06
Jul
2012
Electronista: New quarterly data indicates little change in the US cellphone market, according to research firm ComScore. Android devices continue to dominate as a platform, up 0.8 percent to account for 50.9 percent of smartphones. Apple’s iPhone, meanwhile, has grown 1.7 percent to claim a 31.9 percent share. (more…)
15
Jun
2012
Akihabara News: Now you can control and enjoy music, navigation and other smartphone apps safely while on the move. With the first MirrorLink™ compatible in-car AV centre head unit from Sony, you’re always in touch with your digital world while you’re behind the wheel. (more…)
13
Apr
2011
What Hi-fi: Nokia may have announced a future commitment to the Windows Phone 7 operating system, but that hasn’t stopped the company launching two new models running the latest version of its Symbian operating system.
However, the new phones face tough competition: figures from The Wall Street Transcript suggest some 350,000 Google Android smartphones are being activated worldwide every day.
That’s a 16% increase on the numbers from a few months ago, and a massive rise on figures from about a year back, which were running at about 60,000 a day.
The new Nokia models are the E6 and X7: the E6 is based on the company’s E71 and E72, and is described as ‘a sleek business smartphone with a full QWERTY keypad and a high resolution touch display.’
It’s been designed for exceptional battery life – almost 15 hours talk time and up to 744 hours’ standby – and has full access to Microsoft messaging services including Exchange and Communicator Mobile.
The X7 is aimed at the entertainment market, and has a 4in AMOLED touchscreen with ’16:9 near HD’ 640×360 pixel resolution and an 8MP camera.
It gives 6.5 hours talk time, 6 hours video playback, 50 hours of music playback, and 450 hours on standby.
Also provided are two preloaded games – Galaxy on Fire HD and Asphalt 5 HD – and the X7 has instant access to Web TV on demand, with the option of adding favourites to its home screen or add new channels via the Ovi Store.
Both models have 8GB of storage via a standard microSD card supplied, with support for cards of up to 32GB, and also built-in GPS navigation with free lifetime walk and drive guidance.
04
Feb
2011
GPS Business News: Market research firm Canalys today published its final fourth quarter 2010 global country-level smartphone market data, which revealed that Google’s Android has become the leading platform.
Shipments of Android-based smartphones reached 32.9 million, while devices running Nokia’s Symbian platform trailed slightly at 31.0 million worldwide. But Nokia did retain its position as the leading global smartphone vendor, with a share of 28%.
The fourth quarter also saw the worldwide smartphone market continue to soar, with shipments of 101.2 million units representing year-on-year growth of 89%. The final quarter took shipments for the year to fractionally below 300 million units, with an annual growth rate of 80% over 2009.
During the fourth quarter volumes of Google OS-based smartphones (Android, OMS and Tapas) were again boosted by strong performances from a number of vendors, notably LG, Samsung, Acer and HTC, whose volumes across these platforms grew 4,127%, 1,474%, 709% and 371% respectively year-on-year. HTC and Samsung together accounted for nearly 45% of Google OS-based handset shipments.
At a regional level, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) remained the largest market, with shipments totalling 38.8 million and a year-on-year growth rate of 90%. Nokia continued to lead in EMEA and Asia Pacific, but in 2010 it was overtaken by RIM in Latin America, which shipped over a million more units than Nokia in Q4 2010. The vendor was particularly helped by the popularity of its mid-range smartphones, such as its Curve family of devices.
The United States continued its reign as the largest country market in terms of shipments, at more than double the size of the Chinese smartphone market. RIM recaptured first place from Apple, as the latter experienced its usual US seasonal dip, and RIM benefited from the first full quarter of shipments for the BlackBerry Torch. HTC successfully maintained its third-place ranking in the US for the third consecutive quarter, driven by its speed to market with the latest Android updates and new Windows Phone 7 devices.
“The US landscape will shift dramatically this coming year, as a result of the Verizon-Apple agreement,” said Canalys Analyst Tim Shepherd. “Verizon will move its focus away from the Droid range, but the overall market impact will mean less carrier-exclusive deals, while increasing the AT&T opportunity for Android vendors, such as HTC, Motorola and Samsung.”
Android was by far the largest smart phone platform in the US market in the fourth quarter 2010, with shipments of 12.1 million units – nearly three times those of RIM’s BlackBerry devices. Windows Phone 7 devices appeared too late in the quarter to take full advantage of holiday season purchasing. As a result, Microsoft lost share in the United States, from 8% in Q4 2009 to 5% in Q4 2010.
South Korea, Japan and China
Analysis of the published country-level data shows that, around the world, the strength of smartphone performances remained diverse. In South Korea, for example, shipments grew from under 700,000 units in Q4 2009 to just under 3.4 million units in Q4 2010, making the country a top 10 market.
In Japan, Android shipments have taken off over the past year, with nearly 1.4 million units shipping from local as well as international vendors, such as HTC. More Japanese vendors have also announced plans to launch Android devices in 2011, such as NEC Casio and Panasonic.
Under pressure from Huawei and Samsung in particular, Nokia’s share in China slipped to 56%, down from 76% a year ago, despite growing its volume in the country by over 70% in the same period. Albeit from a smaller base, the Chinese market grew 134% year-on-year, notably faster than the US market, which grew at 64% in the quarter.
11
Mar
2010
Engadget: Nokia VP, David Rivas, was in San Francisco yesterday touting Symbian^3 improvements. While we’ve heard and seen plenty about Symbian Three’s enhanced user experience already, it’s still worthy of another look considering Symbian’s dominant marketshare. Besides, David provides a very detailed look as he walks us though elements like the customizable (and more finger friendly) homescreens meant to provide quick access to call features and at-a-glance data. Rivas also reiterates speed improvement claims over existing S60 5th devices (about a 3x improvement in graphics performance) that should “very very pleasantly surprise” users. Read more and see the video
05
Sep
2008
Electronista: The current rate of growth for estimated iPhone sales may lead to its operating system being more popular than Symbian in as little as two years, according to projections based on both official and estimated data.
Although Symbian reports 19.6 million cellphones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others having sold with its operating system installed during its last quarter, the figure represents a growth of just five percent versus the same time span a year ago and is much slower than estimated growth for Apple, which is thought to be manufacturing as many as 800,000 devices per week and may ship up to 10 million iPhone 3Gs between July and September, or more than half Symbian’s tally despite being a young competitor.
Without significant changes in the growth rate from either Apple or Symbian, OS X iPhone in two years or less, according to the predictions from TechCrunch. Assuming Apple produces a 100 percent growth rate, which is deemed as “quite a challenge” but feasible, the company would overtake Symbian sometime during the summer 2010 quarter.
18
Jul
2008
PC Advisor: Broader collaboration between Symbian and Google at either the application or operating system level is possible in the future, Symbian’s CEO said.
“We have a good relationship with Google,” Nigel Clifford said at a Tokyo news conference. “In fact Symbian was one of the first mobile platforms to put their applications such as Google search and maps,” he said as he showed his mobile phone.
Google is about to compete head-to-head with Symbian in the smartphone space with the launch of its Android platform and Symbian is reorganising to meet that challenge.
Last month Nokia, which holds a major stake in Symbian, said it plans to acquire all the shares in Symbian and turn it over to the Symbian Foundation, a new group backed by several companies in the mobile phone business. As part of the move the three platforms that run on Symbian – S60, UIQ and MOAP – will be unified into a single open mobile platform.
26
Jun
2008
Techradar.com: Techradar spoke to Ulf Wretling, general manager and head of the developer program at Sony Ericsson on the announcement of the new Symbian mobile platform, and he told how the new announcement could re-shape the mobile industry.
“We currently have around 235 models out there,” he said. “There are clams, sliders, touch-screens, but going forward we are going to have even more differentiation.
“The Symbian system allows manufacturers the chance to develop a different type of phone. Essentially, with Symbian, any type of interaction is possible.
When asked what kind of new methods these might be, Wretling said it would open up mobile phones for those who may not have had them before.
“For instance, we introduced the accelerometer, which changed the way you could interact with the mobile phone. But with Symbian we can start looking at different areas, such as mobiles for the old or young, blind of deaf.”
But Wretling doesn’t think that Symbian will be the only OS in the future, as he believes there will always be room for others.
With mobile software platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile currently in a large number of smartphones, and Google’s Android or the LiMo OS on the way, will a new Symbian struggle to compete in an already saturated market?
“I imagine there will be a need for different phones in different applications: phones built in to something else, or high-end devices.
“Consumers will change too; we have business people, IT specialists, prosumers etc. It’s hard to speculate about the future, but I think there will be room for multiple systems.”
One of the interesting points the announcement from Nokia has thrown up is the fact that the new system will be free to all developers, so Symbian will no longer charge for each handset, which uses variants of its system.
“One direct benefit of the royalty reduction is that the penalty to have the system is reduced,” commented Wretling. “Previously, this meant that lower tier phones wouldn’t have been able to absorb this high cost, but now it means we can take the advanced system lower down the handset range.”
25
Jun
2008
Engadget: Nokia’s been in bed with Symbian for many, many years through the development of its S60 platform — the world’s most populous smartphone platform — and they’re taking that relationship to its endgame by announcing that they’ll be acquiring the remaining shares of Symbian that they don’t already own.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though: rather than taking Symbian’s intellectual private for Nokia’s own benefit, the goods will be turned over to the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit whose sole goal will be the advancement of the Symbian platform in its many flavors.
Motorola and Sony Ericsson have signed up to contribute UIQ assets, while NTT DoCoMo (which uses Symbian-based wares in a number of its phones) will be donating code as well.
05
Apr
2008
NaviGadget: Sony Ericsson P5 (aka Paris) is the latest smartphone that promises to have an integrated GPS receiver. This obviously is the leaked image and it hasn’t been made official yet but rumors around the internets suggests that it will be official in May and hit the market as soon as September.
P5 will run Symbian/UIQ 3.3, have a slider keyboard, and even a 5MP camera. For browsing you’ll have access to Opera Mobile 9 browser which should be a breeze operating with the available stylus on the touchscreen.
24
Mar
2008
ABI Research: The market for smartphones will grow from around 10% of the total handset market in 2007 to 31% of the market in 2013. A new study from ABI Research projects this meteoric growth to be a product of a number of complex factors including carriers’ drives to grow data revenues from advanced services and the general trend to pushing “smart” operating systems down into middle tier devices.
ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw comments, ”Smart operating systems are continually being optimized to run on processors with lower performance. There is a strategic move to support smart OSes in single chip midrange devices in order to unlock more data revenues.”
Carlaw adds that, “The market is currently dominated by Nokia (52%) and Symbian (65%). However, the coalescence of the framework wars in the Linux environment and the growing stature of Windows Mobile will enable new competitors to put pressure on this established axis.”
11
Feb
2008
All about Symbian: Possibly trying to stay away from Nokia’s own announcements, LG Electronics has announced its new ‘LG-KT610′, described as a “GPS-enabled, stylish candy bar mobile phone with a unique 2.4 VGA flip screen holding a PC-like Qwerty keypad”.
“Based on Symbian OS™ v9.2 and S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1, ‘LG-KT610′s users can take full advantage of a rich suite of multimedia features and applications.
The sleek new ‘LG-KT610′ is powered with HSDPA connectivity at 3.6 Mbps and GPS navigation capabilities. Combined with a QWERTY keypad and push email functionality, socialising, working and web browsing on-the-go is made easy. Symbian OS ensures the benefits of advanced power efficiency and a high-level of OS security, crucial for social and professional users.”