Nokia’s blog has picked out five applications for your smartphone that will make your time at the summer music festivals just that little bit better. But only five? Surely there are more than that? Ewan Spence dons his blue suede trainers and heads online to find the top apps for music lovers. Power and bandwidth aside, what else do you need?
Nokia's social media outreach initiatives continue apace. Today, from 6 pm (UK time), Niklas Savander, who recently became Nokia's head of sales and marketing, will be answering questions submitted to his Twitter account @NiklasatNokia. The Nokia Conversations Blog has invited everyone to ask any Nokia related questions they may have. Answers will come back via Twitter or via video.
The 'Best RSS Apps' section of Nokia's 2010 Calling All Innovator competition has been judged and a top 10 Ovi App Wizard apps (actually Web runtime widgets) listed, based on 'Innovativeness', 'Cumulative number of downloads on July 15th 2010' and 'Quality of marketing materials'. They're all covered below, with brief comments and screenshots, in case you should want to look any of them out(!).
One we all missed last week, but Nokia have released an updated version of their application suite for Ramadan. Following on from the acclaim of the 2009 release, this year Nokia have gathered everything under a single application. When we talk about Nokia reaching out to customers, this is a wonderful example. See below for details.
The Register’s Top Ten Essential Symbian Apps makes for a good list. I’m sure we could argue that there are some apps that should be there which aren’t, but that’s always the fun of these lists. The question might be what are your top ten apps? Let us know in the comments.
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.
The smartphone is making an audible difference to the world (writes Clive Thompson at Wired). He’s spotted that his mobile phone bills are dropping, and there’s one obvious cause. he’s not phoning people as much as he used to, and what calls he is making are not lasting as long. It’s all to do with the rise of social networks and smartphone connectivity, "This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways."
You may recall last week we pointed out Nokia’a Conversations Blog post crying out the virtues of the keyboard. Keeping the karmic balance, this week sees the touchscreen side of the debate step up to take a swing at the arguments. And then there’s Tomi Ahonen’s take on the debate.
More significant news from the Samsung i8910 HD firmware scene, which is accelerating, amazingly, rather than slowing down. 'faenil' has organised a one-click installer for the Qt 4.7.0 beta2 libraries for non-Nokia smartphones such as the i8910 HD, in theory letting them install some of the new Qt apps (e.g. the superlative Orange Wednesdays). A quote and video from faenil below. In related news, HyperX is now finalising HX8 firmwares, including even more customisations and a fix for Samsung's longstanding Music player bugs (a video for which is also embedded below). It's all go... What do you mean, you don't own an i8910 HD?
The Nokia N8, the first publicly announced Symbian^3 device, is available for pre-order from Nokia Italy's web store. It is priced at €469 (£390 / $600), with availability stated as being at the end of September, just in line with Nokia's stated Q3 shipment date. Nokia Italy is offering free delivery and say that customers pre-ordering will be 'among the first to receive the new N8'. Other Nokia stores will no doubt make their pre-order processes available shortly.
Got a smart idea for something on mobile? Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2010 might be just the thing for you. This competition (with a prize fund of 150,000 Euros) is accepting registrations for the competition until August 22nd. They're looking for smart ideas, not just finished products, and are hoping to accelerate innovation in European mobile start-ups. More below....
With Nokia getting criticised every year for failing to put serious investment into the USA, a single Twitter account isn't exactly going to reverse this overnight, but it's good to see regardless. There's now an official 'Nokia US Care' Twitter account for people to hit up for updates and to fire questions at. Early days, obviously, but personal contact like this really can't do any harm...
A little something for the mobile traveller, as the Pay as you Go Sim with Data wiki is pointed out to me. In it, a country’s network providers are listed, but only those that offer Pay as You Go data. A great resource for those who want to plan ahead before picking up a SIM when they land.
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.
