Hasta La Gadget!

Eldar Murtazin over at mobile-review has chimed in on those alleged Nokia N97 Mini shots that leaked last week — and as anyone who follows the mobile industry knows, when the ridiculously well-connected Eldar speaks, folks tend to listen. The dude says that the N97 Mini is very much real, as is the name, which — get this — he claims was leaked by Nokia itself in an effort to stave off an unnamed competitor who’d also been planning to release a smaller version of one of its handsets with a “Mini” label slapped on the name. At any rate, the N97 Mini apparently isn’t pulling any punches — it’s said to be exactly what you see, little more than a smaller N97 with a reconfigured keyboard and no camera lens cover. That sounds like a tough sell at first, especially when you throw in Eldar’s claim that it’ll step down to 8 and 16GB versions from the N97’s 32GB, but the good news is that Espoo’s seemingly looking to get this on the market for about €100 less ($144) than the N97. As for an official announcement, Eldar says that Nokia’s planning to unveil it at Nokia World next month; the original model was revealed at last year’s show, and frankly, we’re hoping for a little bit more innovation than this by the time they’re done unveiling the new lineup. Rover, perhaps?

[Via Unwired View]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Nokia N97 Mini is seriously just a smaller, cheaper N97, it seems originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

Last week, fellow columnist Ross Rubin talked about the state of mobile platforms and how the era for launching new platforms has come to an end. I tend to take a different view of the mobile market. There are currently six major platforms vying for the hearts and minds of users and third party applications developers — RIM’s Blackberry, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s s60, Palm’s WebOS and Google’s Android — and there’s simply no way the market will support that many device ecosystems. But there may yet be opportunity for other players to enter the market.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the early 80s there were a multitude of personal computing platforms. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Apple and even Timex (yes, Timex) all were in the personal computing business, long before IBM entered the game. All survived for a period of time selling to an enthusiast market with a focus on out of the box featuresets. Once the target became the mass market, however, user expectations changed from the out of box experience (which essentially meant programming in Basic) to additional capabilities provided by third party software. The success or failure of each PC platform was decided in no small part by the availability of third party software. Exclusive titles, best of breed titles, and titles that appeared on a given platform first determined winners and losers. The same thing is happening today in the mobile space.

Continue reading Entelligence: Six is much too much

Entelligence: Six is much too much originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chart showing mobile devices visiting Wired.com

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are the overwhelming favorites for mobile access to Wired.com.

Color us surprised.

While we knew that our readers use and are interested in iPhones, we weren’t prepared for just how drastically the logfile numbers skewed towards Apple’s mobile platform. Taken together, the iPhone and iPod Touch represent 91.6% of the mobile devices accessing Wired.com during June, 2009.

The next closest runner-up, the T-Mobile G1, commands just 1.6% of the mobile device total (based on number of visits to Wired.com), and the Nintendo Wii — bizarrely — is the fourth most popule “mobile” device, with 0.7% of our site visits. (We assume that our logfile analysis software, Omniture, is just confused about how mobile the Wii really is.) The RIM BlackBerry 9000 and Palm Pre also have about 0.7% of total visits.

Grouping by manufacturer gives a slightly different picture: Apple, as before, holds 91.6%, but Nokia comes in second, with 1.7% of the total visits. T-Mobile has 1.6%, while RIM takes 1.5% and HTC 0.9%.

We know from previous logfile analyses that Wired.com readers are more likely to use Macs and Firefox than the general population. But when it comes to mobile access to Wired.com, the massive skew towards iPhones is a little surprising.

One reason is surely that our site is poorly optimized for most mobile devices, so phones that render websites pretty much as desktop browsers do — like the iPhone — are more likely to work well with Wired.com. If your phone doesn’t render ordinary websites well, you’re not likely to come here often.

Also, with 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches in the world, there are a lot of people using them to browse the web.

And as previous studies have suggested, people are much more likely to browse the web on an iPhone than on other smartphones, even if those other phones have comparably featured browsers. That’s probably due to the iPhone’s super-easy (or dumbed-down, depending on your point of view) interface. For instance, Nokia’s latest S60-based phones, like the E71 and the N79, have browsers capable of rendering web pages faithfully. But the interface is clunkier: It just takes more steps to scroll, zoom, and click on links than it does on the iPhone.

The result is plain: Far more people actually use the iPhone’s browser, at least when it comes to visiting Wired.com.

Those who follow Nokia know that its phone lineup is divided roughly into three segments: the Nseries, populated by high-end, media-heavy smartphones (plus the N770, N800, and N810 tablets); the Eseries, concentrating on business, and the four-digit line, which acts as a catch-all for anything not deserving of an Nseries or Eseries designation. It looks like Espoo could be prepping to add a fourth line into the mix, though, on news that they’ve gone ahead and trademarked “Cseries” in Finland. What “C” stands for is anyone’s guess, but this does dovetail nicely with the near-constant stream of information suggesting Nokia will be driving hard with MIDs and netbooks later this year and next, so maybe the “C” stands for “computer.” Of course, it could also stand for “crap,” so we’ve just got to wait and see what becomes of this little moniker.

[Via puhelinvertailu]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Laptops

Nokia files for “Cseries” trademark — but what’s it for? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ok Nokia, this is getting serious. The world’s largest cellphone maker just announced a 66 percent yearly drop in Q2 profit while lowering its 2009 market share target for its cellphones. Originally, Nokia had expected market share to rise in 2009, presumably based on a successful launch of the N97 flagship device. However, outside of a core group of S60 diehards, the N97 has been universally panned in both reviews and user forums alike. And with nothing but rumors of an Atom-based Nokia netbook on the immediate horizon, well, let’s just say that we’re suddenly concerned about the health of our friends from Espoo.

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia cuts market share targets as Q2 profits plummet originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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