At the 2010 Geneva Motor Show, Nokia has announced its partnership with the automotive industry to introduce ‘Terminal Mode’. Terminal Mode is being proposed as an industry standard to connect all smartphones that adopt it, not just Nokia smartphones, to support in-car infotainment systems. Nokia believes it should be easy to share information and content between your smartphone and other devices you use everyday such as your PC and the web. This way it is easy to keep everything synchronized and ensure you always have access to the things you love, such as your music, and the services you use, such as navigation, whenever and wherever you need them.
In this video, Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President of Nokia smartphones, discusses some of the significant aspects of Symbian^3. Jo also goes on to talk about where smartphones are headed in the future in terms of both Symbian and Meego, and how all future Symbian devices will be based on Symbian^3. Symbian^3 will enhance the user experience with better graphics performance, the speed of the UI, and less user prompts, making the experience “WOW but familiar.”
Nokia has decided to scrap what could have been its third NFC handset, the Nokia 6216, due to the quality of the consumer experience not being what it hoped for. The Nokia 6216 would have also been the first NFC handset to have handed over control of the payment system to the Service Provider’s SIM card through SWP (Single Wire Protocol). SWP is the exact architecture that China Unicom is expected to be deploying later this year.
Phil Shwarzmann of Nokia Conversations got Niklas Savander, EVP of Services at Nokia, to answer your questions sent in to @NokConv. Want to know how it went? Check out the video after the break.
The Symbian Foundation today announced that it is joining the Open Screen Project, an industry initiative led by Adobe dedicated to enabling the Adobe Flash Platform across a broad range of devices. The work of the Open Screen Project will help deliver Adobe Flash Player on future versions of the Symbian platform. The rich and open capabilities of the Symbian platform combined with the Flash Player will enable Symbian device users to benefit from the huge amount of Flash-based web content for a vivid and complete Internet experience. Adobe has also announced advancements to the Adobe Flash Platform including the unveiling of Adobe AIR on mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications to come out of the Open Screen Project.
The world’s largest handset manufacturer and world’s largest chipmaker collaborate and introduce Maego. In a significant development in the convergence of communications and computing, Intel Corporation and Nokia are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms. This will create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media phones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences. MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers are expected to be launched later this year.
My buddy Norman John of SymbianWorld and four other Symbian experts were interviewed by Symbian France over the weekend, in a Q&A session to discuss the expectations from Nokia in 2010. The panel were asked to highlight Symbian’s strengths and weaknesses, identify Symbian’s biggest competitor and suggest an application the would each like to see on the Symbian Platform this year.
Nokia plans to develop its operations at the Salo plant in Finland to ensure production is focused fully on the high-value smartphone market, especially in Europe, and it also intends to further increase speed and efficiency of its device production. In the process of this development it is expected that 285 employees effected. Juha Putkiranta, Senior Vice President of Markets, Nokia, stated that, “Salo is a crucial part of Nokia’s global manufacturing network. Plans involving changes to employees are always painful, and they are set in motion only after thorough consideration. However, with these plans our aim is to ensure the plant’s future competitiveness and its special role as one best suited to the production of high value mobile devices.”
The Symbian Foundation has just announced that Symbian, the worlds most popular smartphone operating system, is now officially open source. In 2008, Symbian Software Limited was acquired by Nokia for USD 410 million, and in April 2009 a new independent non-profit organisation called Symbian Foundation was established. The foundation includes Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. The Symbian Foundation’s decision to make its code open source means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the code for ‘any purpose.’
Nokia has today announced its Q4 2009 results, reporting an operational profit of EUR 1.141 billion and net sales of EUR 12 billion, down 5% year on year (up 22% sequentially). The devices and services sector saw net sales of EUR 8.2 billion, up 0.5% year on year (18% sequentially), and converged device sales were 20.8 million, increasing the worldwide smartpohone marketshare to 40%. Nokia has also reported estimated industry mobile device volumes of 329 million units, up 8% year on year and 14% sequentially, with 126.9 million Nokia mobile devices, up 12% year on year (17% sequentially).
