Mobil.cz is reporting that next week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung will announce the G810, a new S60-powered phone. The rumoured G810 specifications are dimensions of 104x52x18mm, with a 2.6 inch QVGA screen, 5 megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom, built in GPS, 150MB of internal memory and microSD card slot, GSM and UTMS (with HSDPA) cellular connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0, USB, and WiFi. These specifications would suggest it will look to compete with Nokia's high end Nseries devices such as the N95. Read on for more.
Lenovo is to sell it mobile phone division to a number of private equity firms for $100m. Lenovo may not be well known for mobile phones outside China (where it is the number 4 handset manufacturer), but trivia buffs may remember its early (now defunct) association with S60. It became the sixth licensee of S60 in 2004 and released the P930 S60 handset in 2005.
Late yesterday Motorola announced that it was considering a 'structural and strategic realignment of its business to enhance shareholder value'. Motorola is exploring its options in order 'to better equip its Mobile Devices business business to recapture global market leadership'. The company is considering spinning off or selling its Mobile Device division, but no final decision has been made and the mobile phone division may yet be retained.
Nokia today announced that it would acquire Trolltech a company which provides software development platforms and frameworks. Trolltech is best known for its Qt product, a multi-platform graphical user-interface framework. Qt is used in KDE, the web browser Opera, Skype and Google Earth applications. Nokia intends to use Qt to enable cross platform development environments.
Nokia today announced its Q4 2007 results. Nokia's overall phone market share reached 40% (smartphone market share is higher still) with net sales of 15.7 billion Euros. In Q4, Nokia's converged (S60) device shipments were 18.8 million (up from 11.1 million in Q4 2006). Converged devices made up 14% of Nokia's total shipments (133.5 million). 3 million Eseries devices were shipped along with well over 11 million Nseries devices.
UIQ Technology today announced that it has added six new partners to its UIQ Alliance Program. UIQ Technology gives its partners extra support in creating and marketing UIQ related software and services. The new members are ArcSoft Inc., CleNET Technologies, Fring, Google, iSkoot and Mobica.
While I'm sure there will be more surprises on the day, the Nokia See Into S60 blog has announced what will be demo'ed on the Nokia Stand at the upcoming 3GSM World Congress, including S60 Touch and the new sensor technologies. Don't forget, All About Symbian will be there to bring you the news, the scoops and the buzz from Barcelona if you can't personally make it.
Nokia and Facebook are looking to work together (reports MoCoNews ). While it is still early days and the report stresses that "things remain to be worked out," this is perfectly in keeping with Nokia's plan to open up Ovi to as many social network partners as possible. The added discussion around Nokia purchasing a stake in the behemoth that is Facebook also fits in with their acquisition strategy.
Symbian today announced that at the end of November 2007 cumulative Symbian OS phone shipments reached 30 million. It took 10 months to go from 10 million to 20 million phones, but has only taken a further 8 months to reach 30 million. Japan is a mature market so this growth is likely on the back on increased market share (50% to 65% year on year as of June 2007).
In a move which is set to further shake up the UK data market, T-Mobile has launched free access to it's network of WiFi hotspots for new users signing up to it's web'n'walk plus or pro plans. What with almost unlimited 3G data and WiFi, this move sets T-Mobile yet another step ahead of the competition in the rush to offer for "free" data access. The full press release follows.
Following on from yesterday's question of "is Jaiku dead?" Jyri Engestrom replied both on the Jaiku Blog , but also to some questions over on my blog . The short answer is the integration with Google has been a massive headache, but things are going to start picking up in the near future.
Popular Palm and Windows Developer Astraware (with a number of mobile phone titles, and the promise of S60 and UIQ this year) has been acquired by Handmark, the company announced this week . I've been waiting a long time for the team behind the addictive Bejeweled titles to come to Symbian OS, and they promise it's still happening in Q1 this year! Congratulations to Howard Tomlinson and the team.
