Is it because Android is the most popular smartphone platform in the world right now, or is it because it’s just fundamentally easier to attack? In any case, Google’s mobile juggernaut Android continues to be the world’s biggest magnet for mobile malware. According to a report out today from security specialists F-Secure, Android accounted for 79% of all malware in 2012, up from 66.7% in 2011 and… → Read More
Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company’s earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: “During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,” the company wrote. “The Nokia 808… → Read More
Nokia is slowly turning around its ailing mobile handset business and today that effort had a nice fillip, by way of some revised figures in which it “exceeded expectations” for Q4 sales. Within that, Nokia says that in Q4 it sold 4.4 million Lumia devices — exactly twice as many units as those of its once-mighty Symbian platform, which sold 2.2 million. → Read More
Viber has essentially been a smash hit right from its conception. The company hit 50 million registered users in February of last year, extending that to 70 million by May. But today marks one of the company’s greatest milestones: Viber has just surpassed 100 million registered users.
To celebrate, and continue to fuel that momentum, Viber is releasing new features and various platform… → Read More
The most notable fruit of Microsoft and Nokia’s close working relationship is certainly the handsome line of Lumia Windows Phones, but the deal has had its share of fringe benefits as well.
Take its impact on Symbian for instance — Microsoft announced last September that they would be giving the platform a shot in the arm with the initially Windows Phone-only Office productivity suite, and… → Read More
Update: The CEO of Rovio, Mikael Hed, has dismissed reports that the company is not developing its latest Angry Birds game for the Windows Phone platform. “We are working towards getting Angry Birds Space to WP7,” he told Reuters. Original post follows below.
Yesterday, the day that Rovio launched its newest game, Angry Birds Space, it also said it has no plans to develop the game for… → Read More
Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform seems to be picking up some steam across the pond, or so a new report from Kantar Worldpanel claims. According to their study, Symbian now only accounts for 2.4% of the UK smartphone market while the Windows Phone platform has grown from 0.5% last year to around 2.5%, barely inching ahead of Nokia’s former smartphone OS of choice.
I know, a victory is a… → Read More
I think it’s safe to say that the new 808 Pureview handset was a surprise to just about everyone here at Nokia’s press conference. Not only did Nokia manage to squeeze a 41-megapixel sensor (no, that’s not a typo) into a smartphone, they squeezed it into a smartphone that runs on the Symbian Belle OS.
But first, let’s get the nitty gritty out of the way. Ridiculous camera aside, the 808… → Read More
Europe is growing quite fond of Google’s Android operating system, according to market research firm ComScore. Android devices now account for nearly a quarter of all the smartphones used in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK — a dramatic jump over the Google OS’s performance last year.
In July 2010, Android only accounted for 6% of the smartphones used in those five European markets… → 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… → Read More
It turns out the leak we blogged last month is true: Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today officially introduced the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C as part of its summer line-up, and the device actually does dual-boot to Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone). Hardware-wise, the LOOX is pretty interesting, too. → Read More
Take this with a grain of salt: Japanese tech blog Juggly is reporting [JP] that Fujitsu is working on a cell phone with both the Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone) on board. According to the article, the handset will be released by Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo as part of its summer line up. → Read More
It’s been a long time coming, but the four people who own Nokia N8s, C7s, and E7s can now play with the AR.Drone from the comfort of their phones using Parrot’s AR.Remote software for Symbian. → Read More
It’s not really news to anyone reading this blog that Nokia have kinda fallen behind in the smartphone race. That isn’t to say that they won’t catch up again, but as far as ranking devices on compelling user experiences goes, Nokia aren’t leading the pack.
Well, it’s good to know that they’re trying to change all that, with Nokia senior manager Gunther Kottzieper announcing at the 2010… → Read More
Web analytics company StatCounter has a knack for pushing attention-grabbing press releases based on data collected by its research arm, StatCounter Global Stats. This time, the company claims BlackBerry has overtaken Apple’s iOS in terms of mobile Internet usage for the first time in the United States in November (see chart below).
Based on aggregate data that the company says it has collected… → Read More
Remember two years ago when Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system? The thinking was that cell phone manufacturers who depended on the Symbian OS could help keep it going. But it was already too late. The iPhone’s iOS and Android started to take over. Even die-hard Symbian supporters abandoned ship. As the fanboy blogger Symbian Guru explained last summer when he decided to … → Read More
Nokia announced earlier in the month that they’d be taking over the development side of Symbian, and that the Symbian Foundation will make the transition to a licensing operation.
Well, the next stage of the transition was announced via their Wiki recently, and involves closing the virtual doors on all of the Symbian Foundation’s websites come December 17th.
That’s right, every single website … → Read More
We can’t say we’re really surprised: according to market research company Gfk, smartphones are getting increasing popular in Asia, with Android now being the region’s most popular OS for this type of handsets. Cell phones with the Google software on board have reportedly enjoyed brisk sales in that region in the second and third quarters of 2010. → Read More
This a guest post by Tim Ocock who first worked at Symbian when the consortium was created in the summer of 1998. Returning in 2001, he worked in a dual commercial/technical role that necessitated almost unrestricted access to both the ‘shopfloor’ engineering teams and upper tiers of Symbian’s management. He left in 2004 to found Symsource, one of the few dev houses specialising in Symbian still… → Read More
This a guest post by Tim Ocock who first worked at Symbian when the consortium was created in the summer of 1998. Returning in 2001, he worked in a dual commercial/technical role that necessitated almost unrestricted access to both the ‘shopfloor’ engineering teams and upper tiers of Symbian’s management. He left in 2004 to found Symsource, one of the few dev houses specialising in Symbian still… → Read More
Say what you will about the state of Nokia, Europe’s favourite Finnish handset maker, but no one will disagree that its product launch strategy over the years has been the very opposite of Apple’s. Whereas Steve Jobs likes to start shipping a product within weeks – if not the same day – of an announcement, a typical Nokia launch goes something like this:
First, a blurry photoed product leak or… → Read More
Considering the immense fragmentation that characterizes the mobile apps industry, it’s good to see decent research help us try and make sense of what’s going on in that particular part of the digital economy, one that is consistently growing in size and importance across the globe. Hence, I invite anyone with a vested interest in the mobile developer ecosystem to check out VisionMobile’s… → Read More
As if Nokia needed yet another wake-up call, self-declared ‘Nokia fanboy since 1999′ Ricky Cadden, aka Symbian Guru is so utterly fed up with the company and the products it releases that he’s quitting his blog (via Mobile Entertainment).
Cadden has purchased himself a Nexus One and seems well on his way to become an Android fanboy.
Anyone with the slightest interest in the mobile industry… → Read More
Nokia is having a rough month.
First, it saw itself forced to cut its outlook for the second quarter and the full year, and now The Register reports that the Finnish company has lost one of its top tech brains.
Charles Davies, former Symbian CTO and notably the first employee and later managing director of Psion, is leaving the mobile juggernaut to take up an unknown role at navigation giant … → Read More
Nokia is having a rough month.
First, it saw itself forced to cut its outlook for the second quarter and the full year, and now The Register reports that the Finnish company has lost one of its top tech brains.
Charles Davies, former Symbian CTO and notably the first employee and later managing director of Psion, is leaving the mobile juggernaut to take up an unknown role at navigation giant … → Read More
Mobile advertising and ad optimization company Smaato has released its March figures on mobile ad click-through rates around the world, and some of its findings are quite surprising.
According to Smaato, Symbian still reigns supreme in its global OS click-through rate index, outshining feature phones (non-smartphones with a proprietary operating system), Windows Phones and Apple iPhone and iPod… → Read More
According to AdMob, smartphones accounted for 48 percent of its worldwide traffic last month, up from 35 percent in February 2009. Dominant still is iPhone OS, which has increased its share of smartphone requests on the AdMob network from 33 percent in February 2009 to 50 percent in February 2010. Android, however, is the fastest-growing these days.
Symbian is the big loser: while it accounted… → Read More
Pretty huge news in our book: Skype has published a free mobile application for Symbian in the Ovi Store, basically enabling over 200 million Nokia handset users to easily download the program and start making free Skype-to-Skype calls from their phones.
If I were a carrier, I’d probably be feeling rather nervous right now – and / or infuriated.
Skype for Symbian, which you can also download the… → Read More
Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to… → Read More
After so many years of hoping and wishing, developers can start getting excited about coding for the Symbian platform. Sure, it’s taken a while and some might be looking forward to Maemo 6 later this year far more than a newer version of Symbian, but opening up the source code to the world’s largest operating system is nothing to sneeze at. The Symbian operating system is aging and… → Read More
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