The Nokia 5230 is the Finnish firm’s attempt to cash in on the success – and shape – of the 5800 XpressMusic with a more budget-minded entry-level version, and going by gsmhelpdesk’s hands-on preview it sounds like they may be on to a winner. The 5230 gets praised for its ease of use and sound quality, happily using a standard 3.5mm headphone socket rather than anything unpleasantly proprietary.
Nokia have announced their Q3 2009 financial results, and when your “Highlights” section leads with the news that overall net sales were down 20-percent year-on-year, at €9.8bn, and mobile device volumes down 8-percent year-on-year (5-percent sequentially) to 108.5m units, you know it’s not been a good quarter. In fact, operating profit for devices & services was down 51-percent from the same three-month period a year ago, plunging from €1,602m to €785m.
CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is putting a positive spin on things, painting a picture of improving demand for products constrained by “component shortages we encountered across the portfolio”. Devices & services net sales have at least risen from the previous quarter, by 5-percent (6-percent when currency fluctuations are cancelled out), though Nokia Siemens Networks net sales continue to drag overall performance down.
Sidekick owners, you can stop mentally-spending that $100 gift-card T-Mobile promised. In a new statement updated to the Sidekick forums, Microsoft’s Roz Ho – VP of premium mobile experiences – has confirmed that the company has recovered “most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage.” She also confirms that the restored files will begin to feed back into devices starting with contacts; reports yesterday suggested that the process had already happened.
There’s a lot of discussion about the role of convergence of devices. Everywhere you go, it seems that someone’s pushing the notion that every function needs to be converged into one device. Now convergence is a great idea: the idea of carrying one device instead of multiple devices is compelling, but is it really realistic? Sure, I’d rather carry one device than two, but our research shows consumers will carry two or, in some age demographics, they’ll even carry as many as three.
After admitting that they could have lost every scrap of Sidekick users’ online data, T-Mobile USA are now following up on their promise of “additional measures” to make it up to affected customers. The carrier is now more hopeful of restoring lost data than it was at the weekend – when it described the likelihood of recovery as “extremely low” – but any user facing a loss will automatically get a $100 T-Mobile gift card.
We doubt we’re the only people who forgot that Motorola had thrown their oar in with the LiMo Foundation, but happily we’ll unlikely to need that knowledge again since the company is seemingly dropping its support for the open-source mobile platform. Motorola VP Christy Wyatt has vacated her seat on the LiMo Foundation board, while the company itself has downgraded its membership from “founding member” to “associate member”.
“At this time it feels that the Android platform gives it a richer, more consistent foundation with strong support for the ecosystem and developer community” Motorola statement
If you’re a player in the cellphone space then the J.D. Power Wireless Satisfaction Survey is your equivalent of the Miss World contest, and it looks like once again it’s Apple wearing the smartphone crown. The iPhone took first place in the smartphone study, both in the consumer and business segments, and neatly keeping RIM’s BlackBerry range in second place.
Modular phone manufacture Modu have already discussed their plans for next-gen 3G and tablet-style devices, but now the company is talking about adding a splash of Android to the mixture. Speaking to TechRadar, Modu CEO Dov Moran revealed that “we’re also planning to have a jacket based on Android, which will enable programming capability [on the Modu unit], but these plans are too early to expose.”
If you fancy a new phone from AT&T, but aren’t too fussed about Windows Mobile 6.5, then the carrier has four more options for you to choose from. Left to right you’re looking at the Samsung Mythic, the Samsung Flight and the Pantech Reveal, which offer differing combinations of full touchscreen and hardware keyboard. Meanwhile there’s also the Pantech Impact, not pictured, with an OLED touchscreen and full QWERTY.
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Got a Sidekick LX 2009? Find it crashes, freezes, locks-up and generally misbehaves? Salvation could well be at hand, as a rumored OTA (over-the-air) update is in the offing; according to Hiptop3's sources, the new firmware is currently being trialled by a small group of beta-testers, before the code is released to LX 2009 owners en masse.
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