As expected by many, Nokia chose to concentrate on their services for their second event this morning at Mobile World Congress (the first was the Moblin/Maemo merger), announcing a barrage of stats, covering the Symbian-relevant Ovi Maps and Ovi Store, plus numbers for Life Tools, all summarised below. Nokia also announced a live pilot of their Nokia Money, designed to allow mobile payments throughout developing countries.
Nokia and Intel’s creation of Meego, from the Maemo and Moblin projects, is a big move, from both companies, and we’ll be covering the announcement and further thoughts over on All About Maemo. This should make Nokia’s strategy over the mid term a little clearer, and perhaps answers the question of what the future is for the Nokia Booklet. Apart from that pesky GMA500 graphics chip, Meego should run “out of the box” on the Booklet when it makes an appearance in Q2.
The Sunday Times has put together an interesting profile on Nokia, published on the eve of MWC. It looks at their position and market share, and takes a pretty even look at where the Finnish company is at the moment. It’s interesting that the story, while framed by the emerging markets of India, compares Nokia to Apple and the service cultures that are growing from each company.
Adobe are making a lot of noise at MWC with their Flash technology moving into the mobile space. Symbian have joined Adobe and their Open Screen Project, with a view to having the Flash Player on “future versions of Symbian”. With over 70 companies now working on the Open Screen Project, the dream of write once, run anywhere is still being kept alive.
We don't link to every other blog's hardware reviews, but we do link to the best: those that are well written and insightful, rather than just being a mass of specs and photos. In this case, here's the Prodigal Fool summing up the Nokia E72 very well, both good points and bad points. In other E72 news, people are reporting a firmware update to v23.002 - comments welcome if you spot anything new. Wonder if this addresses any of the Prodigal's points?
The Symbian Foundation has today unveiled Symbian^3, with details quoted below. And, courtesy of the video-friendly chaps at Nokia Conversations (YouTube channel), we now have an impressive video 'design preview' of Symbian^3 in action. Remember, this is the OS and user interface that will be included in Symbian-powered smartphones in the second half of 2010. Highlights from the video, embedded at high resolution below, are multiple homescreens, 3D 'Coverflow' for music albums, 'single tap' direct manipulation UI everywhere, multitouch (pinching, splaying, to zoom) and live visual multitasking (Web OS/Maemo 5-style). It's quite a visual feast, so look below and enjoy.
Python for S60 has been in a state of flux for oh so long, with multiple forks and levels, but it seems we can put all that behind us now with the formal release of the big shiny v2.0 - the dev kit was released today. You may have noted that we reported on PyS60 being made available via Sw update on some 3rd Edition FP2 devices (and above) a month ago. This new kit represents all the other bits developers (and users) might need to write in Python. The announcement, quoted below, also mentions that the source code is being donated to the Symbian Foundation.
A slightly cheeky Friday link of interest, but I noticed that the most excellent Sky Force Reloaded (reviewed by Ewan here) is now only a quid (£1) in the Nokia Ovi Store, which has to be the gaming bargain of the century. Oh, apart from four even bigger bargains, in that they're all still free in the Ovi Store: Raging Thunder (reviewed here), ToonWarz, Wave Blazer and Armageddon Squadron.
By now you’ll have spotted the impact that Google Buzz has had on the web; but I was struck by something that had flown past my browser on Monday. It was an article by Zach Epstein on “Know your Cell” about the missed opportunity Google had with Jaiku and its founder, Jyri Engestrom – who up until his departure was the Product Manager for what was to become Buzz. Read on for a few dots-joining thoughts...
Forgive the plug, but I haven't mentioned Phones Show Chat for a few weeks - audio podcasts 24 and 25 are now online for your listening pleasure - around an hour each of myself and Tim Salmon of this parish wittering about Symbian, Maemo and Android smartphones, answering Q&A, and so on. Here's the RSS feed for you to plug into Podcasting, to subscribe, if you haven't done so already 8-)
Over on their “stories from around the neighbourhood” blog, the Nokia team have spent two days in Colchester, where a trial of the Point and Find information service is going on. By using a mix of GPS on the handset, scannable barcodes and a central database, the theory is you’ll know what’s going on around you and interact with the environment. So how does it work in practice?
Following the announcement earlier this evening of Google Buzz, the extension of Google and Gmail into social networking, Google Maps (for Mobile) 4.0 has been released, advertised with the feature: "Post and view real-time messages & photos at places around the world". For Symbian at the moment, Buzz is just implemented as another Layer in Google Maps' existing system, though there will be a compatible web site soon as well. For the Gmail integration to work, you'll have to click the link on the Google Buzz web site and then reload your Gmail page. Otherwise, just use Buzz direct from the new Google Maps, just 'Add Buzz', tap the speech bubble and you're off. Screenshots, video and more below. Comments welcome if you've got it working as well.
Canalys stats are another important data point for the smartphone industry, they usually bring out something of interest. Here, in their 2009 summary, (mirroring Tomi's numbers and our analysis), they give Symbian-powered smartphones 47% world marketshare for the year, with RIM in second place on 20%. With their press release focussing on touchscreen numbers, Canalys points out that 55% of all smartphones sold in Q4, 2009 had touchscreens, with Nokia being the leading touchscreen smartphone manufacturer.
Following on from Strategy Analytics and Tomi's stats for smartphone sales in the whole of 2009, summarised here by me last week, we now have confirmation, courtesy of the USA-based IDC, of the very latest Q4 2009 smartphone world unit sales: again, Nokia lead the market with 38% for its S60-based smartphones, while RIM's Blackberrys are in second place with 20%. Q1 2010 results will be even more interesting, expect these in the first week of April.
For those of you who use FourSquare (a geo-location social network and game all rolled into one), you might be interested to know that you can check-in to the game via a third party service, Waze. Details are over on SmashPop if you’d happier using this method than SMS or the mobile website.
