A group of companies, drawn from both the consumer electronics and automotive industries, today announced the formation of the Car Connectivity Consortium, to help develop, maintain and promote in-vehicle connectivity solutions such as Terminal Mode, NFC and wireless charging. The stated goal of the organisation is to have "a seamless, safe, effortless and delightful user experience when using a smartphone in a car".
Somewhat ironic in the light of Nokia's imminent partnership with Microsoft to produce Windows Phone phones ("joining an ecosystem"), figures have been released showing that Nokia's Ovi Store revenues (much of which was from Symbian-based smartphones) were up 719% year on year and ahead of the Google Android Market. More stats below.
Over on Engadget, Chris Ziegler has grabbed a video Q and A session at Mobile World Congress with Stephen Elop. It’s wide ranging in the ground covered, although given the short time-scale it’s mostly sound-bites and short paragraph style answers. And some questions were outright dodged. Nevertheless, it casts some more sunlight on the decisions of Elop and how the next few months are going to pan out for Symbian, Meego and Nokia.
Two days after its investor-focused Strategy and Financial meeting, much covered in previous stories, Nokia held a more consumer-focussed press conference just before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While the overall message was no different to Friday's event, Nokia did provide some additional details on its short-term Symbian plans. These include a wave of new devices and significant software updates for Symbian^3. [Story updated after Rafe got back from the event]
At its Strategy and Financial Briefing event today in London, Nokia has outlined its "new strategic direction, including changes in leadership and operational structure to accelerate the company's speed of execution in a dynamic competitive environment". Some more quotes below, but in short this means a reorganisation into "Smart Devices" and "Mobile Phones", and adding a new OS platform to its portfolio, with Windows Phone becoming Nokia's "primary smartphone platform" and Symbian becoming "a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value". More below, and more through the day, of course. Rafe's on the ground, see the other Coveritlive news item.
At a Strategy and Financial Briefing, which takes place at 10 am GMT on February 11th Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected to outline his vision for the future strategy of the company. Rafe will be reporting live from Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel, London, where the event is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter accounts (@aas and @allaboutmeego).
Even though we first reported on the standardisation of mobile phone chargers two years ago, the International Electrotechnical Commission has finally published its IEC International Standard IEC 62684, entitled "Interoperability specifications of common external power supply (EPS) for use with data-enabled mobile telephones". This final push has partly been made possible by the IEC signing a "memorandum of understanding" with the USB Implementers Forum. The standard has been based on specifications from fourteen companies: Apple, Nokia, Research in Motion, Emblaze Mobile, Huawei Technologies, LGE, Motorola Mobility, NEC, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, TCT Mobile (ALCATEL), Texas Instruments and Atmel.
There's an exhaustive and interesting look, nicely pitched, by long term AAS reader Eugen Diskin here, looking at 16 (count 'em) reasons why the mood of bloggers, analysts and users all seem against Nokia right now. There are some good points in here, some left valid but most vigorously defended. You'll have to excuse the occasional broken English, the author isn't a native speaker - but well worth ten minutes of your time over coffee this weekend.
Nokia has released its Q4 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €884 million (down 23% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €12.65 billion (up 6% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €1090 million, up 10% from Q3. Margins in devices and services were 11.3% (down 4.1% YoY and up 0.9% QoQ).
Nokia sold more than 5 million Symbian^3 devices. Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were up, at 28.3 million, compared with 20.8 million units in Q3 2009 (up 36% YoY) and compared with 26.5 million units in Q3 2010 (up 7%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 31%, down 6% sequentially and 9% year on year, due to the overall smartphone market growth, estimated up by a huge 63% YoY. [Post updated with extra charts and quotes]
O2 has launched "O2 WiFi", offering free WiFi to anyone, whether or not they are an O2 customer. O2 now takes the view that the service can be better paid for by advertising on the hotspot landing pages rather than getting revenue from specific subscribers. In Q1, 2011, O2 is rolling out 450 free hotspots and by 2013 they 'aim to have approximately 15,000 hotspots'.
Nokia have put in place plans to close the all-you-can-eat version of the Ovi Music store. Originally called Comes with Music, and currently branded as Ovi Music Unlimited, the service was available with a select number of handsets, including the X6 and N97 Mini. Nokia have no plans to supply this handset/service combination beyond the end of this year to the majority of territories.
An interesting question from Jeff Pulver on his blog – should our phones have a “dumb” mode that allows nothing but phone calls to come through? The goal of course is to reduce needless accidents as people text, browse and generally use their phone to communicate and distract them from driving (see also AOL’s The Last Text campaign).
Skype has announced that it plans to acquire Qik. Qik provides software which allows you to instantly capture and share (live stream) video on a mobile phone. Qik is available for more than 200 mobile phones, including most Symbian devices. Skype say they share "a common purpose of enriching communications with video" with Qik, but Qik's technology, focused around optimising video transition over mobile networks, will also give Skype's mobile aspirations a boost.
Tomi Ahonen is widely respected for his macroscopic analyses of the mobile world, so it's worth noting this latest publication, exclusively in PDF/ebook form for 10 Euros. A "companion volume" to his Almanac, the new "Phone Book 2010 gives you 171 pages all about the handsets part of the industry, with over 90 charts, diagrams and tables".
It’s nice when a post with such a grandiose title like "The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995" actually delivers. It takes a look at the number of “Android will crush everyone in 2011” articles and ponders what that actually means. Not directly for the industry as a whole, but what it means for Google as a business, and the hardware partners who have tied themselves to the Mountain View company?
