Morning readers, Whatley here, just got this over MSN from a friend of mine at Nokia;

“Hey Whatley, we are buying Symbian and will donate it + S60 to an open source foundation!”

To which my response was a resounding - “Eh?”

You can read the official Nokia press releases here and here

Now, I’m not a developer. I’m ready to admit my knowledge in this area isn’t great. Ewan’s in the Maldives, the rest of the SMSTN Team are (still) sleeping so it’s down to me to make something of this.

Looking around online there is little opinion up yet - however, unsurprisingly, All About Symbian has the news too and Steve Litchfield says that “This is officially HUGE“.

I dropped the news into Twitter just over an hour ago (at the time of publishing) and got few responses back.

One of my followers and all round smart chap, Jof Arnold, emailed over his thoughts, which he’s kindly given me permission to publish here - I for one am interested to find out what this actually means for the industry as a whole and, more importantly, what’s your opinion on this latest Nokia acquistion?

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Over to Jof:

“In practice… well, that all depends on Nokia and I couldn’t possibly comment on their track history of OSS projects - cos I have no idea.

In theory? Potentially an awful lot. Compare to the iPhone and you’ll see why. Remember all those people trying to jail-break the iPhone? Those projects were successful because fundamentally the operating system pissed off many people; cut and paste; closed apps; no file explorer. Now, had apple open-sourced it fully you’d have a situation where the masses would be contributing huge amounts of their time into making the iPhone just how they wanted it… all under apple’s approval of course.

But, apple won’t do that… and developers are annoyed. Which is why any system that allows developed to tinker with the core operating system is going to be attractive to them. All of a sudden, developers haved a connundrum;

• develop for a locked-down system that is only on 10m handsets yet has a cool app-distribution and revenue-sharing system…. (apple)
• develop for an open system that has 200m handsets (nokia)
• develop for some google vapour-ware (android)

Impossible to say what will happen, but developers have always had a soft-spot for Symbian. This is potentially game-changing, but Nokia/Symbian’s got their work cut out; despite all this, Apple is a marketing monster and is hard to resist.”

Jof Arnold
http://www.brainbakery.com
http://twitter.com/jofarnold

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Thanks for those thoughts Jof. There’s a live webcast scheduled in for 11am today.

We’ll have more news, as it breaks.

Thoughts?

The phone is called the LG Decoy and it is a slider phone that has a built in Bluetooth headset. Pretty nifty.

The press release doesn’t say, but I’m assuming that there will be a holster designed specifically for it too.

Actually this is quite interesting and certainly seems to be an interesting development from Verizon. Will all phones be moving this way? Will a built-in headset soon become as important for normobs as the camera is now?

It does mean that more people can walk around looking important waiting for that urgent call that is so urgent they can’t even spare the time to get the phone out of their pocket or bag (or holster).

Seriously, with more and more pressure being applied on people in the US to be hands-free while driving, this could really be a winner.

Check out this article on the boon for bluetooth.

Whatley reporting in…

Founder of Moblog.co.uk and all round friend of SMS Text News, Alfie Dennen, has set up a new blog in lieu of the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit which takes place in London next week.

The weird thing for me (for a start anyway) is the name ‘Mobile Web 2.0‘ - so weirded out was I by this in fact that I had ended up dropping a ‘note’ to Alfie explaining my thoughts.

Well he went ahead and published it:

“When did we have Mobile Web 1.0?

What the hell just happened?
First up: If you ask ANY consumer on the street: Are you using Mobile Web 2.0?
They’ll probably look at you like you’re from Mars.

Second: These naming conventions genuinely drive me nuts. WAP. Mobile Internet. Mobile Web. Internet, made Mobile. Mobile 2.0. Mobile Web 2.0. ENOUGH ALREADY!

We may as well ask: Is this the year of the Mobile?

Just so we can tick every box (and seriously, that question is now, officially, a joke, you know it’s a joke because whenever anyone asks it these days the response is LAUGHTER).

It’s like when people carp on about Web 2.0. More often than not I find myself chiming in with something like: You know people just call it the web now right? …”

And so on. You can read the full post here. There’s a whole bunch of great content up actually (not including my post ), so yeah - head over and check it out!

It looks like Flash has got itself a little bit more territory in its quest for mobile domination - it’s struck up a partnership with mobile giant Qualcomm. Late last week, Qualcomm announced that its BREW platform, used by some US operators, will now come with Adobe’s Flash.

The partnership will see both companies create new development tools for programmers to make Flash-based applications using BREW, with a release scheduled for later this year.

So what does it all mean? In short, it looks like Adobe will be able to expand Flash capabilities further into lower end devices, while BREW devices will look spiffier with the ability to play Flash videos or enjoy other rich content applications. While everyone has one eye on the latest and greatest high end devices coming around the corner, it’s a sound move for Qualcomm and Adobe to work on keeping those with less feature-rich mobiles happy.

Nokia has come out as mobile Linux’s latest cheerleader (granted, it’s not unsurprisingly after it Reuters that it expects Linux tablets to make more of a splash in the future.

On the subject of its Linux tablet range, Nokia spokesman Kari Tuutti told Reuters: “We will expand that range, and we believe that the role of Linux will grow.” Reuters also quotes Nokia CFO as saying the Linux tablets are “going to be terribly important” in the future.

While it’s not a sign that Nokia is thinking of moving away from its Symbian heritage, it’s good to see the company promising more in the way of Linux and diversifying operating systems. But with the likes of Vodafone and Verizon championing open source software through the likes of the LiMo Foundation, I’d be seriously surprised if the handset maker hadn’t at least considered making mobile phones (rather than tablets) that run Linux.

Adobe is making some serious moves into corralling the mobile development market. It’s just announced its latest plan for mobile domination, called the Open Screen Project, with a series of big-name partner like Cisco, Intel, LG, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, and the BBC all getting involved.

Adobe says the project is aimed at “enabling a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications” across all handsets and other devices, and allow all mobile programming to be updated over the air.

Here’s the nuts and bolts of what Adobe will do:

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Making it cheaper and easier for developers to write for a variety of mobile operating systems - what’s not to like?

Sony Ericsson has taken the wraps off the interestingly named Project Capuchin, a technology which it says will bridge the Java ME and Flash Lite development platforms. Accordign to Sony Ericsson, Project Capuchin will let developers cherrypick the best bits of both to create the best content-rich mobile apps.

The bridging technology will come in the form of an intuitive tool to create applications and allow “Flash Lite content to be encapsulated in Java ME applications”. Sony Ericsson has promised developers should be able to get their hands on the goodies in the second half of this year.

Microsoft’s Flash rival Silverlight came a bit late to this party and technology like this, which strengthens both the incumbent mobile platforms, won’t make it any easier for Silverlight to make its mark in the mobile world.

It looks like China really has done it: after seemingly never-ending delays, according to local news service Xinhua, China has now got its 3G service up and running in just a matter of months and yes, it will be ready for the influx of visitors for the Olympics later this year.

China Mobile is giving away 15,000 3G handsets to Olympics officials and 3 million yuan of call credit to boot, says Xinhua. They’ll be able to get the higer-speed TD-SCDMA connection in eight cities, five of which will be hosting the Olympics.

China Mobile first started testing the service back in April - it’s amazing that it will go from pilot to full launch within four months. Some people take that long to test an application, not an entire network. Or am I being too optimistic - is a short testing period likely to signify a network that hasn’t had all the gruelling testing it needs?

IBM has been touting the latest initiative to come out of its Research Labs, aimed at building a slew of services for the developing economies where mobile phones are the de facto web access device.

There’s a lot of fluff around the initiative (social networks go mobile - who’d have thought it?), but some potentially interesting work. Here’s what IBM says it will be working on:

Universal Mobile Translator
IBM’s researchers are developing new technology to facilitate speech between individuals who speak no common language with the goal of free-form dialogue facilitated by a PDA. IBM technology is already allowing travelers using PDAs to translate menus in Japanese and doctors to communicate with patients in Spanish. IBM real-time translation technologies will be embedded into mobile phones, handheld devices and cars.

Portable Power in Your Pocket
IBM’s SoulPad software allows PC users to separate a computer’s “soul” — the programs, settings and data it holds — from its body, the disks, keyboard, screen, processor and other hardware from which it is comprised. Once a computer’s soul is stored on a storage device like a portable USB hard drive or iPod with SoulPad software, it can be carried around and reincarnated in any other computer simply by plugging in the storage device and starting the computer up.

Social Networks Go Mobile
Consumers can communicate with their social network friends regardless of where they are with voice and SMS from either a PC or a mobile phone. This is huge for generation Y consumers. For example, young shoppers looking at purchasing clothes in a store are increasingly looking for immediate feedback via their social networks, and the easiest way to make this happen is via mobile devices.

Healthcare Goes Mobile
IBM Research has brought together mobile phones and “presence” technology combined with health records to provide a potential “good samaritan” with information on how to aid people in critical medical situations. This combination of IBM Research capabilities and IBM WebSphere Presence Server exemplifies IBM’s ability to create enhanced mobile applications for everyday life.

Interesting, it also says it’s working on “voice-enabled mobile commerce” - if there ever was an application that should be more developed, it’s speech input, particularly for developing economies. After all, how useful is text input and SMS in countries where there’s an 50 percent illiteracy rate?

A handful of mobile heavyweights, including the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, NEC and Alcatel-Lucent have announced they’ve got together and worked out a patent sharing system for the development of HSDPA’s successor, LTE.

The framework will give all of the company “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” for licensing each other’s essential patents. The deal will also make sure that those involved can’t charge royalties that are more than a single digit percentage of the sales price of phones using their patents and for embedded LTE modems, the maximum level will be a “single digit dollar amount”.

Getting the patent regime - and particularly the pricing - for using patents agreed before anyone starts using them is a simple but very clever idea. Perhaps if Nokia and Qualcomm had set up a similar agreement they could have saved themselves a truckload in legal fees.

I had a note in from Scott Beaumont at Mippin to let me know that their Mippin Maker tool is now available. Essentially, if you’d like to create a perfectly tailored rendition of your site for every mobile handset, Mippin Maker is for you. It’s free, too. (You do actually need to have a site with an RSS/ATOM newsfeed in order to take advantage of Mippin Maker.)

I’ve got one already, thanks to the team there. You can see it at mippin.com/smstextnews. Here’s how it looks rendered on my desktop browser:

I decided to try out the Mippin Maker process with my brother’s Bladewatch blog. All I did was type in www.bladewatch.com into the Mippin Maker URL box and *immediately*, I mean IMMEIDATELY, this page appeared:

Smart! That was it created. It’s got a temporary URL — mippin.com/mippin4030 — I imagine if my brother ‘claims’ the site, he’ll be able to change that to something a little more relevant.

It really is that fast. Give it a go with your blog.

Following in the footsteps of Google and Apple, AT&T has decided to open up and make information available for developers that will help them create applications for pensioners and users with disabilities. The methodology, called Universal Design, is “the practice of designing products and applications that are usable by the broadest possible range of consumers”, according to AT&T.

AT&T has already created some applications based on Universal Design, including Mobile Speak, a screen reader with Braille support, and Mobile Magnifier, a magnification application that supports low- and high-resolution screens, which it says are now open to the broadest range of handsets.

If any budding developers want to take a look at Unvirsal Design, the documents are available here. There are already some incredibly smart apps out there for disabled users - hopefully this will add to that number.

If reports are right, it looks like the partnership between Sony Ericsson and Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo might have hit a snag. According to Trading Markets, the pair are reviewing their product development plans but declined to say what the results might be.

Earlier reports had suggested that Sony Ericsson would stop supplying devices to DoCoMo altogether, but Sony Ericsson has been denying this and the AFP quotes a spokesman as saying the company has no plans to ditch the Japanese market.

I’ll be interested to find out how NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson will change their plans, but I can’t see the attraction in cutting ties completely - Japan might be a tough market right now, but it’s still practically the centre of the universe for mobile developments.

It’s all go on the mobile web front this week. Nokia has announced it’s bringing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology - a web development technology for multimedia applications - to mobile. For developers, it means a program built using Silverlight can be put on any number of devices or platforms without the need for more coding.

Silverlight will be available for Nokia’s S60 phones, as well as Series 40 devices and Nokia internet tablets. Nokia said that support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

The interesting thing about these sorts of announcements from technology companies is the time lag between a product coming out for desktops and its release on mobile devices - Microsoft released Silverlight in its PC form in the middle of last year. While it’s great to see the gap between the two platforms closing, tech firms should be realising that mobiles will soon be the most popular way of accessing the internet - and giving their mobile development the same kind of treatment as their PC development.

It looks like the launch of China’s 3G is getting a little closer. According to Forbes, the country is experimenting with its own homegrown variant of 3G, TD-SCDMA, in 10 cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Qingdao and Baoding.

According to Xinhua, the trials have been successful and the connection is “good and steady” with video calls coming off without a problem. After waiting so long for the advent of 3G, it seems, we’re almost there. The countdown to the Olympics is on - hopefully 3G will be there on the starting blocks.

Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital department of the Finnish behemoth, has invested in Morpho, Inc., to the tune of 165 million Japanese Yen (~US$1.5 million). Morpho specializes in image processing software for mobile gadgets. PhotoSolid and MovieSolid, both from Morpho and designed to help with image and video stabilization, have grown to be well-respected in the industry. Morpho also offers embedded solutions for motion tracking, panoramic imaging, and backlight compensation.

With Nokia’s Nseries handsets on the frontline of cameraphones and the Nokia N82 sporting a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss optics, and Xenon flash, the ability to efficiently process the image with enhanced features is going to be key. Samsung’s G810, which was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2008 and sports Nokia’s S60v3 Feature Pack 1 OS, like the N82, already has an image stabilization feature.

I’ll be anxious to see how Morpho progresses, and if we see more Nokia interest in imaging-related companies.

A team of 27 researchers and students at the Melbourne University recently unveiled their new GiFi chip, which they hope will be ready for market in 2009. The chip, which measures 5mm on either side, only uses 2 watts of power and sports a tiny 1mm antenna. Since this little chip is manufactured using CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology, it will cost about $10 to manufacture, as well.

Using the 60GHz frequency, GiFi would be capable of data transfer speeds up to 5Gb over a 10 meter radius. This is like super-powered Bluetooth, here. Possible uses would be a video kiosk, which could send a full-length high-definition movie to your phone over GiFi in a matter of seconds, and then you could stream that to your TV once you got home, or transfer it to your PC for later viewing. The possibilities seem pretty endless.

Via: Phonescoop

The S60 Blogs are a source of all types of information, from application betas to marketing thoughts, and every now and again, a gem such as this post from Peter Harbeson. As a bit of an experiment, using his S60 handset, he wanted to see just how much he could do with his phone using ONLY the web browser. Peter was surprised to find that, somehow, he was able to do just about everything.

Peter’s list included being able to:

keep my calendar in any of several web-based calendars (Google, Yahoo, Plaxo, and probably a dozen others)

send and receive email using the web (pharbeson [at] gmail [dot] com, by the way)

send SMS using bigfoot.com

maintain a to-do list

view and edit Office documents using Google docs

listen to music

watch videos

back up data (although most of my data isn’t local, so it’s already backed up)

maintain and use a contact list — this is not as well integrated as it could be, but it’s possible

read ebooks

subscribe to and read RSS feeds

subscribe to podcasts (although I listen to them without the browser)

He goes on to wonder just what the benefits of an entirely browser-based UI would really be. Obviously currently there’s a network connectivity issue, but what if that was solved? How much easier would it be to ‘fix’ the UI or customise it to individual users if it was merely a web page?

If you’ve not seen it, here’s the video on YouTube of Nokia’s S60 Touch UI, as demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress. Thus far, everyone I’ve read were appalled that it was so poorly demo’d. Personally, I’m more excited about S60 Touch now than I have been in the past. I’ve noticed four major complaints that I want to counter:

1. It was demo’d on a tablet, connected to a PC running an emulator. When you’re wanting to show off the UI of something, but don’t want to give any clues as to the hardware, how *ELSE* would you suggest demoing it?

2. It looks just like S60 does. Duh. It’s called ‘S60 Touch’, not “Entirely New Touch Interface”. As is stated in the video, one reason behind this is so that users can easily swap from a non-touch S60 device to a touch-enabled one and not have a learning curve. With over 6 years of history and millions of S60-based handsets on the market, and both Nokia and Symbian kicking butt, why on *earth* would you want to alienate your existing userbase? There’s just no sense there.

3. It doesn’t look like the iPhone. Again, duh. Nokia doesn’t want their products constantly compared to the iPhone, just the same as Jobs doesn’t want his iPhone constantly compared to the S60 handsets. Why not? Because they’re targeted towards entirely different market segments, with only slight overlap. The only thing that they have in common is that they both ‘do’ more media than most phones, and they’re both priced higher than most consumers want to pay for a phone, at least in the U.S.

4. ‘If this is how far along Nokia is, they’re in trouble.’ Personally, I don’t think Nokia/S60 sees touch as a necessity. Everything that I’ve heard points to Nokia/S60 looking at touch as just another input method, to be offered alongside hardware buttons as a convenience in some situations.

Microsoft is having a stormer of a Mobile World Congress. After announcing its decision to buy the software company Danger, hot on the heels of its play for Yahoo, it’s dusting down its consumer effort for mobiles with Windows Live @mobile, where operators will be able to run Windows Live services - Hotmail, Messenger etc - either on a subscription basis, for a one-off payment or as an ad funded service.

And that’s not all, there’s the Windows Live Mobile Developer Program. According to Microsoft, the program will mean developers will be able to create mobile versions of its Windows Live services for mobiles, whether they run Windows natively or not.

It’s a pincer movement from Microsoft to try and take its products into the consumer realm - get a consumer manufacturer on your side with the operating system, with Sony Ericsson and then make sure you can your applications onto any other device with any operator. Clever moves from Redmond.

It’s been a bit of a red letter day for the LiMo Foundation, chief cheerleader for mobile Linux, with the foundation using Mobile World Congress to announce the first handset based on its open source platform as well as new members signing up to the group.

The handsets exiting the LiMo stable feature six from Motorola, including a couple of Razrs, as well as one from Samsung and a shedload of FOMA devices from NTT DoCoMo. The foundation also announced a couple of prototypes in the works, from LG and Aplix. All in all, there are 18 devices from 7 manufacturers to look forward to.

Meanwhile, nine new members signed up: ACCESS, LTD, AMD, FueTrek, Open-Plug, Orange, Renesas Technology Corp., Samsung SDS, SoftBank and STMicroelectronics.

It’s good to see LiMo’s work showing some results and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some of those handsets. It’s also good to see some unity in the Linux movement, with Orange - which supports another Linux group, LiPS, - joining up with LiMo too.

Sony Ericsson has decided it’s time to flirt with another mobile operating system and has leapt into bed with Windows Mobile. The first device resulting from the union will be due in the second half of f this year and comes with a whole host of goodies: wi-fi, qwerty keypad, touch navigation, 3.2 megapixel camera plus all the Windows Mobile standards: Outlook, IE, Word, Excel and a load more.

The handset, known as the X1, will be the first in Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line of devices, all sporting a qwerty keyboard and gunning for converged, mulitmedia-phone-hungry users.

And it’s a good looking device to boot. So with Sony Ericsson on board, Microsoft has now got four out of the five of the biggest phone makers with at least one Windows Mobile device on their books. Good news for Microsoft then, but what does it mean for Symbian? Sony Ericsson has no plans to drop Symbian, as far as I know, but I’d be interested to see what proportion of its smartphone line up will be Windows Mobile in the next year or two.

Here’s a fun new project taking place in Berkeley, California. Students at the University of California at Berkeley will be participating in a project called the Mobile Century experiment to use cellphones to report current traffic conditions. About 100 students will be using Nokia N95s to drive a 10-mile stretch of the I-880 freeway between Fremont and Hayward, CA. Along the way, their GPS-enabled handsets will be reporting speed and location information to a base station wirelessly every 3 seconds. The information will be processed at the base station to determine traffic conditions along the freeway.

This is completely brilliant, using cellphones to report traffic. An interesting part of the report mentions that they’ll be using Nokia Next Generation Location Based Services Platform as part of this project. I wonder what else this platform is being tested for. In any case, if you’re a UC Berkeley student who’s hard up for cash and 21-years old, you can sign up and snag yourself US$250 and a free Bluetooth headset (for safe driving). A lucky 4 participants will get to keep their Nokia N95 handset, as well.

After all the waiting and wrangling, China has finally decided to hand out its 3G licences, with six lucky handset makers — including ZTE and Lenovo — getting the nod, according to local press reports.

China isn’t using the 3G standards most people are familiar with, preferring a homegrown variant called TD-SCDMA. China has been notoriously slow to move on 3G and so it’s good to see the country gradually shifting from the trial phase into something approaching a full-on commercial launch.

The question of standard is still hanging over China though - by picking its own flavour of 3G and one that’s only used in China, there could be problems with roaming and with persuading the mobile makers to create TD-SCDMA compatible devices. Nevertheless, China has the advantage of being a huge market - by 2011, analysts reckon there will be 51 million users on TD-SCDMA and presumably a lot more to come. If nothing else, China has the sheer weight of numbers on its side to get the mobile industry interested in its version of 3G.

Loopt has set up a cool new developer program designed to get the most out of their social-mapping and communication service. Loopt is the power behind Boost Mobile’s Buddy Beacon service, which allows you to easily see where your friends are on a map, making it easier to coordinate social gatherings and the like.

Loopt’s new developer program will give a select few developers access to Loopt’s location feed, so that they can develop rich applications for devices on any platform. Loopt’s CEO Sam Altman says,

If you have a great idea for a location-aware application and want to build it, the Loopt Developer Program will provide the software and infrastructure to create a proof-of-concept product. We’ll provide a path for commercial release and monetization across carriers and devices for the best applications.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Some developers will get awesome access, and Loopt will get to be the driving engine behind the latest Location-based applications. Interested parties should visit developer.loopt.com and submit a synopsis of how Loopt’s live location feed could be used and the application that they plan to develop. Loopt will select 15-20 individuals to make these dreams a reality.