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 now they’ve made good on their word with the release of their Microsoft Office Mobile apps. → 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 Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. An analyst today has taken that news one step further to suggest that the impact of this decision will be far greater than WP7 users missing out on this one game.
Richard Windsor, a mobile analyst with Nomura, calls Rovio’s decision a “worrying development” for Windows Phone because it suggests a lack of confidence in the future of the platform from a key influencer in the industry. That, he says, will have an inevitable knock-on effect, not just for Microsoft but for its biggest and most crucial platform licensee, Nokia. → 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 victory, but Windows Phone’s triumph has much more to do with how far Symbian has fallen in just a year. As of February 2011, Symbian could be found on 12.4% of smartphones in the UK, with its popularity tanking over the intervening months. → 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 features a 1.3 single-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4-inch AMOLED display, and a curved plate of Gorilla Glass to cover it up.
While I can’t help but wish it was a Windows Phone, the OS choice doesn’t come as a huge surprise. More than a few of Nokia’s recent N-series devices have gained a devoted following of photographers who have fallen for their great mobile optics, and the PureView 808 is geared toward that same set of mobile shutterbugs. → 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, putting it dead last behind Symbian, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. One year later, Android has zoomed past their rivals in Cupertino, and now is second only to Symbian in terms of market share. → 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
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 International Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing on Tuesday that the first of many incremental upgrades to Symbian OS coming in 2011 will arrive in Q1, and include more than 50 enhancements, including an updated user interface for the browser.
But no, they’re not stopping there! Jump on past the break for the full skinny on what else Nokia have up their sleeves. → 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 on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month, StatCounter claims BlackBerry OS last month, at 34.3 percent, effectively trumped Apple’s iOS, which recorded 33 percent in November. → 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 give up on Symbian:
I also can’t continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on ‘openness’ while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.
Now Symbian is delivering itself another blow—this time self-inflicted. The Symbian Foundation, which hosts all the open-source code, big fixes, and documentation for the OS, is shutting down its websites on December 17. The Symbian OS will still technically be open-source, it will just be impractical for many developers to look at it or improve it. → 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 — including the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation, and Symbian Ideas hosted on them — will be removed from the web. → 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 in business today. He is currently Technology Director at Steely Eye Digital Media, a full service digital agency in London’s Soho, leading the webification of mobile and appification of desktop web.
Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history. → 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 in business today. He is currently Technology Director at Steely Eye Digital Media, a full service digital agency in London’s Soho, leading the webification of mobile and appification of desktop web.
Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history. → 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 two, followed by an early hands-on review by Nokia’s most wanted Russian blogger. Days if not weeks later comes the official press conference or announcement, and then… nothing. Six months later said device finally begins shipping, meanwhile the mobile world has understandably moved on. → 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 extensive research report (sponsored by Telefónica Developer Communities) on that very subject, because it’s easily one of the most profound I’ve read to date.
Dubbed Developer Economics 2010, the free research report delves into all aspects of mobile application development, across 400+ developers from around the world, segmented into eight major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash/Flash Lite and mobile web (WAP/XHTML/CSS/Javascript). → 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 should read his goodbye post, which is a scathing analysis of why Nokia and Symbian are in the corner where the punches are being served. → 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 TomTom. → Read More
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