Tag archive: Symbian

Nokia has announced that its latest update to the Symbian operating system, Nokia Belle, is now available for download. Announced in December last year, Nokia Belle caused controversy at the time due to its long gestation period, as well as for dropping the Symbian name. Previous updates always used the Symbian name in the title — Symbian Anna for example — but not so with Nokia Belle, a move that at the time came without… Read More

In what should come as a surprise to no one at all, Apple's iOS finished 2011 with a dominant share of the mobile web-browsing market, and will begin 2012 as the operating system of choice for more than half of mobile tech consumers. Net Market Share has a month-by-month breakdown of the mobile and tablet computer operating systems used for web browsing, and the final figures for December 2011 show Apple's iOS leading the study with… Read More

Apple still commands the largest market share for a smartphone manufacturer, but Android manufacturers are closing in. According to new data released by Nielsen, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are all top five smartphone manufacturers, along with RIM. Keep in mind, this data doesn't include non-smartphones. If you factor in those, Samsung is the largest phone maker in the U.S. Worldwide, Nokia leads the pack.  Smartphone market share by… Read More

On Wednesday, Nokia announced the next update of their Symbian^3 operating system, named Belle, would be coming out in February for select devices. Except they didn't call it Symbian Belle, but Nokia Belle instead. The subtle name swap was explained with a throwaway quote in parenthesis saying “previously Symbian Belle,” which did little to shed any light on the situation. Since joining forces with Microsoft, Nokia has steadily… Read More

Following recent reports of factory closures and redundancies, Nokia is now reportedly preparing to put its luxury handset brand, Vertu, up for sale. The move is part of the beleaguered mobile giant's attempts to streamline its operations in an effort to compete with the likes of HTC, Apple and Samsung. For those  of you not familiar with the name, Vertu is Nokia's high-end mobile phone division, which has been around since 1998.… Read More

Based off a report from Ireland-based research firm StatCounter, the Google Chrome browser has moved into second place globally for the first time. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer still remains at the top, Mozilla's Firefox browser continued on a downward trend that started at the end of 2010. The research firm reported that Chrome took a 25.7 percent market share in November 2011 while Firefox fell to 25.23 percent. Just two… Read More

At 9 a.m. U.K. time this morning, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop kicked off Nokia World 2011 by unveiling six new phones including its first two Windows Phone 7.5 handsets: the Lumia 800 and the cheaper Lumia 710. Unfortunately for those of us in the States, they won't be coming to the U.S. until sometime in 2012.  Below is a breakdown of each device and some of Nokia's additions to the Windows Phone platform. These devices are already… Read More

Finland's Nokia is gearing up to launch its first Windows Phone devices, but the company is also continuing to cut costs and wind down its former flagship Symbian business. The company announced today its will be cutting about 3,500 additional positions by the end of 2012, with the bulk of those cuts coming by the end of the year as Nokia shuts down a 2,200-person manufacturing facility in Cluj, Romania. Nokia says it's also… Read More

If you needed any more reassurance that Android stands as a major threat to Apple's iOS dominance, ComScore has a present for you: According to the digital research firm's new study of European cellphone usage, use of Google's mobile operating system has skyrocketed over the last year, jumping over iOS to become the second most-used mobile OS, after Nokia's Symbian OS, in the five leading European markets.  As of July… Read More

When Nokia announced its latest Symbian Belle phones last week, the company emphasized that all three devices support Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology that enable the devices to be used as payment methods and mobile wallets at point of purchases: if retailers support the technology, they can just wave their phones near point-of-sales terminals and approve the transaction—depending how users have things set up, payments might… Read More

Finland's Nokia is in the midst of switching over to Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, but since the first devices aren't due to ship until the end of this year—and won't start shipping in earnest until 2012—Nokia has to do something to try to keep its current customers happy. Today, that's Symbian Belle, a new revision to its Symbian 3 operating system that includes a selection of modern smartphone… Read More

In an interview with AllThingsD, Nokia’s head of US operations revealed that the brand’s feature phones and smartphones would no longer be sold to Canadian and US consumers. Instead, the struggling manufacturer will be throwing its weight behind Windows Phone 7 in attempts to focus on the success of Windows mobile OS. Nokia smartphones have struggled with North American audiences, finding themselves largely without carrier support and eclipsed… Read More

Google's Android mobile operating system continued to gain users during April, May, and June, jumping from 34.7 percent market share in March of this year to 40.1 percent at the end of June, according to a survey of 30,000 mobile subscribers by comScore. This makes Android the most popular OS in the United States. Apple followed Google's lead with 26.6 percent of US smartphone users, a jump of 1.1 percent. Blackberry maker Research… Read More

A new Android virus records users' phone calls without their knowledge, reports Network World. The Trojan malware, which automatically records outgoing phone calls and stores them on the device's SD card, was first uncovered by CA Technologies security researcher Dinesh Venkatesan, who specializes in a variety of nasty software, including “mobile threats.” To test the Android malware, Venkatesan ran tests of the… Read More

Although the company once promised it would switch to human-friendly names for phones, for years the company has tried to distinguish between different classes of phones by prepending them with letters: the E-series were mainly for business users, the X-series were all about portable media, the N-series were flagship high-end models, and the C-series (just over a year old) were for everybody else. Now, the company has announced it will be… Read More