The world is becoming a very lazy place to navigate, with Sat Nav becoming a commonplace feature on a lot of mobile handsets now - I do worry that the skill of being able to read a map is going to disappear. Whilst this may threaten the traditional names in navigation such as TomTom and Garmin it is opening up the possibilities of doing more with navigation and mapping both online and in a handheld format. And that has to be a good thing.
Geolocation services are springing up on more and more Apps and allowing people to interact more not only with their environment but also the people within it. A quick can of the “Nearby” function on Tweetie at any major event is a great way to gauge reaction and also see who is there!
I am very impressed with how Nokia have adopted the navigation and mapping services. They have made it part of the core functionality since the Nokia N80 and really got to grips with things with the Nokia N95, offering turn by turn voice navigation bundled with a lot of their contracts. It should be no surprise then that they were responsible for one of the world’s largest interactive installations recently in London. Check out the video below of their textable sign and integrated online campaign. It is beautifully executed and fabulously innovative.
The sales of mobile phones stagnated last year, as a result of the recession. But smartphones were the exception. According to figures by Gartner, 24% more smartphones were sold in 2009 compared to the year before. Nokia, Blackberry and Apple together sold about 172 million smartphones.
Also important changes as to the operating system of mobile devices. Even though half of the smartphones still use Nokia’s Symbian, it is clearly losing ground. Microsoft Windows Mobile is also on the losing side, being pushed out of the top 3 by iPhone OS. In 2009, iPhone doubled its amount of units sold from 11,8 to 24 million.
Big runner-up is Android. The 6,8 million units sold in 2009 were 10 times as much as the year before. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, there are about 60.000 Google Android phones sold every day now. At that rate there’ll be more Android phones than iPhones by 2011.
In some recent research on the distribution volume of the iPhone, analyst firm IDC released the figures that Apple put up during the 2009 calendar year, doubling the numbers of the previous year and clinching the third berth among smartphone creators. Apple owning about 15% of the smartphone market landscape saw an increase of distribution of 82% compared to the previous year in ‘08. Another study released from Gartner, compares the consumption of smartphone based on OS (operating systems) opposed to the manufacturer. Despite information being calculated differently, the same numbers resulted displaying Apple 15% share of the landscape. Another observation made in the research published was the gap between Apple, Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Symbian (Nokia). According to the chart, Apple has made a tremendous stride into overtaking RIM with the 2× jump in distribution and Symbian has seem to lose of traction in the 2009 year, losing 5½% of their market-share assumably to RIM and iPhone OS.
Nokia, Microsoft and Linux continue to lose ground in the shift to smarter phones
Source: Gartner, Inc.
A report from Gartner issued Tuesday confirmed the trends reported three weeks earlier by IDC. Both firms are witnessing a global shift as users around the world trade in devices designed to make phone calls and send text messages for more powerful phones designed to also surf the Web.
Gartner recorded a 0.9% drop in cellphone sales for 2009 and a corrresponding 23% growth in smartphone sales. IDC calls them by a different name — “converged mobile devices” — but registered a similar pattern, showing smartphone sales up 15.1% for the year.
The spoils, however, were not evenly distributed among the players. In particular:
Nokia’s (NOK), whose Symbian operating system once dominated the market, saw its share erode once again (Gartner: down 5.5 points to 46.9%; IDC: down 1.1 points to 38.9% )
Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone share contiues to grow sharply (Gartner: up 6.2 points to 14.4%; IDC: 5.3 points to 14.4%)
Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry also gained ground, but more slowly (Gartner: 3.3 points to 19.9%; IDC: 4.2 points to 19.8%)
Phones running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS registered a nearly eight-fold gain in market share, albeit from a smaller base (up 3.4 points to 3.9%, according to Gartner)
Microsoft (MSFT) and Linux both lost roughly 3 points to end up with 8.7% and 4.7% shares, respectively, according to Gartner. Microsoft is hoping to turn that around with its new Windows 7 Mobile Series OS, introduced in Barcelona last week.
Below: Gartner’s and IDC’s 2009 smartphone spreadsheets.
It’s automatically in iPhoto on your mac…and you didn’t do anything – it’s all automatic, no cables, no sending over bluetooth, no sharing over web services, no memory card transfer – NOTHING you had to additionally do.
You edit the photo in iPhoto.
You browse the photos on your N900, the edited version is there…. without having to send it back or do anything at all!
Doing NOTHING? Really? But your Mac has to be On Sync right? NO.
You need to be in WiFi range right? NO. This can be done from ANYWHERE.
Is this even possible?! YES! If Steve Jobs and his posse were here he’d call it MAGICAL.
Check out the video below:
If I can avoid it, I hate wires/memory card transfers when sending over photos to my computer. All Nokia phone’s I’ve been using since the 7610 have allowed me to just send over my photos via bluetooth. No cables, no memory card, no fuss. Or from My computer I can just browse my phone’s folders over bluetooth like it’s already on my computer.
This goes one step further with a 2-way sync. The photos ARE on your computer already and you don’t have to think about transferring photos at all, nor have to be in bluetooth range. It’s automatically done, over 3G (I wonder if it can sync using another WiFi hotspot – like your friend’s house or work etc?)
I guess the only problems would be if you are taking a large bunch of photos and you’re killing your battery (even quicker than it does so with normal use) but I guess there’s a way to switch this off.
Also – would this be possible for PC users?
From the http://doitdifferent.wordpress.com/ “I” writes exactly why this hacking capability makes the N900 so great. You can really PUSH the N900!
Why does this make the N900 so great?
This is why I wanted to try out an N900, because I thought I’d be able to hack it to do cool things. And I can. Why? Because it’s based on linux, closely related to a desktop linux and most importantly it’s open. This means I can use scripts I prepared on my desktop *nix system (a Mac, in this case). I can use software written orignally for desktops, recompiled for the N900. There’s a wealth of software out there, all free, and I can look into the source and see how it all works. And the N900 is linux, so how it works under the hood is familiar to me, and so I can hack it to do new stuff so easily. I had this working withing 24 hours of getting the N900. That’s amazing, name any other phone you can create new, genuinely useful functions for that quickly. And I spent a lot of that first 24 hours working, or sleeping or doing other things with the N900. I wanted a trial N900 to answer the questions missing from other reviews. How easy is it to hack? Can you make it do cool stuff? The answer so far looks like “yes”.
The shock of the Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo development has subsided and I think I’m now ready to offer some analysis as I see it.
Religious battles over application packaging aside, much of the conversation has centered on what this melding means for cell phones… dragging in Apple’s now-venerable iPhone and Google’s up-and-coming Android operating system for contrast and comparison.
But in poring over the OS framework (below) tonight it hit me harder than ever that mobile computing really isn’t just a buzz phrase for Nokia– it’s the real deal.
MeeGo Software Architecture Overview
Nokia and Intel are now better poised to do together with MeeGo what they had struggled separately to accomplish via Maemo and Moblin: free a desktop operating system (Linux) from its traditional roost and truly change– and own– the mobile landscape.
In other words, they’re facilitating Phase 2 of the original 1980s PC revolution.
Purists have been arguing that Android, despite its Linux underpinnings and carefully-crafted publicity, isn’t really doing this due to the higher degree of control Google maintains. True, it’s on a growing number of devices, but it remains to be seen how ultimately sustainable its Linux-under-wraps approach will be.
IBM misjudged the desktop PC market even after it introduced what became a major enduring standard in technology. Ironically, the company did not originally set out to create what amounted to an open source hardware paradigm and ultimately begged out of that business completely by 2004. Monumental mistakes such as allowing Microsoft to retain the rights to the DOS operating system proved over time to be a poison pill.
Nokia seemed to be wanting the open computing experience with its internet tablets but without the poison. Their cautious approach indicated they were wary of recreating IBM’s self-inflicted misfortune. There is surely much more money to be made in mobile computing, but given the faster rate of technological and sociological change now as compared to the 1980s it makes sense to develop a well-considered plan.
There have been numerous rumors dogging the Maemo devices line that Nokia would easily abandon what was essentially a skunkworks project, and some moves (like lengthy gaps between device releases) often supported such speculation. But this new marriage with Intel indicates, at least to me, that both companies are serious about being leaders– and survivors– in a mostly-open, truly flexible computing ecosystem.
Linux has long been maligned by spreaders of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as a hacker’s toy OS and maybe that’s why Google is so willing to distance its brand wrapper from its core. Despite traction gained by popular desktop incarnations such as Ubuntu, it’s never managed to inflict serious harm on Microsoft’s PC OS market share and seems to be content running the lion’s share of web servers instead.
However, the resources now in play with MeeGo have the clout, together, to change that public perception. In spite of its childish name, MeeGo may well represent the ultimate maturing of caterpillar Linux into a butterfly form with which closed mobile operating systems cannot long compete.
“The announcement Monday by Intel and Nokia that the companies are teaming up on Linux development may not have told the whole story. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that they’re teaming up on chip development, as well.
Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate was the first to report on the existence of an Atom-based system on a chip (SoC) called Penwell, which is allegedly being jointly developed by Intel and Nokia.”
Semakin maraknya box repair atau tool flasher yang beredar saat ini menambah warna untuk
Para teknisi ponsel.karena Box repair atau tool flasher sangat di butuhkan mereka untuk memperbaiki kerusakan ponsel yang bermasalah di software.Semakin banyak alat 2 flasher yang dimiliki akan sangat membantu para teknisi dalam hal reparasi software ponsel pastinya untuk mendapatkan hasil yang lebih maksimal,karena memang tidak bisa dipungkiri bahwa box repair yang satu dengan yang lain memang saling melengkapi.
Bukan untuk dijadikan koleksi box repair,melainkan suatu kebutuhan untuk para teknisi.
Berikut Di bawah ini kupas tuntas Box repair Cyclone,Mulai dari bagaimana cara Instalasi hingga flashing menggunakan Box repair Cyclone.
I.instalasi software utama Cyclone
1.Klik ganda pada Cyclone Box installer untuk memulai install software utama Cyclone
2.Klik Next untuk melanjutkan proses instalasi
3.pada Destination Folder tidak perlu di rubah,langsung klik Next
4.Kemudian klik Next lagi untuk melanjutkan proses instalasi selanjutnya
5.pada Additional icons, bisa tandai semua agar icon Cyclone muncul di desktop Komputer.lalu klik Next
6.Tunggu proses instalasi berjalan sampai selesai.
7.Klik Continue Anyway untuk melanjutkan ke proses instalsi driver Cyclone Box
8.Driver Box sudah terinstal dengan baik lalu klik Finish
9.Setelah proses instalasi selesai hilangkan tanda pada launch Cyclone Box lalu klik Finish
10.Tunggu Proses Instalasi Nokia Connectivity Cable Driver sampai selesai
II.Pasang Box Cyclone ke computer
1.langkah selanjutnya pasang Box Cyclone ke computer.Apabila ada pesan Found New Hardware berarti box belum di kenali oleh komputer.
2.Pilih install from a list or specific location (Advanced) untuk mengambil driver secara manual,lalu klik Next
3.Cari lokasi driver di alamat C:\Program Files\Cyclone Box\Drivers lalu klik OK
4.Kemudian Klik Next untuk menjalankan proses instalasi driver.
5.Klik Continue Anyway untuk melanjutkan proses instalasi Driver Cyclone box
6.Klik Finish untuk mengakhiri proses instalasi Cyclone Box
III.Flashing via Cyclone
1.Klik ganda pada Icon Cyclone Box yang ada di desktop untuk membuka program Cyclone Box
2.Apabila ada pesan Cannot find “Cyclonebox.dll” lepas lalu pasang kembali Cyclonebox dengan baik,kemudian ambilkan driver box kembali dengan benar.
3.Apabila program Cyclone sudah terbuka dengan baik akan ada pesan Ready to work lalu pilih generasi ponsel sesuai dengan yang sedang di perbaiki.
4.Kemudian Klik Check Flashing Bus untuk mengetahui koneksi box dan ponsel.
5.Apabila Box dan ponsel sudah terhubung dengan baik maka akan ada pesan seperti gambar di bawah :
6.Klik add Image untuk mengambil File Flash atau firmware utama (MCU)
7.Isikan MCU dengan ukuran file terbesar dan gunakan Versi yang tertinggi,lalu klik Open
8.File MCU akan tersimpan pada Menu Flash Image di software utama Cyclone Box
9.Kemudian isikan Firmware pendukung untuk bahasa (PPM) dengan ukuran terkecil setelah MCU dan Versi Firmware harus sama dengan MCU yang di pilih sebelumnya.
10.Klik Add Image lagi untuk mengambil File pendukung untuk Content (CNT)
11.Isikan File CNT dengan ukuran file terkecil setelah MCU,PPM dan Versi harus sama.
12.Perhatikan lagi pengisian Firmware MCU,PPM dan CNT apakah sudah terisi dengan benar
13.Klik flash untuk menjalankan proses flashing.
14.Proses Flashing akan berjalan menuju area Erase flash tunggu proses erase sampai selesai
15.Kemudian akan berjalan masuk area write secara otomatis setelah proses erase.
16.Tunggu Proses Flashing berjalan sampai All Image Processed OK,yang berarti proses flashing selesai.
NEWS In Apps World, Divide and Conquer Carries Risks By Kevin J. O’Brein
February 16, 2010
Barcelona — In the world of mobile phone applications, Apple, Google, Nokia and their competitors seem to have only their differences in common.
The players in the field who are attending the Mobile World Congress here this week are each holding a conference to educate software developers about the idiosyncracies of designing apps for their phones.
Most mobile software works on only one type of device, or for one network operator. An iPhone application will not work on a Nokia phone, and neither would work on Google’s Android system or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
The state of play, experts say, is a cacophony of incompatible, competing software that threatens to slow the growth of the mobile Internet.
“These are all proprietary systems,” said Michael O’Hara, chief management officer of the GSM Association, the London organizer of the Barcelona event, which is the industry’s biggest trade show. “For consumers, they aren’t portable. We are creating islands of applications out there that can’t communicate with each other.”
The competition is similar to what happened in the early days of the computer industry, when pioneers like Microsoft, Apple and International Business Machines tried to foist their own designs and digital quirks on the public in a battle for market share.
But consumers grew tired of being locked into one company’s products and prices, and over the past decade, open standards and products that can be used over a series of devices have come into vogue.
That is one reason why Microsoft — which was forced by European regulators to make its ubiquitous Windows operating system compatible with other products — will distribute the Web browsers of rivals in Europe this year, and why I.B.M. has become one of the biggest sellers of “open-source” software for business.
Such an accommodation, however, appears to be a long way off in the apps world.
Most companies are hoping to mimic the success of Apple, whose proprietary iPhone elevated the obscure field of mobile applications into a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
Last year, $4.2 billion in mobile applications were sold, almost all of those iPhone applications, according to figures compiled by the research firm Gartner. After splitting the revenue with developers, Apple pocketed about $1 billion in sales in 2009, based on industry estimates.
But Apple — which is not attending the Mobile World Congress — no longer has the field to itself. With sales of mobile applications expected to rise 62 percent this year to $6.8 billion, according to Gartner, its rivals are elbowing their way in.
Nokia, the leading cellphone maker, said consumers were downloading more than one million applications a day from its Ovi online business. Samsung, LG, Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and Google have all reported strong traffic on their newly created application stores.
Big network operators are also forging alliances to push their own technical standards. But perhaps the most unlikely entrant in the field is Alcatel-Lucent, the maker of network equipment, like Alcatel-Lucent.
In December, Alcatel-Lucent, based in Paris and New Jersey, began hooking up network operators with software developers and retailers to build mobile applications for multiple networks and operating systems. More than 50 operators have expressed interest in the program, according to the company, and applications are in development.
In Barcelona on Tuesday, Alcatel-Lucent announced that it was expanding its role as an application broker by setting up a cloud computing-based development laboratory it called a “sandbox in the sky” to speed development of broader applications.
The company also began an exchange to meld existing applications into new ones, drawing in third-party investors who help finance the creative process.
“We’re in this to help everyone in the application ecosystem make money,” said Johnson Agogbua, who is in charge of the application program at Alcatel-Lucent.
Mobile operators are also organizing among themselves. Last year four operators with a combined one billion customers — China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and SoftBank Mobile of Japan — formed the Joint Innovation Lab, or J.I.L., to develop applications for handsets sold over their networks. The group has published a specification for a mobile “widget,” which is a simple type of phone application that displays real-time updates of limited data, like the current temperature.
LG, Samsung, R.I.M. and Sharp are making phones using lab’s widget specification.
“We believe this will be good ultimately for the consumer because it will give them more choices,” said Peters Suh, the J.I.L. chief executive. “It is also an opportunity for operators to take back the initiative.”
But the alliances, which are proliferating, are also complicating matters.
On Monday, 20 operators, including AT&T, Sprint, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, América Móvil, NTT Docomo of Japan and Bharti Airtel of India, created the Wholesale Applications Community, another group with the aim to develop common standards. The four operators in J.I.L. also joined, but both efforts will continue to run in parallel, at least for now.
Some question whether close U.S. rivals like Sprint and AT&T, which pay developers to create applications unique to their networks and phones, will end up using a common standard, which could allow customers to more easily change carriers.
“Most operators are selling the same phones for roughly the same price,” said Thomas Kaehler, the founder of Communology, a mobile application developer in Cologne, Germany. “They seek unique applications for differentiation but it has fragmented the market.”
Besides joining the new operators’ alliance, Sprint is also participating in Alcatel-Lucent’s cross-platform initiative. Sprint was the first U.S. wireless operator to develop its own set of mobile applications, using a stable of independent software developers.
But the demands of sustaining the solo effort became too great.
“We are now no longer a walled garden, but an open marketplace,” said Len Barlik, a Sprint vice president for product development. “We can’t do it all ourselves.”
Nokia and Intel have become allies in a new clash of the operating systems with the joint creation of MeeGo. MeeGo is an operating system that blurs the line between a robust mobile phone OS and a lightweight netbook OS.
MeeGo is a hybrid of two operating systems. One is Nokia’s Maemo, which recently appeared in the N900 smartphone (which I love to death). The second is Intel’s Moblin, an OS primarily intended for netbooks. Both platforms are open-source and Linux-based, as MeeGo will be – which is probably the only way to compete with Apple and Google.
MeeGo’s Web site says the source code, and hopefully more information, will become available in the coming weeks, but I’m most curious about who will use the OS. If other manufacturers besides Nokia are willing to put MeeGo on their mobile devices, it could be a worthy competitor to offerings from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We should expect to see a launch around mid 2010.
Already some users are voicing their concerns on their post:
Why RPM, .Deb is so much more used in the community.
Kristoffel
.RPM is being used because of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), which is a project started by the Linux Foundation in order to reduce the differences between individual Linux distributions to make it easier and cheaper for developers to port their apps to different distributions.
Which is not surprising at all, as it is the Linux Foundation that is hosting this project as well.
Ookami
Stability and safety require strict policy of what packages may contain and touch. Isn’t that the Debian way?
That challenge becomes pretty hard if it’s made possible for mainstream users to install packages from other sources than rigorously controlled central repositories. Ad-hoc installation scripts would be out of question. Only new files or ones installed by earlier version of same package maintainer should be accepted. Configuration management should go through a proxy that would require the user to accept access to targeted services.
Even then, malware would flourish. Unless each binary is restricted from seeing any parts of the system foreign to it. Capability-based encapsulation, then?
I’ll now shut up in a late attempt to hide my amateurishness.
Kalle Hallivuori
Looks like they already have a way to go in quieting the concern of developers, but when you see Maemo in full action on a Nokia device, you can really see where this combined strategy can make sense. For Nokia, I really hope this works because they have built some of the best phones in the world.
Three new ambitious platforms starting with zero installed bases and no applications are going up against the following:
Symbian with more than 200 million users and 20k apps
WebOS with less than 3 million users and about 1k apps
Windows Mobile with 30 million users and about 2k apps
iPhone OS, about 75 million users and 150k apps
Android with 3 to 5 million users and approx. 20k apps
Blackberry OS with more than 50 million users and a few thousand apps.
It should be noted that Microsoft’s new Windows Phone “7 Series” will compete with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 which will continue as a product line.
MeeGo will also compete with Nokia’s existing Symbian OS for developers, replacing Maemo.
Most of these new platforms will not have products shipping for at least 6 months during which time another 50 million (at least) new users will join existing ecosystems.
There are now nine smartphone platforms, but who’s counting? I’ve been hearing predictions of consolidation for years and although platforms have come and gone (PalmOS, SavaJe), the total number continues to increase.
If nothing else, this seems to indicate that the industry is not in any state of maturity or point of “over-service” where commoditization takes place.
The European giants that pioneered the mobile telecoms industry are now stumbling in the wake of American and Asian rivals
When Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, takes to the stage in Barcelona on Tuesday evening to deliver the keynote address to hundreds of mobile phone industry executives gathered for the Mobile World Congress the industry’s biggest trade show, the message will be clear: well done, Europe, for getting mobile communications this far. We’ll take it from here.
For two decades, Europe’s mobile telecoms sector has considered itself to be a world leader. It had the biggest names, the technological knowhow, the most customers. Over the past year, however, that hegemony has been smashed. At a time when Europe is mired in economic turmoil and facing a demographic timebomb, one of its great hopes for fuelling future growth is slipping away.
“Europe has become the ‘flyover states’ of the mobile industry,” says a senior European executive, referring to the disparaging term used to describe middle America by high-powered business travellers shuttling between California and New York.
“All the service innovation is being done on the west coast of the US, and all the manufacturing and technical innovation is being done in the Far East. All we’re doing is selling other people’s products.”
His customers now care only about access to services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter on their phones, and the devices they covet are the iPhone or the latest BlackBerry, which has proved a great hit with teenagers. This year’s hot handsets, the executive says, are being made by HTC, the Taiwanese manufacturer, which will use this week’s show to unveil its latest devices, featuring Google’s Android software. While Apple lords it over the high end of the market, China’s Huawei and ZTE are creating cut-price smartphones that will democratise the mobile internet in the coming years.
Sensing the change blowing in the wind, even Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, is turning up in Barcelona to front the software group’s latest attempt to break into a market that it was once shut out of by Europe’s gatekeepers, Nokia and Ericsson. As for Apple itself, the iPhone maker would never do anything so vulgar as actually appear publicly at the event, or have a stand in one of the eight exhibition halls; but its executives will be in town, holding meetings behind closed doors with suppliers and networks as it looks for more wireless partners to back its latest invention, the iPad, outside the US.
After a week in which the turmoil in Greece has shown the fragility of the eurozone and a new acronym, “Pigs”, has entered the economic lexicon as a harbinger of doom, the evidence the Mobile World Congress will provide of Europe’s loss of control over the mobile phone industry is a harsh blow.
It leaves European policymakers, many of whom have bought in to the idea that the future lies in the creation of innovative technologies, to pin their hopes on new areas such as green energy or fall back on old stalwarts such as biotechnology. But the green sector has yet to prove the breakout success that will give Europe its own version of Silicon Valley, while biotech has always been the saviour that never quite seems to arrive. After the dotcom crash at the start of this century, biotechnology was looked to expectantly, especially in the UK, as the next big thing. In America, meanwhile, graduates from Stanford and drop-outs from Harvard were quietly getting on with building Google, Facebook and Twitter.
The impressive lead in mobile communications that Europe once held over the rest of the world was created by the European Union. In the 1980s, when wireless communications went mass-market, America’s Motorola vied with Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson for dominance of the nascent global market. Europe’s players were handed the advantage when the EU officially adopted and set aside specific wireless spectrum for a digital mobile technology called GSM.
The first networks appeared in 1991 and overnight the European technology players that had helped create the standard had a huge market. Seeing its success, other countries soon adopted GSM, expanding the market for Ericsson, Nokia and others throughout the 1990s. Even America’s largest network, Verizon Wireless, is switching to the super-fast version of GSM later this year. So where did it all go wrong?
“As soon as the mobile business opened itself up in such a way that internet technology could become available on mobile networks, that was the end,” according to Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media. “Maybe Europe had a chance but it blew it, in my view, because there are too many sets of interests, each so obsessed with their own sphere of influence that they could not co-operate.
“You had operators and device manufacturers never pulling in the same direction, and I cannot see any way in which Europe can regain the ascendancy. Essentially the future of communication services is that people want access to the cloud of services called the internet.”
The industry did see it coming. It tried several times to create a mobile internet that was not going to be beholden to the American giants. In the late 1990s, a pared-down wireless internet service called WAP was being pushed by several GSM operators. Customers, many of whom were used to dial-up internet access, were unconvinced and soon started summing up the service by replacing the “w” with “cr”.
A few years later, O2 tried to create its own mobile web by importing the i-mode standard from Japan. Again, it was a dire failure. When the “true” web started turning up on the next generation of 3G phones, the operators tried to keep their customers within “walled gardens” – as they were called – creating content portals that offered customers what the operator thought was the best of the web. Usage was paltry. Having spent billions buying licences to run 3G services, the operators had to prove to investors that there was consumer appetite for mobile internet services, so they demolished their garden walls.
Ironically, the operators’ initial intransigence over the mobile web brought both Apple and Google into the industry. The former saw a way of bringing the vertically integrated approach that had worked so well in music – where it controls both the device, the iPod, and the store, iTunes – into the mobile market. The latter made its move because it feared that the combined effect of Apple and market leader Nokia could shut it out of the mobile internet altogether.
In fact, Google needn’t have worried about Nokia because the runaway success of the iPhone changed the game. The arrival of the 3G version of Apple’s device a year and a half ago dramatically altered the mobile industry and proved that consumers, given the right device, will do much, much more than use their phone to make calls and send texts.
Nokia is still the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. But the Finnish giant, a former rubber boot manufacturer whose success created hundreds of millionaires and helped pull the country out of recession when the Soviet Union collapsed, has been sideswiped by the success of Apple and the encroachment of Google’s Android platform. It has been forced to make Symbian, its own software platform, free to developers and handset manufacturers, as Android is, and last month took the desperate decision to give users of its smartphones free access to its satnav services to make its devices as attractive as the iPhone. Only three years ago it spent €6.5bn on the map firm Navteq but it is now effectively giving that intellectual property away as it tries to protect its market share.
The crisis into which Nokia has been plunged by Apple has pushed it into bed with another American giant, Intel. The two companies will use Mobile World Congress to announce new microchips that Nokia hopes will help it to compete with HTC’s latest devices. Apple already has its own in-house chip design team, having bought fellow Californian company PA Semi two years ago.
Ericsson, meanwhile, spun its handset business into a joint venture with Sony. However, after initial success with ”featurephones” based on Sony’s Cybershot (camera) and Walkman (music)technologies, Sony Ericsson’s share of the billion-device-a-year market has collapsed under the onslaught of Apple and BlackBerry, halving from about 10% three years ago.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, says Olaf Swantee, who runs Orange’s mobile operations across Europe. He reckons that Europe’s big mobile phone operators, such as Orange, Vodafone and O2, have the opportunity to leverage their huge customer service bases to get themselves back into the game.
“Yes, the [US] west coast and Asia have really taken very strong positions,” he admits. “If you take equipment manufacturing, companies like Huawei have grown really strongly and we have seen traditional software manufacturers like Google and Apple enter the mobile market as it becomes a more software-driven environment. But, as the market moves to a more mature phase, what is becoming more and more important is the customer interface.”
The importance of direct customer contact, whether that be through shops or call centres, was proved this year when Google launched its Nexus One mobile phone. It sold it only through its website, and those customers who had problems with the phone had to email Google, rather than talk to its network partner, AT&T. Many found themselves waiting days for issues to be dealt with.
In the race to increase revenues – not least to pay for the network investment required to deal with the traffic generated by devices such as the iPhone – the mobile phone operators have the chance to claw back money from the likes of Apple and Google, which aggregate other people’s content through their iTunes and Android marketplace stores.
“Once the markets top out,” says Patrick Bossert, director of strategy at global billing services expert Convergys, “and growth slows and margins get tighter, then those aggregators will be looking to solutions for local-language customer care and marketing.
“They cannot afford to establish a base in every market in which they operate, but the service providers are already there. They may not have a lot of leverage now but, boy, do they have a lot of assets that are actually quite desirable.”
It’s a theme that the GSM Association, which represents all these networks, will be picking up this week as it tries to wrest some of the initiative back from Google and Apple.
“I don’t feel that we are being left behind, but there are areas that the mobile operators need to address,” says Michael O’Hara, the GSMA’s chief marketing officer. “And getting their assets into the developer world, finding a way to get into the value chain, is really key.”
Being great at customer service is hardly the white heat of technology, but for Europe it might just be the start of some sort of fightback. For now, though, the story is going to be – for home-grown talent, at least – depressingly familiar. As Informa’s Newman warns: “In 2010, Apple is going to make hay. I can’t see anyone catching them up this year.”
As much as I like my Nokia E71, when I bought it, it had a few minor annoyances. Because it had firmware revision 200.21.118, there were a couple of irritaing bugs. The screensaver time would not update, unless you pressed a key. The camera quality, wasn’t brilliant – some first shots came out with a purple ‘hue’ that would be corrected only by taking a second shot.
So a recent check of my phones firmware updates revealed version 400.21.013 was available to install. After backing up the contents of the phone memory and 8Gb memory card, I connected the phone and started the download via the phone software update service. Never having any bother before with firmware updates, especially on my N95, I was confident this would pass without incident.
However after 15 minutes the update software (1 minute away from completion and displaying various warnings about not disconnecting the USB cable) reported that it had lost connection with the phone and I had to disconnect/reconnect it and reattempt the update.
Doing as instructed, it appeared to go through ok until the last minute again and displayed a message that the update had failed. Fearing that my phone had been ‘bricked’, even though the phone had been correctly connected to the the update service, I started the phone up and thankfully booted ok. A check with *#0000# displayed the new firmware version of 400.21.013, so the update appeared to complete successfully. everything seemed to be ok on the phone, except when I tried ‘web’, the built-in browser. For some it wouldn’t connect and displayed various error messages to the effect that it couldn’t connect. So I installed ‘Gravity’, my Twitter client. This also displayed an error message and wouldn’t connect to the internet.
The only thing that gave me a clue how to get around the problem was to take the battery, MicroSD card and SIM card out. I usually install all my applications to the MicroSD card and thought there could be some sort of preferences file screwing up the internet connection.
I never found out the root cause, however despite several hard resets, installs of backups and re-install of the firmware (which did result in the same error as the first time), the only solution I found was to hard reset the phone, wait for a while and then try Web. It seems as though, after a firmware update the phone needed time to re-register itself back on the network before I could use extended services such as internet access.
Once I’d re-established a reliable internet connection I set about blanking my MicroSD card and restoring only data that would interfere with phone application settings, then the applications themselves.
Suffice to say, my phone is fully working again, the time on the screensaver is fixed and the camera is much, much improved!
if you go ahead with a firmware upgrade, tread carefully and prepare for one or two heart-stopping moments!
Disclaimer: if anyone screws up their phone after reading any part of this blog and blames me, tough luck. I accept no responsibility for your damaged phone in any shape or form.
From 17:00 GMT, WOMWorld.com/Nokia gets a brand new Experience Map.
Built on Ovi Maps API, you’ll be able to zoom up to city level to see where Nokia devices on trial are [Ha, imagine it was live tracked using the device GPS ].
With Ovi Maps you can of course zoom to street level, but the experience map is set to no further than city level to protect privacy. This city would be where the devices are sent to.
I think it’s great to see where all the people trialling Nokia devices and accessories from WOMWorld are.
Perhaps you’ll see trialists near you that you weren’t even aware of?
I’d be interested to see who else in Wales (if any) is trialling devices.
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In Ovi Maps related thought: It’s improving quite a lot. Quite significantly, search has vastly improved on mobile such that I don’t need to use the google maps app anymore (more on this tomorrow).
The shock of the Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo development has subsided and I think I’m now ready to offer some analysis as I see it.
Barcelona — In the world of mobile phone applications, Apple, Google, Nokia and their competitors seem to have only their differences in common.
© 2010 The New York Times Company 
Delivering precisely what the world needs today: 
From 17:00 GMT, WOMWorld.com/Nokia gets a brand new Experience Map.
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