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
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
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 touch devices, in that order. Android, at the number 2 spot in both January and February 2010, has dropped by around 50% and into fifth place. The only operating systems with lower CTR are those of Palm and RIM (Blackberry). → 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 for 43% of AdMob’s smartphone requests in February 2009, it only reached a 18% share last month. → 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 app straight from the Skype website, will run on any Nokia smartphone using Symbian^1, the latest version of the Symbian platform. → 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 end the year with a 19.9 percent share.
Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share. → 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 hasn’t changed dramatically over the last several years and this is exactly what the platform needs for a major facelift. → Read More
When you think about mobile advertising, you might think the iPhone or Android are the hot platforms (thanks to ads like this). But you’d be wrong.
Some new December data from the mobile advertising company Smaato suggests that it’s actually Symbian that kills both the iPhone and Android. Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s because Nokia, despite the buzz surrounding the sexier smartphone devices, remains the biggest mobile player in the world. But actually, the numbers are for the all-important click-through rates on the various platforms. → Read More
