Symbian OS Continues to Dominate

iPhone, Android No Match for Nokia’s Symbianese Liberation Army [Digital Daily]

from All Things Digital by John Paczkowski

Funny–all this yammering about the fast-expanding iPhone ecosystem and the coming Android onslaught, but Nokia’s Symbian is still the leading mobile operating system around the world. What’s more, it’s likely to remain so in the foreseeable future.

According to IDC’s latest Worldwide Mobile OS Forecast and Analysis, Symbian will remain market leader until at least 2013, despite some big gains by rivals like Android. This is largely thanks to Nokia’s (NOK) strength in markets beyond the United States, particularly emerging ones.

Interestingly, IDC believes Google’s (GOOG) Android will be the fastest growing wireless operating system between now and 2013, when it will be the second most widely used mobile OS in the world. Which means that the research firm expects Android to best not only Apple (AAPL) and its iPhone OS, which holds the No. 3 spot globally, but BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM) which holds the No. 2 spot.

Nokia Still Dominates Smartphones

 Nokia regains 40 Percent Market Share -

Elecronista

Nokia this morning touted a sharp turnaround in its smartphone share for the last quarter of 2009. It shipped about 20.8 million of the devices in the fall versus just 16.4 million in the summer. With an estimated 52.4 million smartphones shipped in the entire smartphone market compared to 47 million, Nokia estimates that it has jumped back from a recent low of 35 percent share in the summer to 40 percent by the end of last year.

Most of this comes directly from improved sales of its core Eseries and Nseries smartphones; the company shipped a total 10.7 million of these versus 8.9 million just one season earlier. Much of the rest includes Symbian S60 smartphones that don't fit into the category, such as the X6, as well as the Maemo-based N900. The period was likely to have been helped the most by the launches of devices like the N97 mini and E72.

The period was overall strong for Nokia. It shipped 126.9 million phones of all kinds, a jump of 12 percent versus a year ago and 17 percent compared to the summer. The Finnish company also bounced back from its sharp loss to make a nearly $1.6 billion profit, more than double the $688.9 million in late 2008.

Its the Content Silly?

Myxer Report: Android Outpaces iPhone Users For Downloading Mobile Content

from TechCrunch by Leena Rao

Mobile content delivery company Myxer is releasing a report this morning that indicate much of what we already know about Google’s Android platform: Android is gaining traction in the mobile space. According to data provided by Myxer’s 30 million users, visits to Myxer’s mobile site from users on the Android operating system grew 350% in 2009, compared to the iPhone, which grew 170%. In total, Myxer delivered seven times more downloads to Android devices than iPhone devices in Q4 2009.

From Two to Twenty Million in Four Years...

Panoramio “Very Comfortable At Google,” Co-Founder Says On Way Out The Door
from TechCrunch by MG Siegler

In a post today on the Panoramio blog, co-founder Eduardo Manchón, says that after four and a half years working on the service, it’s time to leave. Google acquired Panoramio in mid-2007 and Manchón has been there ever since, running the service. He notes that, “Acquisitions can be complicated, and the private nightmare of a founder is the site not surviving the process, but after some time Panoramio feels very comfortable at Google.”

Panoramio has certainly gained a lot of exposure thanks to Google. It’s heavily featured not only in Google Earth, but also in Google Maps. The service claims to have over 20 million high quality photos in Google’s databases, which makes it much smaller than Flickr, Facebook, or even Google’s own Picasa, but the difference is that all Panoramio photos are geolocated, which makes them very useful for Google’s mapping projects. Under Google, the Panoramio photo collection has growth from about 2 million to this 20 million number

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High-sensitivity, high-speed, high-ac...

In Search Of The Perfect Fieldwork GPS 

Free Geography Tools

Published by Leszek Pawlowicz at January 12, 2010 in gps.

1. High-sensitivity, high-speed, high-accuracy GPS chipset.
2. A high-gain, omni-directional antenna. Many units these days come with just a small ceramic patch antenna, and tend to have less signal gain and be more orientation-sensitive than the “stubby” quad-helix antennas found on models like the Garmin 60CSx and the Garmin Colorado series.
3. A decent-sized screen that’s easily visible in direct sunlight. 2.6” diagonal is a bare minimum, 3” is even better. Many recent models have higher resolutions and greater color depth than older models, but sacrifice daylight visibility as a result. I’d rather have a unit with fewer colors and lower resolution that you could use in daylight than a sexy high-tech screen where you can’t see anything on it unless you hold it in the shade with the backlight on.
4. An easy interface for adding text. If it doesn’t detract from screen visibility, a touch screen is fine, but a slide-out keyboard would work as well.
5. Buttons with programmable functions. One of the big problems with touch screens is that you sometimes have to dive multiple menu levels into the interface to access a needed function; the ability to call up such a function with a single button push would make life a lot easier.
6. Decent battery life, at least 15-20 hours.
7. Rugged and waterproof.
8. More waypoints, tracks and trackpoints. Some models currently sold allow only 1000 waypoints, and 10,000 trackpoints, to be saved. I’ve never had to have more than several hundred waypoints myself, but I’ve hit my unit’s limit of 20 tracks and 10,000 waypoints many times.
9. The ability to add your own GIS map data, like point/line/area shapefiles, for display on the unit, preferably with at least some attribute data.
10. Loadable vector maps, from the manufacturer and/or custom maps created by the user or others.
11. Raster imagery like topographic maps or aerial imagery, both standard mapsets (like USGS topos) and your own custom imagery.
12. A tri-axial electronic compass that works regardless of how you hold the GPS.
13. If you have a tri-axial compass, you have the electronics necessary to determine the angle of orientation of the GPS with respect to the ground. This would be useful for geologists (dip and strike), archaeologists (site maps), geomorphologists (ground slopes), botanists (calculations of tree height using angle), and presumably others as well.
14. Some means for recording additional data associated with a waypoint. Standard waypoints are limited to about 30 characters in the note field, and expanding that to a larger size to add more info would be helpful; another option would be audio recording capability that’s linked to the waypoing.
15. A built-in camera with both automatic geotagging, and automatic tagging of the direction the picture was taken in. 5-megapixel minimum, with autofocus and a macro mode for closeups.
16. Bluetooth NMEA serial output so you can use it with a laptop or PDA.

Parrot Bluetooth

Parrot iPhone Helecopter toy

Parrot is a popular manufacturer of bluetooth accessories and other products, but it looks like they are trying anther route because they just announced at CES their next intention, which is to create a helicopter (toy) that can be controlled via an iPhone.

The supposed helicopter will be connected to the iPhone via WiFi and comes with two cameras - one to calculate the speed and another to display the vision on the iPhone screen.

On top of this new helicopter project, Parrot also wants to released games with augmented reality.

Nexus - learning Android

My Nexus arrived yesterday afternoon... on time IMHO. I was excited all day checking the Fed Express record to see if it had successfully be dropped on my doorstep... It had.

I have litterally "0" experience with touch screen phones. I do have many years of use of Symbian/Nokia smartphones and data connections via that device type. I was essentially running my sleek Nexus with in really minutes. I put it aside to get a full charge which maybe took an hour and a bit. Made TXTs, added contacts, took several pictures (one point I will make is Nokia is way out in front on the camera control and results), got my position and local Google Map. Was frustrated to learn that Adobe is not quite ready for the release of Flash that will allow Google Earth connections.

My first experience with the screen-keyboard left me thinking "Whoops, this isn't as good as one of my Palm Pilots from years ago.. my trick was to discover just a light touch really improved with each try my accuracy. But better yet I was able to create TXTs by using its speech recongition with no flaws! And that is really cool IMHO!

I am about to do a around the world trip stopping for several days at a number of meetings in South East Asian and Middle East countries. I have already asked my hosts to allow me to borrow a local phone number SIM so I will soon discover what is what. I can tell you that I use AT&T and from the get go my Nexus will not get the same access to that net as iPhone; via AT&T the best I can get is Edge.