LG drops smartphone forecast for 2011 - www.techradar.com

LG drops smartphone forecast for 2011 - www.techradar.com

Sales estimates down by a fifth

Mobile phones News

By Kate Solomon

LG's smartphone sales - not great

LG has reined in its target smartphone sales targets for 2011, a seeming admission that it is struggling to carve out a niche in the growing market for high end phones.

The manufacturer has cut its forecast from 30 million down to 24 million smartphone sales, including the likes of the LG Optimus 2X and the LG Optimus 3D.

The company has also redressed its overall mobile phone targets, reckoning it will sell 114 million mobile phones, including feature phones and smartphones, rather than its original estimate of 150 million.

Downward turn

The revised estimates are based on the fact that LG sold almost 50 million mobile phones in the first half of the year, including more than 10 million smartphones.

The second half of the year, which includes the annual orgy of consumption that is Christmas, is forecast to be slightly better than the first.

"Our overall performance is gradually improving ... but it's difficult to give a precise prediction when our business will turn around due to a fast changing external market environment," said Park Jong-seok, head of LG's handset division.

Android distribution in June: Gingerbread doubles again - GSMArena.com news

Android distribution in June: Gingerbread doubles again - GSMArena.com news

08 July, 2011

Google just updated the Android version distribution charts and confirmed the continued exponential growth of Gingerbread. The latest smartphone version of the platform has managed to more than double its market for a second month in a row and is now the second most popular Android release.

The first Android Gingerbread (2.3), which was skipped by most manufacturers actually lost 0.1 percent points of its market share, but its updated 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 versions have gained 9.5 percent points and has moved to second place ahead of Android 2.1 Eclair.

With lots of phones getting their updates and a bunch of hot new handsets running Gingerbread hitting the market it’s not hard to see where this growth is coming from. Yet we have to admit we are a bit surprised by its speed.

Froyo is still the most popular Android version worldwide and Gingerbread will need some more time to catch up. Still after slipping 5.2 percent points Android 2.2 has lost almost a third of its advantage in just one month.

Version	Market Share, 1 June	Market Share, 5 July	Change
1.5 Cupcake	1.9%	1.4%	▼0.5%
1.6 Donut	2.5%	2.2%	▼0.3%
2.1 Eclair	21.2%	17.5%	▼3.7%
2.2 Froyo	64.6%	59.4%	▼5.2%
2.3 Gingerbread	1.1%	1.1%	▼0.1%
2.3.3 Gingerbread	8.1%	17.6%	▲9.5%
3.0 Honeycomb	0.3%	0.4%	▲0.1%
3.1 Honeycomb	0.3%	0.5%	▲0.2%

The outdated Android smartphone distributions are, unsurprisingly, continuing their way down, with 1.5 Cupcake, 1.6 Donut and 2.1 Eclair losing a total of 4.5 percent points of their market share. Their shares now stand at 1.4%, 2.2% and 17.5% respectively.

Finally the tablet-ready Android Honeycomb is continuing to make baby steps forward, gaining 0.3 percent points this month. The later distribution, 3.1, is now holding a 0.5% share, while 3.0 has gained 0.1 percent points to a total of 0.4%.

With Android daily activations now over 500000 we expect to see the current trends carry over in the upcoming couple of months. Gingerbread will certainly continue catching up with Froyo, which is now past its peak. If manufacturers and carrier do a good job of the expected updates we might see Android 2.2 and 2.3.3 neck and neck in a just a couple of months.

At that point Cupcake will probably have dropped out of the picture, while Donut will be close to 1% market share. The Honeycomb growth is rather hard to predict, but it will probably continue at about the rate we saw over the past two months, until Android slates prices drop a bit.

New pictures of BlackBerry Touch Monza leak - GSMArena.com news

New pictures of BlackBerry Touch Monza leak - GSMArena.com news

08 July, 2011 | Comments (9) | Post your comment

Tags: RIM, BlackBerry, Touch UI, Rumors

The GSM version of the BlackBerry Touch Monaco - Monza has escaped in the wild once again. This time it broke loose in Greece and we have a few tasty live pictures for you. Unfortunately there are no new details revealed.

Well, the Monza fella has managed to escape RIM once again and it has gone on a vacation in Greece.

BlackBerry 9860 Touch Monza is the GSM version of the identical CDMA smartphone 9850 Touch Monaco. We already met those two several times this year and there is probably no detail that hasn't been revealed.

Anyway, the BlackBerry OS 7-based Monza is once again in the news smiling from sunny Greece. Here are the pictures:

BlackBerry 9860 Touch Monza

The Monza/Monaco duo is supposed to pack a 1.2GHz processor, a 3.7-inch WVGA display, a 5 megapixel camera with 720p video recording and lots of connectivity goodies. As we mentioned above, both should run on the latest BlackBerry OS 7.

According to the roadmap leaked in January, the phones should become available in Q3 this year. We guess the announcement should happen a few days prior to the launch.

Microsoft demands royalties for every Samsung droid made - GSMArena.com news

Microsoft demands royalties for every Samsung droid made - GSMArena.com news

06 July, 2011 | Comments (156) | Post your comment

Tags: Samsung, Microsoft, Android, HTC, Misc

Microsoft is demanding Samsung to cash in $15 for every Android phone sold to date on the base of using several of Microsoft's patents in these devices. HTC as the first company to give in to Microsoft claims and Samsung is now next.
We bet you’re wondering what is actually infringing Microsoft patents in the Android OS and why Microsoft is not trying to get that money from Google.
Well, Microsoft believes the Linux-based operating systems are infringing its intellectual property in some way and Android OS is a Linux-based one. We are sure Microsoft has a well prepared case about what the Linux kernel infringement is, but we are not going to dig in there.
But why not sue Google then? The question perhaps has a very simple answer - Google is not makin any money from the distribution of the Android OS - it's the device manufacturers that make a profit out of it.
HTC obviously didn't have objection to these claims and were happy to sign a deal and pay $5 for each of their Android-based phones.
According to industry officials, Samsung is going to try negotiating a lower $10 fee in exchange for some kind of alliance between the two giants.

Nokia’s $200m secret shows the rot goes way, way back - www.gigaom.com

By Bobbie Johnson Jul. 5, 2011, 5:45am PT 

There have been plenty of attempts to pinpoint where Nokia, the struggling Finnish mobile company, really started to go wrong. Some think it was when the iPhone launched and left it in the dust; some would suggest it was when the board, panicking, hired Microsoft man Stephen Elop. Plenty of people think that it’s all the result of a culture that has spent several years failing to turn great ideas into great products.

But could the rot go back even further than anyone recognizes?

That’s the argument put forward by Finnish newspaper Helsingen Sanomat (the Helsinki Dispatch), which is running an expose today that paints a damning picture of how life inside the company has been tainted for an entire generation, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

The paper, known as HS, has documents that show how the company has been paying through the nose to stop senior talent leaving as far back as 14 years ago — paying way over the odds to retain their top staff at the same time as the company was, apparently, reaching the peak of its powers.

Their story centers on a rebellion staged in 1997 by Nokia product developer Jyrki Hallikainen. Hallikainen convinced 44 other engineers from the business to join him at a new manufacturing outfit, which was to be set up under the auspices of Dutch electronics giant Philips. The team resigned en masse, sending shockwaves throughout Nokia’s senior management. They were taken by surprise by the move, and desperate to stop the collapse happening — particularly since it would rip the heart out of their main research and development team.

The report details how Nokia’s mobile phone boss Pekka Ala-Pietilä (later the company’s president and now the CEO of Blyk), asked Hallikainen and his rebels what it would take to keep them on board. Their price, the documents reveal, was $200 million — the equivalent of around $4.5 million dollars for each of the engineers who were, effectively, holding the company to ransom.

Most of the rebels returned to their jobs at Nokia and Hallikainen continued on his own with the new company, Microcell — which was sold to Flextronics for $80 million five years later.

The Hallikainen story might seem like ancient history, but it’s a sobering tale that I think provides a startling insight into what’s really been happening inside Nokia all these years. From the outside we’ve watched the rise of Nokia as a global force, the leading power in an explosive industry worth untold billions. Yet the truth seems to be that all the way along, the company has been riven with problems, internal politics, scheming and panics. Maybe we’ve been too charitable all along?

And the story has other ramifications too. Hallikainen’s rebellion is also one of the major reasons that Nokia became increasingly paranoid over time. The company suspected that employees were leaking information to Microcell, and executives wanted to monitor staff emails and data to root out any potential moles. But under data protection laws at the time, it was illegal to do this — so, the business tried a different approach. After controversially lobbying the government and even threatening to quit Finland altogether, it helped push through a widely-disliked corporate snooping law known as “Lex Nokia” that would allow it to spy on employees. Perhaps if senior figures had spent less time occupied with what was going on inside Nokia’s own little world, they might have been able to predict what was happening elsewhere.

And, beyond Nokia itself, there’s a lesson here about other things — innovation, success, staff retention. When you’re on the up, keeping your top employees seems simple: give them exciting things to do and compensate them well. But it can backfire. We’re all aware that making payments to prevent staff leaving is common in many technology companies — right now, for example, Google is known to be spending heavily to stop its engineering talent from leaking away to rivals like Facebook.

But does it ever really work? Nokia spent $200 million on protecting its R&D talent, yet the net result is that it’s been outpaced by newcomers anyway. If you can’t incentivize workers without resorting to bundles of cash, then what’s to say you won’t face a corporate Waterloo in five, 10 or 15 years?

T-Mobile Angry Birds Live

T-Mobile Angry Birds Live - Behind The Scenes

Mobile phones News

Nokia: 'We won't fragment Windows Phone 7' - www.techradar.com

One for all, all for one

By Kate Solomon

While Nokia busily beavers away on its first batch of Windows Phone 7 devices, it is also working hard to make sure that its app store integrates seamlessly into the OS' ecosystem.
Speaking with TechRadar, Nokia's Senior Vice President of Developer and Marketplace, Marco Argenti explained that Nokia is determined to avoid fragmenting the ecosystem with apps that are incompatible with other manufacturers' handsets
"We'll create elements of distinction, but we don't want to fragment the ecosystem because in the end we want the whole platform to win," he told us.
Team player
He explained that Nokia's apps will be tailored to its best hardware assets, like high quality cameras and location services.
"There will be exclusive apps but right now we're looking at time-based exclusives rather than fragmenting the catalogue; that's something that every vendor can do.
"But in our case we're also trying to create new apps that really leverage some of the unique characteristics of our devices such as the imaging, the maps, the location awareness – all these differentiators. And we're trying to put those together in the form of apps in a very unique way."
The company is obviously keen to stake its claim on the app store, although it's not clear if Nokia is set to re-brand the entire Windows Marketplace, or if it will simply have its own section in the same way that other manufacturers already do.
"It's going to be branded Nokia," said Argenti. "You'll see the name [of the app portal] when you open the first device; but definitely the word Nokia's going to be there."

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/nokia-we-won-t-fragment-windows-phone-7--973705#ixzz1R5zX2urY