It's AAS video podcast 23, in which I get the lowdown from Joe Odukoya from Symbian on ScreenPlay and FreeWay, and then I sit down with Boaz Zilberman, founder of Fring, to hear about why his VoIP and chat service is different to the competition.
In AAS audio podcast 38, Ewan Spence gets round a Smartphone Show table with mobile trends expert Robert Harmsen and developer Sander van der Wal. 25 minutes of interesting chat!
Nokia today published its results for Q3 2007 (July to September). Based on this time last year, they show an 85% rise in net profits, a 28% rise in net sales and a rise in global market share from 36% to 39%. Nokia sold over 111 million devices during the quarter of which 16 million were converged devices (smartphones running S60).
Symbian has announced two key technologies for the next generation of Symbian OS-powered smartphones, ensuring that superfast mobile broadband and complex interface, video and gaming requirements won't be a problem for the smartphones of 2008 and beyond. Read on for the full press release about the new ScreenPlay and FreeWay and for official reaction from Symbian licensees. And we'll have a video podcast up shortly with a full interview.
Today at the Symbian Smartphone Show Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. The touch interface will support both finger and stylus input, has full multi lingual support, has support for tactile feedback (haptics) and is backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform. Read the full story for and to view the video showing S60 Touch running on some concept devices.
Sony Ericsson, Motorola and UIQ Technology today announced that Motorola has taken a 50% stake in UIQ Technology. UIQ Technology was previously wholly owned by Sony Ericsson following its purchase from Symbian earlier this year. This represents a very significant endorsement of UIQ by Motorola and underlines Motorola's plan to expand its high end multimedia portfolio using UIQ powered phones.
Red Five Labs has announced the launch of a public beta for Net60. Net60 is a .NET Compact Framework implementation for S60 devices. It enables Windows Mobile applications developed using C# and Visual Basic .NET to run unchanged on S60 devices. The current beta is aimed at system integrators and independent software vendors who are interested in using the product.
Next Monday, the day before the Symbian Smartphone Show, is the All About Symbian Pub Meet. It is a completely free and open event and everybody is very welcome to come along and join in. We'll be giving away a Sony Ericsson W950 and a Nokia E61i along with a raft of other prizes. There's also going to be two lightning talks, one from the people behind WOM World (about what they do) and one from Robert Harmsen (Trends in Mobility).
Kuneri today released KuneriLite which is a rapid application toolkit aimed at Flash Lite developers. KuneriLite, which is programmed in Symbian C++, is an extra layer between Flash Lite and the S60 platform which enables extra functionality to be accessed from Flash Lite. KuneriLite also includes a feature to easily create a SIS file for distribution via a Wizard based process.
Jaiku, the activity streaming and presence service (also referred to as micro blogging), has been acquired by Google. The terms of the acquisition has not been disclosed. While Jaiku is often used via the web it also has strong mobile features (including a native S60 client) and the idea of presence is a very important part of the Jaiku message.
Telefónica and Nokia have announced that the two companies are to work together on Internet services. Nokia will customise its multimedia menu on Nseries devices to enable easy access to both Nokia (e.g. Nokia Music Shop, N-Gage) and Telefónica services. The announcement is significant because its puts Nokia's own service offering on an equal footing to those provided by an operator. Read on for more.
If you have the time to come to London next week for Symbian's Smartphone Show, here's another event to attend, albeit with some overlap. Motorola, Sony Ericsson and UIQ Technology will host an informal evening for developers to relax, have fun and do some networking. Details below.
ARM and Symbian today announced Symbian OS would support the ARM Symmetric Multi-processor (SMP) architecture in future OS versions. This technology allows for multiple CPU cores to be used in mobile phones. Don't get too excited though, the first phones using multiple core processors are not expected before 2010. In other Symbian related processor news Renesas today announced it has commenced sample shipments of its new generation chipset, the SH-Mobile G3. Read on for more details.
In what is one of the most significant technology acquisitions of the year Nokia has announced it is to acquire Navteq for $8.1 billion. Navteq is the leading provider of digital map information which is used in car navigation systems (e.g. BMW), mobile navigation devices (e.g. Garmin), Internet-based mapping applications (e.g. Google Maps), and government and business solutions. Nokia uses Navteq data in its own Nokia Maps product.
Walking around this year's Smartphone Show in London, one thought suddenly struck Steve - where were the 'anti-virus' vendors? Is it possible, Steve dares to hope, that the virus hype from developers has finally, finally gone away? Has this part of the Symbian OS world finally grown up?
