The BBC News website is reporting that Sony Ericsson is to cut two thousand jobs over the next year, in order to cut operating costs. The company was making a profit this time last year, but in the last quarter it reported a small loss.
If your eye was caught by the release of a Motorola Z8 "Ferrari Edition" late last year, you might like to note that our related site, Moto Smartphones, has now made the official Ferrari theme available for any other UIQ 3 smartphones. Some screenshots below for other Ferrari fans!
The file-sharing service Share On Ovi is holding a competition for the next couple of weeks to find the best photo uploaded to the service. If you want to take part, just choose what you think is your best photo on Ovi and add the tag "best1" to it. You can view current entries by clicking on this link.
Aha. Things really do seem to be coming together on the sync front. From GooSync's extensions to My Nokia Backup to the imminent Ovi Sync, I've now spotted that Google's GMail contacts is a) about to acquire a SyncML interface, meaning that you can sync from any Symbian OS phone, and b) now changed so that your contacts don't get flooded with email addresses (this has been a longstanding bugbear of mine).
Those of you involved in Second Life might want to take a note of tomorrow's Virtual Worlds Business Panel being run by the Nokia team. It's being held on the main Nokia Island ("Nokia," funnily enough) and runs from 7pm GMT (Noon in SL, 8pm in the UK). Those of you in SL can make a date, everyone else, you've got 24 hours to go find the client and get it running.
Nokia's unified login system Nokia Account is now working again and accepting new registrations, just click on the "New Account" link below the login form. As we noted before, it's not yet in use by most Ovi services, but the plan is for your Nokia Account username to replace all the separate logins Ovi currently requires. If you want to make sure you get your favourite username, it's worth registering it on Nokia Account now so you're ready for the unification. (Note that the registration only requires an e-mail address OR a phone number, you don't have to give both.)
Nokia today released its 2nd quarter results for 2008. Converged mobile device shipments (S60 phones) were 15.3 million (up from 13.9 million in Q2 2007) including more 10 million Nseries and just under 2 million Eseries devices. Net sales from the services and software division was EUR 119 million (up 42% from Q1 2008). Nokia increased its overall market share to 40%, up from 38% last year and 39% last quarter.
Smartphones Show 63 just went live, with a hands-on video review of the Nokia 6220 Classic. There's also a review of the HTC Touch Diamond, comparing it to the Apple iPhone 3G. See also the Hi-res YouTube version and the RSS feeds for the QVGA and VGA versions.
Symbian supremo David Wood's new blog continues to pop up some interesting entries. Here, he talks about this week's Mobile Monday event, focussed on a topic close to my heart, 'Enabling Location in Applications', with relevant links and quotes. I was particularly interested to see the high profile of Skyhook's Wi-Fi location system, something which had hit my radar earlier in the week.
Ah yes, if the E71 wasn't special enough, there's now a gold plated version for you to show off in board rooms across the world. And, surprisingly, it's not that much more expensive, at £550... (via IntoMobile)
Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge is a contest to find the best new concepts for mobile gaming on either N-Gage, Symbian or Java. It's open to all professional game development companies, even the smallest ones, and the top three ideas will receive prize money to develop their ideas. Nokia doesn't want any actual code, they just want a text outline of an innovative unpublished game idea and optionally some mockup screenshots and/or video too. The contest closes on the 20th of August.
Reports are coming in (e.g. here and the official page here) that the Nokia N78 has just received another firmware update, to v12.046, available over the air or via Nokia Software Update. v12.046 "includes a number of performance improvements including softkey selection, Bluetooth stability, video playback, email sending and alarm clock functions."
We usually link to the Carnival of the Mobilists, of course, but we're especially keen this week as one of our articles was selected as the top post. Great general mobile reading, as always, in Carnival 132.
Nokia is going to unify its Ovi and other online services using a single login system called Nokia Account. In theory you can already register your Nokia Account username on the official website, though the registration section seems to be down for maintenance right now so you may want to check back later (it did work yesterday and many have already registered). At the moment Nokia Account is only being used by a few services, most notably Nokia Chat, but eventually it will be used by the entire Ovi suite including Ovi Share, Nokia Maps, Nokia Music, N-Gage etc. We've mentioned this before in other recent AAS items, but a lot of our readers apparently still don't know about this unification, so we thought it deserved a bit more publicity.
Over at the semi-official Nokia Conversations, there's an interesting post today, responding generally to iPhone mania and talking a lot of sense. It also refers to a pet subject of mind, i.e. whether a user wants to use one or two hands (or thumbs) for their phones.
