Recent News Headlines - Industry
China Mobile and Symbian Foundation Collaborate
China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), the world’s largest mobile network operator, and the Symbian Foundation has announced "an agreement to collaborate on a series of key initiatives to improve the mobile ecosystem in China and to stimulate the development of the market for CCMC’s locally developed 3G network standard, TD-SCDMA". There's also a new Symbian Chinese website for locals to check out. Some extracts from the press release below.
Red Bend FOTA now on over half a billion phones
Red Bend, the company behind the Firmware Over The Air update system in most of the smartphones covered here (with the notable exception of Samsung, which doesn't appear to have FOTA yet), has just announced that its FOTA software is now used by just over half a billion mobile devices worldwide, over 413 different devices. This represents a 60% share of the FOTA-enabled mobile phone market. See Red Bend's site for more information.
AAS Insight 85 - Booklet 3G, 5230, Money, N900
In All About Symbian Insight 85 (AAS Podcast 147), Rafe, Steve and Ewan discuss the glut of Nokia news ahead of this week's Nokia World. We cover the Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia 5230, Nokia Money (an under appreciated announcement) and the Nokia N900. There's also some discussion of Maemo 5, service strategy and the Sony Ericsson Satio. You can listen to AAS Insight 85 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Nokia N900 - Maemo 5-powered mobile computing
Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, a Maemo 5-powered device. Maemo 5 is the evolution of Nokia's previous generation of Internet Tablets and aims to occupy the space created by the convergence of mobile phones, laptops and the Internet. The N900 features a horizontal slider design with a three line QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5 inch WVGA (800 x 600) touch screen, ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor with 256MB of RAM (and 768MB of virtual memory), 5.0 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, tri-band WCDMA and WiFi connectivity, integrated A-GPS, 3.5 mm AV jack (audio and TV-out), and 32GB of flash storage and a microSD card slot. The N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009 at a cost of €500 before taxes and subsidies. Read on for further details and comment.
The Phones Show - Chat!
You'll know Tim Salmon if you've been around All About Symbian for a while, he's a regular commenter to news stories. And he now joins me in soft-launching a new audio podcast, a companion publication to my main Phones Show video podcast. Phones Show Chat episode 1, the pilot, is up now, with the main subjects being the Nokia N97 and E55/52. Note that it's a pilot and the audio quality is a little rough in places. Measures are in place to drastically improve things for episode 2. Be gentle in your comments, please!
The Nokia Booklet 3G and the Symbian Ecosystem
Somewhere there's a bundle of ex-Symbian employees quietly muttering “I told them the way forward was a two-box solution....” What to make of the announcement of the Nokia Booklet 3G (beyond the fact that they're consciously avoiding the term 'netbook', even though every single post, tweet and message about this device is going to call it the Nokia Netbook)? Read on for my thoughts on this new mobile device...
AAS Insight 83 - Nokia - Microsoft, Q2 and E55
In All About Symbian Insight 83 (AAS Podcast 145), Rafe and Steve discuss the enterprise focused alliance between Microsoft and Nokia and ponder its implications. Steve shares news of Gartner's Q2 smartphone shipment figures, before moving on to first thoughts on the Nokia E55. We then answer some reader questions. You can listen to AAS Insight 83 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
More Q2 world figures, this time from Canalys
Gartner may have beaten Canalys to the Q2 smartphone sales figure stories, but there's still plenty of interest in Canalys' version of events. The headline numbers are similar to Gartner's, with Nokia in the lead with 44% of the market, RIM in second place with 21% and Apple in third with 14%. From a platform point of view, Symbian OS powers just over half of all smartphones sold across the world, though this market share was down 8% year on year. RIM and Apple's OS both gained share, with Windows Mobile being the big loser, with its market share almost halving year on year.
Quickoffice and the Nokia-Microsoft alliance
Yesterdays news of the Nokia - Microsoft alliance around enterprise software and services has been generating a lot of interest. One of the interesting side stories is that Nokia's Symbian phones already have an outstanding Office compatible software suite, in the form of Quickoffice, which ships with every current Nokia Symbian phone. Quickoffice have released their own statement today noting that its Symbian business represents only a portion of its overall business and that it will ship on 200 million Nokia Symbian phones before Microsoft's product is even released. See below for comment and their statement in full.
Gartner Q2 world smartphone sales figures in
More interesting data from the smartphone world analysts. See below for the full table of data, but essentially Nokia's world market share is down 2.4% year on year, to 45%, despite shipping over 3 million more units, a total of 18.4 million smartphones. RIM improved slightly to 18.7% market share, while Apple is now in third place at 13.3% market share. Notable is the fact that Nokia still outsold RIM, Apple, fourth-place HTC and fifth-place Fujitsu combined, so as ever, it's business as usual at Espoo. In terms of worldwide platform/OS market share, Symbian OS was down 6% at 51%, RIM was up at at 16%, iPhone OS up at 12% and Windows Mobile was down at 9%. Android's share was under 2%, showing how far this has to go to make a serious impact.
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