WorkMobile Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Nokia’

Form Headaches? Try Tablets!

When WorkMobile™ was originally envisaged, the drive was to harness the incredible power of mobile phones to replace that nasty, heavy laptop for high quality data capture. In the last year, we’ve seen a huge surge in tablets… lightweight, powerful devices, with large touch-screens, that can provide a whole new experience in mobile computing. Hot on the heels of the iPad, new devices from HP and BlackBerry are pushing the bounds in computing power and portability, along with a wide range of Android powered devices.

One of the great challenges for all companies delivering mobile solutions is to leverage their solution across this ever-increasing range of platforms. New operating systems create new technical challenges, and new device form-factors create new opportunities to improve the user experience.

In the WorkMobile™ development team, we’re excited about these changes in the market, and are working hard to take advantage of our existing cross-platform development strategy that already enables us to deliver our solution to more than 95% of smart phone users worldwide. We’re already working on tablet optimised versions for iPad and Android (users of which can already use the smart phone versions). Our device team are looking closely at the new BlackBerry PlayBook and it’s new Tablet OS operating system, and at HP’s new web OS-based TouchPad, both of which are due to hit the streets in June.

Getting WorkMobile™ to work on every device we can (currently, everything from an iPad down to a €30 Nokia) is what excites eSay’s device team, and is a big part of what makes WorkMobile™ such a unique product. We’re looking forward to delivering exciting new ways to use WorkMobile™ to you over the coming months!

Graham (Senior Developer)

Nokia – U-turn on Symbian

Nokia has said Symbian will not be discontinued despite a recent partnership with Microsoft to make Windows 7 the main operating platform for its phones.

This is a U-turn on the phone manufacturer’s original stance. Nokia plans to continue selling Symbian devices because it is obliged to do so, according to several reports.

“Just because we are changing our direction in terms of a smartphone platform, it doesn’t mean that the existing platform is completely broken,” said Vlasta Berka, general manager for Nokia Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, at the launch of the E7 smartphone in Singapore.

“We still have obligations to our users, developers, business partners and customers.” There are 200 million Symbian users globally, and Nokia expects to sell about 150 million devices. “Symbian is here to stay,” Berka added.

Google officially ahead of the OS pack

The search giant’s mobile OS has toppled Symbian from its number one position. This reshuffle highlights the speed with which Google has raced to the top of the smartphone market ahead of Apple’s rapid ascension.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, phonemakers sold 32.9 million Android-equipped phones globally, roughly seven times more than the year-earlier quarter, compared with Symbian’s sales of 31 million, according to research firm Canalys.

The numbers also highlight Google’s success in battling Apple, whose shipments of its popular iPhone increased to 16.2 million from 8.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Unlike Apple or Nokia, Google does not make its own phone hardware but instead offers its Android operating system free to other phone makers who can adapt it to suit their devices.

As a result, Android has become the standard software for many phone makers. US phone maker Motorola has even managed to stage a comeback of sorts by focusing solely on Android after years of heavy market share losses.

In fact, only Nokia, Apple and RIM have so far resisted using Android software, and some experts have suggested that Nokia will announce plans to introduce smartphone models using Android.

Contactless mobile payments market set to explode in 2011

According to a report from market research firm iSuppli, worldwide shipments of mobile phones are predicted to reach 220.1 million units in 2014, compared with 52.6 million in 2010 for units with built-in near field communications (NFC) capability. This growth is being driven by Nokia’s NFC-integrated handsets which will be introduced in 2011 and Google’s Android 2.3, which supports NFC.

This kind of technology means that we will become even more dependent on our mobiles for every day life and work, strengthening the need for productivity – boosting business applications.

Symbian to close down its websites

Symbian’s presence on the web is stripped away as the mobile operating system moves back to Nokia. Earlier this month, the Symbian foundation said troubled handset maker Nokia would take over development of the open-source OS, with the foundation remaining in charge of licensing.

The organisation has stated that all of the websites hosted by the Symbian Foundation will be shut down on 17^th December, as well as its Facebook page and Twitter feed. On its website, the foundation said “We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation”.

Nokia bought Symbian in 2008, taking it open source. The code was freely available at the beginning of the year, but just two phones, the Nokia N8 and Nokia C7-00, are running the latest iteration, Symbian^3.

New version of Opera Mobile available for Nokia users

The Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has released a final version of its free internet browser for Nokia smartphones running on Nokia’s Symbian operating system. The company boasts that Opera Mobile 10.1 brings the ‘best mobile browsing experience’ to the popular smartphone platform.

This release also supports geolocation web applications, has new features such as tabbed browsing, and, using Opera Turbo compression, Opera servers also shrink web pages to a small percentage of its original size to reduce data costs and speed up browsing.