Fansite of Nokia professional training

This week’s Report of the Week comes from Anotheran. Anotheran shows off his device and Maps service to a friend who’s with a competitor. I’m noticing a pattern to the reports submitted from our Ambassadors in North America — there’s a bit of defensiveness permeating the tone. I guess fans of S60 tend to take it on the chin from time to time. Is it the culture? The market? Or maybe my imagination. At any rate, Anotheran isn’t afraid to come right back swinging

A friend of mine was showing off the latest Google Maps on his iPhone and taunting me that my E71/N82 didn’t have anything like that. He already knew I was a huge Nokia fan and part of the S60 ambassador program. He is a huge Apple fan and loves showing off the latest things on his iPhone.

So seeing Google Maps display a satellite view of NYC, I pull out my E71, start up Nokia Maps 2.0, connect it to a local wifi and search NYC directly from the search bar. Then I switch it into satellite view and behold, I see what my friend sees on the iPhone. He proceeds to rotate the screen and zoom in and out which I replicate with the D-pad and +/- keys on the E71. I tell him it’s the close to the same thing. Then I show him tilt view which he shows me on his iPhone.

I finally show him the voice navigation and it’s where the iPhone doesn’t have. You could be navigating around your phone looking up an address in contacts while your the voice navigation is still giving your directions to your destination. I tell him that you won’t get that on the iPhone because it can’t run multiple active application in the background.

It was good to show that Nokia Maps is keeping up with what people feel as the best maps software, Google Maps. With the addition of voice navigation, the Nokia Maps package is a more powerful solution.

Thanks Anotheran. As a reward for being selected we’ll be sending a loaner E71 to you. Please confirm with Mike your mailing address and it’ll be on it’s way!

As a reminder to our new readers….S60 Ambassadors sign up and help us spread the word about the features and benefits of S60-based devices and services both on and offline. They tell us about the conversations in “Reports” submitted to the Ambassador website. Every week, we select a “Report of the Week” and post it here. The writer of the Report of the Week is sent a phone to use as they see fit for two months. Ambassadors sign up for the program here.

Just couple of days ago me and my husband moved to our new flat. As you know, it is hard and messy work. You don’t know where is your stuff, which box or plastic bag contains your most urgent things and what you carry to the storage directly. During the moving days I was hoping for one valuable and practical feature to my phone: whistle or clap your hands and phone will answer, telling that “here I am!”. This would also work for messy people in general. Or for elder ones who have forgot their phone somewhere. Just an idea….

The tenth Symbian Smartphone Show is behind us and I thought a week after the show would be a good time to summarize some of the news from the show from S60 point of view and find out what others have to say about the news.

First of all, we were very happy that so many of the over 5,000 delegates stopped by our stand. As mentioned in my previous posts, S60 and Forum Nokia shared a stand right next to the expo hall entrance. In the S60 part of the stand, we were demonstrating some new standalone web applications (widgets) that took advantage of the touch UI in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the new Platform Services features of S60, which expose device applications and data through Javascript extensions to the Web Runtime.

The guys over at the Forum Nokia side had co-operated with some developers to create four widgets for the show, which showed off what clever developers can do with the combination of the web and platform features. The demos included:

• A location-aware restaurant rating app that shows a list of restaurants close to where you are including reviews and customer ratings.

• Another restaurant app from Singapore that lets you save the address and phone number of your selections to the phone contacts, and also gives you a way to send the details by SMS directly from the application.

• A flight schedule application that looks up arrival and departure information on the web, and saves it to your device calendar

• “Callie”, a prototype of a call and messaging profile application, that aims to build a profile of who you connect with, and when, from the call and message logs on your phone.

The most important news announced at the show from S60 point of view were the announcement of porting Qt to S60, the newest member of the S60 family, the Samsung I7710 the announcement of Symbian Foundation’s new Executive Director, Lee Williams and of course the fact that more and more companies support the Symbian Foundation platform.

The All About Symbian team has obviously been very busy at the show! Check out Ewan’s video podcast of him “building a phone” and a special aerial view of the show. Also worth listening are the AAS Insight 44 from the Smartphone Show 2008 , the AAS Insight 45 - Symbian Smartphone Show part 1 covering first impressions of the show, Symbian Foundation and S60 as a platform for Internet Services among other things as well as AAS Videocast #34: Quickoffice and S60 with our own Sari Ståhlberg, Director of S60 Producty and Technology Marketing. Ewan and Rafe also sat down with Lee Williams to talk about Symbian Foundation.

Dotsisx over at Symbian-Guru.com has posted nice summaries of day 1 and day 2 of the show too.
The Mobile Industry Review folks have also been doing a couple of video podcasts. In this one Ewan shares shares his points about the Smartphone Show as well as the current and future state of the Symbian world.

In addition to these, many others have been busy writing their views on the news around the Smartphone show. Check out views on porting Qt to S60: here, here and here as well as Lee Williams’ appointment as the Symbian Foundation Executive Director: here, here and here. Of course there’s been talk about the Samsung I7710 too, for example here, here and here.

Finally, Oren took a video of Kai Öistämö, Nokia EVP driving the S60 truck on the stage at the beginning of his keynote.

What with all the recession talk and lackluster earnings from phone makers, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that third quarter cell phone shipments fell 0.4% from the previous quarter (Q2), and gained a mere 3.2% compared to last year. But what was interesting, was the new rankings for global market share.

(in order from largest market share to smallest)

Nokia - 39.4%
Samsung - 17.3%
Sony Ericsson - 8.6%
Motorola - 8.5%
LG Electronics - 7.7%

So what changed? Motorola lost 4.3% market share in the past year, going from third to fourth place. LG gained 0.1% market share but remained in fifth place overall. The big winner, it seems, is none other than Samsung, who has been able to cement its second-place hold at 17.3% global market share, up from 14.7% a year ago. Nokia didn’t fare badly either, gaining a cool 0.8% to 39.4%.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in the IDC report, like a regional analysis (North America: smartphones are selling strong) and more phone manufacturer-specific analysis. Check it out:

IDC Press Release: Financial Crisis Hits Mobile Phone Market as Third Quarter Shipment Growth Drops To 3.2%, According to IDC

Nokia’s UK Music store is promoting the new movie High School Musical 3, and the official soundtrack with its latest contest. Grand prize: a gift voucher to watch the movie at any ODEON cinema and an “exclusive” High School Music 3 goodie bag. And from what I can tell, the goodie bag includes a mini basketball, a Post-It pad, a bag, a picture frame, and what appears to be a portable disco ball.

Unfortunately there’s only one winner, so you’ll need oodles of luck (and be a UK resident) to win this one. Good luck!

Win HSM3 Cinema Tickets and More

Nokia Takes on Apple

2 min - Oct 5, 2008

The phone maker will unveil a touch-screen phone to rival the iPhone.

Hi all,

as part of the grand S60 Blogs makeover the old individual blogs were archived, hence there is no Mobile Web Server Blog anymore. You can still find all of the past stories via this link. To follow Mobile Web Server stories, I will be using tag ‘Mobile Web Server‘ for those so you can always find the stories. I am also working with Saara to have a new RSS feed, but I don’t know about this yet.

I have to admit I am not completely satisfied with the current status, and I do apologize for all my loyal Mobile Web Server Blog readers if this causes annoyance to you. But you know, all good things come to an end and most changes bring something good with them. For me this change means a better motivation to write also about other things in the context of S60. To follow my stories, use this link or RSS feed.

-Jukka

Nokia aims to take bite out of Apple

2 min - Oct 3, 2008

Oct 3 - The world's largest mobile handset maker is launching a 'free' music package and its first touch phone in a challenge to Apple's dominance of the digital music market.

The Nokia Car Kit gets another update. Now how about my E66?

Salvaged from a previous entry: “If you’re one of the ten owners of the Nokia Car Kit CK-300, you’re in luck: Nokia just released an updated firmware for the device.” And so it is again. The aptly named CarMenu application is now rockin’ with some new, badass features like bigger, more badass fonts.

Here’s the changelog:

• instant access to all your mobile contacts from the car kit
• instant access to all your mobile phone music tracks from the car kit
• full control with the external input device
• bigger fonts for better readability and usability
• same look and feel regarding the user interface

If you weren’t aware, the CarMenu app is for phones that want to emulate the look and feel of the actual car kit display. The advantage, I suppose, is so you can use that monstrous spinny thing to go through your contacts rather than hitting your up and down arrows on your phone.

Compatibility is fairly good, as long as you have a Nokia phone that isn’t a piece of crap: most E- and N-Series devices are included, minus the N82/N85/N79. There’s a landscape version for the E61/71 family, and a portrait version for everyone else.

Grab the 2.4 CarMenu application update.

OK, here’s the global campaign all you Ambassadors outside of NAM and SouthEast Asia have been clamoring for!

We are accepting Ambassadors for a new campaign supporting N-Gage Reset Generation. We have activation codes for the first 500 Ambassadors to who sign up for this campaign. We’ll also be giving away one copy of “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” for the next 12 weeks for each “Report of the Week”. And at the end of the campaign, the 50 most engaged Ambassadors will be rewarded with a Megapack of 10 N-Gage games.

To sign up for the campaign go to the Ambassador site and click on “Campaigns”. There you’ll find instructions on signing up and getting your activation code.

Here’s looking forward to re-invigorating our global Ambassadors, gaming with them, and reading a fresh batch of reports!