The whole announcement includes some pretty interesting figures for mobile sales. HTC is the number four smartphone manufacturer, while Palm ranks 10th, with just a little over 200,000 Pres sold. Microsoft holds 9% of the mobile OS market, slightly ahead of Android’s 2%, though expect those two to switch places by this time next year; and Symbian still holds 51% of the OS market.

About that Android-based Nokia touch-screen device the Guardian was squawking about; it’s not true, says a Nokia rep by the name of Joseph Gallo.

re: Nokia’s rumored Android phone and you can quote me on this: We (Nokia) are NOT making an Android smartphone. Symbian is our platform of choice when making smartphones.

We knew it was coming and sure enough, the Nokia N97 is now available for $700 at Nokia Stores everywhere. 700 bones will net you Nokia’s flagship touchscreen device, unlocked and ready to make iPhones jealous everywhere. Well, maybe not the last part, but it’s still a solid device and worthy successor to the N95/N96.

But if the price still seems high – it is – wait until a carrier like T-Mobile or AT&T picks it up and subsidises the price. Who knows when that will happen or what carrier will pick it up, but chances are it’s coming. Other markets should get access to what Nokia calls a Mobile Computer shortly.

Of the 6 major mobile operating systems (Symbian, RIM, WinMo, Mac OSX, Linux, and Palm OS) included in the data, 3 platforms – Symbian, WinMo, and Linux – all lost some of their respective market share over the past year, while RIM and OSX each experienced growth of over 5%. Palm managed a meager fraction of an increase (.4%), but there’s no denying that things will get more interesting once they let the Pre (Web OS) out of the bag.

[via CNET]

The promise of more Android phones isn’t that far from reality as the companies first model (uphone?!?) seem production ready with a Q3 target launch. You have to imagine that Hauwei has more phones in the pipeline ready to be branded and sold under a providers name. Hopefully more details will seep out of Barcelona’s MWC09.

While there are other emulators out for the Commodore 64 (C64), this is based off of the first one, that appeared in 1991. The two downloadable components to running the emulator are called “Frodo” and “Bilbo”. You’ll need to download them both in order to be able to use it.

if you’re not sure what an emulator is, or want to know more, check out this orientation we did earlier this year.

The Palm Pre made a huge splash last week at CES, partly due to the sleek looking form factor which is a large departure from the Palm Treo or Centro stodgy form factor. Dell would have to find the same mojo ’cause design matters these days. A great OS (more on that later) doesn’t mean squat if it’s loaded on grey box-type phone. 

Thankfully, Dell picked up the driving force behind the Motorola RAZR back in 2007 and slapped the title President of Consumer Business on his nameplate. Hopefully, if Dell does indeed have a smartphone coming, Ron Garriques will be able to steer the huge PC maker in the right direction in terms of design and also away from the Windows Mobile Platform.

Windows Mobile is dying a slow death. It’s still one of the most popular operating systems on mobile devices, right behind Symbian in terms of install base, but hopefully Dell isn’t betting it all on the antiquated platform. What a Dell smartphone really needs is a solid Android or Symbian UI for the smartphone, but chances are Dell will turn to Microsoft’s deep coffers. 

Dell and Microsoft have a long history together and they both need an ace in the latest smartphone marathon. But unless Microsoft has recoded Windows Mobile into a stellar system, this phone would be simply cast aside in favor of a better OS no matter how good the hardware happens to be.

So, here’s hoping that Dell does have a non-Windows Mobile smartphone ready to drop and that it’s competitively priced too. Oh, and on a good carrier.

MIT professor Hal Abelson started today’s final presentation for the school’s “Building Mobile Applications” class by saying, “A course like this couldn’t have existed ten years ago… maybe not even a year ago. Courses like this right now are unique, but in two years they’ll be completely ordinary.”

What’s extraordinary is that on top of a full college course-load at one of the most challenging schools in the country, these groups of students built fully working mobile applications for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian devices while mentors from the likes of Google, Nokia, Bank of America, and Microsoft oversaw their progress.

Here are the ten applications that were presented today. Some of them might remain as small-scale projects, while others are full-blown, robust applications that have already undergone serious development and are poised to enter the marketplace.

Marauder (Windows Mobile)

Marauder measures crowd density by detecting nearby Bluetooth-enabled phones. So say you’re looking for a restaurant nearby — the idea is that you’ll be able to see how crowded it is before you go. For this to work, at least one person’s phone in the restaurant has to have Marauder installed on it. That phone will see how many other phones are around it by checking for Bluetooth signals, and that data will be uploaded to Marauder’s servers. Locations on a map (see above) will be color coded based on density. It’s a cool idea that seems to need to be fleshed out a bit more.

For example, there’s no way to measure density based on a building’s occupancy rate. Currently, 20-30 detected devices returns a “crowded” rating whether or not you’re at a sporting event or inside a tiny club. The program also has potential civil and business uses for things like public transportation and housing data. All in all, a unique spin on location-based services.

Ballyhoo! (Symbian)

Ballyhoo! is a relatively straightforward mobile coupon redemption tool. You search for deals in your immediate vicinity and you’re presented with mobile coupons that can be redeemed at point-of-sale terminals that are equipped to handle near field communication (NFC) – think of those Mastercard PayPass terminals where you just tap your card on the device instead of swiping it.

In order to get merchants on board with this flavor of coupon-giving, shoppers’ usage data can be anonymously given to stores for marketing and research purposes.

Memento (Android)

Super cool. Memento automatically organizes the photos you take with your phone into albums based on the location where the photos were taken. You can choose to make certain groups of photos public and instantly upload them to popular photo-sharing sites while keeping photos taken in another location private. You can view and share your photos by selecting them from within an organized list or pull up a map to look at collections visually (see above). The program looks really straightforward and easy – it’s for people who take a lot of photos but hate organizing them.

Mem2D (Windows Mobile)

Mem2D aims to solve the problem of archiving information you might see on a flyer that you want to remember for later. Events are created using a simple web-based interface and when marketing materials for a particular event get printed up, there’s a unique barcode that’s added as a graphic. People who want to remember the information on, say, the flyer you posted in the student union building would simply use the Mem2D application on their mobile phones to take a photo of the barcode.

At that point, all of the pertinent information – time, place, date, the event’s website, etc. – would be saved to a user’s account on the Mem2D website for later. Event info can be shared with friends via e-mail or SMS, and there’s calendar integration and support for mapping and directions as well.

Mem2D [Mem2d.com]

MobileTrader (Symbian S60)

Think of MobileTrader as an on-the-go marketplace for connecting buyers and sellers who are within a mile and a half of each other. You create a listing as a buyer or a seller and when there’s a match made, each person gets an instant message and can coordinate a spot to meet up and make an exchange. It sounds a little creepy for real-world use but it could find a nice niche in microcosmic systems like college campuses.

In order to prevent spam, sellers aren’t able to contact buyers directly. And everything’s anonymous until a deal is made, at which point the details are recorded – the item sold, the price, etc. – creating a contractual record of sorts. There are future plans for integration with online services like Paypal as well.

Moca (Android)

Moca is a mobile medical diagnostics program for developing nations. It allows medical field workers to go out to remote locations and provide instant data back to doctors in the bigger cities to diagnose. Using an Android phone, a field worker could take photos or videos, record sound (like coughing, etc.), and ask a series of questions to a patient that a doctor would normally ask. The results get uploaded to a server in real-time and a doctor hundreds of miles away can prescribe treatments.

The system leverages the OpenMRS (medical record system) platform to keep records and Moca, itself, is open-source. There’s a pilot program that’ll be set up in the Philippines this summer to test out the idea’s effectiveness. Impressive stuff, indeed.

Moca [MocaMobile.org]

Eclectyk (Symbian)

Eclectyk uses near-field communication (NFC) to replace the myriad of cards in your wallet with a simple cell phone application. It can be used for credit cards, ID cards, and it can even be used to unlock NFC-enabled doors. The program also has a sharing feature for tickets, so whoever in your group of friends shows up for a popular movie first can buy tickets and shoot them into everyone else’s phones.

Security consists of three layers: PIN numbers, hardware-based encryption, and even a remote wipe feature that can destroy everything if your phone’s lost or stolen. The system was developed under the advisement of Nokia and Bank of America.

UberCal (Windows Mobile)

Ubercal is a simple solution to an apparently complex problem. It synchronizes your mobile Outlook calendar and Google Calendar together. You can use Google Calendar’s handy “Quick Add” feature to create an appointment and there’s a template system that allows you to set up commonly-occurring events without filling out all of Outlook’s fifteen or so form fields each time. Slick.

CashTrack (Android)

CashTrack is an Android application that’s used for splitting bills. It consists of the app itself and a web interface. You can automatically split bills equally between people in your address book and keep a tally of who owes whom what. You can also manually finesse percentages of a certain bill so that you don’t end up paying for the seven beers your buddy ordered at dinner when all you ordered was water.

TrainMe (Android)

“Pocket Fitness Trainer” tool, TrainMe, is an Android that contains images and videos of certain exercise moves for people new to working out. It’ll create customized workout plans for you based on how many days per week you want to work out and how much weight you want to lose and the intensity of your workouts will dynamically adjust to you as well. For instance, you’ll do a set of push-ups and then tell the program if it was too easy, just right, or too hard.

The program also includes a food diary and there’s a website that allows you to upload your statistics, workouts, and various other data. You can even browse other users’ workout routines and clone the ones you like for next time at the gym.

It’s old news that Nokia bought Symbian, the software used to power many mobile phones today. The deal finally closed, and now the Symbian Foundation is officially in charge of Symbian development. There are currently ten participants in the Symbian Foundation, though membership is open to anyone with $1,500 to spare. The Symbian Foundation has big plans for the platform. Read on for a glimpse, and some thoughts on what the future might hold.

At Nokia World 2008, Matti Vänskä reminded us that the Symbian Foundation plans to release Symbian as fully open source in two years. From the Symbian Foundation Whitepaper:

The foundation will then work to an aggressive schedule to open source all the
essential software platform components for building a mobile device. It is
expected that this will be completed within the next two years, with the intent that
the platform code will be licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

Vänskä said “ultimately [open source] is how software is going to be developed.” As a GNU/Linux user, that really caught my attention. Obviously an open source Symbian isn’t going to radically change the mobile operating system market overnight, just like Google’s Android hasn’t changed much yet. But if we look at the gradual success of open and free software in general — Apache httpd, GNU/Linux, Mozilla Firefox, et al. — I think Vänskä’s on to something.

Linux was “that hacker OS” for almost a decade before it started being taken seriously. It moved gradually from the server room to the desktop, and the principles of open and free software moved with it. Now almost everyone who uses a computer at least knows about things like Firefox and Pidgin, and many folks have at least heard of Linux.

The mobile space had a similarly lethargic uptake in open source development, but things appear to be speeding up now. The OpenMoko phones haven’t really caught anyone’s attention, nor have many of the other Linux-powered mobile devices until the G1.  With the recent growth of the Open Handset Alliance,  I have high hopes for the effect Google’s Android will have on mobile software development. It sounds like the Symbian Foundation has similar hopes for open software development.  Anyone think that Symbian and Android may some day be sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g?

Will any of this have an effect on Apple’s iPhone or devices running Windows Mobile?  Microsoft has a long-standing animosity toward open and free software, and Apple’s been doing a yoeman’s job of discouraging it lately, too. Will the one-two punch of open source Symbian and Android be enough to drive the other players to change their ways?

Lest you think this device is all business, there’s a unique (and perhaps a bit gimmicky) “switch mode” that allows you to basically keep all of your work-related stuff in one profile on the phone throughout the day and then switch to a more lifestyle-centric profile at night, complete with a darker theme, friendlier icons, and that kind of stuff. Picture an employee for a large company getting in the elevator at the end of the day, loosening the tie and switching phone modes before getting into a cab to go wait in line for some new overpriced, dark, loud, small-portions restaurant.

Overview and Features

The phone’s build quality is excellent. It feels solid – perhaps a little heavy, but it’s a reassuring type of weight, not a big, fat phone weight. As far as size, it’s about the same as a BlackBerry Pearl, but maybe 25% heavier. The Pearl, if you’ve held one, is really light, though. Here’s a shot of the E66 next to the BB Pearl, the HTC Touch Diamond, and the Motorola Q9C for comparison. They’re all about the same thickness.

The phone’s keypad and illuminated function buttons are very sturdy and the metallic frame adds a cool look and provides some protection as well.

Turning the device over, it looks like an actual camera. Under the hood, there’s a 3.2-megapixel autofocusing camera.

Here are some more specs (full specs here):

• 2.4-inch display, QVGA resolution (240×320), 16.7 million colors
• Quad-band GSM (GSM 850/900/1800/1900)
• GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSDPA, 802.11b/g, phone-as-modem connections
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
• Speakerphone, voice dialing, voice recorder
• IMAP4, Exchange, POP3 e-mail
• Integrated A-GPS and Nokia Maps application
• Video playback: MPEG-4, 3gp, RealVideo, H.263, H.264
• Audio playback: AAC, AAC+, MP3, AMR-NB, AMR-WB

Pros

As mentioned before, the solid build quality is a strong selling point for the phone. As for what’s inside the phone, the Symbian OS takes a little getting used to if you haven’t used it before, but wasn’t difficult to master at all. I’ve used Nokia’s internet tablets somewhat extensively and the leap from those to this phone was pretty easy.

Where the Symbian OS really shines is in the application department. This phone had a bunch of cool software on it: an app for downloading audio and video podcasts, Nokia’s music store (depending on the service provider), WMP11 sync, online video and photo sharing, voice recorder, Flash player (yes, Flash!), FM radio, RSS reader, data tethering, instant messaging, video conferencing, VOIP calling, push-to-talk (depends on provider), GPS and maps with landmarking (geotagging) functions, Zip file manager, PDF reader, printing to networked printers, data backup, remote file access, VPN, a barcode reader, and a bunch of other stuff. So yes, it costs $500, but there’s a lot of extra “stuff” that comes with it.

The phone also has a rotation sensor and will flip everything from portrait to landscape when you tilt the phone. You can also silence the ringer by placing the phone face down when a call comes in. These aren’t new features in the cell phone world, but they’re nice touches. All in all, there are a lot of the little things that Nokia does well with this phone, each cropping up the more and more I used the phone. I’m sure I didn’t discover everything, but all the nuances and intangibles were quite nice.

Cons

Battery life was a little short when using a 3G network – around three hours of talk time. When not using data services, though, the battery fares better. I was able to listen to music on the phone for an entire workday with about a half-battery left.

Also, people new to the Symbian OS might find it a bit bland, visually. It’s a relatively pedestrian-looking interface but what it trades in looks, it makes up for in stability and application availability, so it’s kind of a wash.

Finally, there’s the price. It’s gonna be too steep for most average consumers without some sort of carrier subsidy. Businesses would likely do well by this phone, though.

Conclusion

The Nokia E66 is a pretty impressive phone if you’re looking for something solid, stable, and geared for a nice balance of data and phone features. The high price and somewhat unfamiliar operating system might turn American consumers off, but large businesses and world travelers could very well find what they’re looking for in the E66.

E66 Product Page [Nokia.com]

Forsyth also said that Symbian wants to be the face of a mobile-specific open-source community, which doesn’t really exist yet.

Symbian also seems prepared for the pain that can accompany growing; Forsyth finished by saying, “I’m going to wrap up by stating the unbelievably obvious: that we’re going to make a lot of mistakes as we do this.”

A British cellphone carrier has confirmed that the Nokia N96 will be released there in September. This isn’t a rumor, or from some guy who knows some guy or anything, but comes from a “Christmas in July” event held all the way in the UK. The mobile operator is 3, by the way.

At current exchange rates, Americans should be prepared to fork over quite a bit of cash to nab this one, whenever it’s more widely available.

And really, it couldn’t be any worse than the iPhone 3G, right? They (Peter and John) tell me the battery lasts less than a day before you have to charge it, which is hardly ideal.

Nokia’s N-Series is an odd amalgam of high-tech and low, melding some of the best smartphone technology with phones that haven’t changed much since the first proto-Finns heaved their bark boats onto the rocky beaches of Soumenlinna and began fashioning crude cellphones out of cork and shale.

Much has changed about the Nokia line over the years but all of the phones are refreshingly familiar. Whether they are clamshells, candybars, or sliders the buttons are always in the same place, the maddening power switch is still at the top, and the old menu-asterisk unlock code is still in force, ensuring your phone will never unlock itself under any circumstances. Nokia knows how to make good phones.

Sadly, however, the latest N-series N78 didn’t quite grab me the way its older siblings like the N95 did. Was it the form factor? The speed? The size?


The N78 is a standard candybar with a keypad and not much else in the way of input devices. It is a quad-band G.S.M. phone with HSDPA support and has a 2.4-inch screen. It weighs 3.5 ounces and comes in piano black.

The front screen is backlit and when the phone is locked or off it is almost featureless except for a silver square on the front. When activated you see the numbers and icons lit with white LEDs and you come to understand that the odd raised bumps on the front are actually buttons. Here is our first snag.

The buttons are very small. You can get used to them, but the face is cramped when the numbers and icons are lit and hard to navigate. Nokia put the menu botton on the lower left side of the phone and the hang-up and end-call buttons are also oddly placed. Too many times did I try to answer a call and actually hit the “options” button which gave me a second menu to answer the call. It was as if I couldn’t hit the green answer button.

The 3.5-megapixel camera is excellent and the version of Symbian running on this phone is much improved over even last year’s version. Everything was very peppy and browsing was a pleasure. It has GPS and Wi-Fi built-in and along with video and music playback.

Call quality was quite odd. Either the call was too loud – some incoming calls began to hurt after the other party began talking and I had to turn them down immediately, others kind of petered out and I had to turn the volume back up. The sound was simply inconsistent. Music playback was clear through headphones and the built-in speaker. I just couldn’t figure out what was up with the call quality.

Overall the N78 is more of the same. It’s a beautiful phone and folks who enjoy T9 typing and Symbian’s very specific learning curve will probably enjoy this phone. One little perk I especially liked was the Internet radio implementation. It worked flawlessly and in minutes I was able to stream live radio from the Uzbek provinces without trouble. It also has an even cooler FM transmitter function for transmitting the audio straight to a standard radio. My problems were only with the keys and the call quality and not the rest of the phone features.

I prefer Nokia’s N95 because it has more heft and more active buttons. The slide-out keypad and media functions hide things I’d like to see hidden and reveal them at opportune times. The N78 is a high-concept phone with its heart on its sleeve. Like an emo band, the dark lines and backlights add a sense of style to the traditionally staid N-Series but the $450 price tag should give Nokia fans a pause. The N78 can be aggravating but like all Nokia products it’s still better than 98% of phones out there today.

TheRegister makes an interesting point: Symbian is dead. Once Nokia bought and decided to open-source it you can be certain that it will end up in low-end, developing market phones and not any of Nokia’s flagship models. It can’t simply because the OS and UI are twenty years old and far too klunky to offer any wow to a jaded populace.

Now that anything can essentially run anything, Symbian is just a phone OS, not a smartphone OS. Even the definition of “smartphone” has changed. Was the iPhone a smartphone in its 1.x stage? No. It was basically a souped up RAZR. The industry is swiftly moving towards taking better care of their software and letting the hardware stay stagnant. After all, who needs a fast phone if you can’t sanely delete 500 messages from your inbox?

To be clear open mobile OSes have been around for years, starting most prominently with the QTopia project that ran on ARM hardware found in many PDAs and phones. The Linux kernel plays well with almost any platform, making it ideal for small installations.

With the announcement of an “open” version of Symbian coming soon, let’s take a look at what open means to the average consumer.

Android – Google’s smartphone OS is probably about as open as you can get. It’s designed to run on almost any hardware and includes a fully open and free UI complete with source code. It costs nothing for carriers to use and if, if used in its official form, simply brings Google apps and content to the fore at opportune times. To the average consumer Android should be able to add smartphone functionality to a number of odd devices, including phones that once depended on proprietary, no-name operating systems like the Motorola RAZR.

iPhone OSX – iPhone’s OSX uses a Mach kernel which, like Linux, is fairly open and well-document. Unlike Linux, however, the price of the iPhone’s kernel is bundled into the cost of the actual phone and cannot be sold to third parties. The SDK or programming tools for the OS, however, are quite popular and are free. This ensures that programmers can harness the full power of the OS without having to dig too deeply into the core. As a whole, OS X is as close to being open as you can get without really being “open” and fully cross-platform.

Windows Mobile – Windows Mobile is a closed operating system. The common user interface remains unchanged across devices, however, third-party applications can be developed by writing programs using software like Visual C++. Windows Mobile also makes use of the .NET Compact Framework, which is similar to the .NET Framework found on Windows-based PCs.

Symbian – Currently, the Symbian operating system is not classified as open source, although with Nokia’s recent announcement, it will soon be available under the royalty-free Eclipse Public License. As it stands now, though, handset manufacturers that make use of the Symbian operating system are only provided with certain parts of the source code. It is expected to be fully opened up within the next two years. Symbian is the most widely used smartphone operating system in the world today.

The Symbian operating system is currently the most widely used in the world, found on over 50% of “smart mobile device” handsets. This move to open source will place Symbian in competition with Google’s Android platform and the LiMo platform, although only “selected components” will be available at the Symbian Foundation’s launch. The rest of the platform will by fully opened up over the next two years.

Symbian is, of course, the number one smartphone OS in the world simply because Nokia runs them exclusively and Nokia is doing pretty well (14 million Nokia phones shipped in Q1 2008 with 18.4 million Symbian phones shipped) while RIM is a distant second (4.3 million). Windows is at 3.86 and the “everyone else” is in the 2 million range. Palm is at 657 thousand, a sad place to be for the gentle giant.

That Symbian, something completely divorced from Microsoft, can eat Microsoft’s lunch is a damning situation. Unless the new versions start looking – and working – like Microsoft spent more than 40 man hours in in back in 1998, they’re in trouble.