Yearly
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Daily App: Yearly ensures you won't be in the dog house on your anniversary
Yearly from NoIndentity apps is an aggregator that pulls in birthday, anniversary and other date information from your iOS address book. The app is basic in its function, but beautiful in its looks. Yearly relies on your contact information to populate a list of upcoming personal dates that you don't want to forget. The list shows the person's name, picture, the date and details about the notable event (i.e., 25 years on Thursday for a birthday). The app also lists how many days until the event, which is handy for folks who need time to prepare a gift or a card. You can tap on a contact to view additional information like an email address or phone book. If a contact originated in your iOS address book, you can view existing notes or add a new note to the contact. Though you can try to add a note to a Facebook contact, it will not be saved. You can also swipe left or right to expose controls that allow you to call, message or email a contact. This allows you to make that birthday call right from within the Yearly app. Some folks may point out that Yearly is not needed as Facebook already imports a contact's birthday information into your calendar. Yes, that is true, but not everyone enables the birthday calendar in iOS. Personally, I turn off the birthday calendar and prefer to use Yearly as my repository for birthday and anniversary information because of its focus on significant dates. Sometimes my calendar is so cluttered, it would be very easy to miss an upcoming birthday or anniversary. That's not going to happen with Yearly. The biggest drawback to Yearly is that it does not support manual entries. The app pulls its date information from the contacts and only from the contacts. For example, I wanted to manually add the birthdays for my friend's children, but Yearly doesn't allow that. Instead, I had to create contacts for all of them, which was less than ideal. Yearly is available from the iOS App Store for US$1.99.
Nokia submits yearly SEC report, details €1.4b loss and Windows Phone risks
Nokia submitted its annual report (Form 20-F) to the SEC today, and -- as required of all publicly traded companies -- the information provided a candid overview of its financial health and market risks. Based on its quarterly reports, we've already known it was a rather bleak year for the Finnish outfit, which saw a €1.4b annual loss compared to €1.3b in profit just one year ago. Further, its net sales similarly took it on the chin, which amounted to €38.6b in 2011 versus €42.4b in the previous year. In terms of units sold, Nokia pushed out 339.8m feature phones during the year -- a three percent decline from the 349.2m units sold during 2010. The company attributed the drop to its aggressively priced competitors, as well as its lack of a dual-SIM handset for the first half of the year. Nokia's smartphone segment took an even harder hit, which fell to 77.3m units sold -- a 25 percent drop from the 103.6m devices shipped just one year ago. Once again, the company cites its aggressive competition as the primary factor for the decline, along with a waning interest in the Symbian platform.In its discussion of potential threats to the company's bottom-line, Nokia provides a rather forthright assessment that accurately pegs its future success in the smartphone marketplace upon the acceptance of Windows Phone among developers and consumers. Likewise, its projections to sell 150 million Symbian units is failing to materialize -- big shocker there -- and Nokia now expects demand for its homegrown platform to continue deteriorating. Nonetheless, it remains stalwart in the commitment to support Symbian through 2016 -- though surprisingly, no comment on how this in itself could be a disaster to the company's bottom-line. Should Nokia's smartphone effort fail, that leaves it with the Series 40 feature phone segment, which it characterizes as a low-margin business that may see its demand erode as smartphones reach even lower price points. Nobody ever said that the mobile industry was a bed of roses, but if you'd like to view the world through Nokia's eyes, you're certain to find its commentary (pages 13 - 47 of the source document) an interesting read.
