Blackberry maker RIM recently proposed a new nano-SIM card design to counter one proposal made by Apple to the the European Telecommunications Standards Instititute. One of the major points of contention surrounds the use of a SIM tray; Apple wanted to use one, which effectively would impose their SIM tray design on other manufacturers, but it would be interoperable with existing SIM formats since the pin footprint in Apple's layout is exactly the same as the old generation SIM cards. Meanwhile Motorola, RIM, and (until recently) Nokia were pushing a tray-less design with a fingernail catch, not unlike what we see on microSD memory cards. Apple's original nano-SIM design was as long as the old mini SIM was wide, which could easily confuse consumers, lead to jamming, and consequently more repairs and returns. RIM and Motorola's countered that adapters are unreliable and can't hold a card securely against the contacts, but still offered the compromise that you see above.

Despite the compromise offered here by RIM, nobody could agree after an informal vote, which isn't much of a surprise given Apple herded in sympathetic partners to the association. Ultimately, if these guys can't find common ground, it's entirely possible that we'll see two nano SIM standards floating around: one made by Apple, and one used by everybody else. You can imagine what a headache that could be for all parties involved, particularly carriers. It seems like most parties adopted micro SIM without too much of a fight, and that was also a charge led by Apple with the iPhone 4; could the same bullheadedness get other manufacturers to just go along with Apple again? Why is Apple so hell-bent on their particular design anyway? How would carriers side in all of this?

If you're interested in poking around the ETSI documentation, it's all somewhere in here; the particulars of RIM's latest proposal are available here.

Source: The Verge

Just in case we needed any more convincing that people love their iPhones, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has found through recent surveys that Apple's smartphones are leaving customers the happiest. The iPhone scored 83 on their system, compared to to Nokia, LG and HTC who are all tied at 75, Motorola at 73, Samsung at 71, and RIM at a sad 69. The ACSI also looked at U.S. service providers. Topping the list were regional carriers like U.S. Cellular with 76, then Sprint with 71, followed by Verizon with 70, and AT&T and T-Mobile tied at 69.

Lots of other studies have consistently backed up customer satisfaction for the iPhone, but it's always interesting to see just how much of a lead Apple has on the competition. The fact that the competition is nearly ten points suggests it will take a whole lot of work to bring Android and the other platforms up to snuff with iOS.

Do these rankings stack up with the sentiment you see among friends? Is Sprint really ahead of the other three major U.S. carriers?

Source: ACSI via Wired

Samsung has snagged the top smartphone vendor spot from Apple, a throne Apple had just claimed in Q4 2011. Apple's Q1 2012 smartphone market share sat at 24.2%, while Samsung enjoyed a slight lead with 29.1% of all smartphone sales worldwide. The quarter also marked Samsung's leap over Nokia as the top mobile phone vendor globally, which is a huge competitive and symbolic victory. The overall market has shipped 144.9 million smartphones in the quarter, which is a 42.5% increase over last year. IDC's senior research analyst, Ramon Llamas, said of the battle between Apple and Samsung:

The race between Apple and Samsung remained tight during the quarter, even as both companies posted growth in key areas. Apple launched its popular iPhone 4S in additional key markets, most notably in China, and Samsung experienced continued success from its Galaxy Note smartphone/tablet and other Galaxy smartphones. With other companies in the midst of major strategic transitions, the contest between Apple and Samsung will bear close observation as hotly-anticipated new models are launched.

Apple and Samsung have been butting heads in the courtrooms, despite plans to talk about settling on their patent dispute; some might even say the neck-and-neck race between the two giants is what's propelling their legal squabbles forward. As the leading manufacturer, Samsung also embodies the Android threat that Steve Jobs pledged to go to thermonuclear war against. There's more than just patents and market share at stake here - there are big egos and a lot of pride on both sides of the fence. It will be interesting to see who wins which battles, but this is shaping up to be a feud that won't be concluding any time soon.

Have you swapped out an iPhone for a Samsung device? Or, conversely, made the leap from a Samsung Android smartphone to iOS? How are you finding the switch?

Source: IDC

Apple's eccentric co-founder and longtime gadgetphile, Steve Wozniak, decided to get himself a shiny new Nokia Lumia 900 so he could have a bit of a play with Windows Phone and... he likes it. And this should surprise precisely no one. It's a great new phone and Woz tries every great new phone that comes off the assembly line (he has a chair reserved at the end of the conveyer belt, we're told). He's also giddy-passionate about technology (and recently said Android was more functional than iPhone...). However, since he co-founded Apple, Woz liking anything without an lowercase i in front of it makes headlines. So let's have at it.

"iPhone is my favorite phone. I did give my opinion that the Windows 7 phone had superior visual appearance and operation cues that were also more attractive. In my opinion, it sets the mark for user interface. I would recommend it over my Android phones given that it doesn’t yet have the breadth of apps. I surmise that Microsoft hired someone from Apple and put money into having a role in the UI and appearance of some key apps. I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things."

Yeahbutokay... that last part is more than a little around the bend and down the garden path, since Jobs was still alive when Windows Phone and Nokia were put together, never mind anyone reincarnated in the last year WOULD STILL BE A BABY and not in a position to turn around the battleship that is Microsoft. It also doesn't give the credit where it's due -- to the Windows Phone team and Microsoft team for putting together a damn fine product.

Windows Phone is arguably still more of an app than a platform, but that's changing faster and faster every day. While their specs lag Android by a considerable amount, they've got the polish and experience down and should easily be able to start matching speeds and feeds when Windows Phone 8 starts hitting shelves.

Of course that will be around when iPhone 5,1 and iOS 6 launch, so it'll make for an interesting fall to say the least.

Meanwhile, we leave you with Woz, bless him. (It's audio-only. Now if they'd had an iPhone with them...)

Source: SoundCloud file, A New Domain, WPCentral

Nokia has kicked off an ad campaign called Smartphone Beta Test, which features mock video clips roughly describing the development process of the iPhone, and suggest that end consumers are just a part of some big public beta test. That's pretty funny considering Microsoft said that Windows Phone would take about five years after launch to fully mature, but let's leave that alone for now. One fictional product manager tries to raise performance issues relating to display quality outdoors, fragility of the phone against impact, and reception issues (better known as the infamous Death Grip). Of course, he's talked down to by two coworkers telling him ridiculous things like "so don't go outside" and feeding him the classic "you're holding it wrong" line.

While you might expect this sort of thing from Nokia, AT&T's participation is surprisingly aggressive considering their close relationship with Apple. One graphic dug up from the site's source code shows AT&T store locations on a map and a caption that reads "If you've used a smartphone in the last 5 years, it was a tester. To exchange your phone for the Lumia 900, visit an AT&T location today."

I found Samsung's anti-iPhone ads pretty funny, but something about these is just dated. Are we really still trying to bust Apple's chops about antennagate? Anyway, here are the ads. Downvote at will.

Source: WPCentral

Apple is butting heads with RIM, Motorola, and Nokia over the next evolution of SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card sizes. SIM cards are used by GSM and LTE carriers to attach numbers and service plans to mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. After paving the way for the micro-SIM format, which has since been adopted by Nokia for their Lumia series, Apple is now putting pressure on the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to recognize a their new nano-SIM format as the next industry standard. What's the problem? Well, competitors worry that Apple would be in a position to claim patents on the nano-SIM format, and if it was set as the universal standard, they could all end up paying royalties. There's also a concern that other vendors would be stuck with Apple's design even if they think they've come up with something better.

On top of that, Apple might skew the voting process, having recently applied six of their subsidiaries for membership in the council. This would oust Nokia as the largest voting member.  Service providers are all for the nano-SIMs, in any case, and they're supporting Apple's proposal to ETSI. Voting at ETSI starts next week.

The nano-SIM would be 30% smaller and 15% thinner than the micro-SIMs currently found in iPhones and iPads, and that means more room in smartphones for other good stuff. iMore previously heard Apple was intent on moving away from the traditional 30-pin Dock port towards a "micro-Dock" connector due to similar space considerations.

Source: Financial Times

Asymco has compiled the profits, revenues, and unit shipments among all of the major manufacturers, and as you can see in this graph, Apple is still kicking everyone's behind when it comes to smartphone profit share. Though the revenue share gap with Samsung is a bit smaller than the one for profits, Apple is still decidedly in the lead. After all is said and done, Apple is claiming 75% of the profit share, 40% of the revenue share, and 9% of the unit share of the mobile market (though that last number might be closer to 8%).

After Apple's monstrously successful first quarter it's no surprise that Apple is profitable. Heck, it's no surprise they're the undisputed God-King of the mobile industry, and they probably have a giant pool of money where employees can get all Scrooge McDuck on lunch breaks. However, the fact that Apple is pulling in so much money out of the entire industry really illustrates just how successful the iPhone has become. Of course, if you ask any Android fan, financial success doesn't necessarily equate to product quality (and I'm inclined to agree with them), but you can't argue with the results. There's another great graph here that shows just how much the iPhone's market share has increased on multiple fronts since launch in 2007.

With this much of a lead, how much does Apple really have to worry about? Will it suffer death by a thousand cuts from a bajillionty Android devices? Or will Windows Phone eventually come into its own and give iPhone a run for its money? Looking at this graphs, it's hard to imagine either of these things happening. The best the competition can reasonably hope for now is to get comfortable in second place. Let's put it this way -- what would the competition have to do to win you over?

Source: Asymco

IDC has released numbers showing that Apple has surpassed LG to become the third largest mobile phone maker in the world.

Apple jumped into the third spot globally from the fifth spot last quarter thanks to a record-breaking quarter of shipments. That represents the Cupertino-based company's highest-ever ranking on IDC's Top 5 global mobile phone leaderboard. [...] Device sales in the U.S. and Japan were particularly strong given extra sales days in the quarter and carrier distribution.

These figures represent overall mobile phone sales, not just smartphone sales. A lot of Apple's recent growth in the mobile phone market can be credited to their latest quarterly results, where they sold through more than 37 million iPhone units. The majority of iPhone sales fell under the iPhone 4S, so it's safe to say the iPhone 4S had a big hand in pushing Apple to the number three spot.

Although they're pretty far off from taking the number one position held by Nokia (with 113.5 million units shipped in Q4 2011, the majority being feature phones), the fact is the iPhone jumped almost 100 percent in year-over-year sales growth with nearly 100 million units sold throughout 2011. Samsung, on the other hand, only grew about 18 percent.

The question is, with no new iPhone until later this year, and lots of new Android phones expected by summer, can Apple overtake Samsung at number two spot any time soon?

Source: IDC

Strategy Analytics has crunched most of the fourth quarter results announced this week (including Apple's), and figures the iPhone maker is now the top smartphone manufacturer, but only by a sliver. In Q4 2011, Apple claimed 23.9% of global smartphone market share, and Samsung trailed only slightly, with 23.5%. That's just counting Q4, too; for the whole year, Samsung beat out Apple by a single percentage point.

Beyond smartphones, in the world of mobiles at large, Apple was relatively far behind. iPhones constituted 8.3% of the world's handsets, while Nokia still clung the top spot with 25.5%, followed by Samsung with 21.3% global market share. Although that shows the iPhone still has a long ways to go, it did boast the best growth out of the three; during the same quarter last year, Apple only constituted 4.0% of the global market.

The folks at Strategy Analytics stepped in for a few comments. Associate Director Alex Spektor said "Apple’s growth was fueled by intense demand for its refreshed iPhone 4S, as well as the availability of three generations of iPhones at a variety of price points at operators like AT&T in the United States," but there's a lot of promise internationally, too. Tom Kang, another director, said "China is becoming a key market for Apple this year, and we expect Apple’s share to grow rapidly in 2012, despite countless copycat rivals.” Nokia's having a rough time holding onto their top spot, despite generally positive reviews of their first Windows Phones. According to Executive Director Neil Mawston,  “Nokia’s global handset shipments declined 8 percent annually to 113.5 million units in Q4 2011. Volumes were buoyed by the sales of Nokia’s low-end dual-SIM models in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, but were a little soft overall, as initial shipments of Microsoft Lumia phones could not offset declining Symbian sales."

It's rarely a surprise to see Apple doing well in terms of sales, but they'll have to keep working hard in order to stay ahead of Samsung. We're seeing lots of different Android phones coming out of Samsung to address different price points, and though Spektor's right that there are older iPhones still on the market, they lack the forward-compatibility of many Android handsets.

It's worth noting that according to Strategy Analytics, the overall smartphone market grew 63.1% in 2011, versus 71.4% growth in 2010. Do you guys think smartphone momentum is starting to plateau, or is this just a slight bump in the road?

Source: Strategy Analytics via Apple Insider

According to a group of hackers in India, Apple, RIM and Nokia could be providing backdoor access to the Indian government, allowing them to monitor user data. The Indian government might be insisting on this access in exchange for allowing Apple and other smartphone vendors to offer their products and services in India, they have allegedly given them access to cellular communications. The agreement appears to be called RINOA (Rim, Nokia, Apple).

Several documents have been found referring to RINOA and how information was gathered from some of these government bodies. I know India is a large country but I'm not quite sure what is more damaging -- not having a presence there at all or betraying your customers' trust by allowing the local government to access data without their knowledge.

Source: ZDNet

Rene, Seth, and Jon Fingas of Electronista talk iPhone 4S 2 months later, Galaxy Nexus competition, Nokia hipsters, iOS 5.1 beta 2, PhotoStream, fake iPhone strings, Netflix, Microsoft apps, newnew Twitter, UI, and more. This is iPhone Live!

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• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)
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You can reach all of us on Twitter @TiPb, or you can email us at podcast@tipb.com, or leave a comment on the website when the show goes live.

We're here every Wednesday night at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern, 2am GMT, and our companion show -- iPad Live! -- is at the same time, on the same channel, on Sunday nights. www.TiPb.com/live

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Kevin, Phil, Derek, Dan, and Rene talk Windows Phone from Mango to Tango (and Nokia!), BlackBerry DevCon and BBX superphones, Android's Ice Cream Sandwich and Galaxy Nexus, webOS and the road ahead, and iPhone 4S and Siri. This is Mobile Nations!

Agenda

• Happy 1st Birthday Windows Phone!
• CrackBerry at BlackBerry DevCon 2011 -Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• http://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-nexus
• HP leaning towards un-spinning-off PSG
• HP using TouchPad to test Windows 8, meeting with webOS buyers? [rumor]
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• iOS 5 Review

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Clayton Miller's Interuserface takes a look at the iconic shapes behind today's biggest mobile companies, and while Apple, iPhone, and iPad are obviously roundrects (rounded rectangles), their competition is just as geometrically aligned:

Microsoft’s Metro UI owns the square. Apple has a corner on the roundrect, from the Springboard launcher to the iPhone hardware itself. Nokia, despite its late entry with MeeGo’s Harmattan UI, found the squircle unclaimed and ran with it beautifully. Palm has used the circle from the early days of PalmOS, and in WebOS, HP continues the tradition with care (one might even note that both Palm and HP structure their wordmarks around the circle).

Zune, obviously, couldn't hold the squircle, and neither Bada nor RIM could take the square or roundrect as their own. Interestingly, Google's Android has no iconic hold on any simple shape (nor do Facebook or Amazon for that matter, who have elected to stick with letters).

[Interuserface via WPCentral]

When Apple next announces their financial results, they should have close to $70 billion in the bank, which according to Asymco will be enough to buy all their manufacturing competitors with the exception of Samsung. That includes HTC, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. (Google and Microsoft aren't manufacturers, they're platform vendors.)

The more remarkable thing is that as market values of phone vendors continue to decline, Apple’s cash will continue to grow dramatically. Indeed, a time may soon come when Apple’s cash will be worth more than the entire phone industry.

I'll say it again -- North Carolina isn't a data center, it's a money bin.

[Asymco]

It looks as though Nokia and Apple have finally come to an agreement over the lawsuit they have been involved in since late 2009, with Apple agreeing to pay licensing fees for key Nokia patents. Originally, Nokia claimed that Apple had infringed on almost two dozen of their patents for mobile technologies. Apple argued that Nokia was demanding "unfair" licensing fees and didn't want to pay more than other companies licensing the same technology, then counter sued for UI and computer-related patents. Complaints flew back and forth, and now the end result of the lawsuit was that Apple has to pay Nokia a lump some of of cash on top of royalties for the term of the agreement with Nokia.

The financial structure of the agreement consists of a one-time payment payable by Apple and on-going royalties to be paid by Apple to Nokia for the term of the agreement. The specific terms of the contract are confidential.

"We are very pleased to have Apple join the growing number of Nokia licensees," said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Nokia. "This settlement demonstrates Nokia's industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market."

Apple having to pay Nokia was never really in question. The argument was over how much. Nokia's patents were in a pool that was supposed to be freely and fairly licensed to everyone. Apple felt Nokia was violating the letter and spirit of that by asking more of Apple. Whether or not Apple eventually got the same terms as other licensees, or whether they did have to pay up more, is still a question.

Apple also remains in litigation with the three top Android makers, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. For now, Nokia is no longer in litigation with anyone.

UPDATE: Apple has issued a statement to the New York Times [NYT]:

“Apple and Nokia have agreed to drop all of our current lawsuits and enter into a license covering some of each other’s patents, but not the majority of the innovation that makes the iPhone unique,” Apple said. “We are glad to put this behind us and get back to focusing on our respective businesses.”

[Nokia via FossPatents]

Market research company, IDC has just released its smartphone market share numbers for the first quarter of 2011 and it clearly shows Apple is only second to Nokia in worldwide shipments.

Apple’s shipments have grown from 8.7 million in 2010 to 18.7 million in 2011 which is an amazing growth of over 114%. In the same period Nokia only managed a 12.6% increase.

Only 6 million units now separate Apple from Nokia. Apple has posted market beating year-on-year growth which has been bolstered this year with the release of the CDMA iPhone for Verizon as well as strong China, South Korea and Saudi markets. Apple’s market share has increased from 15.7% to 18.7% in the last 12 months.

[The Loop]

After a judge recently threw out 5 Nokia patent complaints against Apple, Nokia has filed a second series of complaints with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) against Apple. This second complaint is alleging that Apple infringes Nokia patents in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, tablets and computers.

Our latest ITC filing means we now have 46 Nokia patents in suit against Apple, many filed more than 10 years before Apple made its first iPhone," said Paul Melin, Vice President, Intellectual Property at Nokia. "Nokia is a leading innovator in technologies needed to build great mobile products and Apple must stop building its products using Nokia's proprietary innovation.

This new complaint refers to seven Nokia patents in the areas of multi-tasking operating systems, data synchronization, positioning, call quality and the use of Bluetooth accessories. This one looks set to drag on for quite some time, and in a great many countries!

[Nokia PR]

Following the epically brutal "our platform is burning" memo, Nokia announced today it's going to start using Windows phone in an effort to better compete with -- and disrupt if they can -- incredibly successful upstarts like Apple's iPhone, iOS, and iTunes App Store ecosystem. Nokia makes great hardware and Windows Phone is about as elegant a piece of software as Microsoft has ever written. That's a powerful combination -- if they can execute (and that's a big if).

Video after the break and for complete coverage see our sibling sites:

• WPCentral on Microsoft/Nokia alliance
• Nokia Experts on Nokia/Microsoft alliance

Then come back and let us know what you think, is the new Nokia Windows Phone going to be greater competition than the sum of its parts?

New Nokia CEO Steven Elop, who formerly ran Microsoft's most successful business unit, has written one of the most brutally candid and forthright state-of-the-enterprise memos the mobile industry has ever seen, including an assessment of their position post-iPhone. Their "platform is burning":

In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

Nokia makes brilliant hardware, arguably the best in the business, but they've been slow to adapt to the capacitive multitouch, app-centric, ecosystem-driven new smartphone world. And their software strategy has been fractured and frustrating. Elop clearly recognizes the issues and plans to start addressing them. Our own resident Nokia Expert, Matt Miller says:

Nokia will be holding their Capital Markets Day on Friday where Mr. Elop will reveal his future strategy. There are rumors that he might partner with Microsoft and release Windows Phone 7 devices or go with Android in an HTC-like multiple platform approach. As a fan of both Nokia and Windows Phone 7 you know what I would prefer. If Windows Phone 7 is brought to Nokia hardware then get ready to see a LOT more writing here on Nokia Experts as WP7 is my personal preferred platform at this time.

Will Nokia go with Windows Phone 7 or Android, try to relaunch MeeGo or Symbian at a faster pace with better user experience, or do something else entirely? And how, if at all, will it effect competition with iPhone? We'll find out Friday.

[Engadget via Nokia Experts]

iOS 4.2 for iPhone supports a technology known as Network Controlled Fast Dormancy which enables the cell network and the handset to work together to create the best conditions for smartphones to work quickly yet have a longer battery life, and minimize network congestion.

Interestingly, it is Nokia Siemens Networks and not Apple that has brought this to everyone’s attention. Nokia Siemens Networks has posted the news on its own blog page.

Tests by Nokia Siemens Networks have shown that iPhone iOs 4.2  supports a technology called Network Controlled Fast Dormancy. To overcome the problem Nokia Siemens Networks introduced a method that, instead of putting the handset into idle or keeping it always active, keeps the handset in an intermediate state. From here, a smartphone can wake up much more quickly and needs to send far fewer signals to and from the network to start a data connection. You get a fast network response and longer battery life.

As Nokia Siemens Networks point out, this technology is a good thing for the user and the actual network. Users gobble up less data and get a better overall experience; especially battery life. The network receives less demand and can provide a better service to its users.

So have any of our readers noticed any improvement in data retrieval times and more importantly battery life since updating to iOS 4.2? Let us know in the comments.

[Nokia Siemens Networks via Engadget]

According to Gfk's recent survey, iPhone users remain the most satisfied and claim they'll stick with their iPhones instead of jumping ship to another smartphone platform. Out of all the users surveyed, only 25% of them plan to stay loyal to their current smartphone platform while 56% of those surveyed plan to keep their options open when buying their next smartphone. Out of those users who say they're staying loyal to their current smartphone platform, Apple users made up 59% of that number. Microsoft phones showed the lowest user loyalty base at only 21%. RIM, Nokia, and Android fell between the 24-35% ranges.

Lead analyst, Ryan Garner had this to say about smartphone loyalty -

"Loyalty with a handset is a lot more complicated these days in that people buy into experiences at the high-end level,"..."If a phone doesn't do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty."

Most smartphone users rely on owning a smartphone that's not only user friendly but reliable and stable. Those are the types of things Apple has managed to nail. Not to mention Apple having the most extensive choice of applications available via their App Store. These things all combined could be what keep Apple users loyal. I know a huge factor for me is the amount of money I've already invested in the platform through purchasing applications. If I switched platforms, those applications would be rendered useless to me. So to all the members of the TiPb community, what is it that keeps you loyal to the iOS platform?

[via Reuters]

With the Launch of iAd by Apple many companies are choosing to advertise with them instead of Google or Microsoft. Businessweek.com reported that Apple may control as much as 21% of the market by the end of the year. Google will drop to 21% from last year’s holding of 27% and Microsoft, who was only just getting into ads, will drop to just 7% from last year’s 10%.

Not bad for Apple, who wasn't even in the mobile advertising market until they bought Quattro Wireless and announced iAd back at WWDC 2010.

Unilever, whose first iAd made its debut in July, is "extremely happy" with the results of its ad campaigns, Rob Master, the company's North American media director, says in an interview. More than 20 percent of people who click on Unilever iAds—which feature video and an interactive game—check out the ad a second time, he says.

Natalie Kerris, a spokesperson at Apple, reports that since June the number of brands that use Apple’s iAd has doubled. This trend isn’t just affecting Google and Microsoft either as both Nokia and Yahoo ad services are suffering as well.

Have you seen iAds in your apps? Are you any more likely to check out the products showcased in an iAd compared to a Google AdMob ad, or an ad from another network? Is Apple really offering a better experience for both advertisers and end users? Let us know your thoughts.

This is an official entry by Slyfi in TiPb’s next top blogger contest. Think you have what it takes to join Team TiPb? Bring it!

[Business Week via Fortune]

iPhone has tiny market share, monumental profit share according to Canaccord Genuity and IDC, and pretty much everyone else who's ever mentioned it. TiPb's been pointing this out for a long time of course, but boy does the above graphic make it visually apparent just what the difference is.

Why do we, as users, care if Apple's making more money than everyone else (most of them combined)? Because it means Apple can keep making the iPhone they want to make, not the iPhone carriers dictate they make. Apple doesn't have to add big logos on the front of their phones, add carrier bloatware or let carriers make exclusive deals to lock out apps, lock out search engines, or replace Apple's own app store with a carrier store that won't let you take your apps with you to other devices and providers.

Sure, Apple will make mistakes and get things wrong, but ultimately Apple is a company that believes we, the end users, are their customers -- not the carriers.

So, yes, Nokia has a bigger market share and Android likely will as well soon enough. Apple's laughing all the way to the bank, though, and providing a phone that may not be as "open" as we like to us, but certainly isn't as tragically "open" to the manufacturers and carriers as the competition.

We'll see what, if anything, that means to a potential Verizon iPhone deal...

[Fortune]

Nokia went after Apple today as part of their Nokia World event, taking issue with how Apple counts mobile devices (Nokia only counts phones), and how Apple SVP of iOS, Scott Forstall, appropriated Nokia's connecting people meme and dared to make it happy.

Unfortunately, where it counts, with innovative, mind-share stealing smartphones Nokia still seems to be lost in multiple OS' and iterative hardware. What's more they've recently exchanged their longtime CEO for a former Macromedia and Microsoft business exec, Stephen Elop, and their lead designer and VP of mobile solutions, Anssi Vanjoki is moving on as well. A cross-roads to be sure. (And one that still doesn't seem to have a clear path to North American carrier support).

Our own Matt Miller is there covering the event for Nokia Experts and ZDNet, and if there's anyone who loves those devices and those platforms, it's Matt, so check out his complete Nokia World Coverage.

Then come back here and let us know what you think. Can Nokia own the mind as well as the market again, or is it an iOS world now? (Okay, with some Android and Berry too...)

Gartner says global Android market share will surpass iPhone market share by 2011:

Gartner expects manufacturers such as Samsung to launch many new budget Android devices in 2H10 that will drive Android into mass market segments. Other players, such as Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola, will follow a similar strategy. This trend should help Android become the top OS in North America by the end of 2010.

Internationally Android would be second only to Nokia.

Totally unrelated link: iPhone is 3% of handset unit volume, 2x profit of RIM, Nokia, Sony combined. iPad next?

[Gartner via Android Central]

While iPhone accounts for only 3% of handset market share by unit volume, Finacial Times reveals some Goldman's numbers that show it's set to capture a stunning 2X the profit share of Nokia, RIM, and Sony -- combined.

And Goldman only showed those numbers by way of saying how enthusiastic they are about iPad doing the same thing to the PC industry. That sounds crazy, but iPad almost equalled Mac sales numbers this quarter and while its margins are less than the Mac's, they're higher than the razor-thin netbook and bargain basement PC industry where much of the volume rests.

TiPb's been saying for a while Apple only cared about market share as much as it meant increased profit share. Looks like that's working out for them.

[Financial Times via Business Insider Daring Fireball]

Apple has added the Nokia N97 mini to their (growing?) list of smartphones that suffer from the now-infamous "antennagate" death-grip. Here we see the N97 dropping from 7 to 3 bars.

Of course, iPhone 4 doesn't suffer from death-grip but death-touch, a single point of attenuation on the bottom left side. Apple made a trade-off for better overall reception and increased battery size at the expense of that single point of death-touch in low signal areas, but has since attempted to draw attention to the greater, industry-wide death-grip. (Though there's at least one video out, not from Apple, showing the new Samsung Galaxy S succumbing to a death-finger all its own.)

Meanwhile, David Chartier has started Don't Hold it Wrong, a log of similar videos as well as manuals where manufacturers point out attenuation areas on many different phones.

It's not surprising the whole "antennagate" hasn't faded away yet. It is a little surprising Apple's still adding to the attention. Video after the break.

Update: as commenters rightly point out, Apple didn't originally include Nokia on their antenna page but Nokia saw fit to make a statement about it, so now the collection has been rounded out.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

One of the greatest tricks Apple pulled off at the iPhone 4 press conference was changing the dialog from death-touch -- a single point of antenna trouble on iPhone 4 -- to death-grip -- a device-wide point of antenna trouble faced by the entire industry.

Apple for their part did cop to making iPhone 4's point of attenuation very external and incredibly visible. Steve Jobs called it "x-marks the spot", but then Apple very quickly moved on from this death-touch to a wider death-grip and demonstrated it on handsets from RIM's BlackBerry to HTC's Droid to Samsung's Windows Mobile.

I initially thought this was a mistake on Apple's part -- that they were spending too much time deflecting onto the competition. Turns out I underestimated Apple, but not as badly as the competition. What Apple very neatly managed to do there was conflate their own widely reported iPhone 4 death-touch into the very real but widely under-reported death-grip phenomena that does indeed affect the entire industry.

What's more, by those very competitors responding that the death-grip either didn't affect their devices, was minimal at best, or wouldn't affect future devices, they cinched it for Apple. They became part of the problem. Why?

Because their devices absolutely suffer from the death grip. Instead of pointing out that yes, Apple was correct, the death-grip was an industry-wide problem but the death-touch was thus far unique to Apple, RIM BlackBerry, Samsung, and Nokia denied the death-grip, thus ensuring everyone with the issue -- or just an itch for attenuation attention -- would fire up YouTube and make a video clearly discrediting their statements.

HTC for their part just said they didn't have many reports of the problem. However, as David Chartier points out, HTC effectively white-labels their phones to Verizon and they didn't make it clear whether the number of complaints they reported included Verizon numbers. This is similar to Apple citing AT&T return numbers for iPhone 4, not gross Apple return numbers. It's what brought about the saying "lies, damn lies, and statistics".

My original take on Apple's press conference was that Steve Jobs should have just stressed that making the iPhone 4 antenna the way they did was a trade-off, better battery life and stronger signal in many cases in exchange for that single point of problem -- the lower left hand corner death-touch. Andy Ihnatko made the same point, if more eloquently. Arguably a modern smartphone has any number of tradeoffs -- AMOLED screens offer better color and blacks that utterly fail in direct sunlight. (Free sun-screens anyone?)

I still think Apple should have been crystal clear about that trade-off, but it's looking increasingly like they didn't have to. In their rush to get comments out in front of the media RIM, Samsung, Nokia, et al have let the conversation get changed from death-touch to death-grip, and they've let videos on their own handsets propagate across the web. One look at BlackBerry on Boy Genius, Nokia on Electronista, Samsung on InformationWeek, HTC on Engadget, many others via Daring Fireball, and even manufactures' own warnings against touching their antennas in their own manuals via 1FPS shows how they've become part of a story that last week was all about Apple.

Sure a few sites like Ars Technica and When Will Apple? will raise a fuss over it, but it's done. Competitors dove headlong into it. And since Apple has now effectively priced the death-touch problem as one free case per phone, all that remains to be seen is if competitor's denials + customers videos = free cases for other phones too.

So I underestimated Apple but they didn't underestimate their competition.

Note: this editorial is based on a Twitter conversation with Seth Weintraub from 9to5Mac who is absolutely right, one day college courses will be taught on these PR tactics. Check out his article on Fortune.

Update 1: Dilbert's Scott Adams comes to the same conclusion, which he calls the "high ground maneuver", and wonders if Jobs has had hypnotist training.

Update 2: I said above that while many smartphones have the death-grip, only the iPhone has the death-touch. Daring Fireball links to a YouTube video showing the Samsung Galaxy S having, if not the death-touch, then at least the death-finger. Again, from now on no smartphone is safe.

Prior to Steve Jobs laying into Google and Adobe, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, and Nintendo got their shots in on Apple and the iPad, and here's what they had to say:

• Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet." [via Business Insider]

Someone might want to tell him people are making Android tablets, or is he still using BlackBerry?

• Nokia social point-main Mark Squires: In a post titled, "A fruit confused", he takes issue with Apple calling itself the world's largest mobile devices business (measured by revenue). [via Nokia Conversations]

Fair enough, considering there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, but the title of the post... really?

• Microsoft director of product management in the developer platform, Brandon Watson: "developers of applications for the iPhone OS–which the iPad uses–are not making money. Developing applications for the iPhone and iPad is expensive, he said, because iPhone OS uses the Objective C language rather than Microsoft’s more pervasive .NET platform. And Apple’s control over the platform has alienated some people that make software for its products, he said." [via Technologizer]

Cue Windows Mobile millionaire dev and their 140,000 runtimes in 5... 4... 3... 2...

• Nintendo President Satoru Iwata: 'It was a bigger iPod Touch. I question whether those features would be enough to get people to buy new machines." [via NYT]

Never mind his own company just released a bigger version of their own, the Nintendo DSi LL... He's missing the same point many others are likewise missing. The iPad isn't just a big iPod touch. The iPad is a big iPod touch. That's its killer feature.

And yes, we'll be saving all these comments, and any others we come across, and looking back at them one year post-iPad launch to see if it works out any better for the competition than it did when the iPhone was mocked in 2007...

[Thanks to everyone who sent these in!]

As part of their iPad keynote today, Apple took the opportunity to say that, with $15.6 billion in revenue last quarter, as $50 billion dollar company primarily focused on mobile devices (iPod, iPhone, MacBook), they were the #1 mobile device company in the world -- bigger by revenue than Sony, Samsung, and Nokia's mobile devices businesses.

Along with the financial figures Steve Jobs touted 250,000,000 (!) iPods sold, 140,000 iPhone/iPod touch apps, 3 billion downloads, and over 75 million iPhone and iPod touches (yeah, we underestimated!).

Jobs went on to say even he didn't believe it, and it wasn't how they think about Apple. But he sure did say it, and that's a shot across a lot of bows right there.

Previously, on Patent Wars, Nokia escalated their lawsuit against Apple by requesting a US import ban on virtually every product Apple makes with the International Trade Commission (ITC), and now Apple has responded in kind against Nokia phones.

Yes, phasers and disruptor fire is criss-crossing the legal heavens and photon torpedos are exploding in the silence of judicial space.

We could joke that Apple has more to lose here, since their products are far more popular in the US than Nokia phones are, but again this is just what giant electronics companies with billion-dollar legal war chests do. It's "negotiations", and we hope all the lawyers enjoy the new unibody aluminum Ferraris they'll be getting out of this.

[Bloomberg via Engadget]

Nokia, massive if alien-to-North America, sued Apple for WiFi/GSM/HSPA patent violation, at which point Apple spun around and counter-sued for iPhone patent violation, and now Nokia has yelled the legal equivalent of "fire everything!"

According to PC World:

Nokia fired the latest salvo in its ongoing patent dispute with Apple, saying Tuesday that it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission charging that Apple infringes its patents "in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players and computers."

The complaint involves seven patents that Nokia says Apple is using to "create key features" in products related to the user interface and camera, antenna and power management technologies. Nokia wants the ITC to investigate its claims.

So, if we can piece the story together as we've heard it rumored, Nokia is supposed to license it's pooled patents to Apple under the same equitable and reasonable terms as everyone else, but decided they wanted Apple to counter-license their iPhone patents to Nokia. Apple declined, Nokia sued, Apple counter-sued, and now Nokia is seeing them and raising the stakes -- to the very roof.

Nokia is huge, Apple has billions, this could drag on for years and years. We're guessing the execs don't care and neither do the lawyers.

[Thanks Icebike for the tip!]

How does the iPhone compare to sibling site NokiaExperts.com's two platforms, trusty Symbian S60 OS as seen in the N97 mini and the next generation Maemo OS of the N900? That's the question I'm looking to answer in TiPb's first week of the 3rd annual Smartphone Round Robin

I’ll confess from the start that I wasn't terribly familiar with Nokia’s platforms coming into this review. They dominate the rest of the world, of course, but for a variety of reasons they haven’t made much of a dent here in North America yet. Lucky for me, the SPE network has reached across the pond to Seattle (hey, there must be ponds between Montreal and Seattle!) to bring Matthew Miller to the table this year. His tremendous knowledge and enthusiasm -- along with the incredible help I received from the NokiaExperts community -- are the only reason this review was able to happen. So to him and to them; thanks.

(Speaking of the NokiaExperts community, remember you can still jump on that thread and each day you reply, you're entered to win your choice of Nokia smartphones, including the two reviewed below!)

Now let's get it on... after the break!

Hardware Design

Nokia is often -- and rightly -- praised for their hardware. Heck, any company that can make stainless steel smartphones and still get great radio reception knows the deep dark secrets of telephony. Let's not even mention the 8-megapixel camera model either. (I know I won't, I can't remember all the numbered names the way Matt can).

And that's one of the first thing to note about this year's Round Robin and our platform-centric, rather than device-centric mandate. Decidedly unlike the iPhone, Nokia (and every other entrant) fields multiple models and form factors every year. In Nokia's case specifically, maybe too many (though they'll reportedly be cutting back in 2010). Luckily for me, both the N97 mini and N900 (can I call it maxi?) are horizontal sliders.

Last year I had some misgivings about the sliders as they generally felt "squeaky" and unmistakably two parts even when closed together into one. Nokia's felt solid (so solid Matt had to help me open them up the first time). If physical keyboards are a must for you, and you love the landscape, this by itself gives both one huge advantage. (Big fat camera lens with blinding LED flashes gives both another.)

Where the Nokia devices differ is that the N97 mini is a slender candybar when its keyboard is stowed. Nokia really trimmed off the sides when they slapped on the mini, and while the d-pad was lost, the arrow keys and right-aligned space bar made the smallish physical keyboard perfectly fine to type on.

The N900, by comparison is a beast. It's exactly Nokia's internet tablets past with a phone thrown in just for the fun (and future) of it. It wasn't the biggest slab in this year's slobber-knocker (we'll get to the HD2 in coming weeks) but that's not for lack of trying. If the BlackBerry Bold 9000 remains the Cadillac of smartphones (and keyboards) this thing is the F150 truck -- pure power. If a netbook is still too big for you, here's an alternative. Seriously.

Neither, however, have the iconic singularity of feel or sheer solidity of the iPhone (not that any slider could). The N900 especially keeps design out of the way, but where the iPhone is the pure sex of glass and chrome and plastic so tough it really, truly, does not blend, Nokia's devices manage to be equally black and shiny, though undoubtedly less iconic. Also, having no slider makes the iPhone much slimmer and more pocketable than either Nokia device.

Software Experience

For a great reference look at the software on these Nokia devices, check out Matt's videos:

• N97 mini first impressions
• N900 Video walkthrough

Back? Okay, here we go!

That Jailbreak Thing

I'll state this at the outset of every review -- for the Round Robin, we're dealing with a stock iPhone. Sure, if you do run a Jailbroken iPhone, it does change the equation considerably -- full background multitasking, robust notification systems, complete theming options, apps not approved by Apple, and so on. But fair is fair, and this review compares only the iPhone that Apple gave us.

Multitasking Mania

The iPhone multitasks very well, thank you. But since the iPhone is the only entrant in the 2009 Round Robin that doesn't let 3rd party apps run in the background, we're going to start with this and likely concede the same ground for every week, and every platform that follows.

Nokia, by stark contrast, multitasks its apps off. They’re just all supposed to run in the background. On the N97 mini, however, this creates a bit of a problem as Nokia, for some unimaginable reason, decided to drastically starve the device of much-needed RAM. So, yes, you can run many apps at once and enjoy background refreshes and streaming music and whatever you want -- you’ll just run out of memory quite often when you do so. Heckuva job there, Nokia.

The N900 on the other hand does it with RAM to spare. 4 desktops to swipe through (or press, drag to be more exact), with multiple apps, widgets, and full, live, Mozilla browser windows open all at the same time. If I could drag and drop between them, I might forget I wasn’t using a desktop OS. In fact, not being able to drag and drop is the only thing making me less worried about the iPhone still not multitasking.

Right now, the only major advantage to multitasking is speed of app update and transition. On the iPhone, for example, when I launch my RSS app I have to wait for it to check and update, which feels like it takes a long time. Having that updating transparently in the background would be great. Likewise, the old cliche about not being able to stream Pandora still applies. Otherwise, 2 factors help mitigate the lack of 3rd party notification for much of my daily use -- 1) Push Notification handles a lot of deal-breakers that would otherwise come up (i.e. you are near-instantly alerted to a new IM) and 2) the iPhone 3GS is so fast, and developers are getting so good at saving state, that the app switching between closed apps becomes pretty much unnoticeable.

However, when we really start to see multiple apps become usable at the same time, when they can interact together as peers (rather than one being in the background while the other interacts with the user), the game will change again, and Apple better be ready. (And yes, I’ll come back to this when I get my shot at webOS in weeks to come).

In the meantime, Nokia is great at multitasking but in a way that makes it a nice-to-have for me, not a must-have. I wouldn't choose S60 over Maemo or either over iPhone just because of it (or rather, because the iPhone lacks it).

Customize This

One of the first things Matt pointed out to me on the N97 mini was how easy it was to customize the experience. No, not just wallpaper though that’s certainly a snap. He could arrange his apps in folders, where and how he wanted them. More so, S60 supports widgets and supports them well. The iPhone doesn’t support them at all.

If you’re not familiar with widgets, think Dashboard on OS X or Sidebar/Gadgets in Windows Vista/Windows 7. If you’re not familiar with those, think small applets that run on the home screen and dedicate themselves to showing you easily glance-able bits of information. So, you could (and they do) have Twitter status widgets showing the most recent post or two in your @mentions, weather info for your city, breaking news headlines, and many others that you can create, enable, and slap up onto the screen.

But with the ability to manage your device to that degree comes with it the equal and opposite reality of a device that needs to be managed to that degree. If you don’t want to fuss with your phone or deal with folders or figure out what widget really should go where, Apple is more than happy to decide for you (or just decide you don’t need some of that stuff anyway). And that’s not me being obtuse (yet), that’s a very real segment of the iPhone’s user base -- people who just want something that works, not something that makes them have to work.

The Right to Remain Resistive

Plain and simple, Nokia won’t offer any capacitive multitouch screens until 2010. That means both the S60 N97 mini and the Maemo N900 come with resistive touch screens. In their favor, both work pretty well. They work well enough I never felt the need to reach for a stylus (and Matt later told me the N97 mini doesn’t even come with one -- how’s that for resistive confidence!)

Having gotten used to glass, capacitive screens over the last couple years of iPhone use, however, I’ve come to regard using a resistive device as a chore. Instead of light flicks and swipes with the finger, Nokia devices require firm presses and drags with the finger nail. Sure, resistive screens are more pixel-precise, but they’re far less immediate than capacitive ones, and that lack of immediacy results -- for me -- in a lack of connection to my device. The iPhone’s screen feels like it knows what you want it to do and just does it. Nokia’s screens feel like they do what you force them to.

If you absolutely need a stylus or want to put your long fingernails to work, you may be just fine with resistive, but especially for new users, I think capacitive is just a far more natural-feeling technology.

State of the Apps

It's tough for any platform to compete with the (as of this review) 116,000 plus iPhone and iPod touch apps in the iTunes App Store. Nokia is going to try with the Ovi Store, already launched for the S60 and coming soon for the N900. Then again, there will be no approval-style gatekeeping that I'm aware of on Nokia either. So, while there are less apps, there will also be less apps rejected or simply not allowed because the platform owner doesn't want them.

In fact, Symbian is in the process of going open source with the Symbian Foundation, which claims it will be even more open that Google's Android platform. So if that's your scene, it's certainly something to consider.

There are some inarguably excellent S60 apps as well, including the social-network powerhouse, Gravity, and two way video calling with Fring (the iPhone can only receive, not send, video calls via Fring). For the N900, you have to be a higher level geek and get into repositories if you want 3rd party apps, but come on, the thing runs a full Mozilla desktop-style browser. (That includes Flash, and Flash-ads, for good and ill).

For those contemplating making the switch, however, it's a mixed bag of hurt. You'll get more apps on the iPhone -- more variety of apps and variety of choices within each type of app, but only so far as Apple approves them. For new-to-smartphone users, Apple providing a managed (would that we could say well-managed) environment is likely more positive than negative. It's a dictatorship but a mostly benevolent one, easier and safer, and ultimately that's a comfortable way to start.

Conclusion

People get the iPhone because they want the iPhone. In North America I think it's fair to say people have to really want Nokia to get a Symbian S60 or Maemo device. While you can only get the iPhone on AT&T, that also means it's subsidized down to $199 or $299 ($99 for the 3G). Nokia hasn't been able to come to terms with US carriers for most of their devices, which means you'll have to pay full price on top of your monthly cel service (though perhaps absent a long term contract). Even then you'll be restricted to GSM carriers AT&T and T-Mobile, and if they don't have T-Mobile's unique 3G bands, restricted to EDGE speeds.

Likewise, all the power of Nokia's platforms demand greater responsibility from the user. The more you can manage, the more you typically have to manage. Again, that's what many Nokia fans love, but it's not something everyone will want to bother with, and its what makes me say you really have to want it want it.

The real crux of the two Nokia platforms, however, comes down to the fact that there are two Nokia platforms -- one struggling to remain relevant and the other working to become credible. That Nokia is the world leader in smartphones with a fortune in the bank means there's no real risk in adapting either -- Nokia isn't going anywhere. But it is a little disturbing that they're keeping both horses in the race. Pushing a smartphone platform into the forefront of consumer mindshare is tough. Pushing two, when North America has eluded them so in the past borders on the strategically unfathomable. Sure, S60 is transitioning to open source and theoretically won't be entirely Nokia's burden alone, but considering what (and who) else is happening in the space, it will still be almost entirely Nokia's burden alone.

These are the dichotomies that face Nokia and its platforms -- globally popular yet locally unknown, past its prime yet not ready for primetime, targeted at emerging markets yet embraced by high-order geeks. And given the strength of other options, I'm not sure it's one most consumers will be willing to investigate.

At the end of the day (and of this review) the best advice I can offer is this -- if you're trying to decide between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N97 mini or N900, get the iPhone. If you know the iPhone is not enough for you, if it's too limited or you're just too much geek, then get Nokia, and seriously consider the N900. Better to brave the future than get stuck in the past. (Heck, if you want the world's tiniest Linux netbook with a phone bolted on, get the N900.)

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Join Rene and Matt Miller of NokiaExperts.com for Round Robin Symbian and Maemo vs. iPhone, Apple vs. Nokia patent lawsuits, Fake Steve vs. AT&T, App Store's new look, App Store's still broken, and the Google Phone (NOT!). Listen in!

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

TiPb-verse, the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin starts NOW! And for me, it starts with what's likely the biggest challenge -- Nokia and its dual platforms of Symbian S60 and Maemo as represented by the N97-mini and the netbook-that-thinks-its-a-smartphone, N900. Hugely popular everywhere that's not North America, it wasn't in last year's Round Robin, and truth-be-told, I've barely ever seen it before.

To get some extra help, I've got a post up at NokiaExperts.com, where I'm really hoping to get my understanding expanded a notch (or ten).

Dieter Bohn, on duty for Palm webOS has likewise triumphantly returned to TiPb's iPhone forums, and you folks really need to get in there an get him up to date on all things iPhone 3GS and 3.x.

(As extra incentive, remember that every day you post a reply on those threads (or the other Round Robin threads) you get another chance to win on of six (6!) smartphones -- one per site!)

To get things kicked off right, we've got a video after the break where likely the best man on earth for the job, Matt Miller gives me a guided tour of the N97-mini and N900, helps me with the interface, and reveals the awesome power of the platforms.

Next up, I spend the week figuring out what Symbian S60 and Maemo mean in relation to the iPhone, the smartphone space in general, and to new users considering their first platform, or veterans considering making the switch. That'll all be summed up right here on Friday. Can't. Wait.

[YouTube Link]

Remember when Nokia sued Apple for infringement over essential wireless patents? Us neither, but Apple sure does -- in a counter-suit which says Nokia is copying the iPhone interface. Says Bruce Sewell, Apple SVP and General Counsel:

"Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours"

And in the complaint:

"Nokia has rapidly lost share in the market for high-end mobile phones. Nokia has admitted that, as a result of the iPhone launch, the market has changed suddenly and [Nokia was] not fast enough changing with it. In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface."

They remind Nokia of their EVP, Anssi Vanjoki's statement about the iPhone in 2007:

"[If] there is something good in the world, we copy with pride"

To which Apple responds:

"True to this quote, Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple's iPhone ideas as well as Apple's basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia's purported standards essential patent. Apple seeks redress for this behavior."

Whether or not this leads to a quick(er) settlement and cross-licensing deal on both sides, it's interesting to note the "mutually assured patent destruction" strategy we (and PreCentral.net regarding Palm vs. Apple) have spoken about before seems to be holding true. If one sues, the other(s) sue back. Boom. Merry $&@#ing Christmas indeed.

UPDATE 1: Engadget reveals:

Apple also says Nokia wanted to cross-license Apple's various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn't will to do.

UPDATE 2: Official Apple PR on the lawsuit.

UPDATE 3 & 4: Roughly Drafted explains in good detail a theory under which Nokia wouldn't license their pooled patents to Apple under "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms,” and instead wanted a cross-licensing deal with access to Apple's private (non-pooled) patents. Apple refused, Nokia sued, Apple sued back. (Thanks to JK in the comments).

[NokiaExperts and Apple Insider]

Interesting and contrasting set of blog opinions, as Engadget columnist and analyst Michael Gartenberg asks the difficult question "What's the future of Nokia?" and SPE's own Matt Miller of NokiaExperts responds with "Nokia’s future is under their control and I believe it will be very bright".

First up Gartenberg says:

Nokia failed to lead a changed market and has been forced into reacting to competitors instead of driving its own vision of the future. As smartphones left the realm of the enthusiast and became mass-market in terms of adoption and feature use, Nokia fell behind.

Now, I don't think that's fatal or long term, and I don't believe Nokia is going out of business. But I do question the company's position in the market and ability to lead without a major change in direction and strategy -- especially in the US and North America. Truth be told, Nokia now reminds me a lot of Apple back in 1996, losing relevance and market share in places that matter but with huge potential to leverage core assets and a terrific brand with millions of loyal fans. And as Apple did in its day, Nokia must now either try to decisively seize back its leadership position -- or lose it entirely.

Miller argues:

I too have some frustration with Nokia because I KNOW they have the capability to lead with devices and an operating system that excites consumers and we just haven’t seen much from them in interface changes or a clear strategy the past year or two. They need to show us that they are in control and will be blowing our socks off with products and services in the future that have no direct relation to what Apple or Google have already done. I have met some extremely talented and smart people at Nokia and they have obviously seen the success of the iPhone and the excitement surrounding Android so I have to believe they have some very exciting projects in the works to challenge both of these platforms in the next year or two.

The iPhone clearly shook up the mobile space, first in terms of user interface with iPhone OS 1.0, second in terms of application delivery with the App Store and iPhone OS 2.0, and thirdly with the price-drop to $99 for the iPhone 3G at the release of iPhone OS 3.0. Those kind of repetitive, rapid fire hits to a market can really disrupt established players, especially when done by a company as secretive as Apple. Add on Google's Android, webOS, and other platform advances, and it takes considerable will and agility to respond in a concise and timely manner. Nokia has shown the ability to do neither so far, but their size gives them one incredible buffer against the upstart smartphone platforms. The only question remains -- can and will they do it before the buffer (and profitability) runs out?

Give both Gartenberg and Miller a read, and let us know if Apple and the iPhone have anything to be worried about...

Last week we covered the analyst accounts that Apple's iPhone was more profitable than Nokia's handsets. Since Apple makes high margin on one premium phone, while Nokia has a range of featurephones and smartphones, including low-to-no margin ones, it didn't seem too unlikely. Joe Wilcox, however, broke out his abacus and begged to differ, saying no they weren't, and everyone was stupid for thinking they were. John Gruber then tapped Calculator on his iPhone, looked at GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and non-GAAP numbers, and said the estimates were within reason. Wilcox updated his original post, decrying the use of non-GAAP numbers, and re-asserting his original conclusion.

Who's side are we on? Why, the audiences' of course, with popcorn, hotdogs, and spicy drink in hand. It's not like either Apple or Nokia give us a cut of the winning profits, and though we love our iPhones a lot, we'll take a blog v.s blogfight any time.

[via TUAW]

Engadget's resident legal gadget eagle, Nilay Patel, has put together a great, depth analysis of Nokia's recent lawsuit against Apple and the iPhone over patent infringement.

As usual, the race to hype this dispute as a bitter standoff between two tech giants desperate to destroy one another has all but ignored the reality of how patents -- especially wireless patents -- are licensed, what Nokia's actually asking for, and how it might go about getting it. And as you know, we just don't do things that way, so we've asked our old friend Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us sort things out and figure out what's really going on here -- read on for more.

In a nutshell, Nokia believes Apple is infringing on 10 patents that are core to GSM/UTMS/Wi-Fi. All the other major players have paid up. Apple hasn't. Apple may believe the patent fees are already paid by the manufacturer of the components they bought for the iPhone, or they may just be using the legal system as way to negotiate a lower ultimate licensing fee from Nokia.

If the area interests you, check out the whole analysis and then let us know what you think!

Out sibling site NokiaExperts.com brings word that Nokia is suing Apple in Delaware court. Why-for?

ten patents related to GSM, UMTS, and WLAN standards that Nokia states they established after investing more than EUR 40 billion in R&D over the last 20 years. Nokia stated that they have successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia’s innovation.

Seems other companies have coughed up the cash to use them, but Apple's waiting for a court to force their hand. With $35 billion in the bank, they can obviously afford to give a fortune away to the lawyers, but why go to the effort? Do they really think a court will somehow dismiss the patents as invalid?

Pass the popcorn, get ready for some patent pugilism, and let us know what you think!

Nokia's latest latest and greatest, the N900, is being shown off at Nokia World, and it again has our own NokiaExpert, Matt Miller, all shades of excited.

While some have complained about it's meager 3 rows of keys (3 rows too many for me, but I know many others like physical keyboards...) most are really excited about it's Maemo (Linux-based) operating system, and it's new user interface.

In fact, antonioj, who sent the link our way, thinks it might be enough to pressure Apple into refreshing the 2007-era iPhone UI...

Nokia has announced a new, Maemo-powered N900 which our good friend Matt Miller of NokiaExperts.com is beaming about in an iPhone and Palm Pre competitive sort of way:

I have to say I have not been this excited about a Nokia product for quite some time and with the T-Mobile USA 3G support I will definitely be picking one up as soon as I can. The N900 fixes all that is wrong with the N97 and then throws on a slick Maemo UI and feature set that should have most any geek drooling.

32GB, OpenGL 2.0, ARM Cortex A8, 800x600 screen, 5mp camera... Pretty clear that Nokia is doing their usual hardware magic, many specs closely mirroring the iPhone 3GS, in fact (though what's up with 1GB of application memory?!) And Maemo 5 UI...

Does this mean Nokia is abandoning Symbian on the high end for this hot new Debian Linux-based OS? Will they be able to really come up with a user experience that can take mind share away from the iPhone and Palm Pre? And will this device finally give them some sort of presence in the North American market?

Our friend Matt Miller over at sister-site NokiaExperts has just posted up his first impressions of the white Nokia N97. Like most premium handsets over the last few years, the N97 has been played up as another "iPhone killer" so we figured we'd better keep an eye on it at well.

What's Matt's take away? Good but not great if we're reading it right, though Nokia is promising updates that might make it even better.

Head on over to NokiaExperts for the full rundown and video overview, and let us know what you think!

Our newest sibling site, NokiaExperts.com has linked up an article suggesting Nokia and Verizon's previous iClonic efforts were just generations one, and now they're preparing to transform and merge into... A Nokizon (Verkia?) uber-iPhone killer?

It seems that Verizon may have deep hard feelings against the Apple and iPhone exclusivity deal and appears to be making a deal with Nokia to create a 4G LTE (long term evolution) touchscreen device for the US market.

The backstory here is that Apple reportedly went to Verizon first with the iPhone and was rejected, so despite the recent rumors (and Verizon's rather sad little surveys), there's no reason to think Apple will be helping them out any time soon, hence... Vernokiazon?

No word on specs or release dates or whether it will have phaser functionality and arrive on unicorns or anything yet, but in all seriousness, Nokia puts out amazing specs (see the n97) and Verizon has a great network, so is it possible that whatever they put out could join the Android G1, BlackBerry Storm, WinPho 6.5/7, and the Palm Pre in the long list of "iPhone Killers".

[NokiaExperts.com via TheStreet, thanks to The Reptile for the tip!]

UPDATED: Daring Fireball nails it. Closed or open, the smartphone industry was stagnating before the iPhone...

ORIGINAL: Steve Ballmer is the gift that just keeps on grief'ing! Proven wrong about the iPhone already, both the Microsoft CEO and his counterpart at Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvu both decided to take fairly transparent jabs at Apple, who once again didn't even bother to attend the show. CNet (via MacRumors) has the gory details.

Said Kallasvu (taking a break from iCloning the iPhone App Store):

Apple's vertically integrated model, where its hardware and software are tightly controlled by the company, further fragmented the market. And he added that what is truly needed is more openness in developing applications.

Said Ballmer, (who's been getting his own fair share of grief this week over WinPho 6.5):

"I agree that no single company can create all the hardware and software. Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice."

One disgruntled European expressed displeasure at all the iPhone talk, asking why it deserved attention when it had only a tiny sub-percentage of the market.

Responded AT&T Mobility chief Ralph de la Vega:

"Because the other 99.5 percent of the industry is trying to copy the iPhone."

It wasn't all hugs and kisses from AT&T, though, even with the iPhone providing life support to their bottom line. Jabbed de la Vega:

"The iPhone is a great success, but it would be even better if the applications were interoperable,"

Um, yeah, because then people might actually want to buy those other, less innovative, non-iPhone you have stockpiled in your warehouse?

If you haven't heard, Apple's a no-show here at Mobile World Congress 2009, this show pretty much belongs to Microsoft, HTC, and Nokia (with a side of Samsung and Sony Ericsson). However, as with other trade shows like CES and CTIA, Apple's presence is felt in its absence. Rather than join their brethren in the mobile community, Apple sits it out and watches while other companies are forced to make their announcements in a context Apple has created. To wit: Both Microsoft and Nokia announced App Stores this week. Microsoft's Market is basically a no-show, though, all we have is promises. Nokia's isn't ready yet either, but it will be in May.

Actually, we know quite a bit about Nokia's App Store, called the Ovi Store. It's an extension (and replacement) of their earlier services and includes everything from apps to ringtones to wallpapers to widgets. Here's the thing, folks: Nokia may have solved the #1 problem at Apple's App Store: finding apps that are 1. good and 2. interest you.

What Nokia has done is build a sophisticated relevancy engine that can sort apps based on a variety of factors that are actually relevant to you -- like what you friends are using, or what kind of app you like to download, or what music you tend to prefer. It looks to be much better than your standard "top 50" list and if Apple is smart and shameless (we know they're both), they'll steal these features as soon as humanly possible.

The Ovi Store also looks to be a little kinder and gentler on developers too, giving them more power over how (and if!) their app will be distributed.

I've written the whole thing up over at sister-site Nokia Experts, go on and take a look.

[How about Apple needs to expand iTunes GENIUS recommendations to the App Store immediately? -- Rene]

Yeah, yeah, Michael Dell once said Apple should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders. We all know the can of whupApps Steve Jobs has unleashed on the industry since then. These days, Apple's profits look as good as their products and Dell's... likewise.

So it's with no small amount of trepidation we notice WMExperts noticing the world noticing Dell might just be making an entry into the smartphone market...

What's wrong with that picture is pretty much what's wrong with the exhibit in general. While Apple holds a fairly small percentage of the global cellphone market (as it does the global computer market), it happens to enjoy among the largest percentage of profit in the market (also, as it does with computers).

MacDailyNews highlights that while Apple ships an insignificant number of units compared to a behemoth like Nokia, it makes DOUBLE the profit of Nokia. Likewise, while rivals such as the Palm Pre are getting some much deserved attention, their finances (and thus ability to pay talent and fund much needed R&D) are on the brink -- while Apple has nearly $30 BILLION in the bank.

So, while carriers are increasingly desperate for "hero" phones to make a splash and attract high-spending customers, according to mocoNews.net, current performance is showing few -- if any -- can currently match either the return on investment, or user experience, of the iPhone.

Sure, the smartphone market in general is continuing to grow, and may even be recession proof according to Forbes, but is anyone outside of Apple really poised with enough creativity, cash, and cunning to leverage it?

[Thanks to Jeremy and Dieter for source links!]

We're incredibly happy to announce that we're adding another member to the Smartphone Experts family of sites: Nokia Experts!  Nokia Experts will be run by the inestimable Matt Miller, also known as The Mobile Gadgeteer, host of ZDNet's Smartphones and Cellphones blog, palmsolo, and all around mobility guru.

Matt has a ton of knowledge about a subject that the rest of us at Smartphone Experts have historically lacked, namely Nokia, S60, and the Symbian OS in general.  He gives himself a brief introduction here, in the unlikely event you're not familiar.

Nokia has, as yet, not successfully made a big smartphone push in the United States, but that's quite likely to change as they have a slew of exciting new devices coming out and are also likely to have their E71 messaging smartphone picked up by AT&T very soon.  In other words, if, like us, you're relatively new to Nokia and S60 but want to learn more, Nokia Experts is surely going to be one of your best resources.  Heck, Matt's already published a full review of the Nokia 5800 Tube XpressMusic touch screen S60 device.  The 'Tube' is already a best-selling device overseas and is more of a worthy contender than you might think, so the review is definitely worth a read.

Go on and head over to Nokia Experts now and give 'em a big ol' hello!

Moments after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, Nokia showed off the "Tube", an iClone so convincing some thought they'd simply managed to score a demo unit. While the "Tube" eventually faded into a "comes with music" device, and Nokia has now zigged instead of zagged with the N97, BGR has just come across a slide that shows Nokia's iClone plans may still be alive and unwell.

What is it? When will we see it? Since the N97 isn't even shipping until June-ish 2009 (likely just in time for a WWDC launch of the iPhone 3.0 -- iPhone HD?), who knows when we'll see this new device. All we can hope for is that is doesn't cosign itself to mindlessly cloning iPhones past, but actually tried to innovate something more for the future.

If they do, what you want to see on the Nokia next-gen touch?

Is this enough to up Nokia's game in a post-iPhone world? Probably not, though it looks solid enough and will no doubt have the pundits punting "iPhone Killer" all over again (really, didn't the Storm teach them anything?) Engadget has the video (above) and the stats, which are admittedly drool worthy:

3.5-inch, 640 x 360 pixel ... resistive touchscreen display with tactile feedback ... QWERTY keyboard [slider] ... HSDPA, WiFi, and Bluetooth radios, A-GPS, a 3.5-mm headjack, 32GB of onboard memory with microSD expansion (for up to 48GB total capacity), and a battery capable of up to 1.5 days of continuous audio playback or 4.5-hours video. 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss glass and "DVD quality" video capture at 30fps, too.

The hardware certainly reads -- and looks -- impressive but the UI isn't exactly bowling us over. While Nokia is calling it the "world's most advanced mobile computer", we're not sure its Symbian guts are quite up to Mobile OS X level computing yet (though InfoSyncWorld thinks HTC may have a lot to worry about).

What do you think? iPhone Killer, or just another wannabe? And by June 2009 (likely shipping date for the n97), could Steve Jobs already be on the WWDC stage dropping the iPhone HD bomb?!

Reader Reptile writes in with the tip, and the pithy title inspiration. Seems like our friends to the frozen north (no, not Canada, Nokia-land!) finally released their iClone... er... Tube... er... Xpress Music.

The device, which started life as a complete rip-off proof of concept roughly 3 minutes after Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone live on the Macworld 2007 stage has taken a long -- looooooooong -- time to come to market. Was it worth the wait?

Well, in targeting the iPhone, it's already placed itself squarely in the "follower" camp, and not the "leader" position Nokia should not only enjoy, but command. Strike one. Also, if as Reptile suggests, no one (outside the gadget blogsphere and -- maybe -- Europe) noticed, can it even really be considered launched? Strike two.

As long as there's the iPhone, every other "me too!" device will be an iClone, simple as that. Want a real iPhone Killer? Do what Apple did and drop a device no one sees coming, and revolutionize the industry in your own, innovative way. That's how you'll kill the iPhone.

Absent that. Strike three.

Video link via Engadget

Nokia dominates the planet when it comes not only to cellphones, but also to Smartphones. But the upcoming iPhone Risk-style onslaught (not to mention the pending release of Android, though delayed) looks to have them a little worried. So they're finally getting their Symbian ducks in a row: enough of trying to work together with other companies like Sony and Motorola, they've purchased the entire OS shootin' match and are unifying the platform. Simple explanation: Symbian is the base OS, then there are different interfaces on top of that: S60 and UIQ. We're not fond of either, but between the two of them S60 seems to be the one with more legs (and more support, it's Nokia's interface of choice).

Update: we've got more to say here, so make the jump for the analysis.

UIQ is getting folded in to the platform now, basically, and the Symbian foundation is shoring up its base with input from the major players (but Symbian Limited is to be owned by Nokia). What's more, the platform will be offered for free instead of for a small fee and will even eventually be made 'open source' so people can much around with the nasty bits of the code. So basically Nokia is buying it so they can give it away. Confused yet? It's alright -- the bottom line is that in coming years Symbian development will continue apace and now has a decent chance of catching up with the iPhone's UI elegance. Well, a chance anyway. Interesting that Nokia is betting on a combination of Android-style openness and Apple-style unified look-and-feel.

In case you're thinking this is a yawner, it's not. See, the Symbian folks are pumped:

The list of partners who have already committed to the Symbian Foundation is pretty earth-shattering, as well, including AT&T, NTT Docomo, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone in terms of carriers. Handset manufacturers who’ve signed up include LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. Tech leaders such as Broadcom, Fujitsu, Texas Instruments, and WiPro are also on board. This is an army, more or less.
This is a massive step for the mobile and open source communities, and a big deafening blow to mobile Linux and more importantly - Android. Essentially, the Symbian Foundation is what Google intended Android to be, only it’s already millions of devices strong. The ecosystem is already built, and thriving.

We agree, the target here is Android (and a little Windows Mobile on the side), but that doesn't mean that the iPhone won't take some collateral damage. See, the whole point of the is-it-isn't-it-really iPhone price drop was for them to pick up massive market share so their developer ecosystem could gain a foothold worldwide. If Nokia can get Symbian unified and moving foward quickly, that gambit isn't going to work so well (outside the US, anyway). Heck, even if Nokia can't, they're still by far the dominant player in the industry. Apple really has its work cut out if they want to become synonymous with "smartphone" across the world. Synonymous with smartphone right now: Nokia.

Will Apple sell a ton of iPhones? Yes. However they're facing as big a beast here in smartphones now as they do on the desktop. Although we don't think the iPhone will sit around 10% marketshare like the Mac does, we're not going to hold our breath for more than 30% worldwide marketshare. I'm not, anyway.

The loser here? Could be Motorola. It's not enough that they've lost all their RAZR lovers to the iPhone, but rumor has it the forlorn company is set to make a "last stand" smartphone that was originally supposed to feature, wait-for-it, the soon-to-be-defunct UIQ. Looks like they'll be reworking that there plan, eh?

Read Via

No need for double-takes. You didn't click the wrong link. Just breath, dig deeply, and stick with me for a moment. Yes, you really are still reading the iPhone blog.

For a 1.0 device, the iPhone knocked the ball -- if not out of the park -- soundly into the fence, and sent a complacent industry fumbling and flurrying to catch it. But no device, not even from Apple, could get everything perfect the first time at bat. Now, I've pretty much staked my turf here by playfully poking a little bit of fun at the competition but, truth be known, when they're not wasting their time on iClones every platform and handset has some great -- even killer -- features to recommend it. In that spirit, here's my top 5 list of what Apple should seriously consider stealing... er... learning from the competition if they want to hit a home run with 2.0 and beyond...

5. Blackberry's Email Management

RIM is the undeniably #1 in smartphone market share, but they come in at #5 on my list for the simple reason that, while what they do well they do phenomenally well, as a platform I think that very maturity has led to little innovation, and hence little (and narrow) potential to mine for iPhone improvements.

That said, they are the email monster for a reason. With one major caveat, nobody does email bigger or better than Blackberry and while Twitter, IM, VoIP, video chat, and other technologies old and new battle it out for communication domination, email remains the mainstay of the mainstream, business and consumer alike, and in that regard Apple has something important to learn from Blackberry.

What Blackberry Does Right

Blackberry does email to the point where the two are almost synonymous. Push notwithstanding, when it comes to managing email, the Blackberry is a beast. It's simply the best there is at what it does.

What Apple Could Do Better

RIM uses a centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle all Blackberry messaging everywhere, providing true, near-instantaneous "push" to thousands and thousands of Crackberrians each and every moment. But here's that major caveat: it's a single point of failure. Outages, from carrier to regional to network-wide have increasingly plagued the service, as have privacy and security concerns.

With the upcoming 2.0 update, the iPhone will support the ActiveSync "push" technology Apple licensed from Microsoft. ActiveSync eschews the "one NOC to manage it all" and instead simulates "push" between local Exchange Server and mobile client -- in this case, the iPhone. If someone else's Exchange Server -- even Microsoft's in Redmond -- goes down, it effects your iPhone service not one bit.

That just leaves the iPhone MobileMail app itself. Fairly easy to set up and use, it still remains a challenge to manage multiple accounts and messages. Better mass-mail handling, especially for important functions like delete, is imperative (and is rumored to be coming with 2.0 as well).

Beyond that, however, better organization is needed. A single, unified inbox, like the one on the desktop Mail.app would be a great first step, followed by the ability to hide selected, seldom-used IMAP folders to clear up some clutter.

Speaking of IMAP, since MobileMail can "see" IMAP folders for Calendar, Apple Mail To Do, etc. better integration with the iPhone Calendar and Notes application (and dare we dream -- Task app?), seems natural given what's been done in OS X 10.5 Leopard's Mail.app.

And since the spammers seem intent on mail-bombing the internet back to the stone age, some client-side anti-spam filters would also be most welcome.

Taken together, these improvements would go a long way to making the iPhone king of the next email generation.

4. Palm's Click Counting

We want powerful, we want beautiful, and -- dangit! -- we want drop dead easy to use. Great design is functional design, great user experience is intuitive, almost transparent experience. Apple nails this to a large degree. I've said it before, but my two-and-a-half year old godson can pretty much navigate his way around the iPhone, from pictures to camera to notes (his ABCs) to calculator (his 123s) which unbelievable ease and accomplishment. But there remain a few problem areas.

Palm OS, dinosaur that it is, has legendary ease of use. Rumor has it that early Palm developers, like co-founder Jeff Hawkins, literally counted each and every "click" it took for a user to accomplish a task, and did everything possible to optimize and minimize that number. It has failed miserably to keep up with the times, but in a few key ways (no pun intended!) it's still timeless.

What Palm Does Right

Palm understands moving around a mobile device like nobody else. Almost every task can be accomplished with just a few touches, clicks, or key presses. Brian has already covered the ease of entering appointment/calendar data on in the constantly-saved model of the Palm OS, and I'd add past innovations like photo speed dialing (which seems a natural for the iPhone, and ironically was a Palm innovation for their first Windows Mobile device, and requires a 3rd party add on for Palm's own OS!). TreoCentral.com no doubt has many more examples. Though perhaps not as practical on an all-touch device, even little things like typing to begin a contact search or call are all time-saving techniques mastered by the Zen of Palm, and a spirit the iPhone could easily learn.

What Apple Could do Better

In addition to being so old its joints creak and crack every time it turns around, the Palm OS lacks the power to deliver a modern user experience, and bizarrely lacks standardization even across its own device platform (besides the aforementioned lack of photo dialing on the Palm side, GSM and CDMA phones have sported different dialing apps, some modernized while others are left to languish in whatever layer of hell 1990 monochrome aliased bitmaps are condemned).

Adding photo dialing to the iPhone would be trivial. All the Quartz and Core Graphics/Animation services are there, just begging for an Apple take.

Likewise improved calendar entry: tapping on an empty slot should bring up a New Event editor the same way tapping on a filled one brings up a viewer. And data should be saved automatically unless specifically cancelled. The mobile world is both more prone to interruptions and less forgiving of them, after all.

The sideways flick currently used to move between photos, Weather app cities, and other information surfaces could be leveraged more widely as well to speed up functionality. Let me flick between album lists while a song is playing, or email folders from one account to the next.

Digging down into, and backing up out of stacked screens is so iPod Classic.

3. Windows Mobile/HTC Speeds, Feeds, and Divergent Needs

As any WMExpert would tell you, Windows Mobile -- in Microsoft's most favoritist model -- is not a product but a platform. So, I'm adding in stalwart hardware manufacturer HTC to round out the reference. Before we get too deeply into that, however, it's worth remembering that the Microsoft model makes for an almost diametrically opposed situation to Apple's. At the time of this writing, there is only 1 iPhone model, from 1 manufacturer, on 1 US-based carrier. Last count, there were 3.2 gazillion Windows Mobile phones across a plethora of OS variations (standard, smartphone... er... purple?) and innumerable manufacturing SKU's not only from HTC, but Palm, Motorola, and even Symbian co-founder Sony Ericsson, among others, which run on every carrier and it's multitude of resellers.

But Apple's end-to-end control of the device, while giving it an undeniable edge in stability and user experience, comes at the cost of variety and individual configurability.

Back in the dark days of tech support we used to joke that if you were in Mac support, every question had a simple "yes, here's how..." or "no, sorry" answer, while if you were in Windows support, every question inevitably started with "maybe" and led to hours and hours of digging, tweaking, and testing. And in many ways, the same holds true with the iPhone today: One feature set and a limited range of settings. And in very narrow ways, that leaves room for Apple to learn something from Windows Mobile.

What Windows Mobile Does Right

Again, I'm including HTC in this equation, and from that standpoint, they deserve credit for upping the game with a VGA quality screen and a release schedule that allows them to continuously field the latest and greatest mobile processors.

On the Windows Mobile side proper, the beast is so infinitely tweak-able it might as well be a hobbyist kit. Dig deep enough, and you can find settings for how you'd like your settings, and settings for those settings as well.

What Apple Could Do Better

While my heart remains set on a Nano-esque 202dpi screen (the current iPhone is 160dpi) bringing 720p to the mobile world, I would realistically expect VGA's 640x480 in the next revision. The iPhone, with the video-out cables, is already capable of pumping 640x480 to your TV, why not to the iPhone screen? And while a yearly, single product release cycle doesn't give much room for proc bumps, going beefy from the start, and getting the new chips early like Apple does with their laptops and desktops, would keep up the cutting-edge tradition and reputation, and help see devices healthily though their annual life cycles. (This might even be something proprietary chips via the recent PA Semi purchase could help with...)

On the configuration side, while Windows Mobile has 'em, they've also left them pretty much scattered every which where but under under a unified Settings area, which is precisely where the iPhone sorts them. However, though its certainly understandable that Apple is focusing on the casual user, surfacing some lower-level options a la Windows Mobile, organized and implemented with Apple's fit and finish, would go a long way to appeasing power users who currently turn to jailbreaking in a desperate attempts to get closer to the metal. On the Mac side, there are 3rd party apps that create GUIs for otherwise Terminal-only settings, and while I'm not suggesting (though maybe pipe dreaming a little...) that Apple should provide an official way to get Terminal up on the iPhone, an Advanced button that allowed for more options and deeper tweaking would be a happy medium for many users.

(What, you thought I'd beat the dead horse of cut and paste?)

2. Nokia's Mobile Video Creation

"I'm streaming live right now, come chat!" is pure Twitter bacon (like spam, but you opted in to it). Many tech pundits, who are also iPhone users, love the Web 2.1 ability to stream video from anywhere and everywhere, whether it's Robert Scoble shoving a camera in front of economic powerhouses, or the infinitely better looking Cali Lewis demoing Wii fit for the good of the masses, or the first lady of Apple (and self-confessed Jobstalker) iJustine zooming down the highway, live streaming video, especially live streaming mobile video, is the latest IT thing.

Many (most?) of these bleeding edge technojournalists are also Apple fans and devoted iPhone users. So, the fact that they're all using N95's to stream their mobile videos shows that Apple could learn something from Nokia.

What Nokia Does Right

Say what you want about Nokia's Soviet-military design aesthetic and their rather pathetic North American release schedules, they know how to throw a camera at a smart phone. The N95 sports a massive 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens and DVD(ish) caliber video capture. This compares to the rapidly obsoleting 2 megapixel cam on the iPhone, which also fails to enjoy any Apple-provided video capture (which means jailbreaking and loading unsupported third party apps are your only current option).

So, while Apple and the iPhone's built-in iPod rules the roost when it comes to consuming mobile media, the N95 can't be touched when it comes to creating that media on the go. This is why all those aforementioned iPhone toting blogerati, when they clog my Twitter feed with their live streaming announcements, are streaming live via the N95.

What Apple Could Do Better

There have been rumors of an upcoming iChat Mobile application, and even video conferencing, and that's a start. Apple, however, stands alone in 360 degree spherical integration, and while they don't have as massive a footprint in most of them the way Microsoft might, they at least have a toe in all of them, from hardware, to software, to services, from production, to processing, to deployment, to consumption. You can fire up Final Cut Pro on your iMac, create a movie, upload it to .Mac and sync a copy to your iPhone. Imagine that power harnessed around mobile media creation?

Right now, QIK and Nokia need each other to produce streaming video (while the N95's battery lasts, that is). Imagine an iPhone with a decent camera and video capture that could stream live via, or send recorded clips to, .Mac gallery. And imagine if Apple took the much-needed step of enabling support for UstreamTV, stickam, Flickr, and YouTube.

Coupled with seamless integration with the Mac, iMovie 08, and higher end apps, and -- BOOM -- the king of mobile media consumption becomes the king of mobile media creation as well.

Everyone could be a life-caster.

1. Android's Cloud and Location Based Services

I know. Android is still somewhere between vaporware and the eternal beta tag that hounds so many of Google's initiatives. How could they be my #1? Here's the thing: with a few notable exceptions (we'll get to those in a paragraph or two), they're batting nearly 1000 on all "cloud services" right now. And the cloud is the future.

What are cloud services? Most of us run applications locally on our computers. We buy software, install it, and use it to save files on our hard drive. Cloud services change that game entirely. They run applications on servers (often huge data centers) that we access via our browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox), or through a dedicated client (iTunes, Sidebar Objects, Dashboard Widgets, etc.). Instead of buying them, we get them for free, sponsored by advertising, or via paid subscription. And instead of saving files locally, we have the option of saving them on the same servers (and data centers) the services themselves run on. We may lose some potential privacy and control, but we gain the advantage of multiple backups scattered over many geographies to preserve our data. If you think this doesn't sound too different than the old server-client model, or the Sun and Oracle predictions of the network being the computer, you're right. Just on a far greater scale.

What are location-based services? According to Google, the next gold rush. It's tying the cloud in to your current location, based on WiFi, and better yet -- GPS coordinates.

Apple provides some of these services already, with .Mac mail, iDisk storage, .Mac galleries, Back-to-my-Mac, and Sync, and rumors indicate they may be amping it up with IMAP IDLE-style "push" email and PIM sync, and maybe even a complete revamp with the next release, but they still could learn a lot from Google.

What Google Does Right

Confession: I'm a .Mac subscriber. Yes, it's buggy and overpriced, but Back-to-my-Mac and the Sync features alone were enough to lure me in. Nevertheless, Google owns this space. They're predicted to earn more than Microsoft's Windows + Office monopoly soon, and some say that's only the beginning. Indeed, the entire raison-d'être for Android is to give away an OS in hopes of getting Google's services onto more phones and thus, into more hands.

They want you to meet an old friend over one of their Open Social powered networks, use their email to contact the old friend, their search to find a great diner near the both of you, their calendar to schedule a lunch, their Docs suite to get some work done while you're waiting, their Blogger to write up the event, and their Picasa gallery to store pictures of your reunion. (All with tasteful text and banner ads, tuned per your interests and location, served up along with your results and data)

What's more, many of their cloud services allow for easy collaboration. You can share your calendar, work on your spreadsheet along with some colleagues logged in back at the office, and publish everything online for the world to see.

And the most important piece -- indeed the missing link up until recently -- Google Gears allows for offline persistence; you can keep using many of your cloud apps and cloud-stored data even when you don't have a WiFi or cell connection. If you have to get on a plane to see your old friend, you can keep typing away, and when you land everything will sync back up.

What Apple Could Do Better

Where Google strikes out is integration. Their offerings are a disjointed and sometimes disoriented mishmash of homebrews and buyouts, with nowhere near the cohesive user experience or inter-offering leverage Apple could provide. Until recently, some services didn't even work under a single login. There are also huge holes in their offerings, like Amazon S3- or Microsoft Skydrive-like storage (yes, you can rig up gDrive, but I'm talking official offerings here).

Apple already has some of these holes filled (iDisk), but are missing many more pieces themselves. There are suggestions Apple doesn't "get" social networking (or doesn't want to get it). But an easy to use blogging service built into .Mac and the iPhone would be an excellent start. And given Apple's existing "Cult of Mac", a social network tied into that admittedly snobbish demographic would be an easy sell as well. Tie it into the location-based services (opt-in, of course) and suddenly the cloud network takes on physicality as well. Instead of "Steve's Twittering: Meet up at the Mothership after Keynote", Steve can see how many of his friends and contacts are already at Keynote, and tying into search, calendar, IM, and other services could make for a very easy workflow to set up the meet.

This brings me back to the integration. The way Contacts flows into the Apple client for Google Maps gives a hint at how it should "just work". The iPhone Maps app in general shows that Apple can make hybrid client/cloud software better than anyone on the planet. Imagine that leveraged across the device?

Get an email with a spreadsheet, and instead of just a preview, you could launch iWork Online, make your edits, and have them available to all team (or family -- Apple's consumer focus!) members instantly. Still working when you get on that plane? Newer versions of WebKit promise offline modes with database support for just such an eventuality, and WebKit is the foundation of the iPhone's MobileSafari browser, and much of its data rendering in general).

And once the iPhone scales, and iPhone data starts to get aggregated and leveraged (with firm privacy and security policies!) for the benefit of other iPhone users, watch out. Today's social networks and sharing proof-of-concepts will looks positively anemic.

Apple (or an Apple/Google alliance even?) could get an immediate edge going into the next great paradigm shift in computer technology.

Conclusion

So there you have them: better Blackberry-style email management, Treo-centric focus on click counting, Windows Mobile-ish configurability, Nokia inspired mobile video production, and Google Android beating cloud services are my top 5 things the iPhone could learn from the competition.

Is Apple already thinking along these lines? We'll have to wait for WWDC -- and likely Macworld 2009 -- to know for sure. How about you? If Apple could take 5 things from the competition to improve YOUR iPhone, what would they be?

Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

BREAKING! RIM to Preemptively Release bbTablet!

We don't break fake news here often, so when we do, you know it's going to be big -- and dare we say -- bold. No, scratch that, BOLDER!

Keenly aware that Apple may be releasing the long-anticipated iTablet at WWDC this June, and fed up with being called on for blatantly copying the design of the iPhone, RIM has decided to strike first this time and rush out a tablet of their very own: the bbTablet, aka Blackberry 1200, aka BOLDER!

Crackberry.com probably has one on order from eBay as we speak, but it's tiPb that's scored the exclusive specs: ultra-wide 1920x320 "Lawrence of Arabia" screen, OSish 4.6, and full desktop size Qwerty keyboard! Take that, Apple!

Mike "Deadpan Funnyman" Lazaridis, when asked for fake comment, had this to say about what makes RIM's device the "iTablet Killer":

Full desktop Qwerty keyboards. I'm sorry, it really is. I'm totally not making this up. Totally. People don't like screens. They really don't. Makes them squint. And read. Totally. They're getting tired of looking at their old tablets and they're coming into the stores and they want to be able to do, like, Facebook and they want to be able to do, like, instant messaging and they want to be able to do, like, e-mail and they ask for those features thinking that they're going to get another tablet, and I tell them they don't need screens for those things, they need keyboards, big @$keyboards. Totally. They need the (BlackBerry) BOLDER because it's the best devices for doing those kinds of activities. And so what is the defining factor? The keyboard. I mean, if the suits would let me, I'd ship without a screen at all. 100% keyboard. Totally. </blockquote> <p><strong>RIM Bends Over (Backwards) for India</strong></p> <p>Sadly, and shamefully, this is news of the unfake kind. We've <a href="http://www.imore.com/2008/04/12/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-12th-edition/">covered</a> the <a href="http://www.imore.com/2008/04/19/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-17th-edition/">seemingly</a> <a href="http://www.imore.com/2008/04/26/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-26th-edition/">endless</a> RIM vs. India debacle before (where by debacle we mean "India says they want to spy on all Blackberry traffic" and "RIM says want fries with that?") and now, <a href="http://crackberry.com/indian-government-gets-ok-rim-monitor-blackberry-network">according to Crackberry.com</a>, it looks to finally be resolved. So what was the sticking point? Did India want a way to reassure citizens they were restricting their surveillance to dully processed, court-certified "people of interest"? Nope. Did RIM fight for the privacy of their user base? Not so much either. Seems all RIM wanted was some legal @$ cover in case, you know, giving India the keys to their digital vault resulted in personal data being made public.

Jeez. Ya think?

So India now joins China and Singapore as countries RIM actively helps violate the privacy of their citizens? Nice! Unless you're one of the citizens... But it isn't like you're not about to get a heckova better option soon anyway...

The Worst of All Worlds?

Corporate crony stuck with your company's massive overspending on a RIM server and legacy dependence on Microsoft monopolyware? Desperate -- willing to do anything! -- for some small sip of ice water in big, buggy server hell?

Okay, just DON'T DO THIS!

Not since Sony Ericsson's Flashenjavastein Monster has anything so hideous blighted the mobile world. (Note to Interwebs, why must you upload images we can never unexperience?)

If you want an iPhone, get an iPhone. If you want Vista, go tell Steve Ballmer you're the one. In either case, when it comes to these "themes", in the words of Casey and Dieter: EPIC NO!

Now GSM Can Has Outdated Treo's 2!

Not so fast, AT&T and Sprint users! Been making fun of the Palm 800w inflicted on the CDMA world? Well, it's karma time! TreoCentral.com and WMExperts.com have double-teamed-up to bring a little payback in the form of the newly leaked Treo 850! That's right, 50 more Treo points wrapped up in the same 600-ish package, albeit with a sure-to-win-innovation-of-the-decade new feature: flush screen!

Hey Palm, 2003 called and they would kindly like their device back.

And in No Other News

It's happening just like we said it would: Apple has set the bar so high, other manufacturers are now ducking under it. Witness Nokia. Now, if you live in North America like we do, you might think Nokia is just that great Norfinwedish furniture store -- you know, where you pick up stuff on the cheap and then break a thumb and die cursing trying to put it together yourself? Well, apparently in the rest of the world they sell smartphones (we were just as surprised, honest). We might of known that, of course, if their US market share hadn't free-fallen from 20% to 7% in the last two years (not coincidentally the time frame between the N95's launch in Europe to the last neck-bearded blog post vaguely remembering it still hadn't really seen the light of day in the US...)

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/05/24/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-may-24th-edition/feed/ 2 http://www.imore.com/2008/05/11/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-may-11th-edition/ http://www.imore.com/2008/05/11/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-may-11th-edition/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 00:53:07 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/?p=2263 This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about]]>

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

[Note: Due to the dust settling from our mega-merger -- and our subsequent allergies -- we’re keeping it short this week. Just the low-lights.]

Crackberry Cracks the Net

Big week down Crackberry.com way as none other than Kevin himself plastered the interwebs -- from Daring Fireball to Engadget to Gizmodo -- with his exclusive videos, reviews, and... video reviews of one of the most hotly anticipated handsets of the year.

Or so we thought.

Nice try, Crackberry. While the elegant chrome bezel and glossy black facade almost had us fooled, the huge, honking tic-tactile keyboard kicked our aesthetic back to reality.

So what device did Crackberry.com break the interwebs (and likely Kevn's paypal account) for? Confession: they lost us at keyboard, so -- shrug -- Treo 400?

Assault and Blackberry

Celebrity publicists, eager to meet the needs of the Paris Lohan’s of the world, often seem to karmically torture their torturous clients with whatever RIM product Amazon will pay them to take (while expensing it at full price, no doubt...)

But what about the poor celebrities that have to use the tiny screened, tiny keyboarded, media-challenged monsters? What are they supposed to do?

Turns out one got so angry she tried to destroy her hated handset by bashing it (repeatedly?) into a Brooklyn neighbor.

No jail time for the celeb, Crackberry.com tells us. The Blackberry? Authorities are reportedly seeking the recycle penalty.

Attack of the iClones

Our special Wait-a-Thon edition covering the HTC Touch Diamond, and posts on the Philips x800 and the Sprint Instinct $100 million ad campaign show that some carriers and manufacturers can, by throwing vast amounts of money down the pit, make a sixth generation Windows Mobile handset flounder and ultimately still fail to copy the inaugural iPhone. Point taken.

Now how about taking this point -- and all that money, engineering skill, and software architecture experience -- and making a great Windows Mobile handset that is, you know, like not totally ashamed to be Windows Mobile?

Windows Seat on the TyTn’ic

The good: WMExperts.com lets it be known that HTC will finally fix the crippled video drivers that have been plaguing TyTn II owners since the dawn of time (or, at least, since the dawn of them buying the disastrous device).

The bad: They probably won’t be fixing it for any version anyone is likely to own, including the AT&T Tilt.

The ugly: HTC won’t be fixing the crippled drivers pandemic to any of their other devices either.

Nope, they’re too busy claiming the shoddy performance of their grafted-on TouchFLO interface on the Diamond iClone will be fixed in a future update. Credibility much?

Super-Size Your Centro!

With over a million Centro’s served, Palm finally asks the next logical question: want fries with that?

Yup, TreoCentral.com says official Centro branded accessories are on the way. Or more of them. Or just a mediocre cradle and audio adapter. Or something. But at least now every bargain-basement, ancestral-generation would-be smartphone neophyte can get the combo.

Look, More Palm News!

We can’t believe it either, but we actually have two (2!) minor Palm items this week. And speaking of minor Palm items, it looks like both the 800w and 850v (or 500z or whoknowswhat?) will see the cold, cruel light of day some time this year (and not, as many thought, flux-capacitor-like back in 2001 where their design seems frozen...)

And In No Other News

In apparent retaliation for the iPhone, and the sense of childlike wonder it is now threatening to restore around the world, those Norfindwedish fiends at Nokia are now retaliating by bringing more of their hyper-powered, Soviet designed handsets to North America, including the N95, a handset so costly it made Steve Balmer briefly consider picking up a relatively inexpensive iPhone...

What’s next, the similarly military sounding E66 and E71? (Or were those old Epson dot-matrix designations...?)

Death by utilitarianism. Fiends.

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/05/11/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-may-11th-edition/feed/ 4 http://www.imore.com/2008/04/12/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-12th-edition/ http://www.imore.com/2008/04/12/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-12th-edition/#comments Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:55:29 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/04/12/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-12th-edition/ Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you]]>

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

NOC Back to RIM's Regularly Unscheduled Outages

Having finally mastered outages both unscheduled and scheduled, CrackBerry.com tell us RIM once again led the industry in outage innovation with the new, improved, cluster-buster outage. Your carrier, your area, your email? Dunno. Not when, not where. It was, however, limited to AT&T. And Verizon. And, yeah, T-Mobile. East coast only. Plus west coast. Oh, and in between too. We're mostly sure about that. Mostly.

Compete with that, ActiveSync!

(Ha Ha! Indeed...)

RIM to India: Please... be Gentle.

Lest we forget that RIM's Network Operations Center (NOC) isn't just about communal service failures so regular they must be on a high-fiber diet, CrackBerry.com reminds us about their other advantage: convenient one-stop security and privacy violation spots.

Obliging to a degree that makes even Jerry Yang do a spit-take, RIM already maintains proxy-servers in Singapore and China designed to allow those governments to spy... er... surveil all data traffic in their respective dictatorships... er... countries. Now they may go so far as to provide the government of India the translation code(s) needed to decrypt the actual messages sent from Blackberries themselves(!?).

Important sacrifice necessary in the war against whatever amorphous threat-du-decade allows governments to trample individual privacy, or overt act of an evil empire in-the-growing? Well, the telcos support it, so easy call...

In Ur WinMob Runningz Android

Windows Mobile not making your current smartphone buggy and unstable enough for you? Google to the rescue, says WM Experts!

Simply take your old, outdated, Windows 6.0 or 6.1 phone and install the destined-to-be-in-perpetual-beta, Android OS on it, and bingo! (Or is it BSOD?) Twice the OS with half the resources and still nothing in the way of user experience!

Word on the street is that this is only step one. Soon you'll be able to run Access Linux Platform on top of Android. And with ALP's killer Garnet emulation mode, that's a quad-OS sammitch writing so far from the metal you'll never be disturbed by anything even remotely resembling a phone call again. (But you will be able to run all 300 8-bit 160x160 apps you bought for your Treo back in 1832!)

Lab tests show performance isn't great, however. Only twice as fast as current milestone builds of VistaMob 7.

NOC-Down, Drab-Out

A special bonus WMExperts podcast this week, with special guest CrackBerry Kevin, brings us a techno-a-techno "push" email punch-out, as Blackberry's Notorious NOC takes on Microsoft's MSCMDM (aka Miskumdum, which, apparently, Superman must somehow trick Steve Balmer into saying backwards in order to banish the Monkey Boy back to his home dimension).

Elegantly available, ironically enough, via iTunes.

Treo 755p Sprint'ing Towards the Finished Line?

Treocentral.com reports that Sprint has stopped selling the latest -- 2006 vintage -- top-of-the-line Palm OS Treo 755p. Or not. Apparently the sales numbers really don't indicate either way.

And in No Other News

First it was Blackberry, then it was Samsung, now Nokia has sent in an iClone of their very own.

Seriously.

How do you say "shameless" in Norfinwedish?

Gotcha. "Tube".

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/04/12/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-12th-edition/feed/ 0 http://www.imore.com/2008/04/08/send-in-the-iclones-nokia-tube-edition/ http://www.imore.com/2008/04/08/send-in-the-iclones-nokia-tube-edition/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:55:39 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/04/08/send-in-the-iclones-nokia-tube-edition/ demo a ]]>

When the iPhone was introduced, Nokia's first official response was the corporate equivalent of a raspberry (the spitting kind, not the fruit!). Their second official response was to demo a device which so closely mimicked the iPhone that it quite possibly was one.

"If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride," said Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia.

Well, proudly copy it they have! The final device, bewilderingly code-named "Tube" is ready for prime-time (or whatever time it is they relegate programs that knock off last season's hits).

Is Nokia worried about the iPhone and it's popularity? Not according to Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia (who must be auditioning for a shot on iPhone JEOPARDY!):

"We've done [the iPhone's sales numbers to date] since we've had dinner on Friday."

We would hope so! Since the global sales leader with a complete range from cheapo handsets to high-end convergence devices available in almost every country, on every carrier, on the planet is comparing numbers to a single (albeit revolutionary) iPhone available in only a handful of places on a single carrier each. And Fake Steve claims to be mathlexic! (N95 to iPhone numbers in the US anyone?)

That Nokia has adopted the increasingly popular "if you can't beat them, copy them" strategy -- a strategy that, if Apple had adopted it, there would be nothing for RIM, Samsung, Microsoft, or Nokia to be copying right now -- is disappointing to say the least. But it once again highlights that if Apple hasn't achieved market share, it's certainly achieved market leadership.

Do you want a world where there's the iPhone and every other manufacturer's knockoff of same? Or would you rather see the other companies innovate and revolutionize and differentiate their offerings? What do you think?

(via Engadget)

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/04/08/send-in-the-iclones-nokia-tube-edition/feed/ 6 http://www.imore.com/2008/04/05/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-5th-edition/ http://www.imore.com/2008/04/05/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-5th-edition/#comments Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:04:48 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/04/05/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-5th-edition/ Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you]]>

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Outage Huge Success

After several weeks of failure, CrackBerry.com reports that RIM finally succeeded in taking down their network, as scheduled. Unlike previous outages, reportedly the result of failed upgrade attempts, this one required the pulling down of an overly large Looney-Toons-esque lever marked with a big, red "OFF" and stymied Waterloo based engineers for weeks.

Proving it's easier to succeed with failure than fail with success, once RIM restored their "push" to the legions of addicts, one CrackBerry.com commenter reported the service seemed slower.

Great. Last week they copied the iPhone design, now their copying the Microsoft upgrade model.

In Ur Fridge. Can has Push?

On April 1st, CrackBerry.com informed us that RIM, doubtless under heavy iPhone ActiveSync pressure in the board-room, was making the next logical move to expand both their product base and their waist lines: BlackBelly Kitchen Appliances.

According to the CTIA release, each fridge will come complete with enterprise-class "push" water and ice dispensers, and teeny, tiny little tic-tactile keyboards on the handles. No desktop-class browsers, however, are currently planned.

Staff who were on-scene overheard a RIM employee mumble: "@#$%ing Steve Jobs comes out with a multi-touch fridge and think we'll care? We'll just stop-and-run straight to the bathroom... Already got the SureType flusher working in the lab..."

Microsoft Releases Windows Mobile 6.6.6

Unlike the previous item, this one has April Fool's written all over it. Sorry, WMExperts.com, but we're not biting. Just how stupid do you think we are, really? There's no way Microsoft wasted the 6 months between Macworld 2007 and the iPhone release, and the almost 9 months that have followed, on this most incremental update of the beast.

Nice try, especially the Paint.exe'd up screen shots (mad skills there, Bohn!) and pitch-perfect spoof of a classically lame Microsoft presentation. If you'd thrown in a Steve Balmer "Mobile Developers!" dance, it might (might) have been a tad more believable.

As it is, even a die-hard Windows fan-pundit would probably react to this with:

Microsoft is failing badly here

Better luck next April Fool's!

Sony WinMob Reaches Xperia-tion Date

Take one Sony Ericsson phone and... throw it away. Then, In a touching vote of confidence to the industrial design force who crafted you everything from the PlayStation line to the Rolly, get HTC to build you a new kit. Finally, in a show of good faith to your longtime Symbian alliance partners, ditch your time-tested, world-dominating OS and shoehorn Windows Mobile 6.6.6 onto the device. And what do you have? The beginning of a Palm-esque downward spiral. (Can you downward spiral from the bottom? We don't know. We're mathlexic, remember?)

WMExperts.com brings us bitter-sweet first impressions on the last rights, in all their banana-slide-out gory glory.

Apparently the device is aimed squarely at North Americans. For a Japanese/Norfinwedish company, that's a pretty overt act of aggression. The minute RIM releases their international-only Symbian-powered Blackberry, it's payback time, fellas!

In Palm News

Treocentral tells us Mexico got a blue Palm Centro.

Yup.

Moving on...

And in No Other News

We blew the Norfinwedish meme already, so no N-Gage jokes from us this week (luckily Nokia supplied their own!). If anything else happened, like say if an Asian powerhouse took a page from RIM's playbook and proudly announced their entry into the iClone market we're blissfully unaware.

For reals.

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/04/05/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-april-5th-edition/feed/ 0 http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-28th-edition-wait-a-thon/ http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-28th-edition-wait-a-thon/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:55:37 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/28/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-28th-edition-wait-a-thon/ Wait-a-Thon post! Leave a comment here for you chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! In the meantime, congrats to last]]>

[Jobs help us, we're making this an official Wait-a-Thon post! Leave a comment here for you chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card! In the meantime, congrats to last week's winner, Dyvim!]

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Outages Outage

Last week Crackberry.com let slip that RIM had gone so far as to begin scheduling their own network outages. Not merely content to follow trends, however, RIM has now one-upped themselves again and, apparently, scheduled an outage for their outage!

You heard right! The once on off is off again! No word yet on when exactly the outage will be rescheduled, though smart money is on a date to be surprised by later!

Waterloo, Start Your Photocopiers!

Two years ago at WWDC we thought we'd poke a little bit of fun at the folks in... Oops, sorry, wrong copycats. This time it's the fine folks at RIM who've toiled away for hours to ensure that no Blackberry owner will ever again mistake their device for a Palm. How? By making their latest model a form-factored photocopy of the iPhone! Glossy black frontage? Check. Rounded chrome edge? Double check. 3.5" gorgeous media wide-screen? D'oh! 'Fraid not. You still get a tic-tactile hard keyboard to burn 90% of your useful face-matter!

Sincerest flattery aside, nothing says market-leader like dressing up in last year's competitive dress...

WinMob Treo 800 to Rock... 6.0?!

What's better than outdated hardware running the latest version of Window's outdated mobile operating system, 6.1? You guessed it, patched-up hardware running the already obsoleted version of Windows, 6.0! WMExperts.com is kind enough to report Sprint's July roadmap, touting the Stockholm-syndrome supporting release in all it's antiquated glory.

But don't give up all hope, there's still VistaMob 7.0 on the horizon, and given Microsoft's current schedule, the 2007-era OS should hit beta by 2011, RTM by 2015, and be almost usable by SP1 in 2017, just in time to magically pair with the much-delayed Surface! (Warning, link contains harsh language).

Palm Reports Lack of Financial Results

Speaking of Palm, er... is anyone still speaking of Palm? Ed Colligan, we guess, who according to TreoCentral.com, busted out a shiny pink Centro worth of financial woes this week. Sales up but revenue down? Jaysus, that'll harshen Bono's elevated partnership's mellow right quick now, won't it?

But with Rubenstein, Bell, and Fox freshly pilfered from high-margin Apple, that's a trend that will hopefully level out around 2010 when Palm's 2005 OS, Nova, and astounding new form factors (can you say "clam shell!), finally ship!

And in No Other News

Yeah, we still can't speak Norfinwedish (Nokian?) and we're still not paying any attention to other smart phones, if there are any (we're not even sure). Heck, an entire major mobile manufacturer could be ripping itself in half right this very minute and we wouldn't have a clue. Seriously.

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-28th-edition-wait-a-thon/feed/ 25 http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/double-edged-nokia-boosts-data-speed/ http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/double-edged-nokia-boosts-data-speed/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:55:09 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/28/double-edged-nokia-boosts-data-speed/ Nokia Siemens Networks announced that they have developed new software which double the speed of existing EDGE data networks (the type of networks that currently supply carrier-based internet connections to]]>

Nokia Siemens Networks announced that they have developed new software which double the speed of existing EDGE data networks (the type of networks that currently supply carrier-based internet connections to iPhone users worldwide).

So, 2 x slow = how less-slow exactly? 592 kbps says Nokia, who estimates availability beginning Q3 2008. Of course, 3G rumormongers will have us long past EDGE by then, so not to be outdone, Nokia also revealed plans for a next-gen nitro punch called EGPRS 2, which they hope reaches speeds of 1.2 Mbps:

“By 2015, we expect to live in a broadband-IP world with five billion people ‘always on’ and therefore Nokia Siemens Networks is committed to protecting customer investments and continue to implement leading EDGE technology. Dual Carrier software upgrade is an easy and extremely cost efficient step to bring broadband user experience to GSM/EDGE networks”, says Ari Lehtoranta, Head of Radio Access Business Unit, Nokia Siemens Networks.

(via Gizmodo)

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/03/28/double-edged-nokia-boosts-data-speed/feed/ 0 http://www.imore.com/2008/03/24/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-24th-edition/ http://www.imore.com/2008/03/24/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-24th-edition/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:15:06 +0000 Rene Ritchie http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/03/24/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-24th-edition/ Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, this Week in Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about]]>

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, this Week in Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Likes Outages So Much They Start Scheduling Them!

CrackBerry.com brings word that RIM once again gave some tough-love to Blackberry addicts in the form of a NOC outage on March 22 from 2AM to 6AM EDT. Sorry, no email for the after-after party, Lin-Lo! But it's not just the Hollywood scandalrati who'll suffer. 2AM EDT translates into late night on the west coast, early morning in Europe, and midday in Asia. Giving a nation of Jet Lee's the DTs? We'd start running now, Lazaridis!

WinMob Treo 800 Delayed Until... Er... Hello?... Little Help?

According to WMExperts.com, the two long suffering mobile platforms that suffer longer together, Windows Mobile and Treos, will not see the new high-end model drop until sometime later this year. Why? Who knows, but we can offer some hypotheticals:

1. This baby will be rocking the new OS, which is still running just a tiny bit behind schedule as Microsoft wants to make sure users enjoy VistaMob every bit as much as its big desktop brother.
2. It was shown at a Gatesnote, and as such is contractually forbidden to hit the market for at least another year. (Hi, Surface!)
3. Bono now owns the place and spent enough time in Cupertino to inject himself into every little feature discussion. "Jaysus, needs more red now, dunnit?"

And in No Other News

Yeah, sorry, nobody much covers other smart phones in these parts. Nokia probably did something in Scandinavia but we can't read Norfinwedish so who knows? It's not like they're being sued by a thousand year old lady or are -- yet again -- beating, stomping, hammering, pummeling, and slapping around the dead horse that is N-Gage, right?

]]> http://www.imore.com/2008/03/24/this-week-in-smartphone-schadenfreude-march-24th-edition/feed/ 3