Hasta La Gadget!

Maybe it’s the lack of a banging soundtrack, but we’re finding ourselves somewhat underwhelmed by these first video appearances by the highly anticipated Symbian^4 user interface. What we’re shown is a now familiar layout for touchscreen devices, with a trio of home screens that can be customized with widgets and live information trinkets such as a clock and a weather app. It is, as promised, very touch-centric, but it is by no means revolutionary. Both videos are titled as mere “first glimpse” offerings, however, so the eternal optimist in us likes to believe that there’ll be plenty more to get excited about as we move closer to that early 2011 launch. See them after the break and let us know what you think.

Continue reading Symbian^4 makes video debut, fails to wow

Symbian^4 makes video debut, fails to wow originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gartner just released its annual numbers for worldwide mobile phone sales to end users in the year known as two thousand nine. Looking at smartphone OS market share alone, Gartner shows the iPhone OS, Android, and RIM making the biggest gains (up 6.2, 3.4, and 3.3 percentage points from 2008, respectively) at the expense of Windows Mobile (off 3.1 percentage points) and Symbian (off 5.5 points). Although Gartner says that Symbian “has become uncompetitive in recent years,” (ouch) it concedes that market share is still strong especially for Nokia; something backed up by Nokia’s Q4 financials and reported quarterly smartphone growth by 5 percentage points. Regarding total handsets of all classifications sold, Nokia continues to dominate with 36.4% of all sales to end users (down from 38.6% in 2008) while Samsung and LG continue to climb at the expense of Motorola (dropping from 7.6% to 4.5% of worldwide sales in 2009) and Sony Ericsson. See that table after the break or hit up the source for the full report.

Continue reading Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate

Gartner: Apple, Android, and RIM winners in 2009 smartphone growth, Nokia and Symbian still dominate originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s next year’s smartphone for you. At the ST-Ericsson stand here at Mobile World Congress, the company was showing their U8500, a dual ARM Cortex-A9 chipset running at 1.2 Ghz running Linux, Android … or Symbian^3.

According to the Symbian Foundation’s John Forsyth, ST-Ericsson’s Symbian demo is running the brand-new version of Symbian unveiled this week, although ST-Ericsson didn’t drop it to the menu screen or anything like that, and ST-Ericsson’s folks would only confirm it was running some version of Symbian.

The Symbian^3 demo was being used to show 1080p video decoding, which the U8500 offloads to dedicated chips so only 10% of the CPU is used in the process. The U8500 also supports HSPA+ – T-Mobile’s new super-high-speed 3G network – HD video recording, 20-megapixel still capture, and 12 hours of video playback on a standard 1,000 mAh battery, according to ST-Ericsson. On a nearby table they showed the same chipset running Android spanned over two screens.

A gaggle of higher-ups from Sony Ericsson stuck around after the conclusion of today’s event to show off the X10 mini, X10 mini pro, and Vivaz pro in person, and we seriously can’t stress this enough: the mini twins are small. Well, either that, or the men holding them were gigantic — but we’re pretty sure it’s the former since we got around to spending some quality time with the mini pro and continued to be blown away by its diminutive stature. Rikko Sakaguchi (pictured left) had two colors of the mini plus a Vivaz pro, while Lennard Hoornik was rockin’ the original X10 plus a mini pro. We’ll be honest: the company’s platform strategy is as meandering and muddled as ever, but with designs like this in the pipeline, they’ll definitely be demanding their fair share of attention over the next few months. See a bunch more shots of the execs handling the phones in the gallery below.

Sir Howard Stringer and friends show off Sony Ericsson’s new handsets originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As we’d figured out last night, Symbian’s big reveal for today was the completion of its move to a fully open, royalty-free platform — meaning you no longer need to be a paid-in-full member of the Foundation to see all the code — and they’re ready to talk about it and spread the word far and wide. Though Symbian’s certainly not getting as much share of the mobile discussion these days as some of its smaller competitors, it’s certainly important to keep in mind that these guys have software deployed on literally hundreds of millions of devices, making this perhaps the largest-scale conversion of a closed operating system to open source in history. Because the code has been licensed under the Eclipse public license rather than the harder-core GPL, device manufacturers will be able to continue to tack on custom features and hardware support without open-sourcing it, which should make them less gun-shy about throwing weight behind the platform — and considering how badly these guys need to get back into the spotlight, that’s a good thing. Follow the break for the Foundation’s intro video to the wide, wide world of open source and Symbian^3, the first version to be fully spread out for everyone to see.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source

Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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