Apple trumps Nokia for smartphone share on Nokia's home turf

Apple produced a symbolic win late Thursday after an IDC study revealed that it had beaten Nokia for smartphone market share in Nokia's core market of Western Europe. The iPhone slipped from 24.6 percent share a year ago to 20.8 percent, but Nokia's market share collapsed from 40.6 percent to just 19.6 percent in one year, giving Apple the top spot. Apple shipped 49 percent more iPhones to the region to hit 4.4 million where Nokia saw its shipments drop from 4.9 million to 4.2 million.

RIM shipped more BlackBerry phones to Europe than before, 3.5 million, but the climb wasn't enough to stop it from dropping to third place at 16.5 percent. Android's rapid rise, meanwhile, helped HTC more than double its share and tie with RIM. Samsung's Galaxy S almost single-handedly helped catapult the company from just 2.5 percent of European smartphones last year to 12.1 percent in early 2011.

In all cellphones, Nokia faced a second upset as Samsung's smartphone push helped it take over the top spot at 29.3 percent; Nokia fell to 27.9 percent. Apple saw a larger relative gain to 9.8 percent but was steady at third place.

Local device research manager Francisco Jeronimo explained the reversal of fortunes as a lesson for Nokia and others not to presume their names and existing dominance would guarantee success in the future. Apple and Samsung were succeeding because they understood trends quickly and leapt on touchscreen phones. Nokia is well known for having been slow to adopt touchscreens and did little to improve Symbian until Symbian^3 last year, ultimately having to switch to Windows Phone to catch up.

"These results show how volatile this market is and how important it is not to underestimate the trends," the analyst explained. "Companies like Nokia (and Ericsson in the past) may have strong brands and big market shares as Nokia always had, but can be overtaken by their competitors on a blink of an eye."

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Nokia slips out finished Symbian^3 SDK

Nokia on Wednesday released version 1.0 of the Symbian^3 software development kit (SDK). With it, third party developers can create apps for the OS, which is used in the company's flagship N8, which debuted more than a year ago, as well as the C6, C7, E6 and E7, among others. Included in the SDK is documentation, API references, examples, an installer for ActivePerl and an emulator, but not an IDE for a simplified development environment.

The final version includes VGA resolution support for the E6 pro phone and support for the Qt 4.7 and Qt Mobility 1.1 programming interfaces. The browser has been updated to version 7.3.1.1. A Three Plane Comms architecture improves data flow performance. Added Symbian standards include OpenWF support, SQLite 3, XML parsing and more. Korean and Chinese languages are present as well.

Supported runtimes include both Nokia's multi-platform Qt as well as native Symbian C++, in-between Java technology, and Web Runtime (WRT).

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Nokia N8 to come in pink with Symbian Anna update

Nokia has announced a pink version of its flagship Symbian phone, Ovi Store. It will come preloaded with the Symbian Anna update, at around the same time as the update will become available to all other N8 users.

Baring the new external paint job and the updated OS, the device retains the same hardware as the original N8. This includes its highly-specified12-megapixel camera, a 680MHz processor and a new graphics core. Its audio capabilities remain a highlight with Dolby Digital Plus support over HDMI to a TV. It centers on a 3.5-inch 640x360 capacitive touchscreen and it includes 16GB of RAM, which is expandable via its microSD slot.

The pink model joins the black, orange, blue, green and silver models in Nokia’s N8 lineup.

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Nokia: we won't enter tablets unless we can be unique

Nokia chief Stephen Elop hinted in an interview with YLE late Wednesday that the company would be more cautious about entering tablets than others. He believed the company could go either with Windows or an in-house platform like MeeGo, but the team had to choose what was right and distinctive. The iPad was continuing to succeed partly because it was facing a glut of similar designs that couldn't distinguish themselves, and Nokia's plans would involve something unique.

"There are now over 200 different tablets on the marketplace, only one of them is doing really well," Elop said in a reference to the iPad. "And my challenge to the team is, I don't wanna be the 201st tablet on the market that you can't tell [apart] from all of the others. We have to take a uniquely Nokia prospective."

What that would entail is still uncertain. The company filed for two tablet design patents that suggest a look superficially like that of the N8 smartphone and could theoretically use Symbian. An alliance with Microsoft and a desire to stand out through MeeGo, though, could leave it waiting for a tablet-ready interface from either OS. Windows won't have that until Windows 8 in late 2012, but a tablet-native MeeGo has already been seen in development.

Nokia been usually been one of the slower companies to adapt to modern mobile trends and has paid for it through its drop to 29 percent phone share. As a virtual non-competitor in tablets, however, it has the luxury to enter the market when and how it wants. Google and RIM have both rushed to get out competitive alternatives to the iPad interface but have so far been criticized for bugs, a lack of polish and missing third-party or even first-party apps.

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