Posts Tagged ‘Nokia’

United Arab Emirates switches off Blackberry services

Monday, August 9th, 2010

On October 11, 2010 the UAE authorities will suspend the usage of some services in Blackberry phones. This decision was taken in the context of national security, informs Reuters. The thing is that the government can’t control the information transferred via these devices as the UAE doesn’t have the corresponding code.

This action is expected to touch about 500,000 users. The limitation will be valid till Blackberry doesn’t work out ‘the good-enough solution’, admitted the General Director of the Telecommunication Department Mohammed Al-Ghanim. According to the official, only Blackberry services will be put under a ban. Al-Ghanim says smartphones Nokia and iPhone won’t be touched by this limitation so iphone application developers can relax.

The negotiations between the Department and the manufacturer of smartphones Research In Motion have been carried since 2007. The UAE authorities inform that the compromise in using Blackberry Messenger, e-mail 2and Internet access services hasn’t been reached.

Earlier the dissatisfaction of data coding in Blackberry Messenger has been expressed in other countries as well. Thus, last week the government of India informed that such data could be used for conducting acts of terrorism. Despite this news, BlackBerry apps developers continue creating products for this device which is considered the most popular one in the market at present.

Blackberry & Nokia will give in their positions at the market of mobile apps & devices

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

nokia_blackberryIn the nearest future the producers of smartphones RIM and Nokia will face the problem of changing their positions at the market. The reason of this will become the actions of Apple and Google. The analytics from Goldman Sachs’ warned about this after analyzing the state of retail sales of smartphones in the US.
According to their data, the RIM Blackberry devices stopped being best-sellers at the mobile operators (apart from AT&T) because of a rapidly growing interest to the latest Android based communicators and the corresponding demand for them at consumers. However, despite all this, RIM will be able to realize about 11 mln smartphones by the end of the year, which will be a good result in comparison with the previous period ended with 11.2 mln devices sold.
The situation at the Finnish producer is even more tragic than at the Canadian company. Nokia itself is expecting the decrease of sales at the end of the spring sales – up to $8.3 bln or even lower due to a high competition at the market of highly technological devices.
While the market share of Nokia is still big, the share of Apple with its best-sellers iPhone and Google Android is growing rapidly thanks to launching new devices. The players of the mobile application market take advantage of the situation and actively place orders for mobile application development for Android. Numerous iPhone apps developers are trying to keep up with them.

Symbian OS is open and free now

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

This month the Symbian platform has become completely open and free. Lee Williams, CEO, says that this operating system is already a dominant one, but now mobile software development for Symbian gets all the advantages of work with open source projects, almost unlimited possibilities. Mr. Williams also stresses Symbian additional advantages comparing with Android OS. He explains that Android has not more than a third of open codes, and the rest of them are closed.

One more advantage of Symbian OS: programmers and other specialists working at platform development will regularly publish plans of the future upgrades according to Lee Williams’ words.

The initiative to open Symbian appeared in June of the year 2008, when Nokia announced its plans to buy the rest of the Symbian programming codes from other companies and place them under control of Symbian Foundation. Now there are more than 330 million of Symbian-phones in the world. They are produced be such companies as Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu and Sharp.

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Choosing the best platform for mobile apps development

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Reviewing platforms for mobile apps development we cannot help but write some more descriptions. Let’s estimate such OSes as Symbian, Linux Mobile and Palm.

Symbian OS
Nokia is losing its forces, it was the best developer of mobile phones in the world a couple of years ago, but now it buckles under pressure of other leading companies. But is still has “margin of safety”. Moreover, Nokia popularizes Symbian, now this OS has open code (open source), and this fact will definitely have an influence on company’s further development.

Symbian_OS

Symbian UIQ
Symbian UIQ was developed by the UIQ Technology Company. UIQ (User Interface Quartz) is a software platform based on Symbian OS. In early 2009 UIQ Technology was liquidated, and this intellectual property was transferred to Symbian Foundation (non-profit organization). So mobile software developers don’t plan further improvements of UIQ (as an independent platform).

Linux Mobile
Programmers working for mobile development companies make facetious remarks that every self-respecting company making smartphones intends to make its own version of Linux based mobile OS. Some of them achieve success in it, others don’t. It’s almost impossible to enumerate all of them, here are only some examples: Access Linux Platform, LiMo, Moblin, MotoMagxj, Nokia Maemo, Openmoko, Openmokon, Palm webOS, Qt Extendedmn, Ubuntu Mobilem, etc. All these OSes have their own look-and-feels (many of them are incompatible), that is why it’s very difficult to develop mobile apps for such platforms, it’s just a non-value-added process.

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Palm OS
Once this OS occupied bulk of the market share. At the same time Microsoft decided to start the development of its own mobile OS Windows CE, because IT-giant was inspired by success of Palm OS. But now it is no longer relevant, Ed Colligan said that Palm will no longer produce products based on Palm OS, the company’s efforts will be focused on Palm webOS, but that’s another story.

Palm_OS

Show your location using Google Latitude!

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Now you can show your location to the best friends via Google Latitude! The service Google Mobile Maps introduced a new feature called Google Latitude. It gives the opportunity to indicate user’s location and show it to selected contacts via mobile phone (using the GPS). You may be know this flashing blue dot on the map, which shows your location, wherever you are. In other words Google Latitude gives you the opportunity to “share” this blue dot with anyone you want.

Google Latitude is a mobile application (supporting such platforms as Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry). You can install it by downloading via mobile browser at google.com/latitude. Using it, you will always know where your friends and family are, also you can call them directly from this application, send instant messages or emails. Each contact added in your profile will be marked as an icon or avatar on the map; it will have the same look in the contact list (like in Twitter).

Do not want to shine your location? So you can “hide” from unwanted contacts (choose “hide from this friend” in properties of each contact). You can even enter your fake location. So it’s so easily to control the degree of your privacy.

Google Latitude is available for users of Blackberry, Windows Mobile Smartphones, iPhones, Android-devices and Nokia S60 in 27 countries.