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Unreleased Nokia N95 follow-up pops up on YouTube
YouTuber Mr. Mobile shows off HMD's prototype phone that could've served as a sequel to the classic Nokia N95.
Symbian was once held ransom for several million euros, and Nokia paid it
Long before Nokia took up residence at Microsoft and became enamored with Windows Phone, the company had another mobile OS to care for: Symbian. For a while, it was the most widely used smartphone OS in the world, and according to a Finnish TV station, being its custodian was no easy task: In 2007 Nokia apparently paid several million euros to keep its encryption key private. MTV News (no, not that MTV) reports that criminals threatened to release the encryption key into the wild, potentially opening the OS to attacks and malware by unsavory programmers.
How the iPhone took Nokia down
The once-mighty have fallen. Nokia's Symbian smartphone OS was, not too many years ago, the platform of choice. Now, says Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider, the company is being sold off for scrap. He relates how a Finnish journalist for Helsingin Sanomat wrote a letter to the company in 2008 noting that a recently acquired Nokia E51 smartphone was almost impossible to use compared to an iPod touch purchased after seeing a friend's device. Journalist Lauri Malkavaara's missive to Nokia stated that "I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have used the device now on a daily basis for over six months, and I have not even thought about any manuals. The logic of the device opens up right away. It is no wonder that it is a huge success all over the world." Malkavaara then went on to describe how difficult it was to figure out how to do just about anything on the Symbian phones that were being sold at the time, concluding with "By putting a telephone like the E51 onto the market, Nokia has squandered its most important legacies: to produce telephones in such a way that they are easy to use. This will cause problems for Nokia." Instead of listening and changing the design strategy for Symbian, Malkavaara says that "Nokia bosses started calling me, wanting to explain Nokia's strategy." Things changed; after the launch of the iPhone, some Nokia executives realized that Symbian was in trouble. Executives were given iPhones for competitive analysis, and one gave the phone to his 4-year-old daughter, who of course figured out how to use it in no time. The executive said that he "knew Nokia was in trouble" when his daughter asked if she could "take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?" The AppleInsider post goes on to talk about how Symbian stalled after the iPhone 3G was released, which was before any Android phone had shipped. At the same time, BlackBerry was beginning to implode as well. Nokia tried, but failed, to regain relevance and marketshare with the MeeGo and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. It's a sobering story of how quickly a company can lose focus and fall from grace.
WhatsApp voice messaging updated with one-press record-and-send feature
These days, you don't even have to ring someone, listen to their spiel and wait for a beep when you can just use apps to send voice snippets. WhatsApp, which recently reached 300 million users, has made its existing experience even easier with a new feature that lets you record and send voice memos with one press of the mic icon. A WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget that the company has "spent a lot of time refining [voice messaging] and made it really simple to use." As a testament to this, WhatsApp has now removed length limits for recorded messages and plays audio within the app instead of opening a media player. Playback will automatically switch from a handset's speakers to its earpiece when the device is held to your ear, and the mic icon will turn blue when recipients have listened to spoken missives. With the new perks available on the mess of platforms WhatsApp calls home (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10 and Nokia Symbian / S40), we bet everyone with that chatty friend are shaking in their boots.
Nokia ships its last Symbian phones this summer
That moment we'd been expecting (and to some extent, dreading) has come: Nokia is near shipping its last Symbian smartphones. The company should deliver the final round of 808 PureViews sometime this summer, marking the effective end to an 11-year-old platform. Those still attached to the software will have to take comfort in support that will last until at least 2016. We're not overly attached to Symbian -- it never completely adjusted to the modern era -- but it's hard not to shed a tear for the OS that brought us the N95, E71 and other smartphone classics. Let's just hope that the next round of Lumias can fill the hole in our hearts.
Windows Phone sees big gains at the expense of BlackBerry and Symbian
Alright, so Microsoft is in no danger of toppling iOS or Android anytime soon. But the analytics firm Kantar has seen significant growth for Windows Phone, largely at the expense of BlackBerry. In practically every major market WP8 has started to chip away at its competitors, growing from 6.2 percent to 6.7 percent share in the UK in just one month. Twelve months ago it was at only three percent in the country. The most dramatic ascent has taken place in Italy where it accounted for just 5.4 percent of handsets sold in February of 2012, and now makes up 13.1 percent of sales. Even in the US Windows Phone is seeing steady, if hardly eye-popping growth. Symbian and BlackBerry are obviously the biggest losers. In Mexico, both platforms have seen double digit drops in their share of sales over the last year. While in the UK, the company formerly known as RIM has gone from a seemingly secure third place with 16.8 percent of the market to a quickly fading fourth with 5.1 percent is just 12 months. Meanwhile, Apple is sitting pretty with hardly a change to its position and Android continues its juggernaut-like assault on all markets. To see the complete global figures check out the images after the break.
Refresh Roundup: week of March 18th, 2013
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
Kantar: Android back on top of US smartphone share in January with Sprint's help
Most US smartphone market share estimates last fall saw Apple retake the lead as it rode a wave of iPhone 5 sales. While there was always a question as to how long that trend would last, new data from Kantar Worldpanel supports beliefs that it was really more of a momentary pop. Android reportedly took back the lead at 49.4 percent of American sales between November and January, improving its overall position versus the same month last year. Not that everyone else was necessarily hurting -- iOS still had a 45.9 percent slice of the pie, and the continued Windows Phone 8 rollout took Microsoft up to 3.2 percent. The real wounds were dealt to a pre-transition BlackBerry and Nokia's outgoing Symbian. We seldom get an explanation as to why such shifts take place, but the researchers suggest that a significant chunk of the January switch-up can be assigned to one carrier: Sprint. Its decision to cut the Galaxy S III's contract price to $99 supposedly helped Samsung's flagship climb from 14 percent of Sprint sales in October to 39 percent over the more recent 3-month span. The Galaxy S III didn't play as much of a role elsewhere, Kantar says. Sprint's average contract pricing for Android also dipped to $95 at the same time, helping Samsung alone get 60.3 percent of the network's business as customers snapped up bargains. Big Yellow only played a small part in the overall US market, as you'll see in the detailed charts after the break, but it may have been large enough to tip the balance in OS preferences at the start of 2013.
IDC: Android surged to 69 percent smartphone share in 2012, dipped in Q4
Few would doubt that 2012 was Android's year given how rapidly it grew, but it's good to have some context. IDC is more than willing to oblige. It estimates that Google's OS climbed from 49.2 percent of the smartphone space in 2011 to 68.8 percent in 2012. As we've seen in the past, though, most of that came from customers leaving embattled platforms, including a pre-BB10 BlackBerry and Symbian. Apple reportedly held its ground at 18.8 percent, while Microsoft appears to have turned a corner with Windows Phone by climbing back up to 2.5 percent. The fourth quarter results paint a slightly different picture. Android still had a comfortable 70.1 percent of share in IDC's reckoning, but it took a hit from 75 percent in the third quarter -- similar to what we've seen elsewhere, the iPhone 5 launch helped iOS claw back enough share to hit 21 percent. BlackBerry and Windows Phone weren't quite so rosy, although they also didn't have full quarters with new devices to offer. We'll have to wait for the first quarter of 2013 to finish before we learn of any true shakeups in the status quo.
ComScore: iPhone up to 36 percent of US phone share in December, Android stayed put
There's been indications that Apple staged something of a comeback in the US during the fourth quarter, owing partly to an iPhone 5-related spike. ComScore's smartphone share data for December appears to bear that out. It estimates that the Apple claimed a 36.3 percent slice of the American market in the last month of 2012: that's a noticeable boost from 35 percent in November, and two points up since the iPhone 5's September arrival. Android remained on top at 53.4 percent, but it was once again unusually static, edging down from highs earlier in the year. Other platforms took their usual blows, although there's no doubt some hopes for revival. Just don't anticipate looking for overall cellphone market share. ComScore has switched to focusing on smartphones, and it's telling a different story than we've seen in the past. When only smartphones count, Samsung's December share left it in second place, at 21 percent -- still an increase over prior months, but not as large as Apple's 36.3 percent. The biggest surprise is LG's rise to 7.1 percent and fifth place, quite possibly due to the Optimus G and Nexus 4. Enough shifted that the market may be even less recognizable in 2013, for better or worse.
Strategy Analytics: Android claimed 70 percent of world smartphone share in Q4 2012
Maybe it's easier being green than we thought. We suspected Android would do well in smartphone market share when Strategy Analytics had Samsung surging ahead in the fourth quarter of 2012, but the firm's newer breakdown of estimated share by OS shows an even larger jump for Google's overall platform -- from 51.3 percent in fall 2011 to 70.1 percent one year later. Apple was knocked down slightly to 22 percent, although it's mostly other platforms that took the bruising. Collectively, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone and other platforms sank from 25.1 percent of the smartphone space in late 2011 to just 7.9 points as 2012 drew to a close. When just two companies' platforms make up 92 percent of smartphones, it's safe to call the result a duopoly, like Strategy Analytics does -- even if others aren't so content with the idea.
The Daily Roundup for 01.24.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Parent iPhones can track kids' non-iPhones with MobileKids
The delicate dance of independence, safety and personal boundaries between anxious parents and digital-generation kids is always tricky. Some apps and device usages are A-OK, some are a highly concentrated essence of bad choices (looking at you, Snapchat) -- but most fall into a gray area, subject to negotiation. Some parents may choose to know as much as possible about what their kids are doing online, and in turn they want their kids to know that they know. MobileKids, the parent / child paired app launching in the US today, aims to replace uncertainty with information whenever possible; the goal, according to development house Bipper, is to bring back the transparency of kid tech usage that we had before mobile took over. "We aim to help parents define limits for a mobile generation much like parents did in previous generations when the only phone in the household was a landline attached to a wall," says founder and Norwegian mom Silje Vallestad, who was moved to launch the company when she noticed her daughter's friends using cellphones... at the ripe age of 6 years old. The child app (only available for Symbian and Android at the moment, with a limited iOS client coming soon) delivers usage reports for the kid phone directly to the adult phone. Bipper previously offered a SIM-based parental reporting tool in Europe, but now focuses completely on apps (including the adult SOS app bSafe). The platform-independent parent app can monitor kid device usage, check location (much like Find My Friends), set time controls or other usage thresholds, and in future versions will include geofencing alerts on the kid phone location. The parent app runs on both iPhone and Android, plus a web portal. Full-on iOS households, however, aren't going to derive the maximum benefit from MobileSafe. As mentioned, right now there's no kid app for iOS at all; when it does arrive later this quarter, it won't be able to do the detailed monitoring that the Android and Symbian versions can deliver. It will, however, keep most of the location features and the Safety Alarm / SOS alert that kids can trigger to notify guardians of their location. Of course, it's possible that even iPhone-loving parents might choose a different device for their kids, and in that case the MobileKids pair may work well. The MobileKids app has already launched in the Norwegian App Store, and now US customers will be able to give it a try. The SOS alarm and basic features are all free to use; the advanced reporting features (most of which are not applicable if the child uses an iPhone) require a subscription plan at US$5.90/month or $59.90 per year.
Nokia 808 PureView: officially the last Symbian phone
So long, Symbian. Nestled away in the company's financial announcement this morning, Nokia confirmed that its pixel-punching 808 PureView phone will be the last release powered by the increasingly creaky Symbian OS. In no uncertain terms: "The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia." The company still managed to sell a total of 2.2 million Symbian devices during the last quarter, half the number of Windows Phone 8 devices shifted in the same period -- presumably thanks, in some way, to that as-yet unparalleled PureView camera sensor. We'll be pouring one out (and capturing it in 38 megapixels) if you need us.
ComScore: iPhone up to 35 percent of US smartphone share in November, Android steady
Smartphone launches sometimes have to build up steam before they can go full speed ahead. Apple might be learning this first-hand, based on ComScore's figures. After a lackluster October, the company's just-reported November smartphone market share in the US was up sharply, to 35 percent; while the spike isn't directly credited to the iPhone 5, rapidly growing availability of the company's newest smartphone certainly didn't hurt. Android was still comfortably ruling the roost at 53.7 percent, although its share was only a slight increase over October. As such, most of Apple's gain during the month came from smaller rivals' pain. It was a more familiar story among individual phone makers. Samsung had a comfortable lead at 26.9 percent of the larger American cellphone market in November, while Apple padded its advantage over a sinking LG to hit 18.5 percent. With Motorola and HTC also on the downward slide, the US market this fall was increasingly mirroring its global counterpart, where it was really Apple and Samsung's game to play -- others might have to be content watching from the sidelines in the future.
Skype officially ready for Symbian Belle FP1 and FP2 devices
Skype has been available through official channels for Belle-based Symbian devices for awhile, but not for those running FP1 or FP2. If you'd wanted to use the world's largest VoIP service from a more recent (or recently updated) Symbian phone like the 808 PureView, you were stuck. A low-key update has thankfully flicked the support switch for those who upgraded to the newer OS before their internet calling could follow suit. From early appearances, though, compatibility is the primary upgrade; My Nokia Blog doesn't see a functional difference from earlier releases. The Skype refresh is still a welcome tweak for those who'd like to hold on to Nokia's original smartphone platform for just a little longer.
ComScore: Android's US share kept growing in October, Apple passed LG in all cellphones
We've been wondering how much the first full month of iPhone 5 sales would skew US market share in October. The answer is... not much, if you ask ComScore. Android kept growing to 53.6 percent of American smartphones on the back of the Droid RAZR M, Galaxy Note II and other devices, but the iPhone's market share just managed to remain steady at the same 34.3 percent as in September. Apple could mostly be glad that it wasn't in the position of its older rivals: the BlackBerry dipped below 8 percent share, while the wait for a Windows Phone 8 turnaround may have triggered a sharp drop in Microsoft's stake to 3.2 percent. There was a symbolic (if anticipated) changing of the guard for the wider American market, however. After months of closing in, Apple just barely edged out LG to become the second-largest cellphone maker of any kind on the US stage at 17.8 percent. A familiar scenario elsewhere kept Samsung once again on top at 26.3 percent, while Motorola and HTC remained on a downward slide. We'll be keeping a close eye on how the November results alter the status quo -- between Windows Phone, LG's Optimus G and a cavalcade of multi-device launches, there's been potential for more than one tidal shift in the mobile world in the past few weeks.
Nokia Transit updated with segmented maps, advance routing on Windows Phone and Symbian
Nokia still has a ways to go before directions in Nokia Transit (also known as Nokia Transport) are on par with Google's, but the Finnish crew is clearly on the right track with a fresh update to its Windows Phone and Symbian apps. Travelers now see segmented route maps that provide a closer look at key points in the trip as well as more focused directions at those crucial moments. The app is that much more savvy about travel times, as well -- the forward-thinking can at last plan trips days in advance, and there's new options for relative arrival times as well as a simplified destination history. Symbian even gets its own specific update with long-overdue support for route updates in-app, rather than through upgrading the app itself. Lumia owners on Windows Phone 8 devices can get the spruced-up version of Transit or Transport today as a regular update; Symbian and Windows Phone 7 users willing to live on the edge can get roughly equivalent betas at the same time.
ComScore: US smartphone share leveled off in September, Android and iPhone continued their reigns
We're so used to constant flux in smartphone market share that it's a surprise when things don't move. Yet that's what we're facing today. ComScore found that the US smartphone field in September was virtually unchanged from where it was in August, even down to smaller players like Symbian and Windows Phone. Accordingly, Android still ruled the roost at 52.5 percent, while 34.3 percent were iPhone adopters. It's difficult to say whether or not the iPhone 5 had a tangible impact -- while Apple had banner sales in the last several days of September, we don't know to what extent that was offset by people holding off from buying an iPhone 4S. Overall cellphone sales showed some of that more reassuring give and take. The positions remained the same, but the US was once again a painful market to be in for anyone that isn't Apple or Samsung. Apple crept up to within a stone's throw of toppling LG at 17.5 percent to its rival's 17.7, while Samsung's successful shift to smartphones helped it keep exactly 26 percent of the mobile sphere. We're most curious to see how October shakes out: between a full month of iPhone 5 sales and the Droid RAZR HD, we may learn that the calmness of September was just a momentary illusion.
Refresh Roundup: week of October 8th, 2012
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
