Nokia this morning announced the launch of two dirt cheap phones, the Nokia 101 and Nokia 100, which the company says are its most affordable phones to date.
Priced only 25 euros ($35) and 20 euros ($30), respectively, that should hardly be a surprise.
Of course, ‘dirt cheap’ is relative – the feature phones are meant for people in countries where phones have to be this inexpensive to even be considered for purchase (large parts of Africa and Asia, in particular). → Read More
Teasers are tricky. Companies have to find a way to get you excited about something without telling you what that something is, which can be difficult. It’s especially difficult to keep the secret product under wraps when the teaser file is named after the product.
That said, Nokia’s Symbian Belle teaser is now more of an announcement than anything else, and we now know the update will be available August 24. → Read More
Despite the fact that the company has a newly adopted OS in the works with Windows Phone 7, Nokia has always promised to continue supporting Symbian, its first born OS. That said, owners of the Nokia N8, C7, C6-01 and E7 will get to download the Symbian Anna software update starting today. The update includes improvements to the browser and maps, along with new icons. → Read More
If you were to sit down and look at all the devices Nokia has for sale in the United States, you may come away thinking that they weren’t in the business of making impressive devices. With only a few exceptions, Nokia’s domestic offerings are low-end, S40-powered talk-and-texters — hardly what one would expect from the self-proclaimed “world leader” of the cell phone industry. → Read More
According to a report from IDC, Apple shipped more smartphones than any other manufacturer in Q2, stealing bragging rights from a struggling Nokia. With 20.3 million units shipped, Apple managed to nab a 19.1 percent market share, representing year-over-year growth of 141.7 percent. Samsung and Nokia followed behind, with RIM and HTC bringing up the rear.
But Apple taking the crown is only one part of the story. Read on for the rest of the stats. → Read More
Riding high from the release of the (admittedly) mid-range Nokia 500, the folks over at the Nokia Conversations blog have just released something else they seem very proud of: new product naming guidelines!
Starting with the 500, Nokia is returning to their numerical roots for all of their future handsets. This feels like a step backward, but Nokia promises that they have applied a bit of logic to their nomenclature. → Read More
Nokia’s developer relations team would like you to remind you that Symbian has an App Store, called Ovi, and they’ve just surpassed 7.62 million downloads per day, thank you very much.
Their short announcement states that thanks to a recent change in the registration process – namely the removal of account requirements for the downloading of free apps – has sparked interest in the Ovi store. Most downloads are coming from India, making that country “the top country by downloads from the mobile web channel.” → Read More
Thanks to the rise of the popular, non-business smartphone – namely any phone that supports app creation – carriers can expect to sell 420 million units this year, taking over a quarter of total phone sales away from “traditional” phones.
The winners in this race? Samsung and Apple. The loser – by a long shot? Nokia, with a fall from 40% to 24% in one year.
→ Read More
We’ve been saying for a while now that Samsung is primed and ready to dethrone Nokia from its nearly 15 year reign as the top smartphone maker in the world, and it would seem the moment is upon us.
We can’t say for sure, as Samsung hasn’t released official numbers, but research firm Strategy Analytics told Bloomberg that Samsung’s official sales numbers should fall between 18 million and 21 million units sold worldwide. → Read More
CNN offers a lot of mobile apps on a lot of devices. There is CNN for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and even Nokia phones. There are even different apps for international news. All in all, CNN’s mobile apps have been downloaded 10 million times, according to the company.
The most popular app is CNN for iPhone, which has been out the longest—since September, 2009. And on Apple devices alone, CNN apps are the No.1 and No. 3 news apps on the iPhone, as well as the No. 1 news app on the iPad. CNN would not provide a breakdown between iOS, Android, and Nokia downloads. → Read More
In this episode of Fly Or Die we go through a few popular gadgets including the MacBook-alike HP Probook 5330m, the EFun Nextbook, and the Nokia N9.
We found most of the devices to be acceptable but we were in agreement about the crablet EFun Nextbook which is about the worst piece of garbage imaginable (based on our extensive test that involved us looking at the thing as it crashed constantly.) → Read More
That was a long sayonara: in November 2008, Nokia decided to pull the plug on their Japan operations, at the same time announcing they will re-enter the market with their luxury sub-brand Vertu. They started offering those phones (and the services that come with them) in September 2009, but now decided to give up on this business in Japan, too. → Read More
When product shots of the Nokia N9 leaked out on Monday, something caught us a bit off guard. No, it wasn’t that it was runnin’ MeeGo — nor was it the device’s funky Salmon-pink hue. The weird bit? It didn’t have a keyboard. For months now, whispers and leaks around the rumor mill pinned the N9 as a MeeGo-powered device with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. As it turns out, that was the N9 at some point. Sometime in the last few weeks, however, the-device-formally-known-as-N9 became the N950, and Nokia decided it would only be made available to MeeGo developers. Want to see the dev-only device in action? Take a gander behind the jump. → Read More
Nokia this morning announced that it is establishing a new ‘Location & Commerce’ business unit, which will be formed by integrating the NAVTEQ business with its social/location services operations. Effective July 1, 2011, Michael Halbherr will become executive vice president of the new unit and spearhead Nokia’s self-described “revised mission in mobile and location-based services”.
Halbherr will be reporting directly to Stephen Elop, chief executive officer of the beleaguered mobile phone giant.
In other news, Nokia and Accenture have finalized an agreement for the former to outsource Symbian software development and support activities to the latter. → Read More
Are you a lingering Nokia fan, still defiantly tying yourself to the mast as the ship’s fate wavers? Are you not only happy about their decision to move forward pretty much exclusively with Windows Phone 7, but also anxiously awaiting the first fruits of that new labor? Anyone still nodding along at this point? → Read More
Nokia this morning announced that it has settled a patent row with Apple. Under the settlement agreement, Apple will pay a one-time fee as well as on-going royalties to license patents from the Helsinki, Finland-based mobile phone maker.
The deal will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies, including the withdrawal by Nokia and Apple of their respective complaints to the ITC. Nokia further states that the patent license agreement is bound to have a positive financial impact on its (recently revised) outlook for Q2 2011. → Read More
If you are reading TechCrunch you probably already realize this fact: Flavor-of-the-month consumer Internet companies have a way of hogging the spotlight. If you didn’t, we conveniently published some evidence of it yesterday.
But that reality predates us by at least a decade. In 1999 when the world talked about Silicon Valley, they usually meant sexy dot coms. In 2005 when people were writing headlines about “the return of Silicon Valley,” a lot of people working in technology were justifiably irritated. After all, tech behemoths like eBay, Yahoo, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard never exactly left.
That focus on the sexy, social, consumer Web over everything else has only gotten more pronounced as those many of those one-time flavors of the month like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Groupon have become bonafide giants. The difference is that now the divergence in attention actually makes sense. → Read More
It looks as though Nokia’s 15-year reign is coming to a close, as Samsung is expected to usurp the world’s largest phone maker this quarter, according to Nomura Research Institute. And if losing the top spot isn’t tough enough, Nokia likely won’t even take the second place position this quarter either, as Nomura sees Apple sliding past the Finnish manufacturer, as well. → Read More
Speaking somewhat cryptically at D9, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop responded to a question about tablets thusly: I’m not going to announce a tablet here today. But as a high level point, there’s a connected digital experience will increasingly define what consumers are looking for. It’s important for us to play across that space. We have to address that whole space. What do you guys think? If Nokia weren’t getting into the tablet game, Elop would have said “right now we’re focused on the mobile sector” or “we’re waiting to see how the market evolves.” This is as good as confirmation — by internet rumor-mongering standards, at least. → Read More
The backstory of last year’s film Tron: Legacy picks up where the first film left off. Kevin Flynn teams up with Tron to create a new Grid, one meant for programs and users. But Flynn realizes that he can’t be in the system working on this constructed world all the time, so he creates another program, CLU, to help with the effort. Together, the three of them work on creating this new perfect system.
Then something happens.
I’m reminded of this story when reading Kevin Fox’s post last night entitled: Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers? (MSFT+Skype+Nokia). In it, he lays out a scenario in which Microsoft uses their acquisition of Skype alongside Windows Phone 7 and their new deep partnership with Nokia to disrupt the system that we’ve all been familiar with for far too long: carrier dominance. Their aim is to create a new Grid, if you will. And they’re not alone. Google and Apple are also working on this goal. Flynn. Tron. CLU. → Read More
