News tagged ‘Nokia’

We know how the new iPhone 4 compares to the iPhone 3GS. Now it is time to size it against its fiercest competitors from all the major platforms. Take a look at the results against the HTC EVO 4G, Nokia N8, Palm Pre Plus and HTC HD2:

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After yesterday news report about tenth suicide among Foxconn employees Apple had officially commented on the situation. Here are the words from the company's public statement:

"We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn. Apple is deeply committed to ensuring that conditions throughout our supply chain are safe and workers are treated with respect and dignity. We are in direct contact with Foxconn senior management and we believe they are taking this matter very seriously."

Reuters also informed that Apple will investigate the case and had already involved its own investigation team to "address these tragic events".

Foxconn is known much not only as the manufacturer of iPhone 4G, it is also a company responsible for making a number of products created by HP, Dell, and Nokia. Analyst Andrew Deng from Taiwan International Securities told Reuters that these companies might  react accordingly in case Foxconn is not tackling the problem:

"It's a crucial issue that Hon Hai [registered trade name for Foxconn] has to deal with right away. If not, Nokia, HP and Apple might cut their orders as pressure against buying their products could be mounting."

According to information from the Wall Street Journal Foxconn chairman Terry Gou has already launched antisuicide measures. They include the construction of special nets around Foxconn's building (as most of the workers died because of a jump from the roof) and establishing the "Foxconn Employee Care Center". Moreover, the company invited counselors and academic experts to talk with its employees and asked a group of Buddhist monks to utter prayers for the factory.

This week Terry Gou also showed reporters a huge swimming pool, bakeries, dormitories and banks built for employees needs.

Here is a video 'Shaping Digital Gaming' about the evolution of Gameloft company which is celebrating their 10th anniversary:

It 's a really great video. It starts with Nokia black and white, you see Java apps, than it goes to Palm Pre, iPhone and iPad. The graphical improvements are evident. We wish Gameloft other 10 years and more.

Yesterday we posted information about smartphone sales in the last quarter 2010, and as you remember Android-based phones become more popular than iPhones. Now it became known that Apple's spokespeople commented on this data.

In its research NPD group studied over 150,000 completed surveys, that were undertaken online every month in America. Apple's representative Natalie Harrison thinks it is not enough data to make precise conclusions:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide."

It is unknown why Harrison mentioned iPod touch when discussion was about smartphones market, but according to Reunters last week Harrison had referred to the IDC research. The latter also reveals that Apple losing its positions, but this time worldwide, with Nokia and BlackBerry sales ahead in first and second spots respectively.

According to a report by Marketwatch (which in turn refers to a figures revealed by Strategy Analytics), smartphones now take 18% share on the market of all mobile phones.

"Sales are driven by healthy operator subsidies, competition between vendors, and a rising number of cheaper models built around operating systems such as Google Inc's Android and Nokia Corp's key smartphone platform Symbian."

It is interesting that different smartphone makers sometimes compete on different markets. Strategy Analytics reveals that Nokia shows good results in India and China while Motorola focuses more on US.

As we wrote before, Motorola raised up its profits after producing its Android-based Droid/Milestone, which is frequently called the closest rival to Apple's iPhone.

Nokia's purpose is to gain the leadership on the markets that are only emerging. In the first quarter the company has 21.5 million smartphones sold, but these are mostly cheap models that were shipped primarily to South America and China. North America remains a "problem child" for Nokia. The company's sales make 40% of all the sales in this quarter.

RIM has 10.6 million BlackBerries sold and takes second place with its 19.7% share.

Globally Apple has 16,4% market share in selling smartphones in this quarter and became a mobile vendor number one in the US. The company made record 8.8 million iPhone sales. Among all mobile phone makers Apple hold 3% global market share.

Finnish company Nokia admitted last week that the competition on the high-end smartphone market is high enough and it is finally affected on quarterly earnings. In the first quarter of 2010 Finnish cellphone maker earned 465$ million. In the same period of the 2009 they earned 162$ million. Well that can be explained by an economical situation in the world, but this year results were expected by analysts to be higher.

Nokia conceded the average selling price of their cellphone products dropped down from 66 to 62 euros. The numbers for smartphones are more significant - from 190 (first quarter of 2009) to 155 euros (first quarter of 2010).

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is pretty obsessed about this fact:

"We continue to face tough competition with respect to the high end of our mobile device portfolio".

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California-based company MicroUnity System Engineering filed a lawsuit against Apple, Acer, HTC, LG, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, Spring, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and AT&T. It accuses these companies in infringement of 14(!) separate patents about mobile processors.

The lawsuit was filed few days ago in a District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a place where patent complaints are filed commonly in hopes to get a favorable outcome. The devices named in the document are iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (32 Gb and 64 Gb versions), Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Nokia N900.

The patents that were named in the suit are listed below:

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In a week after the story about the lawsuit Oppenheimer analyst Yal Reiner wrote a research note, where it is said that Apple started warning Motorola and HTC in as early as January 2009. The Cupertino's company was not so happy to see that rivals' new products look like iPhone (or at least use the same concepts).

Apple COO Tim Cook even commented on this situation:

"Apple will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we'll use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal".

The words were presumably about Samsung, LG and Nokia (Palm is not mentioned as its sales numbers are not so considerable).

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The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.

The annual Pwn2Own hacking contest is coming up next month. During the event competitors will be given the chance to win cash prizes.

The competition will start on March 24 at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. This year, hackers will take on an iPhone 3GS, a Blackberry Bold 9700, an unspecified Nokia smartphone running the Symbian S60 platform and a Motorola, most likely a Droid, powered by Google 's Android. A successful hack must result in code execution with little to no user-interaction. Any exploited phone wins its attacker $10,000 in cash.

During the Apple iPad presentation we all saw that the link with a flash content was broken. So it became pretty obvious that Steve Jobs' company continues to impose a list of restrictions on their devices that limit both consumers and content publishers. Without Adobe Flash support all of the iPad users won't be able to access the full range of web content, and that includes over 75% of video and 70% of games.

Though Adobe and about 50 of their partners in the Open Screen Project are aiming to bring Flash to all sorts of other devices. And if Palm Pre and Nokia N900 runs Flash extremely well, there is no reason iPad can't do it on its new 1 Ghz dual-core chip.

Here is our live blog from Apple's event:

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Fring has added video calling support to the iPhone and iPod touch via Skype. This is a huge step further. iPhone became a videophone!

It works on Fring to Fring, and Skype to Fring. Unfortunately, it's not bi-directional. You would be able to see whoever is calling you from a desktop, but you won't be able to transmit your image. The reason is because the iPhone doesn't have a front camera, so you can't do face to face. The application will support two-way video calling if the iPhone and iPod touch gain front-facing cameras in the future. The company already supports two-way video calling on several Nokia phones with such cameras.

A promotional video highlighting the new video functionality has also been released:

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Yesterday Tristan Nitot, the European president of the Mozilla Foundation, has responded to some questions about the future opportunity to see Firefox on the iPhone and iPod Touch:

"The issue is more with Apple than with us because they control the App Store and because they refuse applications which compete with something that is already on the phone. It’s unlikely that we’ll see a version of Firefox running on the iPhone"

As for Firefox Mobile, it will be launching on Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, and Nokia Maemo tablets in December.

Recentrly we've talked about Nokia and their willingness to enter into direct competition with the iPhone releasing new devices based on Linux. Now on the official Nokia website we can already pre-order the new mini tablet N900.

The operating system is the Maemo 5, that is based on Linux. It has an ARM Cortex A8 processor with 256MB of RAM for applications and other 768MB in virtual memory, so total is 1GB. So the multi-tasking is guaranteed. The graphics uses Open GL | ES 2.0, which is quite good.

The new operating system is much more flexible compared to Symbian. The Web browser is developed by Mozilla and is capable of playing Flash 9.4 movies and animations.

It looks like an iPhone but lacks the Home. It also has a sliding QWERTY keyboard. The screen resolution is 800 × 480 pixels (16:9). There are two cameras. The main has 5 MP with Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens and two LEDs for flash. The onboard memory is 32GB but can be expanded with microSD to additional 48GB.

The target price (tax excluded) is 500 euro. Nokia N900 will be available starting from October.

Here's a video that shows the Maemo interface in action:

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