Hasta La Gadget!

Smartphones are taking over the U.S., says Nielsen research. Photo courtesy of Nielsen

If your last cellphone purchase wasn’t a smartphone and you’re living stateside, consider yourself in the minority.

So says the most recent data from Nielsen, which claims 55 percent of U.S. mobile phone purchases over the last three months were smartphones. That’s up 34 percent from last year.

“With more compelling features and lower prices, Apple’s iPhone set the trend,” said Gartner mobile analyst Ken Dulaney in an interview.

Even outside of the national market, smartphones have risen drastically since the iPhone’s debut, four years ago Wednesday. The company sold a record 18.6 million iPhones in the first three months of 2011 alone. The proliferation of new smartphone models running on the Android platform has also driven this growth: A recent tweet from Android head honcho Andy Rubin claims 500,000 daily Android device activations.

As the rise of the smartphone gradually edges out the traditional feature phone, the mobile landscape as a whole is changing dramatically. Carrying an ‘always on,’ web-connected device is slowly becoming the norm; 38 percent of U.S. mobile phone users now own smartphones. Mobile carriers saw this coming a mile away, preemptively ending unlimited data plans as smartphone data consumption rose. Like it or not, the future is mobile, web-connected and data-hungry.

“The vast majority of mobile consumers — 55 percent — are now choosing smartphones over feature phones when they purchase a new device,” a Nielsen spokesperson told Wired.com. “And they are choosing app and media-friendly devices like iPhones and Android phones.”

Interestingly enough, Android is losing some of the momentum it once had in the smartphone market. While it rose in marketshare by 20 percent over a one-year period from February 2010-11, that growth seems to have stagnated, settling around 27 percent of recent smartphone purchases over the past four months. It is, however, still the leader in terms of smartphone platform share.

Android’s growth has most likely been stymied by a surge of iPhone purchases, according to Nielsen’s data. Over the same four-month period, recent iPhone purchases jumped from 10 to 17 percent. This was probably driven by the release of the iPhone 4 on Verizon’s 3G network on Feb. 10, which allowed a flood of new customers who weren’t thrilled about AT&T’s service to buy Apple’s phone. Previous to the release, AT&T carried Apple’s phones exclusively.

Those of you who love Apple’s hardware but not the high prices may be in luck — circulating rumors suggest Apple may come out with two new phone models this fall, including a “feature phone” version of the iPhone 4, nee the iPhone 4S. However, we’re skeptical about that claim.

Android’s stagnation is Apple’s gain and RIM’s loss, according to Nielsen data. (Photo courtesy Nielsen.)

The T-Mobile myTouch 4G claims to have the most advanced camera of any smartphone currently on the market.

If you’ve been looking for a phone with a serious camera, T-Mobile may have you covered with its latest offering.

The HTC myTouch 4G Slide’s main claim to fame is its camera, an 8-megapixel beast with dual LED flash and “zero shutter lag.”

A backside illuminated sensor and f/2 aperture lens are included to improve low-light performance. Other camera-centric features include a panoramic photo tool, HDR, and something called BurstShot, which takes multiple photos in quick succession so you can capture just the right moment — presumably so your cherished jump shots don’t become awkward squatting shots.

It’s interesting to see HTC put so much emphasis on the myTouch 4G’s camera, as opposed to performance and display, like most companies do when marketing their smartphones. But hey — the old saying goes that the best camera is the one you carry everywhere, so if the smartphone in your pocket has an awesome camera, even better. It’s a clever way for HTC to differentiate a smartphone in an extremely crowded market.

The myTouch 4G runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and is skinned with HTC Sense 3.0. As a T-Mobile phone, it’s also got the company’s Qik video chat and Group Text services baked in. A hands-free mode lets users control the smartphone with voice commands when they’re driving or otherwise occupied.

Rounding out the specs are a 3.7-inch WVGA super LCD touchscreen and a full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It’s powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor.

The T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide will be available in July for $200 with a two-year service agreement.

See Also:

• T-Mobile Announces Android-Powered MyTouch
• Android Phone Redux Is a Massive Upgrade
• Big, Beautiful and Badass: The 9 Coolest Android Smartphones at …

Looks like Nokia finally hired a designer with some taste. Photo courtesy of Nokia

By Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

Nokia has finally announced the long-anticipated N9 handset, the culmination of Nokia’s five-step plan to deliver a mainstream Linux-based smartphone. The N9 is an impressively engineered device that is matched with a sophisticated touch-oriented interface and a powerful software stack with open source underpinnings. It’s a worthy successor of the developer-centric N900, but it provides a user experience that is tailored for a mainstream audience.

The N9 is the first truly modern smartphone that Nokia has unveiled since the start of finger-friendly interface revolution. Although it’s a significant technical achievement, it’s sadly a pyrrhic victory for Nokia—the device has arrived a year too late. The Finnish phone giant has already abandoned its Linux platform in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system.

The N9 has a 1GHz TI OMAP Cortex A8 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 3.9-inch AMOLED capacitive display, and an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The hardware specifications aren’t industry-leading, but are still respectable—especially when you consider the fact that much of the software is native code, not hampered by the resource overhead of a managed code runtime. The industrial engineering is outstanding, featuring a curved glass screen and slender polycarbonate body.

The front of the N9 has no buttons, a design decision that was made possible by the software’s gesture-based interaction model. The N9 user interface, which is largely built with the open source Qt development toolkit, has a completely new look and feel. Aside from the rounded icons, it looks very different from Symbian and the Maemo interface of the N900. Nokia is calling the new user experience layer “Swipe” in reference to its emphasis on the swiping gesture. It has a very fresh and distinctive style.

There is some confusion about the exact configuration of the N9 software stack. Nokia’s official marketing and PR material cite MeeGo 1.2 as the software platform, but it’s actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo.

It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it’s really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2. What this means is that the distinction will be little more than an implementation detail as far as users and application developers are concerned.

A closer inspection of Nokia’s MeeGo strategy shows that this hybrid approach is entirely consistent with the roadmap that Espoo was espousing earlier this year.

Another major point of confusion is the relationship between the new N9 and a leaked prototype with the same name that showed up on the radar last year. The original MeeGo-based N9 prototype had a slide-out physical keyboard and was thought to be scheduled for a Q1 2011 launch. That design, which was known internally as N9-00, was dropped. The release date got pushed back as Nokia started a new keyboardless design called the N9-01, codenamed Lankku, which was likely the basis for the N9 that Nokia unveiled this week. Based on some odd images that Engadget spotted, it looks like N950—a special developer variant of the N9 that will only be available to select third-party developers—might be based on the original slide-out keyboard design.

Will it blend?

Although it appears to have a lot to offer, the N9 unfortunately won’t get an opportunity to shine. Nokia’s schizophrenic platform strategy and lack of long-term commitment make the device a non-starter. The new phone is a bit like the Titanic: a masterpiece of quality engineering and luxury craftsmanship that is doomed to sink on its maiden voyage. The ambiguity of MeeGo’s role in Nokia’s future product lineup and the company’s frustrating mixed messages to third-party software developers have already set up the N9 for failure.

When the rumors first started to emerge about the possibility of Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, I was highly skeptical. As I pointed out at the time, Nokia’s MeeGo efforts were very close to producing the kind of platform that Nokia needs to be competitive. The company had effectively bet its future on MeeGo—meaning that any change at such a late stage would be borderline suicidal.

When new CEO Stephen Elop issued his now-infamous “burning platform” memo, my advice to the company was to go all-in on MeeGo and avoid the distraction of a transition to another operating system. Elop, however, had other ideas. His opinion was that MeeGo would simply take too long to deliver, whereas adopting WP7 would allow them to get a product to market with a modern operating system right away.

The fact that a compelling MeeGo device will likely launch first raises the question of whether Elop misjudged the Linux-based platform and its suitability for consumers. It’s worth noting, however, that Nokia is also on track to launch its first WP7 device this year. Elop was not wrong in his contention that Microsoft’s platform offered Nokia a quicker path to the market.

It’s likely that Elop viewed the long-term challenges of doing proper MeeGo maintenance and integration (vs. the quick-and-dirty hybrid model of the N9) as an untenable challenge for a company in Nokia’s position. The decision to adopt WP7 was an exit that allowed Nokia to avoid the difficulty of advancing its own platform. The downside is that dependence on WP7 will relegate Nokia to the role of a mere hardware manufacturer. In choosing WP7, Nokia is sacrificing the kind of platform autonomy and opportunity to control its own ecosystem that it would have had with MeeGo.

Elop has said on several occasions in the past that MeeGo will remain in the background at Nokia as a research platform for future innovation, albeit with significantly reduced investment. It’s not really clear what this means, but it seems fairly obvious that MeeGo doesn’t have a strong strategic relevance at Nokia anymore due to the switch to Windows Phone 7. Without more clarity about the extent to which Nokia will support the platform and consumers who buy the N9, it’s hard to imagine it attracting a serious mainstream audience. If Nokia doesn’t treat MeeGo as a serious platform, then the N9 is simply not going to get enough traction to make it viable, especially when it comes to third-party software.

The sad part is that Nokia once had a large audience of third-party developers who were eager to support a MeeGo device. Companies like Rovio and Qik already had Qt-based ports of their applications under development specifically for Nokia’s MeeGo devices. The new platform strategy has thrown the company’s existing third-party developer community under a bus and has made it impractical for them to continue supporting the company’s products.

If Nokia ported its open source Qt toolkit—which is supported today on MeeGo and Symbian—to WP7, it would open the door for building applications that target all three of the company’s major operating systems. Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen. Elop himself rejected the possibility of Qt on WP7.

Nokia’s attitude about Qt through this platform transition has been agonizingly inconsistent. During the presentation at which the N9 was unveiled, Qt was repeatedly highlighted as a critical part of Nokia’s vision for mobile development. From where I’m standing, it’s not at all clear how Qt can continue to be defining part of Nokia’s mobile strategy when it’s not even going to be supported on the company’s flagship WP7 devices.

Nokia can tout the large Symbian install base as a target that makes Qt relevant in the mobile space, but that’s a dead end—Sybmian will be phased out in 2014. It’s not even clear now if Qt 5, scheduled for release in 2012, will even officially support Symbian. Qt is still one of the best tools available for cross-platform desktop development (and thanks to a permissive license and diverse community, the toolkit’s survival is ensured in the long run irrespective of what Nokia does), but it’s not officially supported today on any mainstream mobile operating system.

When I think of Nokia and its place in the market today, I’m reminded of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus is often depicted as a being with two faces pointed in opposite directions. At times, it seems like Nokia is still looking back at MeeGo as if it lies ahead and at other times the company is seemingly aimed at an unwavering path towards WP7.

The mixed messages and inconsistencies in the platform strategy are not helpful. By creating confusion about what development tools and platforms Nokia is really going to stand behind in the long-term, the company is making it impossible to have any confidence in its future plans. This is especially problematic for its first—and possibly only—MeeGo device, a compelling product with little future ahead of it.

Titanic slide image by Flickr user Lorraine W

Sony Ericsson’s new Xperia Active Android phone aims to be your new workout buddy, holding up in the sweatiest of environments. Photo courtesy of Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson’s new smartphone was made for two kinds of people: sporty jogger types and those who sweat profusely.

Dubbed the Xperia Active, Sony Ericsson’s recently announced smartphone is built to withstand the elements. It’s dust proof, water-resistant and even incorporates “wet finger tracking” (which, admittedly, sounds somewhat gross).

The Active probably won’t withstand a dip in the lap pool (or an accidental drop in the toilet). It’s aimed more at those who want to browse the web while on the treadmill, or perhaps check out their Runkeeper stats while taking on their latest triathlon. One word of advice, though: last time we checked, it’s still not kosher to talk on your phone at the gym.

Along with the Active, Sony Ericsson also unveiled the Xperia Ray, a fairly bland, run-of-the-mill Android smartphone. It comes with a 1-GHz processor, 3.3-inch screen and 8.1-megapixel back-facing camera.

Sony Ericsson unveiled the devices at the CommunicAsia tech conference in Singapore on Wednesday.

Over the past few years, hardware manufacturers have been pushing out new Android smartphones to the public at a breakneck pace. The problem, however, is that most of the phones have similar hardware specifications, with little else for consumers to differentiate between each device. Handset makers have tried adding on different layers of software (or “skinning”) over the stock version of Android in order to give a different look and customized feel to its phone. But not all custom skins have proved popular with smartphone enthusiasts, and some prefer a bare-bones approach to the operating system.

Sony Ericsson has taken a different path by releasing novel hardware designs with minimal software modification. The company’s recent release of the Xperia Play (or “PlayStation phone”) included a built-in, slide-out PlayStation controller interface, the first of its kind seen on a smartphone. The release of the Xperia Active is in the same vein as the Play — curveball additions to the company’s smartphone line-up which aim to break from the indistinguishable crowd of available devices.

The two phones are expected to be available this fall.

How do you solve a problem like Nokia? The company has been foundering for years, and at this point may have taken on more water than newish CEO Stephen Elop CEO can bail. But how did a company that once defined the mobile industry fall so far behind? It might be more a matter of distance than ideas. More »