Turn-by-turn navigation was one of the features that iPhone users were most looking forward to with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software. Unfortunately, as users quickly found out, turn-by-turn meant either significantly more expensive apps, or a monthly fee. Not only does Waze do it for free, but it offers an interesting gaming element to boot.
The reason Waze can be free while other turn-by-turn apps are expensive is that their maps are entirely user-generated. Waze simply lays down a foundation and users build out the roads just by using the app. And the company makes it in your interest to help them not only by offering turn-by-turn functionality, but also by turning the mapping of uncharted areas into a game or sorts. If you’re on a road that no Waze user has mapped before, you will see little dots and your car icon will turn into a Pac-Man-like character, to eat the dots and collect points for it. → Read More
According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales are down about 6% from the same time last year; yet the volume of smartphone sales has increased almost 30% in the same time frame. No doubt the uptick in smartphone sales is due to the release of cool new devices like the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and the various Android phones coming to market. As expected, Nokia remains king of the hill in terms of both regular and smart phones, though sales of their fancy new N97 have been extremely weak. Compare that with sales of Apple’s iPhone which enjoyed 500% growth in shipments! RIM is number two, yadda yadda yadda. → Read More
Apparently they’re not too worried over there among the Symbianites. Despite growing pressure from ever-more-inexpensive smartphones, they don’t seem to care much about competing. Maybe it’s overconfidence from years on the top, or maybe they have an ace up their sleeve. I think it’s a little of both; they don’t think they need an ace, because they’ve seen what everyone else’s ace seems to do when it goes up against the iPhone: break. Perhaps Nokia is secure in their belief that they don’t need to compete with the iPhone, webOS, and Android — at least, not yet. The move to open-source Symbian is a forward-looking one, but it’s a slow-paced project and not something most people will see the benefits of until much later. And when one of their biggest competitors was open source from the start, those benefits seem pretty questionable. That said, I’d like to think that the people at Symbian know what they’re doing, since they’ve been doing it for so damn long. I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out. → Read More
According to Gartner’s final 2008 “Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System” stats, reigning mobile OS champ, Symbian, remains on top of the world with a whopping 52.4% majority market share. Although that number is down over 11% from 2007, Symbian still maintains a healthy 35.8% lead over its nearest competitor, Research In Motion. (chart after the break) → Read More
Huawei has big plans for 2009. The OEM handset maker plans to launch two to three different Android phones and maybe even a Symbian and LiMo handset all this year. Even with the global economic doom and gloom? Wowzers! → Read More
Our sister site MobileCrunch may be convinced that not every company needs an app store, but for Nokia to launch a central platform for distribution and sales of micro-programs developed for the Symbian OS, it would make a whole lotta sense.
And if what Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com (both blogs are in Russian) writes is true, then that’s exactly what the Finnish juggernaut in mobile is going to launch at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. I concur with Engadget who says launching an application portal/store is a logical step to take for any mobile handset maker these days, but if Nokia is in fact going to launch one it will be worth taking a look at, and not only from a consumer or developer standpoint. → Read More
Ah for those thrilling days of yesteryear, when gaming was 8-bit, and the world was blocky. If you thrill at the thought of having a portable Commodore 64, and you have a Symbian phone, then your dreams are coming true. → Read More
The smartphone market used to be reserved just to business types and nerds, but now everyone wants an iPhone or Palm Pre; Dell likely wants a piece of that action and might have a smartphone ready. It could be unveiled as soon next month at 3GSM or the Mobile World Congress. But does Dell have the goods needed to make a killer smartphone that stands out from the rest? → Read More
MIT professor Hal Abelson started today’s final presentation for the school’s “Building Mobile Applications” class by saying, “A course like this couldn’t have existed ten years ago… maybe not even a year ago. Courses like this right now are unique, but in two years they’ll be completely ordinary.” What’s extraordinary is that on top of a full college course-load at one of the most challenging schools in the country, these groups of students built fully working mobile applications for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian devices while mentors from the likes of Google, Nokia, Bank of America, and Microsoft oversaw their progress. → Read More
Symbian on Tuesday released its second quarter financial data. The Nokia-owned company said that it bested last year’s sales mark with 19.6 million units sold. That may seem high, but over the past six months, 159 different Symbian OS-based mobile devices hit store shelves, compared to just a handful from RIM and one from Apple.
The most glaring element of Symbian’s release was that it only grew 5 percent over the past year. Considering mobile phone sales grew 12 percent in the second quarter, according to Gartner, and considering Apple is selling 800,000 units each week, Symbian may be losing its grip on the market. → Read More
Throw out that WAP browser on your cell phone. We are quickly approaching a point where a full browser experience is available on our mobile devices. And it is not just the iPhone. A startup called Skyfire is in some respect even further along than Apple in bringing the entire Web to your phone. Its mobile browser lets you slide Web pages around and zoom in like with the mobile version of Safari. But it also supports Flash and Ajax sites. (It does this by offloading most of the heavy lifting to its servers rather than the mobile client). That means you can watch Youtube videos and go to Google Maps right in the mobile browser instead of having to download separate apps. In contrast, the iPhone’s Safari browser still does not support Flash and so to watch a a video you have to launch the separate Youtube app. As it becomes possible to do more and more inside the mobile browser itself, it raises the question of whether that indeed is the killer app for mobile Web phones. For the most part, you still get a richer experience by downloading a separate single-purpose app to your phone. But efforts like Skyfire’s point to a future where that may no longer be necessary for all but the most sophisticated apps and games. Skyfire launched on Windows Mobile, but as of today it is also available in a private beta for Nokia phones running Symbian’s S60 operating system. The first 200 TechCrunch readers to sign up for the beta here will get invites (enter invite code: Tcrunch). I just tried it on a Nokia N95, and watching video in the browser looks great as long as you are connected via WiFi. As 3G networks become a reality, that should change (although I am supposedly on AT&T’s 3G network in New York City, and videos take so long to load that they are basically unwatchable at this point). And I still prefer the speed of the Safari browser overall in terms of responsiveness. But for other mobile platforms, Skyfire is going to give mobile browsers like Opera’s a run for their money. And if Apple ever actually allows another browser on the iPhone, it could add some much needed competition there as well. The company recently raised $13 million in a series B round from Lightspeed, Matrix, and Trinity. Below is a → Read More
The Nokia E66 will be hitting the U.S. in the third quarter with an unsubsidized price of $500. While that price may sound like it’s a bit (or a lot) on the high side, the phone actually has a fair number of tricks up its sleeve and will likely appeal mostly to corporate users who may never see the price tag to begin with. Lest you think this device is all business, there’s a unique (and perhaps a bit gimmicky) “switch mode” that allows you to basically keep all of your work-related stuff in one profile on the phone throughout the day and then switch to a more lifestyle-centric profile at night, complete with a darker theme, friendlier icons, and that kind of stuff. Picture an employee for a large company getting in the elevator at the end of the day, loosening the tie and switching phone modes before getting into a cab to go wait in line for some new overpriced, dark, loud, small-portions restaurant. → Read More
