For all the talk of N8's, iPhone 4 and Galaxy S smartphones, there's another much more important battle happening. At the low end of the market, cheap footsoldiers such as the Symbian-powered Nokia 5230 are gearing up for a fight with Android devices like the ZTE Racer. Can Android provide as much of a success as S60 5th Edition in the £100-and-under market? And why could it be regarded as the key battleground for market share? Read on for my thoughts...
From AAS's department of the bleedin' obvious come comments from me after looking into data from the last ten years in the Symbian world, looking at screen sizes across a range of form factors and interfaces (including Series 80 and UIQ). Yes, form factors are gradually converging, and yes, screens are getting larger. No real surprise there then, but I thought you might be interested in the charts themselves below...
What’s the most used internet application on your Symbian phone? It’s likely that the web browser is going to feature quite highly if we were to have a survey, and the huge number of eyes that mobile websites can gather is only going to grow in the future. That makes it one of the growth areas for online advertisers, and the capabilities of Symbian-powered smartphones should help drive innovation and help grow the market for everyone involved. My thoughts below....
Canalys has just released a limited set of numbers for smartphone sales in Quarter 2, 2010, showing Nokia with a leading 38% marketshare across the world, with actual sales of its Symbian-based smartphones up 41% year on year. RIM's Blackberrys were second in terms of smartphone marketshare, with 18%, while Apple was at 13% worldwide. Android-powered smartphones made up a lot of the 'noise' in the analysis, split across a multitude of manufacturers, but showing very siginificant growth, as you'll see from the table below.
Sales of mobile phones in Q2 this year are up over 19% compared to last year (reports ABI Research). There are some slight changes, with Nokia and Samsung dropping share slightly, in part due to re-organisation for Nokia and the prevailing economic conditions hitting Samsung. The launch timing of the iPhone 4 hasn’t helped Apple, who also dropped market share. Mind you, with all sales up, that’s still more handsets sold by each company compared to the raw numbers from Q2 2009.
You've seen the 'pinching and zooming' adverts for many (non-Symbian) smartphones, showing lightning fast manipulation of full desktop-class web page renders, with new pages 'coming down' in a matter of seconds. "It's the Internet in your pocket" say the promos. And, from my own observations, for many people this is utter pie in the sky. Out in the real world, mobile coverage and bandwidth falls diabolically short - which partly helps explain the popularity of a certain proxy-based web browser that works on everything and enables not the 'real web', but more 'looks and feels a lot like the real web, but isn't really'...
In All About Symbian Insight 129, we start with a number of short items: Angry Birds as a favourite game, Qt on Samsung and Sony Ericsson, Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition. In the second half of the podcast we respond to number of listener questions, from a discussion of how quality impacts on user experience, to how Nokia should market the N8 and the possibility of an Android Nokia device. You can listen to AAS Insight 129 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Many years ago, everyone thought that Instant Messaging (IM) would be a big winner on the mobile platform. That’s turned out to not be the case – the winner in the field of short form updates has been the status message on Facebook and the broadcasting nature of Twitter. So what happened? And are the same mistakes being made by the current slew of location-based apps that are the so-called 'next wave of innovation'? Read on...
Spurred on by his reviews of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro and Samsung i8910 HD, David Gilson looks at the huge investment Nokia has made into providing an Ovi service layer - it seems that, whatever Ovi's detractors might say, the absence of this service layer on non-Nokia hardware is desperately noticeable. He also wonders whatever became of Symbian's Horizon project - as good a starting point as any for getting applications out to all Symbian smartphones.
An interesting view of the mobile application space has come to light over the weekend with a report commissioned by the BBC Trust to investigate the state of play with mobile apps, smartphone app stores and accessing content on the move. It concludes that (at least for information and news portals) “[the market] is already trending toward free apps”. More below.
Nokia has released their Q2 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €295 million, with net sales €10.0billion (up 1% Year-on-Year). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €643 million, down 16% year on year. Margins in devices and services were 9.5% (down 2.7% YoY and down 2.6% QoQ). Converged devices sales (smartphones) were significantly up, at 24 million, compared with 16.9 million units in Q2 2009 (so up 42% YoY) and compared with 21.5 million units in Q1 2010 (up 12%, QoQ). As such, worldwide smartphone marketshare was 41%, stable sequentially and year on year. Full story and comments below.
Yesterday, a new non-profit organisation, Symbian Developer Co-operative (DevCo), announced its existence and that it had joined the Symbian Foundation. It aims 'to raise the profile of individuals within the Symbian community and give individuals a full voice in the governance of the Symbian platform'. As a member of the Symbian Foundation, Symbian Developer Cooperative has the same rights as any other member.
The relationship between the network and manufacturer has always been one of the more opaque areas in the history of the mobile phone – and as the demands of modern smartphones push the capacity of the networks, the discussions and bartering on both sides continue behind closed doors. Which sometime open a little bit. Wired author Fred Vogelstein has posted a detailed look at the marriage of AT&T and Apple. See below for a quote.
In leaps and bounds, the term 'smartphone' is being bandied about by manufacturers, analysts, journalists, developers and end users across the world. Which would normally be a good thing, except that there are many definitions, all totally different. What exactly defines a smartphone in 2010? What did it used to mean in 2007? Or 2003? With reports regularly quoting the word, it would be good to all agree what the word means, surely?
In all the talk of user interfaces, promises, updated software and hardware, there is one other area that Nokia need to look at. Making the Nokia name one that everyone is the world is happy to be associated with. How can they do that? Here are some thoughts.
