Archive for Nokia
by Ewan Spence
July 3, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Nokia, Open Source, Symbian, UIQ, Sony Ericsson
With hindsight, if the Symbian partners had made the move to open source the base OS, the triumvirate of user interfaces, and place all the developer tools and knowledge in a single place a year ago, it would have been seen as leading the way in the mobile. And while the pragmatist knows that this move will have been months in the planning, it looks a touch more defensive than it actually is.
Make no bones about it, this is a big deal. Imagine if Microsoft suddenly decided to make Vista open source. To commit to putting out every line of code under an open source licence such as the Eclipse Public Licence)
Nokia had made the move to buy out the remaining partners in Symbian, thus gaining control and ownership of the company; it’s IP – primarily the Symbian OS; and the staff. The staff would become Nokia employees, and the operating system would be placed into the Symbian Foundation, and over a two year period it would be made fully open source, alongside the S60, UIQ and MOAP user interfaces (which eventually would be integrated into a single UI, the unified platform of Symbian OS, due in 2010).
In the short term, not much is going to change. The manufacturers have their product line-ups sorted for the festive season and into 2009. The Symbian OS has a strong roadmap, with updates roughly every six months to the base code will remain. Long term the per handset fee (of roughly $5 a unit) will be removed, all the code will be visible, and a unified UI will help the developer base focus on making more programs, rather than make one program run on more than one UI.
It’s the medium term where it gets interesting; the point where Symbain does the switch over, and could (if not managed correctly) take their eye off the ball with all the management meetings and staff re-orientation. There’s also the fact that the UIQ interface is now effectively dead – the unified UI will be based on S60 and take elements of UIQ and MOAP. UIQ have laid off a little more than half their staff, and I wouldn’t expect to see another major iteration of UIQ now – which leaves Sony Ericsson with a phone OS that could now be at a dead end.
It’s certainly interesting times, and a bit of a gamble on Nokia’s part, but tat the very least they’re only gambling the same amount of money they would pay Symbian in licence fees over a year or so. So financially it’s worth taking.
And if they can establish Symbian OS as the default OS (just as MS-Dos did) then it will pay off in spades.
by Tarek Abu-Esber
June 18, 2008 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Apple, Nokia, Android, LBS
If you’ve read any articles about the Future of Mobile then the chances are Location Based Services (LBS) got heavy billing. These days LBS has become a real industry buzz-word with more and more GPS enabled devices hitting the market and a plethora of new LBS services going live.
The user scenarios are pretty compelling: be able to know where your friends are, meet new people in your immediate area, get search information based on where you’re located, Geo-Tag your content so you can map where it was taken and many others being dreamed up.
In fact the future of mobile LBS was so pervasive that Google used it as a main components in their Android platform. It should come as no surprise then that when the top 50 entries to Googles Android Developer Challenge were revealed a large portion had used location in some way.
The pattern was also evident when a group of students at MIT handed in their projects which were created using Google’s Open mobile platform. Their professor had asked them to come up with the kind of Mobile Service they would like to use in the future and to then try and build it for Android devices. Again LBS was the most common type of service with the students using location information to determine various phone settings like ring-type or call barring and to deliver reminders (e.g. reminds you to buy milk if it detects that you’re near a store) as well as other useful features.
And the pattern isn’t unique to Android. When Apple announced the iPhone SDK they also announced that VC firm Kleiner Perkins were setting up a $100 Million iFund to invest in companies building applications for the iPhone. At the end of May the first two companies that had been chosen were announced and Whrrl, an LBS application, was one of them.
Apple themselves had acknowledged the importance of LBS when they added location tracking software in an firmware update for the original iPhone which identified the users location using cell towers and WiFi hotspots. This trend continued when they added Assisted-GPS to the iPhone 3G which was announced last week and will be available in July. The mapping application will take advantage of the AGPS and iPhone developers can too, so we should be seeing just as many iPhone LBS applications as on Android.
And then there’s Nokia who’ve probably put more GPS enabled handsets in the hands of customers than any other manufacturer. GPS support has become a staple in their N-Series Symbian devices and from this week the same is also true of their E-Series enterprise handsets. Nokia have driven users to take advantage of that hardware by releasing a couple of free LBS applications for S60 users, both of which have been hugely successful.
Nokia Maps, which was originally a free add-on and now comes pre-installed every Nokia S60 handset, and Nokia Sports Tracker have been downloaded by millions of users whose feedback has been used to improve the products over the last few months. In fact Nokia Sports tracker, originally used to track your performance while exercising, proved so successful and was used in so many diverse ways that users dubbed it Life-Tracker.
So in 2008 the hardware is starting to become common place with every major handset manufacturer shipping GPS enabled devices. We’re also seeing the handset manufacturers and OS producers starting to make LBS software available. The foundations are being set and by the looks of things the developers have taken notice. Will 2009 be dubbed “The Year of LBS”? I certainly hope so and I can’t wait to see what the industry comes up with.
by Darla Mack
June 4, 2008 at 12:26 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Nokia, emergency services
In the past weeks since the disaster in Sichuan, China Nokia has played a very generous role in offering its support.
Both Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks have offered not only financial support but a solution of technology as well. With their initial donation of RMB 3 million for search and rescue missions, 5000 mobile phones donated with prepaid sims in partnership with Sichuan Mobile, and the plans for longer term efforts such as the offer of psychological/counseling services to school children and helping schools to educate the children about earthquakes, Nokia has indeed displayed a heartfelt way to help people stay connected.
“This disaster has changed the lives of many Chinese people and sadly ended many others. I am proud and humbled by the tremendous and spontaneous efforts and sacrifices our staff in China have made, as well as by the financial donations that have been made by our staff, not only in China, but in several other countries, such as Finland, USA, Canada and Denmark. We are matching these employee donations.” Said David Tang, Vice President, Nokia Greater China.
by Ewan Spence
June 2, 2008 at 9:13 am · Filed under Devices, Apple, Nokia, Design, Development
Don’t you just love it when you have to companies start moving in completely opposite directions? Especially when those two companies are rather important in the smartphone and messaging space, and they end up in the same place?
I’m talking about Nokia and Apple, which definitely aren’t N/A to the mobile space. Last week Nokia invited me to attend their S60 Summit, which was an opportunity for the Finnish company to talk about their future plans and thoughts on the space – and there was a lot of focus on their move into the widget space. Using their ‘web runtime,’ a framework devised fro the webkit root of their mobile browser, they are making development of web 2.0 enabling widgets as simple as putting together a page of html, some javascript, and a touch of CSS for the layout. This doesn’t leave behind the Symbian C++ or J2ME programmers, but opens up a huge number of new developers.
Time to change the names.
The SDK for Apple’s iPhone, along with the ability to use the iTunes store to distribute and sell native C++ applications that run on the phone is due to make a big impact this summer. People are itching to get access to the device, the extra onboard features, and to run “outside the browser.” Previously developers only had access to iPhone users by web based widgets, that ran on basic html, with a touch of javascript and CSS, in the browser. (Jailbreaking doesn’t count, just as running iPhone widgets on an N95 didn’t count either, m’kay).
The true balance point isn’t at the extremes of ‘all widgets’ pr ‘all native code,’ but somewhere in-between. The manufacturers have come around to that thinking, and are now going to be able to be compared on a like for like basis; both by developers looking at coding environments, and end-users looking at the respective software catalogues. Now the hardware on each side is pretty much defined for the next eighteen months beyond incremental steps (such as stepping up to 3G), the true battle of the hearts and minds is going to be in software.
Gentlemen, start your dev-kits!
by Ewan Spence
April 16, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Mobile Tech, iPhone, Apple, Nokia, 2008
The sky is falling the sky is falling, there must be a 3G iPhone around the corner all the tea leaves and chicken [little] entrails say so!
Yes there is more furor around certain dedicated parts of the internet in regards to an update to the iPhone line, especially with the ‘why wasn’t it there in the first place’ 3G connectivity (to which I suspect the answer is a mix of cost, high power consumption, and Apple’s relative inexperience in the mobile market place). And driving that discussion over the last few days has been the drop in price of some one hundred pounds ($195 US) by UK carrier O2 on the 8GB iPhone – bringing it to a respectable (but still overpriced) 169 pounds
Yes I said overpriced, but let me refine that. It’s over-priced for the UK market, where you can pick up the high end Nokia Nseries devices for under 50 pounds in many cases. As we’ve said time and again, the nature of the market in different territories can affect a device and how it is received. The US finally had a phone with a good set of features for the tech crowd, and they loved it.
Please don’t read too much into a price cut of a company that has likely got excess stock on a unit. If there was some devious plot to clear the shelves, don’t you think that the 16GB unit would also have a price cut? Or that the cut would also be given to O2 customers in Ireland?
I’ve no doubt there will be a 3G iPhone in the near future, but Apple are traditionally very good at keeping things quiet, especially when there’s not been a squeak of an FCC filing for a 3G variant (which needs to be done some 90 days before a product release as I recall).
Apple fanboys, seeing patterns when there are none. Gotta love em.
by Ewan Spence
March 26, 2008 at 11:23 am · Filed under Usage + Usability, iPhone, Nokia, 2008
Is the iPhone a massive success because it opens up the regular American user to the power of the internet on the move; or is the iPhone a success because a significant number of the purchasers are the tech elite that continually push their equipment to the limit?
(I’m dispensing with the more straightforward question of “is the iPhone a success or not” because the straightforward answer differs depending on the territory you are in. The results in the US I think are on or ahead of any sensible prediction, but the European take up has been slow and low. A discussion for another time, perhaps).
With every survey that comes out promoting the iPhone as the best thing to hit the mobile internet, I always come back to the central questions of why people are measuring ‘the phone’ rather than measuring ‘the user?’ After all, the difference between my Dad getting any internet capable phone, and myself, is going to be huge. My Dad is likely to use it to check the weather online before he goes out for a round of gold – I’m more likely to be uploading 10mb long videos, streaming live conversations, a Twitter client polling every 180 seconds, and a thousand and one other data services. I might even call someone if I have to get an immediate answer!
There’s no escaping the fact that the iPhone has created a greater buzz in the American marketplace – and having now experienced the consumer side of the US market it’s no wonder that the tech savvy users are swithching to the iPhone, but I don’t think that’s a basis for declaring it as a complete game-changer in the space. When using a cellular data connection, it has a cute web browser, a passable email client, and some look-up functionality for weather and stocks.
But I’d be doing that on any phone… in Europe. If I was to move over to the States, my options are much more limited in terms of handsets that would have these capabilities. The iPhone is very much the only mainstream option available, beyond grey imports or manufacturers web shops. So is it any wonder when you have one phone in a territory that the lions share of geeks are using it? And of course does that answer the European [lack of] uptake issue as well?
Oh and before you leave some statistical ‘evidence’ in the comments… that spike of visitors to Google from mobile devices such as the iPhone and Nokia’s N95 has everything to do with people using the mobile internet more, and nothing to do with Google being the default home page for the browsers and search clients in these devices… No sirreee.
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Google, Nokia, Chumby, Yahoo, UK, Android, Events, London
London continues to be a hotbed of mobile hacking and innovation, with next month’s Over The Air, taking place on April 4th + 5th at Imperial College.
Organised by BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester and Vodafone’s Daniel Appelquist and backed by Nokia and Google, amongst others, Over The Air will be playing host to around 450 attendees across 48 hours of hands-on hacking and code-campery!
iPhone, Openmoko, Android sound like they’ll be strong themes, but expect to see a bunch of sessions on user experience design as well as some masterclasses from handset and software companies, including Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe and Yahoo! on day one.
Head on over to the Over The Air blog for more information on the schedule and how to register…
by Darla Mack
March 3, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Nokia, Ovi, T-Mobile
Some recent announcements struck my attention and made me realize that providers not only in the US are trying to pull strings in order to get consumers back into the habit of using their services.
Something that is common practice here in the US between carrier and manufacturer has spread across to Germany and possibly (although not officially stated) other parts of Europe. T-Mobile Germany will be pulling all Nokia handsets (not that there are any available currently) that can access Nokia’s Ovi service. Their reason for doing so is clearly because they want consumers to utilize the similar services that they offer and charge for it. To sum this all up… they want to have a service branded device. Very much like the Nokia N75 offered by AT&T here.
In conjunction to this finding, Nokia has announced today during CeBIT a new carrier specific device which has taken on the model number of the olden days. The Nokia 6650 will of course be T-Mobile branded and specific to the carriers portal of services. Did anyone see this coming?
To me it seems that T-Mobile wants a piece of the pie. I’m sure Nokia didn’t project this, but then again they did accommodate them with a device. But since Ovi can be accessed from any device with a browser just what is it that T-Mobile is so worried about?
by Darla Mack
February 5, 2008 at 10:31 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Tech, Usage + Usability, News, Mobile Applications, Nokia
MTV Citizen Journalists will be covering Super Tuesday today across the states using mobile technology and the web to keep people updated. Street Team 08 will be armed with Nokia N95’s and Flixwagon software to cover 23 states during the primarys.
This is a very unique use of mobile multimedia. As quoted by Bill Plummer of Nokia and Christina Norman of MTV:
“Nokia is proud and excited to see our flagship Nokia N95 multimedia devices being used so creatively to support and promote the electoral process,” commented Bill Plummer, Vice President, Sales, Nokia Americas. “Nokia Nseries devices are at the forefront of mobile technology, in this case delivering real-time high-quality Internet- ready audio and video reporting from the polls — the very way that first-time and future voters have come to expect their news.”
“Young people are taking hold of the political process like never before, and are clamoring to share and react to the stories as they unfold on the campaign trail in real-time,” said Christina Norman, President of MTV. “The Street Team’s Super Tuesday coverage will be hyper-focused on the issues and stories that matter most to our audience, empowering them to experience the day’s historic events in a whole new way.”
Now other than following the web (God forbid we should sit in front of our laptops or pc’s for a whole day), users can text the word STREET to 44686 on their mobiles or visit m.street08.com from their mobile browsers.
by Imran Ali
January 28, 2008 at 11:03 am · Filed under News, Google, Nokia, Open Source, Greenphone, Android, Linux
A few hours ago, Nokia announced its proposed $153m acquisition of TrollTech…a curious and surprising development. So what does this mean?
- What will happen to Trolltech’s famously open source handset, the GreenPhone (that predates even the OpenMoko platform)…will we see some Linux-based Nokia handset in 2008?
- Nokia’s press release focusses on TrollTech’s cross-platform development technology - will the adoption of Qt be Nokia’s defence against Google’s Android?
I have my fingers crossed that this acquisition is Nokia’s ‘openness moment’ 
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