Symbian's developers are making a big push into China (reports Daniel Shen at the Digitimes), with an expansion to almost 300 staff expected at their R&D Centre in Beijing. The market in Asia for smartphones is one that most western handset manufacturers have been eyeing over the years, and I'm sure that 'let's try to be big there' has been the downfall of a few companies along the way.
While in San Francisco last month, Ewan popped in to see N-Gage's 'Ikona'. Here's his exclusive interview with the man who is N-Gage's public 'face'. Find out how he got started with N-Gage, and find out just how important the N-Gage blog now is to Nokia.
It's.... AAS Insight 19 (aka AAS audio podcast 68), mainly concentrating on the news of UIQ 3.3 and what it will mean, but also chatting about the split of Motorola, the v21 update for the Nokia N95 Classic and the usual software spots. Here's the Insight 19 listening link, here's the RSS feed for you to subscribe for the future.
Symbian announced two new OS technologies today at CTIA: Symbian SQL and an advanced Location Based Services (LBS) architecture. The first will allow the use of much larger data sets by smartphone applications and the second will simplify the development of genuine location-sensitive apps and services. The full press release is below.
If you thought that Symbian Signed was too many hoops to jump through to get your game onto a UK handset, just wait till the British Board of Film Classification gets involved (BBC News and other online sources). Released later today, the Byron report will recommend that any video game will be forced to carry cinema style classification (currently only games depicting sex or gross violence are certified).
UIQ Technology just announced the availability of UIQ 3.3. The new release is built on top of Symbian OS v9.3 and adds among other things, Opera Mobile 9.5, supporting 'a full web-experience on mobile devices', Opera Widgets and UIQ Dashboard. Whether this will bring more UIQ 3 powered smartphones to the market in the near future or not remains to be seen. Full press release after the break.
Motorola today announced that it had commenced a process to split itself into two seperate companies: a mobile device business and a broadband and mobility solutions business (reflecting current divisions within the company). The move seems likely to avoid a direct sale of the mobile device business, but a joint venture with another company remains a distinct possibility.
PDA Essentials magazine, issue 73, is now out in the UK. Of specific interest is an interview with Mark Loughran, sales director of Nokia UK, in which he states that Nokia should sell 35 million GPS-enabled smartphones this year. That's er.... a lot. Mark mentions the 6220 Classic as important in achieving this goal. More from issue 73 below, including their Sony Ericsson W960i review.
The SXSW interactive festival (happening right now in the USA) is a busy conference, but Ewan caught a taxi ride with James Pearce, Vice President of Technology for the dotmobi consortium, and asked him about the controversial top level domain for mobile devices, here in AAS podcast 65. Are you convinced about his arguments for .mobi? Comments welcome.
Showing that you really can't believe every stat you read without knowing the exact context, and remembering the attention some USA mobile browsing stats got when they announced that Apple iPhone browser use trumped that of any other device, I was interested to see stats from respected UK computer magazine/web site PC Pro, showing the top 5 mobile devices that had accessed their servers in 2008 so far. Read on....
With Ewan somewhere in America still, Rafe recording an Insight with me and then taking a well deserved long weekend break himself, it's been an odd 24 hours, centred around the big news from Cupertino and smartphone industry reaction to it. Read on for some analysis on this and other interesting weekend reading links.
Mitsubishi is to close its loss making mobile handset business with employees being reassigned to other areas of the company. Mistubishi currently makes phones for Japan's NTT DoCoMo FOMA network; the handsets use the MOAP-S (MOAP on Symbian) software platform. Handset shipments to NTT DoCoMo will halt by September. And so we bid goodbye to another Symbian licensee. Read on for more details.
Nokia has announced at CeBIT that it will make Microsoft's Silverlight (think Flash clone) available for S60, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering 'next-generation' media experiences and rich interactive applications. Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keyote at their MIX08 conference on March 5 and availability to developers is intended to be later this year. Read on for more details and analysis.
It's Monday and it's time for our new Insight podcast. In number 15 (aka AAS podcast 63), we look at news, geotagging privacy concerns, recent handset designs from Nokia and Ewan reports on truly mobile software. Give it a listen on the way home from work. Here's the RSS feed if you want to subscribe regularly.
In this podcast we cover current developments around Nokia's Ovi strategy including Sync, Share, N-Gage, plus we chat about all aspects of the Nokia N96, following on from our hands-on preview. Finally, we rant and rave a little about Google's new native search 'client'. Here's the link: Insight no. 14, plus the RSS feed to sign up for the future.
