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Engadget: Pretty good news for Nokia today as it announces its Q4 results. Net income jumped 65% to €948 million (on €12 billion in sales) or 26 eurocents per share, from €576 million euros, or 15 eurocents a share, earned in Q4 2008.

That handily beat the consensus forecast of 19 eurocents per share. Importantly, Nokia grew its smartphone (or “converged devices” in Nokia parlance) marketshare to a healthy 40%, up from 35% just last quarter.

Looking forward, Nokia cautioned that it expects its adjusted operating margin in Devices & Services in Q1 2010 will be at the low end of its 12% to 14% target. At the time of this posting, Nokia stock has jumped about 9% in recognition of these good times.

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BBC: Phone giant Nokia has launched a free map and navigation service for its handsets that analysts believe could challenge stand-alone sat-nav devices.

The service stores maps on the phone, cutting down the need to update and download new ones over the network.

Ovi maps will initially be available on 10 handsets and will offer so-called “turn-by-turn” navigation, similar to that in existing GPS devices. It can display local data from travel guides, such as Lonely Planet.

Users can also post their location to Facebook. Nokia said that it expects third-party developers to build new applications for the service.

“It’s like a giant mash-up environment,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia at the launch.

The firm estimates that it has already sold 83m phones that can use the service, which can be downloaded for free from its Ovi application store.

Mr Vanjoki said that it would be preloaded on all compatible phones offered by Nokia from 21 January.

Previously, Nokia owners had to pay for its premium navigation service. Analysts at CCS Insight said the move could be viewed as a “competitive response to Google”, which also offers a free live sat-nav for its Nexus One handset and the Motorola Droid.

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BBC: Phone maker Nokia has said it will “defend itself vigorously” after Apple launched the latest salvo in an ongoing legal wrangle between the two firms.

On 15 January, Apple filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) asking it to block Nokia imports to the US.

It is the latest move in a series of legal proceedings that started in October when Nokia sued Apple.

The Finnish firm alleged that Apple’s iPhone infringed 10 of its patents. Apple countered by filing its own lawsuit against Nokia, saying the phone maker had copied certain aspects of the iPhone and infringed 13 of its patents.

In late December, Nokia filed a further claim with the ITC, alleging Apple infringed seven of its patents in “virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, and computers”.

Apple told the BBC that it would not comment on its latest legal move. However, Nokia said it would “study the complaint and defend itself vigorously”.

“This does not alter the fact that Apple has failed to agree appropriate terms for using Nokia technology and has been seeking a free ride on Nokia’s innovation since it shipped the first iPhone in 2007,” a spokesperson said. Apple is also being sued by camera maker Kodak over technology used in the iPhone.

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Electronista: Palm stock climbed over 8 percent on Friday after speculation that it would be bought out by Finland-based Nokia.

Trading was about 15 times heavier than usual in the morning and remained heavy until the end of the day. The spike mirrored a similar increase from late September.

Neither company has commented on the rumor. Critics have pointed out that such a deal is unlikely as Nokia is heavily invested both in its deal with Symbian as well as its own Maemo Linux operating system. It’s also been suggested that the speculation may have begun to help fuel share prices and boost the stock before shareholders have to cash in.

However, Nokia is currently lagging in smartphone share and has relatively simple touchscreen designs that go without the multi-touch present on some of its competitors’ products, including Palm’s Pre or Apple’s iPhone.

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Electronista: Apple in two years has pushed the iPhone up to 2.5 percent of the entire cellphone market, Strategy Analytics estimates.

The company has roughly doubled its share from a year ago and now has half the share of established firms Motorola and Sony Ericsson, which have remained flat at five percent.

Some of the gain is likely to have come at Nokia’s expense, as it shrank to 37 percent share, its lowest since the start of 2007.

Samsung was the largest winner in the phone market and climbed to 21 percent, or second place, after shipping 16 percent more phones than it did a year ago.

LG despite its recent smartphone push has just 11 percent of the total market. The gains made by Apple and Samsung are predictive of what the analyst group sees as the first genuine year-over-year increase in phone sales since the worldwide economic crisis began.

It expects sales in the entire phone industry to climb three percent to reach 300 million phones. The increase would be a reflection a recovering financial climate and may also be helped by a return to form for companies like Motorola, whose Droid may be its first strong-selling device since the RAZR.

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BBC: Nokia has reported a loss for the July to September quarter after sales sank by almost a fifth.

The company made a net loss of 913m euros ($1.4bn; £838m) for the period, compared with a profit of 1.1bn euros for the same quarter last year. This included a write-off of 908m euros reflecting the fall in value of its Nokia Siemens Networks division.

Nokia has suffered as mobile phone makers like Apple have developed more popular smartphones, analysts say. Net sales fell to 9.8bn euros compared with 12.2bn euros a year ago.

Chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that sales “were constrained by component shortages”.

Despite the fall in sales, Nokia said it had maintained its overall global market share in mobile devices at 38%. It said it had increased market share in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

“This was offset by lower market share in Greater China, Asia-Pacific and North America,” Nokia said.

The company estimates that global mobile phone sales in 2009 will fall by 7% from 2008. “Overall, I have to say it is kind of a mixed bag with a negative bias. I think that the big picture doesn’t look that well,” said Thomas Langer at West LB.

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NaviGadget: One of the biggest digital map makers, Navteq, is going to be using data from Nokia to enhance its traffic reports.

Nokia, which purchase Navteq last July gathers data anonymously from millions of Nokia phones to enhance its map and traffic data. The data will expand Navteq’s real-time traffic service to include secondary roads in addition to the primary roads it covers now.

It will also improve arrival times and route planning on navigation devices using Navteq maps. TeleAtlas, Navteq’s main map competitor already does something very similar by collecting data from TomTom GPS devices.

In addition Google just started with the crowdsourcing of traffic data, now providing traffic information on side streets as well as freeways.

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The Washington Post: The world’s top cell phone maker Nokia cut its profitability and market share forecasts due to tough competition, sending its shares sharply lower on Thursday.

Nokia, whose rivals include Apple , Samsung and RIM , now sees second-half underlying operating profit margin at its key phone unit at the first-half level of 11.3 percent, compared with analysts’ consensus expectations of 17.4 percent in a Reuters poll.

Nokia also cut its forecast for 2009 market share at its phone business, seeing it now on a par with last year, compared with an earlier forecast for a rise.

Analysts said a sharp fall in Nokia’s average sales price, and the cut in outlook implies increasingly aggressive pricing.

“Handset makers are being really, really aggressive,” said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. “A lot of companies cannot really afford it: Sony Ericsson, Motorola, to some extent LG.”

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Electronista: A rumor last week suggests that Nokia could remove copy protection from all its music services within the next year.

Claimed sources for ME say the smartphone maker will switch its pay-per-download store from locking songs with Windows Media protection to unguarded MP3s by late this year.

Tellingly, Comes With Music would also reportedly make the switch and would do so sometime in 2010, giving users a year of unlimited downloads they could move to any device, including iPhones and iPods.

The motivation is believed to center on an original Nokia preference for a relatively open, widespread format that was initially denied by Universal and other music labels. Both its per-track store and Comes With Music use protected Windows Media files that limit where the songs can be played and discourage users from entering into Nokia’s ecosystem as a result.

Nokia has routinely tried to explain poor uptake of Comes With Music in key areas like the UK and believes devices and distribution are the key factors. However, in its own recent studies it notes that 40 percent of those who bought one of the special phones needed for Comes With Music never activated the feature, suggesting that many either don’t know how to use Comes With Music or else decide they’re uninterested shortly after buying a given handset.

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Electronista: Nokia’s long-in-progress sequel to the N800 series tablet may largely be a more advanced version of the N97 smartphone, a leak on Monday hints. Possibly called the N900, MobileCrunch claims it would have a 3.5-inch touchscreen and a slide out (if non-tilting) QWERTY keyboard but would carry a much sharper 800×480 resolution, a faster TI OMAP processor and 1GB of memory thanks to a 768MB virtual memory cache.

It would run the Linux-based Maemo OS instead of Symbian. Many of its other features would also remain familiar, including the combination of 32GB of internal storage and a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, but it would gain new features in software thanks in part to the faster hardware. It would be capable of capturing 800×480 video and would run Firefox as its browser, including with full Flash support. Despite the form factor, it would still have GSM, EDGE and HSPA-based 3G and could make cellular calls as well as using the access for data.

If accurate, the N900 would ship as early as July for Asia, the Middle East and T-Mobile’s worldwide divisions; T-Mobile USA would get the tablet with native 3G in August or September, and the rest of Europe would have access in October.

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Reuters: Nokia on Monday began rolling out its much-anticipated online software and content store, Ovi Store, as it aims to follow the success of Apple’s App Store.Nokia said it had started moving Ovi Store to production servers, preparing for the global commercial launch, and the store was opened to users of a few of its phone models in Australia and Singapore on Monday.

Nokia has promised to open the store globally this week.

To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is building a new business from mobile Internet services — like games or maps — but is scaling back separate investment plans due to the slowdown, and focusing on merging the delivery of services.

Nokia, which made its first ever quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit alone by more than 700 million euros ($979.7 million) to counter plunging demand.

The Apple App Store has proved extremely popular, with one billion applications downloaded in less than a year, and operators and technology firms including Vodafone Nokia, and Microsoft now want a piece of the pie.

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Electronista: Nokia this morning reported major falls in both its financial performance and its phone market share for the quarter.

The Finnish cellphone maker’s operating profit has dropped from slightly over $2 billion in early 2008 to just $72.4 million in early 2009 based on a significant decrease in sales income, which dropped by 27 percent year-over-year.

Much of this is attributed directly to a 19.3 percent plunge in cellphone shipments from 115.5 million phones in the first quarter of 2008 to 93.2 million for the same period this year.

The company also expects its overall market share to have shrunk in the same space, falling from 39 percent to 37 percent on estimates that the total phone market shipped 255 million phones between January and March. Its average selling price declined dramatically from $104.07 to $85.62 as economic conditions skewed towards less expensive devices.

Most of the drop is blamed on dropping share in relatively poorer regions such Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and southeast Asia.

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