Dean Pattrick Head of Nokia Entertainment showing off some of the Mix Radio features (And yes that is a Badass Guns&Roses T-shirt)

Now that MWC is over (unfortunately) I had a chance to organize all the Q&A sessions we had with all the awesome Nokia guys; we had four in total, one with Damien Dinning about the 808 and it’s camera which I posted seperately, here we have 3 more Q&As about the Luima design, Nokia Maps/Transport and Nokia Entertainment.

Once again I’ve listed the points in Bulletins for quick reading and because I can’t remember all the questions

Just want to mention that all the Nokia people were AMAZINGLY nice and really comfortable to be around; Dean Pattrick spent the first 15 minutes telling us ‘war stories’ that sounded alot like something else and Jason Gregory the man responsible for the N9 and the Lumia 800/900 spent about an hour in a bean bag chair having a causal chat with me.

Anyways off to it, hope you find this useful (Unfortunately I lost the notebook I had written these notes in so I’m going off of memory here)

“Since Nokia Are now the largest provider of Windows phone (largest share of the pie) our greatest focus will be on Increasing the size of the pie” (~~ focus on helping WP grow rather than competing for the current WP market share)

Mix Radio is a free, internet streaming music proposition with no subscription or accounts needed. Just out of the box and listen to great music.

Lumia/WP

• The 800 was not being planned or designed before Feb 11^th  (meaning that there was no previous indication of a Nokia WP)
• As far as is known to us there was never an Android Nokia even for testing/Experimental purposes
• The Design of the 800/900 admittedly inspired by the N9 have been greeted with huge success, and as such expect to see upcoming phones continue to have this same design (they call it the Fabuli design apparently that’s how the designer described it at first)
• Having a technology such as pureview is an amazing thing and it would be ridiculously insane not to capitalize on it with our main ecosystem (WP)– (Probably once they’ve found a way to utilize the pureview tech with a smaller sensor)
• Possible memory expansion in upcoming devices
• The Lumia 610 is running on 256MB of Ram making it the first ‘fragmented’ Windows phone

• Q: Since fragmentation has begun on Windows phone what’s to stop other manufacturers from making low-end phones that ruin the windows phone experience that so far has prided itself on being smooth on all devices
  A:  Windows has set forth a strict set of guidelines for the minimum amount of specs required for a device to be approved to run any version of WP – as of now this benchmark has been set by the 610, and for the time being don’t expect any device to launch with less specs.

• Q: When are we going to see the fruit of the Nokia Exclusive customization of WP (I basically asked if we could have WP with swipe)
  A: As of now we have no plans to do any serious visible customizations as that would give Nokia an unfair advantage over other OEMs that produce Windows phones which could lead to alienating them and making them switch back to android (Back to focusing on increasing the Size of the Pie itself and not Nokias share of the pie right now)

• The main selling point of the Lumia 610 is it’s design and not it’s price, as we didn’t not compromise the integrity/design of the device to fit a price range.
• Nokia has no plans of releasing a Tablet as of now as first of all we are still focusing on Re-entering  the US Mobile market and do not want to get distracted, as well as that as of now there is no way for Nokia to stand out and offer a proper tablet experience amongst the slew of other tablets available (In other words when we do a table we plan on doing it right)
• Internet tethering will Be available on the Lumia 900 upon launch however for previously launched Lumias (710&800) this feature will be pushed out with the next WINDOWS/Microsoft update (Will not be a separate update)
• The date of the tethering update is not for us to announce, as it is Microsoft responsibility to push out this update
• The Lumia 900 does not have a curved screen because it would lead to at least an increase in .5-1 mm of width as well as making the phone more likely to fracture (it’s difficult to make a screen that large curve without weakening the glass or having to add extra layers to reinforce it
• The white Lumia 800s are available for purchase in stores as of this week

Maps:

• Transportation and offline maps services will be available to the current and upcoming range of Lumia devices in a separate app update whiten the upcoming weeks (no need to wait for a Microsoft Software update)
• transportation with estimated times of arrival and recommended departure times will be provided to all locations that have supplied Nokia with their timetable schedules/infrastructure
• Nokia maps will replace Bing maps as the default map service on Windows phone, as well as several other OSes (RIM?)
• Voice guidance and turn by turn navigation have been added to the browser-based maps service on Android & iOS (Coded in HTML 5)
• Maps on Android/iOS are cached in the browser to save on data charges (voice guidance can be downloaded as a separate package)
• The Weather widget which was removed from Symbian will be released later (recently launched in the Beta labs)
• Nokia Pulse (location-based private Social network) will get dedicated clients on Android and iOS rather than web-based accounts
• Sharing your updates on FB/Twitter from Pulse was purposely left out to keep things more private
• Offline nav on the Lumia range was not introduced upon release due to the limited time they had before first shipments
• “Car Mode” will soon be introduced to the Lumia range as well

“We’ve put these rumours to rest a long time ago. The focus for Nokia is on executing on our partnership around Windows Phone and growing the ecosystem, and each company has the tools they need to do so”

Basically Eldar knows nothing please focus on the awesomeness of our phones, seriously though; Nokia UK responded to slashgears post about Eldars ramblings clarifying that Nokia doesn’t mix Business with more Business, their relationship is basically with the windows phone ecosystem, not even Microsoft (I know it’s the same thing but those words can make a huge difference).

Update: For those of you interested I tracked down the ‘orginal tweet’ that put these matters to rest along time ago, By “Mark Squires” Comm Director of Nokia, this reply was after the Nokia being bought rumors surfaced the first time (early May)

Unrelated topic but I didn’t think it was worth a second post, yesterday Engadget posted what to look forward to at CES, with barely a mention of Nokia (hidden inside a link under WP), so the Nokia twitter people took it upon themsleves to remind them.

We’ll be there too! RT @engadget Engadget’s 2012 CES Preview nokia.ly/AjQEAc

— Nokia (@nokia) January 4, 2012

Which brings a random point, Nokia had a trend of not replying to anything being said about them, carrying an aura of silence except when they wanted to release a product, it’s nice to see how they’ve changed; be it reading Nokia fan Blogs (simplest example is giving Jay an N9 when a commentator asked) or replying to rumors and chiming in at random times; I like the new Nokia.

Slashgear

Following on from the comeback of Gameloft games with Eternal Legacy, a couple more games have popped up in HD stylie. Asphalt 6 comes in a whopping 255MB and Dugeon Hunter steam rolls in at 305MB!

Download through WLAN if you can!

Dungeon Hunter 2 HD

The epic tale of Dungeon Hunter continues in this thrilling action RPG. – Play the campaign solo or with up to 3 adventurers in co-op multiplayer mode. – Enter Gothicus’ dark fantasy atmosphere with high-definition graphics. – Dungeon Hunter levels up! 3 new difficulty levels and an open world 5 times bigger than before. – Deep customization system: 3 classes, 6 specializations, dozens of skills, and hundreds of unique items to collect.

And

Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD

Get your adrenaline pumping for the newest edition of the Asphalt series. Discover 42 cars & bikes from world-class manufacturers like Ferrari or Aston Martin. Tune your vehicle & customize it with decals before tearing up the streets of L.A., Tokyo, the Bahamas & other beautiful locations, each rendered in HD. You ’ll be driving against tough opponents in 11 different leagues with 55 events plus Online/Local Multiplayer for up to 6 players.

Cheers Immortal for the tip!

As mentioned in Jay’s previous post in November, today marks the official close of the Symbian foundation websites. While most of our readers likely never had much experience with or exposure to these websites, they posed a major resource for a lot of curious cats like myself who wanted to keep track of progress on Symbian development as well as contribute ideas for improvements and/or features that we wanted to see in the platform. Nokia has created their own Symbian blog which in due course is expected to be populated with news etc. concerning the platform progress, releases and projects being undertaken that are related to Symbian.

However, all indications point towards a more closed system of development being undertaken.Whether this is done in a similar manner to the Google Android method where code dumps are made regularly and changes made at the whim of the company overseeing development remains to be seen. This, however, is both a positive and negative in that the closed system has somewhat less red tape and bureaucracy standing between ideas/concepts and the realization and productizing of these concepts. Unfortunately this comes at the cost of valuable community feedback and input. Simply looking at the number of great and well supported ideas that were submitted to the Symbian Ideas site (now unavailable of course) is testament to the benefit of using collective intelligence and outside ideas.

Statement by Tim Holbrow, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation after the break:

“In 2009, we established the Symbian Foundation to make the Symbian platform available open source and royalty-free. In November 2010 we announced that the foundation would ramp down its operational activities as a result of changes in global economic and market conditions.

We are now well underway with transitioning the foundation from a non-profit organisation responsible for governing the open development and curation of the Symbian platform, to a licensing entity with no permanent staff. Moving forward, the foundation will be responsible only for specific licensing and legal frameworks put in place during the open sourcing of the platform.

The Symbian platform will continue to evolve under Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative direct and open model.

Due to this transition, many of the operations and services the foundation provided to the Symbian community have now ceased. With the exception of this blog site, the foundation’s public websites have closed, along with open access to the Symbian source code.

However, much of the foundation’s data is available to the public via FTP until 31 March 2011. For access to this content, please e-mail contact@symbian.org. Some content is still controlled under certain licenses; Symbian Foundation members will continue to have access to Symbian Foundation License content.

Specifically, the FTP site will allow access to:

1. Current platform source code
2. Platform Development Kits:
   • S^2 PDK 2.0.3 (parts of S^2 are only available to current Symbian Foundation members)
   • S^3 PDK 3.0.4
   • S^4 PDK 4.0.a
3. Databases:
   • Database exports from Bugzilla, Wiki, Forums, Ideas and Symbian Horizon.
     NOTE: all private, personal information has been removed
4. Documentation:
   • HTML source for the platform reference documentation and public mailing lists

Access to the FTP site will cease on 31 March 2011; by this date we anticipate a new model for hosting Symbian code will be available from Nokia.

You can find more information on Nokia’s plans for Symbian at http://symbian.nokia.com. Forum Nokia is the best place to access developer support for Symbian, including tools, documentation, technical support, and discussion boards.

We would like to extend our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to the major milestones achieved at the Symbian Foundation. We can all be proud of these accomplishments – some not seen before in the history of computing, such as the completion of the largest transition to open source of any commercial codebase in software history. We would also like to extend warm thanks to the entire member community for their continued commitment to the Symbian platform.

We are confident that these are absolutely the right changes in the context of today’s market and economy, and we look forward to watching a new era of success for the Symbian platform unfold.”

Via

As mentioned before in the press release Jay posted, and has been rumored in the blogosphere for quite a while, it seems that Nokia and the Symbian board have taken a decisive step towards improving the Symbian OS, speeding up time to market, improving developer and OEM relations and at the same time cut out some of the bureaucracy that has held Symbian development up for so long. This move was hinted at when Lee Williams stepped down from the Symbian Foundation as executive director and was replaced by Tim Holbrow (former CFO) with rumors circling that winding down operations would commence imminently.  It seems that such a guess was not far off the mark.

I’m certain that a large percentage of people in the blogosphere are now shouting at the top of their voices that Symbian is dead, Nokia is down the toilet and are doomed and that Symbian has no place in the smartphone market (Engadget commenters are truly  remarkable no?). But I’d have to respectfully say that they are patently wrong. Below I’ll outline a few of the reasons why this change has happened and what the future may/may not hold for Symbian development in light of current news.

One of the most telling statements concerning Symbian development were the announcements of Sony Ericsson (SE) and Samsung, that they were discontinuing Symbian development and had no plans for the continued support and/or production of Symbian devices. Looking at those two announcements in a vacuum one might be inclined to think that two of the three major OEM  supporters and Foundation contributors (not dissing Fujitsu here) had withdrawn from an OS that was seemingly about to fail miserably.

Looking at the situation in context however, yields a starkly different story. Having tracked code package submissions to the Symbian Foundation from the fledgling days of S^2 & S^3, I’d yet to see any significant contributions of code by either company. While that’s not to say they didn’t provide any monetary support, the fact that the entire idea of the foundation was to distribute work amongst large companies with significant resources in the hope of faster iterating the OS than any single company could possibly achieve. Unfortunately for the Symbian Foundation, this was not to be, and Nokia has and will continue to contribute the VAST majority of the code.

Worse still, Android came along whereby OEM’s could get a free ride in essence, contributing little if any code, little if any monetary support while getting an OS that they could basically flash onto the base hardware provided by Qualcomm and run with it. While that’s not to say that this is a “bad” approach, in some ways it leaves the OEM’s at the mercy of Google’s whim and provides no real benefit, in the long term at least, for OEM’s looking to differentiate, grow profits significantly and control their own fates.

Android also had the benefit of provided an app store that integrated directly into the OS in the form of Android Marketplace, something that Symbian had categorically lacked before 2008. When Nokia came out with the Ovi Store in 2009, it became clearer still to all OEM’s involved with Symbian that not only could they not compete with Nokia in terms of hardware costs, reliability and scale, but they also couldn’t compete in terms of value added services to Symbian OS.  Worse still, Symbian Horizon, which would have been the go-to application repository for Symbian applications for all OEM’s, failed spectacularly leaving Samsung and SE high and dry with regards to added services, through no fault of the Symbian Foundation of course.

NB. Symbian in it’s base implementation comes without mapping applications and application stores

Having realized that there would be no financial benefit in sticking around, both companies decided to jump ship to an OS where all the work was done for them and they simply needed to toss an OS on some hardware and meet some nebulous requirements concerning the use of Google services and market and they’d be just peachy.

The second most telling statement made was by Nokia where they said that they had no intentions of sticking to the large-scale generational changes to the Symbian platform formerly known as S^3, S^4.x , S^5 etc and that they would be sticking to continuous, smaller scale improvements to what they would call “Symbian” with most recent devices getting the changes initially slated for the generational S^4 release. Furthermore, they publicly stated that Symbian development would give way to Qt development, in essence both dog-fooding and relegation of Symbian C++ to legacy status.

In hindsight, these events in addition to the rapid pace of development of both software and hardware in the mobile sphere has led to the predicament the Foundation has faced, and thusly the decision made in the conference call and board meetings today.

On the bright side of course, SEE2010 begins tomorrow with the MeeGo conference slated for the following week. Here’s to hoping for at least SOME positive news and seeing positive strides being taken in both domains.  Keep your browsers pointed here for more news on both Expos in coming days.

The following blog post was dropped into our comments section not long ago and having read it from end to end, I can sincerely empathize with the author and agree almost whole-heartedly with his views.

I think the key takeaway from this article is that Nokia has an image problem and seems not to realize the severity of said image and the possible repercussions of such a problem. Let’s hope that Nokia World 2010 is the beginning of a change in direction for Nokia.

Give it a read and leave your comments both here and @ texrat’s blog.

http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/an-open-letter-to-nokia-for-2010/

Thanks a lot Randall. Great post.

Currently available for the Nokia N97, N97mini, X6, 5800, and 5230

Video of Swype in action below.

via

Note this is not meant to be a serious article, a realistic analysis, nor do I have any inside information about any upcoming takeovers. This is more of an exercise in thinking out loud from someone who doesn’t claim to be an expert on such things…

1. Merging with Research in Motion (“Nokia in Motion”?)

Symbian is probably here to stay, as is MeeGo. Blackberry OS has its perks, but to be honest most of the good stuff with Blackberry devices lies in their messaging strengths, which were largely written in the same MIDP Java that Symbian already supports. Nokia’s own messaging software on their devices has drawn criticism over the years, and has never really improved much. They’ve simply added extra email connectors over the top that create confusion and annoyance, whereas Blackberry users have loved every minute of their experience.

Fortunately for Nokia, everything else about Blackberry OS is easily outdone by Symbian. Plus, Symbian supports more than just Java for its application development.

Worth an extra note is that some of the most popular Blackberry devices have been those aimed at enterprise with the very small qwerty keyboards, akin to some of Nokia’s E-series devices. I imagine a merger with RIM would see a lot more high quality devices in this form factor appearing, possibly with a load of multimedia hardware and software thrown in to show off what Nokia is good at.

2. Merging with Apple (“Appia”?)

Combining Apple’s innovations and success stories with the iPhone with Nokia’s hardware expertise and raw sales counts would likely lead to explosive results. Assuming the executives didn’t end up in some sort of Battle Royale situation on an desserted island in the Pacific, we’d probably see a lot of interesting results.

First and foremost, we’d see the number of devices output by the combined company probably easily countable on one hand – one device for each of Nokia’s current choice of letter prefixes perhaps, each with similar hardware and almost identical software, but in different appearances (different form factors, screen resolutions, camera positions, etc.)

The choice between the operating systems on the devices would be tricky. Clearly Apple’s iPhone has the edge as far as user experience and application stores go, and so iOS would need to stick around. However, Nokia’s shown time and again that Symbian is stable, secure, and easier to develop from. Perhaps the answer will be to throw higher specced, Nokia-standard hardware into a device running iOS, and throw in some multitasking and a few other Symbian-isms. Maybe there would still be 2 sets of devices in the market. Or perhaps we might see devices that can dual-boot iOS and Symbian based on needs?

To be honest, it’s more likely that whichever company leads the merge will work to crush the efforts of the other, absorbing a few of the opposition’s good ideas into their own flagship devices. At least the patent war would be over though.

3. Merging with Google (“Gookia”?)

Ignoring the most entertaining name so far, merging with Google is perhaps the most unlikely of these unlikely combinations. Apart from anything else, I expect a lot of their services would suddenly gain the Ovi brand, possibly even the main search engine after a few years, albeit alongside Google’s name.

But that aside, Android would probably not last long in a Gookia World. Symbian would carry on as always, of course, but Android would likely get absorbed in their high-end devices along with Maemo. Perhaps MeeGo would gain a few more project teams, and we’d end up with MeeGoid?

The key point to note is that this merge would perhaps mean the least changes to the parent companies overall. Most of Google’s various ventures would continue to develop as before, and Nokia would keep selling Symbian and Series 40 devices by the millions. However, the pool of resources for the very high-end phones would likely give Gookia a major advantage over its competitors – iPhone and Blackberry devices might even start to decline in popularity, though of course there’ll always be fanboys.

And the rest…

Of course, there are other companies we could consider. Merging with Microsoft (“Nokrosoft”?) would likely see the Nokia name and products fade into obscurity over the following decade. Going with HP (“Nokia HP” is the best I could come up with) to join with old rival Palm would likely be another where the Nokia name get phased out, but the devices themselves would probably continue to develop in a similar manner to the iPAQ brand continued in its years beyond Compaq.

Much of this is just idle speculation offered so that readers can consider the interesting, or entertaining outcomes that might follow these merges. Though, always consider that the acquisition of Palm by HP was a surprise to many, and so perhaps some of these ideas aren’t as far-fetched as we might assume.

By all means offer some thoughts in the comments. I imagine some of our readers can come with far more comedy around the topic than I might manage with my company names…

Finnish mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia Corp (NYSE: NOK) said today it had agreed to buy US smartphone manufacturer Palm, Inc (NasdaqGS: PALM) for 4.15 billion dollars (3.14 billion euros)

“Nokia is committed to be at the forefront of mobile user interface and internet services. By joining forces with Palm, we will  impliment our shared strategy of delivering innovative web experience and services through a unified, single identity user management of all user information and media to our mobile devices.” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President and CEO, Nokia. “The integration of WebOS will give our consumers leading convergence devices that more than meet and exceed consumer expectations.”

California-based Palm, Inc will be launching the Palm Pre at the end of the month, the first and last Palm device to feature WebOS.

The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009.

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idOFLO0104L20RI0A9lP

At the first London Nokia: Go Play event, OVI was announced. With OVI, Nokia is attempting to grasp mobile internet services by taking the next step at connecting people and allowing users to get at all their digital content whenever, where ever.

“… we believe that mobile advertising will be an important element in monetizing those services for our customers and partners. Enpocket’s mature leading edge platform and people expertise are a strong fit with Nokia existing capabilities in the mobile advertising market,“

said Tero Ojanperä, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia.

“This acquisition is a game changing move to bring the reach and depth of Nokia to organize the market across the world, and make it easier for an ecosystem to develop.“

The platform can deliver mobile advertising across multiple formats including SMS, MMS, mobile Internet advertising, and video. Enpocket is powering mobile advertising for leading mobile operators and publishers across the globe and has an ad sales force that is working with large brands.

“Effective interactive advertising on the mobile device can create tremendous value for the mobile industry while bringing new Internet services to people around the world,“

said Enpocket President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Baker.

“Enpocket and Nokia are combining to provide the leadership needed to define, build and standardize globally the business of mobile advertising so that brands can easily and efficiently engage consumers on their personal devices.“

About Enpocket

Enpocket is the global leader in mobile advertising, providing brands with end-to-end, turnkey solutions that make marketing to the personal device simple and effective. With an award-winning platform and worldwide partner network of mobile operators and publishers, Enpocket delivers high ROI mobile advertising experiences. Powered by analytics, the Enpocket Platform delivers targeted ‘intelligent mobile marketing’ with measurable results. Enpocket is headquartered in Boston with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Singapore and Mumbai. To learn more, please visit www.enpocket.com.

Enpocket.com – watch the flash demo. Is it me or did I hear an iPhone?

The mobile phone may be small, but in the bigger picture it’s far from it.

No other medium is as personally engaging.

Or as capable of such wide reach, timely relevance and variety of interaction.

Learn how our global lead in rich solutions and smart, predictive targeting can benefit your brand.

Who cares about size when it works like nothing else?