from over 50 companies to the principles of the unified platform.
Symbian have announced a wide range of companies joining the initial ten board members of the Symbian Foundation. Set up with a view to provide an open source mobile operating system with a strong eco-system, there are now over fifty companies supporting the plans that were revealed in June 2008. From today, ARM, CleNET, Flander, Fujisoft, Huawei, Inmote, Innopath, RedBend, Scalado, Symsource, Trango and Visa are supporting the Foundation.
Rafe's been trying out Nokia's newest Music service offering, Comes with Music - for real, with a full retail package. There may be some caveats with the system (PC/MSIE-only, DRM-heavy), but overall he comes away very impressed. How is the PC client to use and what's the overall experience like for a new music-loving phone user? Can you retro-fit CwM to an existing handset? What can you do and what can't you do with the downloaded music? Find out in Rafe's definitive Comes with Music review.
Nokia today released its 3rd quarter results for 2008. Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.5 million (down from 16 million in Q3 2007) including 9 million Nseries and 3 million Eseries devices. Sales and profit were down, but the gross margin in the device and services division increased (36.5% from 36.1%). Nokia's market share fell to 38%, from 39% last year and 40% last quarter.
Carnival of the Mobilists 145 is over at mjelly this week and well worth a look, with interesting mobile-related reading plus some splendidly bizzarre carnival imagery....
In All About Symbian Podcast 96 (Insight #43) Steve, after an E90 firmware update, asks why he can have a better experience than Nokia Software Updater. We also talk about about recent content on All About Symbian before moving on to some thoughts and reflections on S60 5th Edition with some special attention for backwards compatibility.
In an extended edition of the All About Symbian Podcast (Insight #42) we reflect on the announcements out of last week's Nokia Remix Event in London. There's some a general discussion of the tone of the event, but the meat of the podcast focuses on Nokia's first S60 touch handset, the Nokia 5800 MusicXpress, before moving on to Nokia's new Comes with Music service.
Mobile magazine is reporting that Sony Ericsson intends to close its flagship London store, quoting 'market conditions don't make it appropriate'. A shame, but you may remember my sorry experience there a while ago. It's not really surprising that the store failed to make a profit, in all honesty.
All you can listen to, including Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell! Comes With Music is here and it's time to bring out the Cassandras and explain why it's such a bad idea. We don't have any Cassandra's to hand though, so Ewan will have to suffice.
Today sees the formal unveiling on S60 5th Edition. The new version of S60, built on Symbian OS 9.4, adds touch enablers to the platform, which means it is possible for licensees to create devices that use finger touch and/or stylus interaction. Other additions and improvements include the new sensor framework (adds easy integration of sensors, such as accelerometers into the platform) updated web technologies (WebKit version updated, Flash Lite 3 as standard) and enhanced multimedia functionality (support for widescreen displays, image and video editors as standard). Read on for more details.
Today, in London, at its Remix event, Nokia formally launched its Comes with Music service offering. Comes with Music (CwM) lets you buy a Nokia device that includes a year of unlimited access (downloads) to tracks from the Nokia Music Store. After the year is up you can keep any previously downloaded music. CwM will launch first in the UK later this month on the Nokia 5310 Xpress Music, with the Nokia N95 8GB and Nokia 5800 Xpress Music to follow in due course. Read on for more details.
Nokia continues to increase their portfolio of internet services with the upcoming acquisition of Oz Communications (via MoCoNews and others). The Canadian firm specialises in providing both IM and email alongside a basic social network to operators including Verizon and Sprint. The obvious home for this platform is inside Ovi; the deal should be completed by the end of the year so we may see where Oz ends up in early 2009.
Nokia announced today that it is 'renewing its business mobility solutions and strategy'. Nokia will cease developing or marketing its own behind-the-firewall solutions. Rather than offering its own complete end-to-end solutions, Nokia will strengthen strategic partnerships and will form its enterprise offering by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Cisco.
I can honestly say that this week's Carnival of the Mobilists is the biggest for quite a while, because I've been the one having to sit through all the submissions to compile it. Here's the result, Carnival 143 over at The Phones Show. Happy reading - and don't miss Tomi Ahonen's feature post or Barbara Ballard's conference notes, either are enough to get you through your lunch hour on their own!
