Vodafone UK customers have plenty to look forward to now that both the business centric Nokia E7 and multimedia powerhouse Sony Ericsson Xperia arc have made their way to Vodafone’s web site as “coming soon.”

Although no exact time frames were given regarding their arrivals, it’s only natural to assume at this point that they’re very close to launch – especially when Vodafone UK mentions them as coming soon. As it currently stands, you can only register to receive the latest updates regarding both smartphones. But with almost all things, we’ll slowly start to see additional and concrete information regarding the availability and pricing for both smartphones in the near future.

With two highly anticipated smartphones bound for Vodafone UK, one targeting business minded individuals with the other for multimedia buffs, there’s going to be a lot of excitement for their customers. So if you’re interested in either devices, you can check out their respective coming soon pages and register for those updates.

source: Vodafone UK (1 & 2) via Unwired View

A recent Canalys report announced the end of a long Symbian rule in the mobile OS world, but an analyst took a deeper look at the numbers and refuted the company’s statistics. The problem with them? Android activations. Analyst Tomi Ahonen didn’t question Nokia’s figures despite some information over at the Finns that their converged device sales stood at 28.3 million, but rather puts Google’s numbers under scrutiny.

Based on daily activation rates, diligently reported by Google folks, Ahonen claims that Canalys’ estimate is far fetched. The reason for this lies in daily Android activations, which have reached 300,000 units a day in December according to Andy Rubin’s tweet on December 9, 2010 . To reach the 33.3 million sales figure that Canalys came up with, Android activations must have been at 600,000 a day, which is very unlikely.

Ahonen doesn’t mention anything about the fact that Canalys included the OMS and Tapas platforms (Android-based platforms produced in China), as well as the fact that Google activations include not only smartphones but other devices like tablets. These facts cast some doubt over the estimates by Canalys, but it should be very soon when other companies like IDC come up with their statistics to prove which side is right.

source: Communities Dominate Brands blog

Thanks, Eugen!

The King is dead. Long live the King. You got it right, folks, Android is now the most popular mobile operating system in the world according to the latest Canalys report. Sales of phones running the green robotic OS stood at 32.9 million, while Symbian smartphones accounted for 31 million in the last quarter of 2010.

The industry has gradually stepped out of Symbian land during the last two years and now Nokia is the sole producer of Symbian phones. Major manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, LG and Sony Ericsson have all put their chips on Google’s OS and the situation is hardly changing in the future.

Nokia still retained its position as the global leader in smartphone sales with a share of 28%. HTC and Samsung accounted for the major part of Android smartphones with a combined share of 45%.

Nokia’s official numbers for converged devices (which include smartphones and mobile computers) however differ from the estimate by Canalys. The Finns reported converged device volume of 28.3 million for the fourth quarter, even less than the figure by Canalys. Last quarter’s results are no surprise, but rather prove a trend that has formed long before. It also remains disputable whether some S40 devices with a touchscreen like the Nokia C3 Touch and Type could indeed fall in the smartphone category.

source: Canalys via Yahoo! News

We had a leak last week that showed a sample from the dual-core LG Optimus 2X shooting 1080p Full HD video solo. Now the reviewers have matched it up against the Nokia N8, which has the biggest camera sensor of any smartphone. The shootout hasn’t been in stills, as most probably the photography-oriented Nokia N8 would have won that round, with its 12MP shooter, and Carl-Zeiss lens. You can read the rest of the article at PhoneArena.com.

After developing the aircraft Bluetooth Access Point, the folks over at ASiQ realized that most planes already have some sort of an inexpensive satellite link onboard, as well as a computer, be it just the pilot’s laptop. Therefore they created a piece of software, which connects the two, beaming mobile voice and data capabilities to your cell phone via Bluetooth.

The proprietary software will be sold in the form of a SafeCell application for BlackBerry, Symbian, and, soon, Android devices, at the whopping $12500 price tag. If you don’t have the satellite link gizmo, ASiQ will sell you the aforementioned Bluetooth Access Point device for $10000 more. Still, a far cry from the few hundreds thousand dollars a conventional aircraft mobile phone system usually costs, at a fraction of the weight.

The cherry on the cake – the Iridium system connects you directly to the available satellite ground stations, circumventing the mobile roaming networks, and allowing for the cheap $1 per minute of talk time, instead of up to $5 when roaming. Not that you will be nickel-and-diming your phone bill, if you can afford a jet, but still a nice perk.

The $12500 cost probably makes the SafeCell the most expensive application to date, but considering the alternative solutions, ASiQ claims it’s pretty cheap. Oh, and for iPhone users – Apple’s Bluetooth stack there is too restrictive, so configuring the software for iPhone usage will cost you extra, but it’s doable. Too bad, but you can have your own choice of smartphone and a noise-cancelling hands free kit for free, as a bonus with each unit of the SafeCell app, purchased by January 30th. We’ll review the application as soon as the corporate jet arrives from the factory. Hey, it’s the holidays, anything can happen!

source: ASiQ via Thinq

Pressured by the interviewers at the D: Dive into Mobile conference last week, Andy Rubin, of Android origin, had a hard time fending off questions about Google talking with Nokia’s new CEO Stephen Elop about the possibility of introducing Android to Nokia devices. Such a move would make huge sense, at least for the North American market, where Nokia is almost non-existent. Despite that it is not as big as Europe, Asia and Africa, where Nokia sells half a billion phones a year, the American market is extremely visible and something of a trendsetter in the last few years, with the advent of iOS and Android devices.

Andy Rubin said that, basically, every OEM manufacturer is adopting Google’s mobile OS, and with the shutting down of the Symbian Foundation website Nokia is left the sole licensee of the aging platform. He said that he is totally open for business should the new management at Nokia, which is headed by the former Microsoftie Stephen Elop, decide to evaluate Android as an option. We are sure that Google’s chief Android guy would love to see his creation on a few hundred million phones more. The “no comment” type of avoiding direct questions if Google is in talks with Nokia about it, only confirms the sneaking suspicion that talks might already be underway. The Nokia part starts at about 6 minutes into the video below.

source: AllThingsDigital via Computerworld

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The browser on the Nokia N8 has been pitted against the competition, and the results come to show you’d be better off with Opera Mobile and Opera Mini on your Symbian^3 handset. That’s at least until Nokia issues the firmware update with the new Symbian browser, which is rumored to appear in January.

Below are the page loading results in a table form with two numbers – the first one is how long did it take for the page to load in usable form, i.e. with readable content, while the ads and other elements continue to load. The second number is how long did it take for the pages to load completely. The competition has been the Android 2.2 browser, as found in the blazing fast HTC Desire HD, Safari, Opera Mobile with the Turbo mode on and off, as well as Opera Mini.

Not looking pretty, but it seems that if you download the free Opera Mobile (which has a new Symbian iteration) for 90% of the websites out there, and use Opera Mini for the rest, you can make do pretty well until the Symbian^3 update hits. On the bright side, Opera’s browsers compress the pages, so your data consumption is slashed significantly while using them.

source: AllAboutSymbian

Smartphone sales in Asia have been one in every five phones in the quarter ending September 2010, according to GfK Asia. That is almost fourfold increase compared to the same period of last year, and amounts to over 4.7 million smartphones sold, half of all sales in value.

What attracted our attention to the study, though, is not the growing relative percentage of smartphone sales, this is a worldwide trend. Much more interesting is that in the Asian region as a whole, Android has now taken the lead compared to the previous top dog Symbian, according to GfK Asia. Nokia’s phones are hugely popular there, and Symbian is still leader in the Southeast. In North Asia, though, Android has overtaken iOS as the most popular mobile platform, while the trio Android, RIM and iOS has taken a sizeable chunk of Symbian’s market share overall.

We will see if this is a harbinger of things to come, and still, it is better to judge Nokia’s performance after the sales results for the Nokia N8 and Nokia E7 are in, and that won’t be until Q1 of next year.

via Symbian-Freak

HTC Desire HD (L) and Nokia N8 (R) both now available from Vodafone U.K.

A pair of today’s top-of-the-line smartphones are now being launched overseas by Vodafone U.K. in a manner that almost makes those in the U.S. wish that the States were still British colonies. The carrier’s web site and retail outlets are both now offering the HTC Desire HD and the Nokia N8. The former is a Froyo flavored Android device that is equivalent to a 4G-less version of Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G available in the States. The unit is equipped with a 4.3 inch WVGA display and a 1GHz Snapdragon processor along with an 8MP camera with dual flash and AF.

The Nokia N8 is the Finnish based firm’s strongest challenger to the Apple iPhone, matching the 3.5 inch screen size of Apple’s touchscreen device and offering users the new Symbian ^3 OS. With a 12MP camera on the back of the phone, the N8 is superior to the majority of handsets when it comes to taking snapshots. Video capture at 720p allows for HD videos.

Vodafone is offering the HTC Desire HD for free with a 24 month plan costing 35BP a month. Buy the phone online and get 900 minutes of uncharged texts and 750MB of mobile data per month compared with the 600 minutes of texts and 500MB of monthly data you receive when buying the unit at a store. Buying the phone online will also entitle you to 5MB of European roaming data.

The Nokia N8 can also be obtained for free with a 2 year, 30BP a month service. A special lime green variant of the model is available for Vodafone buyers only.
source: TechRadar

Nokia once held 70% of India’s mobile device market. According to IDC research, they now only hold 36.3%, which is an almost 18% loss from last year.

In other markets, the loss can be attributed to the increasing popularity of Google’s Android OS and Apple’s iPhone. The loss in India, however, is different because their market is much more heavily weighted towards basic feature phones.

The IDC report indicates that smaller companies like Micromax, Spice Mobile, Karbon, and Lava have begun to replace Nokia as the feature phones of choice in India. Their cumulative market share has doubled to 33% in only 6 months.

Nokia is disputing the findings of IDC, claiming that they overestimated the size of the dual-SIM market in India, and thus miscalculated Nokia’s overall market share. Nokia also claims that IDC failed to include shipments from a particular factory. Despite Nokia’s doubts, IDC is sticking with its original estimates.

The smaller-brand phones that once only appealed as budget devices are now offering innovative and appealing features unavailable from Nokia. Spice Mobile, for example, has introduced an integrated UV light to detect counterfeit currency, and dual memory card slots for quick inter-card data transfers.
source: IndiaTimes via MobileCrunch