Nine months ago, Steve looked at the then-new Apple iPhone, pitched against the also-new Nokia N95 8GB flagship - with the release of the iPhone 3G, it's high time for a rematch. It's evident that the iPhone 3G has closed the gap and wins in some areas, but there are still holes in its functionality that you could drive a motorhome through, leading to another overall N95 8GB victory.
I'm not sure how to respond on this one - after the announcements from Apple, American Technology Research have downgraded their stock recommendation on Nokia from 'Buy' to 'Hold' because of the increasing competition, and they are awaiting a competitive response from Nokia. I suspect that response will be coming at some point next week.
In AAS Insight #28 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss some of the news from the past week including Trolltech, Mail for Exchange 2.5 and the Symbian Smartphone Show before moving on to the general waffle topics: firstly S60's increasing integration with the PC and web, secondly smartphone statistics and definition.
Gaming was also fairly high on the agenda at the S60 Summit. Ewan was in the room and taking copious notes - here's his report on Nokia's strategies and expectations for N-Gage for the next few years.
Just to prove they were listening during all those S60 Summit seminars, Rafe and Ewan focus in this feature on S60's Web Run-Time (WRT), which was heavily promoted at the event. They cover what it is, where it's going and what it will mean for developers and end users. In addition, Rafe recorded this podcast, talking to Ganesh Sivaraman about WRT and all things widgetey.
In AAS Insight 27, the latest All About Symbian podcast, we talk about some recent firmware upgrades for a number of devices before moving on to a wide ranging discussion from topics out of last weeks S60 Summit. Areas covered include the future of user experience, Samsung and the S60 platform, the future of software development and widgets and WRT.
All About Symbian regular Matt Radford is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week, it's here at his All About iPhone blog. Carnival 125 is a bit of a cracker, actually, with discussion about whether content providers should pay the carriers for the data consumed by the end user, with a look at a huge new mobile-related craze from Japan, plus a detailed look at the implications of Google's Android (and the aforementioned Apple iPhone) for the rest of the smartphone industry.
Arun Sarin is stepping down from his CEO role with Vodafone. While cutting a controversial figure since his appointment almost 5 years ago, he has overseen rapid expansion in traditional markets, and made significant inroads into India, Turkey and Eastern Europe. In those five years theuser base has grown from 120 million users to 260 million.
In AAS Insight 26, the latest All About Symbian podcast, covers opinion on new devices (HTC Touch Diamond, Apple iPhone 3G, Blackberry Bold), looks ahead to the S60 Summit, gives a first impression on the Nokia N78, the N-Gage games transfer issue and the launch of Nokia Maps 2.0.
The Indian industrial giant Videocon is apparently interested in buying Motorola's handset business. Videocon already have licences to build 3G phone networks in India, and see potential benefits from also owning a handset manufacturing unit. Motorola currenly owns half of UIQ Technology and manufactures UIQ3 handsets, so such a sale may have implications for the Symbian world. (via Mobile Burn)
Orange and Nokia today announced a three year strategic international partnership on mobile services. The two companies will work together to provider users with an offering of music, games, advertising, maps and location based services. The relationship will see 10 Nokia handsets added to the Orange Signature range with services integrated into the familiar Orange user interface.
Symbian today publish its first set of 2008 results, which showed shipments of 18.5 million devices in Q1, a year on year increase of 16.5%, a figure which suggests a flattening of device shipments. This takes total Symbian OS device shipments to 206 million. There was also a 92% growth in consultancy service revenue to £4.8 million driven demand for services from 'a broader and deeper range of customer mobile phone products in the pipeline'.
With the concept of over-the-air syncing hotter than ever (e.g. GooSync), thanks to the guys at SMS Text News for the scoop that Vodafone just bought Zyb, another of the top SyncML hosts on the 'net. Keeping your PIM data in the 'cloud' is obviously something Vodafone now gets and for which it has got plans. Good news for everybody.
UIQ Technology today announced that Dr. Colin Tucker has been appointed to the position of Non-Executive Independent Chairman of the Board of Directors of UIQ Technology. Other members of the board come from UIQ's owners, Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Dr. Tucker has previsouly held executive positions at a number of mobile companies including Orange and Hutchison.
Congrats to Russ Beattie and Mike Rowehl, the guys behind Mowser. It may well have looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, but the service has been bought by the dotMobi consortium. Reporting on Dev.Mobi, James Pearce charts out the use of their new toy, namely to drive Opt-In mobilisation of websites, integrating the Mowser Directory, and of course using the (re)formatting technology.
