TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

Nokia’s N96 is well on the way to become the next N95. We have started to cover N96 sightings, and are proud to bring the latest two:

BestBuy gets N96 – charges 800$
The Boy Genius Report claims that the N96 will hit the US retail chain BestBuy for a whooping 800$. While the pricing obviously is outrageous and insane, the management is said to believe in the device as some stores will receive live demo boxen (hit link for images).

More sightings in Austria
The image below comes off the outside of a popular Vienniese electronics store called Niedermayer. The company apparently decided to brand some of its stores with a Nokia N96:

The ad states that the N96 is “more than a phone” and knocks out the following specific features:

• Video & TV
• Internet
• Games
• Navigation
• Music
• ?Photos

P.S. As for quality: the N96 I won at the Smartphone Show is built a lot better than the one I handled in Berlin. Updates on build quality are coming soon!

The OLED screen technology found on Nokia’s N85 allows for insanely high contrasts: a feature loved on both sides of the big pond. Apparently, this is clear to the boys with the N in their name – the device has just passed the FCC with support for American 3G frequencies.

Unfortunately, nothing is known about carrier partnerships, pricing or release dates as of now.

P.S. As usual, further information can be found at the FCC!

The tiny-teeny Motorola booth at the Symbian Smartphone Roadshow was a hierophant of more evil things to come – from the moment I heard their keynote speaker ignore the Symbian Foundation almost completely, I was almost 100% sure that the end of Symbian at Motorola’s has come.

Sanjay Jha, the new head of Motorola’s device division, has stated that “multiple upcoming devices will be scrapped” according to the Wall Street Journal. He then went on to state that Motorola will focus on three OS’ses in the future: WM, Android and a proprietary one for dumbphones.

I personally think that this reaction is completely understandable (and will be mirrored by Sony Ericsson very soon). Many developers, hardware makers and analysts alike have told me (off the record) about how unhappy they are about the discontinuation of UIQ.

Motorola currently is not in a too healthy state – for them, having to reengineer devices is not a possibility. However, the SF OS (as cool as it may be) will force to do just that…GoodbyeMoto is all I can add here.

I personally wonder why T-Mobile UK is so big about Nokia: its Austrian sister company barely carries S60 devices. Nevertheless, it looks like Austria’s A1 no longer is the only carrier advertising the N96:

P.S. It indeed is a bit funny that the T-Mobille URL ends with /tube…wasn’t that one another cattle of fish ?

I have absolutely no idea why nobody heard of the Games Summit beforehand – I just received a press release stating that it is currently taking place in Italy, Rome.

While I personally think that there is little interesting to see there for individuals, one of the passages of the press release contains interesting tidbits for N-Gage freaks:

With the N-Gage service now live for six months, we have a truly global service on offer with sales transactions in over 130 countries and tens of millions of N-Gage compatible devices available,” said Tero Ojanperä, executive vice president and head of the Nokia entertainment and communities business. “The most active players reside in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Australia and Spain, but we’ve seen active players worldwide with repeat purchase rates over 35% globally. Game trials have also proved to be important, with download to purchase conversions up to 30%.

These statistics are extremely impressive for a simple reason: third-party software sales for handheld devices are traditionally said to be extremely weak outside of the USA (I actually can’t confirm that from the TamsShop, but more on that another day).

As for the download/sales ratio: this is truly fabulous. MicroISV’s celebrate getting a 10% conversion rate (Tamoggemon gets around 1 – 2%) – 30% is insane.

Unfortunately, this year’s taping of the keynotes has turned into a minor fiasco. I was late due to an issue with the London Subway, AND could not upload the videos to Google Video.

Anyways, I managed to find a host willing to take the huge movies. Enjoy the keynotes below, courtesy of BlipTV!

Samsung
I missed the first part of Samsung’s keynote, which was focused on the INNOV8. I joined the party while the following slide was displayed – it shows the segmenting of Samsung’s S60 offerings:

Here’s the video:

Motorola
Motorola had to exchange their keynote speaker – he spoke about the device market in general (very interesting presentation):

Unfortunately, UIQ folks will be disappointed – not a single word on the Z8/Z10, and absolutely no info on upcoming devices.

Loose ends
Finally, here’s a shot showing Samsung’s and Motorola’s keynote speaker shaking hands after their presentations:

Resco’s News is an excellent RSS reader – I use it every day to stay on top of my industry news. Unfortunately, the program becomes extremely slow as it accumulates more and more articles…start-up times of 30 seconds are common.

I have worked together with Michal Sartoris, and am proud to present the beta below. It is about 3-5x faster, and also eliminates most (all) spontaneous crashes.

Hit the link below to get the sisx file – the full version can be purchased in the TamsShop for 12$.
RescoNewsS603rd_EN.sis

After having looked at the accessory bundle of the E66 in the last installment of this review, it is now time to look at the physical size of the box.

First of all: we are looking at a so-called slider phone here. This means that the keypad of the box can slide below the screen when it comes to transportation:

Our first comparison partner is Palm’s now-classic Treo 680(/750/755). As the E66 is a multitap phone, beating it size-wise is a must:

HP’s latest QWERTY ipaq (the 910 business messenger) is a bit wider, but just as slim:

The E71 is a bit bigger, but also quite a bit slimmer:

Flip phones are slightly smaller, but can be a lot thicker. Our Nokia N71 and QTek8500 can be considered extreme cases for thickness and slimness – the images are below:

Finally, a small shoot-out against a hp rx4240, a ipaq 3600 and a first-gen iPod touch:

Compared to the features it has, the E66 is extremely sleek. While design handsets may be a bit slimmer, the E66 will comfortably fit into even the tightest pouches.

Tune in soon for the next part of the big TamsS60 review of Nokia’s E66!

Every Java developer knows and loathes the always-annoying security prompt – whenever your midlet does something, the user is annoyed with a security prompt.

While this may be very good for device security, it is a huge inconvenience for Java midlet users and is cited by some as one of the main reasons for slow J2ME adoption among third-party application developers.

Multiple people have told me about their issues with the lack of a “permit forever” option in Java VM’s at the Symbian Smartphone Show…somebody must have overheard us talking, as their pleas have just been fulfilled. The new VM is said to become available on new S60v3 FP2 devices, and may also be deployed to some older ones via NSU.

As of now, no ETA is given – stay tuned for further info as we get it!

Via Developing on S60

Don’t ask me why – tracking down Symbian Foundation folks at the Symbian Smartphone Show seems to be exceptionally difficult. However, I managed to leave a bunch of questions behind on a sheet of paper – the Symbian Press team forwarded them to Mark Durrant (who seems to be faceless ).

Here’s what he has to say:

What does the Symbian Foundation plan to do in order to restore UIQ developer confidence in the new platform?
The new platform will be a unified and de-fragmented platform built on the most open, proven and successful platform for smartphones. This gives the widest possible target audience for developers; we expect this will be an exciting opportunity for developers.

Will the first release of Symbian Foundation support touch screens?
Yes as it will be based on S60 5th Edition. S60 recently announced S60 5th Edition which includes support for touch. The Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is the first touch device based on that platform.

Does the Symbian Foundation plan to work with small hardware makers selling just 100s of PCs?
The Symbian Foundation will be open for membership to any organization, big or small. The foundation’s platform will be available initially to members on a royalty free basis, for a low membership fee of US$ 1500 per year, which should not be a barrier to companies of any size.

Will the OS be available royalty-free to non members?
Yes, when the Symbian Foundation platform becomes fully open source, which is expected in June 2010.

Why was no UIQ compatibility layer included?
The initial members of the foundation concluded that the priority for compatibility was S60, the predominant UI on Symbian OS. Many UIQ applications also have an S60 version available, so creating a UIQ compatibility layer would not add significant benefit but would add overhead to the platform.

Does the Symbian Foundation plan an app store of its own?
This is something which could be considered but in the spirit of open source, would not be exclusive.

P.S. For legal reasons:
For all of these answers, it should be remembered that the operation of the Symbian Foundation is subject to the acquisition of Symbian Limited by Nokia, in turn subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals.

This one is very important for all Austrian readers of Tamoggemon’s content network. Austria’s governmental carrier A1 has suffered an extensive network outage, leaving parts of Austria without voice, data and SMS service.

As Three shares A1’s network in some (rural) areas, this outage can also affect 3 handsets outside of their home 3G network. Three customers can thus try to fight back by forcing their handset into 3G only mode, while A1 users have to sit it out.

Once again: do NOT change your A1 handset’s settings. You can NOT do anything on the client side!

P.S. In case you feel like further information on Three’s network – hit this URL for a nice interview!

The last weeks have seen rampant rumors stating that the carrier Hutchison 3G (aka Three) has stopped/halted sales of the Nokia N96 due to quality control issues related to the device’s software and multimedia features.

TamsS60 has just spoken with a Hutchison representative and got the following statement for you:

All issues have been resolved by the end of September. Customers who keep their phone’s firmware current can use the N96 on Hutchison’s network without any known issues.

Once again: if anybody peddles this story to you, forget it. The issues are resolved for a month now – enjoy your N96 (as long as it lasts )…

QuickOffice’s James Mullican used the opportunity provided by the Symbian Smartphone Show for a quick demonstrations of the new features found in the next version of Quickoffice for S60.

The first new feature involves ZIP files. If you don’t already own an external file manager (why not – X-Plore rocks), QuickOffice now allows you to open zip files in order to access their contents:

Charts in Excel 2007 sheets can now be displayed:

Furthermore, password-protected files are supported in the latest version of QuickOffice:

The final and most crucial feature unfortunately is limited to FP2 handsets. These devices can now access WebDAV shares – these are similar to FTP servers and allow you to put files online rather than store them on the phone:

QuickOffice 6.0 was very stable during the demonstrations – the program seems more than ready for release. James obviously was proud of his/his team’s work by the way:

In the end, QuickOffice 6 is an evolution rather than a revolution. If you need any of the features outlined, purchasing the product is a no-brainer. On the other hand, people who are happy with QuickOffice 5 should definitely also give MobiSystems OfficeSuite a chance if they feel like spending extra money on an office suite.

It’s this part of the month once again – AdMob has provided me with a new Metrics Report. For all these of you new to the topic: AdMob is a company that focuses on serving up ads to mobile devices. Thus, they find themselves in an unique position for gathering data about market shares – and gladly pass that data on to the press.

As usual, I have picked out the most interesting bits of info – links to the full report can be found at the links below:
Palm OS – US market share takes decisive blow
The Palm Os finally is out of the US top 20 except for the Centro. The figure on the left is from August, while the figure on the right is from September. The single big winner is the iPhone, which now has about 3.2% of market share compared to the 3.4% of the Centro:

US – carriers and manufacturers
Our next char looks at which carrier deploys wich mobile phones. One can immediately seer that Sprint is the single biggest user of Palm devices, while MetroPCS acts as a game reserve for dead or dying phone manufacturers:

OS market share analysis
When it comes to OS shares all around the world, the Palm OS still manages to take in 6%. Symbian dominates the market, Windows Mobile and RIM OS fight about the second place:

Further reading
September 2008 – PDF
August 2008 – PDF

P.S: Should the PDF links ever go down, please let us know – we have them archived!

So far, most carriers (except for Hutchison/Three) have loathed and feared VoIP applications like Skype or its mobile cousin Fring. In fact, some data plans prohibited users to use VoIP programs.

However, this is now set to change – Austria’s biggest carrier A1 just announced a cooperation with Fring:

….
announced today the first ever deployment of fring’s mobile VoIP and mobile internet community application for a Tier 1 network operator.

Under the agreement, mobilkom austria will give its customers access to a dedicated version of the fring mobile client, containing fring’s entire open-platform, feature-rich suite of internet based mobile communications & community services, allowing A1 over IP users to talk, chat and interact with each other & all of their online communities, and access fun mobile web applications, using the internet connection capability of their mobile device
….
Avi Shechter, fring’s co-founder and CEO commented: “Today’s announcement by fring and its new partner, mobilkom austria, represents just the beginning of a sea change in the relationship between mobile VoIP and traditional mobile carriers.
….

I am not exactly sure myself as to why A1 chose to take this rather radical step, as the carrier traditionally is known to be the exact opposite of offensive when it comes to adopting new technologies.

This combined with the Telefonica statements (coming soon) make me think that we are looking at a significant change in the carrier landscape. Traditionally, carriers have been afraid of innovation..this policy seems to change all over the board currently.

What do you think?