Always interesting to see the latest figures coming out, this time from Gartner for Q1 2009. Nokia's market share in the smartphone world had fallen slightly, to 41%, but they still sold more devices (15 million) than the next four manufacturers put together. The 5800 in particular was pointed out as a success story. Behind Nokia in the stats were RIM with 20% of the market, and Apple at 11% with their iPhone. In terms of smartphone OS, Symbian powered just under 50% of devices sold. Comments welcome!
The N79 certainly seems a suitable device for a hardy, dusty, GPS-enabled, solar-powered cycle ride across the globe. Susie Wheeldon, Jamie Vining and Iain Henderson are using 'Nokia N79 Active' devices to find their way (Nokia Maps) and keep track of their heart rate (Sports Tracker), as they make their way through 15 countries in travelling 12,000 miles. It's all being powered by thin-film solar panels attached to their bike paniers. You can follow their progress over the next nine months on www.thesolarcyclediaries.com. Photo and bits from the PR below.
The Register has a good summary of the saga of Yahoo!'s latest Java mobile 'all in one', which has apparently now been canned. Yahoo! Go and their new mobile home page all seemed pretty slick to me, but one can't help but feel that the mighty Y! are fighting a rear guard action against the invincible big-G. Comments welcome if you're a big Yahoo! Java client fan...
NTT DOCOMO today announced its new handset line up for 2009. Included in the line up are Symbian (MOAP) phones from Fujitsu (F-08A and F-09A) and Sharp (SH-05A, SH-06A, SH-06A NERV and SH-07A). Features include being water proof (low end models) and 10 megapixels cameras, GPS built in digital TV receivers, world roaming (high end models).
Last week's announcement by Vodafone UK that they were scrapping their roaming charges for users of the Vodafone Passport service was a welcome levelling of the billing system to the problem of calls made abroad. The offer makes it simple to understand what your bill for calls, texts and MMS's will be when you are travelling in Europe, New Zealand or Australia – you'll pay exactly the same as you would when at home. Read on for my comments.
The 8GB variant of the Samsung i8910 HD (also known as the Omnia HD) is now available to buy on the UK operator Orange. The handset costs £97.50 on a new 18 month - £35 contract. Once the phone is available through Orange's retail partners this price will likely fall, but at the moment the i8910 is only available direct from Orange retail (limited stock) or its online store.
Nokia has announced that the much anticipated Nokia N97 is going to be now available to pre-order online later today priced at £499 (inc VAT, SIM free) from the Nokia Online Shop. Typically the Nokia UK Online Shop gets the first stocks of UK variants of Nokia devices. Here are the links to the Black Nokia N97 and White Nokia N97), though no shipping date has been set yet. As we know, the Nokia N97 will also be the first device to feature (in its firmware) the Ovi Store, which is set to go live in the next week.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and the S60mobile people often seem to have a legal-hack method for things the rest of us wouldn't even have thought of. Here it's shown that you can access and (with some difficulty) copy files back to Apple's Mobile me service from a S60 3rd Edition FP2 smartphone such as the Nokia E75. The MacGyver of the Symbian world?
The BBC News website today reported proposals to change EU rules governing consumer rights regarding software guarantees. In amongst the article was a gem of a statement from the Business Software Alliance which represents Microsoft, Apple, IBM and many other software giants: "(Digital content) is contractually licensed to consumers and not sold."
The world's first mobile MMORPG TibiaME (available on Symbian S60 1st, 2nd and 3rd Editions and Java J2ME) is still going strong, and has received a new update. The magic system has now been made more detailed with a new spell system, and the game world has had an entire new island added to it. The basic game world and client are free, but it costs extra for the gold client and for access to the premium areas of the game world.
YouTube Mobile, the native S60 client for the video sharing service, has been updated and is now (almost) fully compatible with touchscreen phones running S60 5th Edition, such as the Nokia 5800. All main functions work perfectly, with touch-screen control and support for text entry fields and a virtual keyboard. See below for screens, comments and links.
An interactive demo has been added to the Nokia N97's product pages on the Nokia UK web site. The interactive demo showcases some of the key features of the upcoming phone, including the customisable homescreen and Facebook functionality. The demo also includes the ability to log in to your own Facebook account (using Facebook Connect) so you can see what it looks like on the N97. Read on for more details and screenshots.
Those folks at Vesuvius Software have been busy in the last few weeks, cranking out more useful little Java-powered freeware applications for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and S60 5th Edition. Brand new and screenshotted below, with hyperlinks, are Musician's Swiss Knife, Soft Touch Stopwatch, Karao60 and ScratchMMS.
Ozone is now available for S60, at the same beta 0.9 version that appeared for UIQ 3 last year. Ozone is a web browser that "not only delivers advanced features such as client-side database support, application cache, zooming and multiple windows, but also provides the best web-standards compliant experience that's available". The beta download is at www.o3mobi.com. Comments welcome if you've tried Ozone.
