Mobile Phones News Blog

Symbian’s life has been hanging by a thread for sometime now, after the Android-of-its-day was systematically abandoned by manufacturers – remember both Samsung and Sony Ericsson once supported it, see the Omnia i8910 HD and the Satio for example 0 and even Nokia themselves opting to go with Windows Phone over the ageing platform.

If a new report is true, we could be getting very close to the final hurrah for Symbian, as The Register says Nokia has just one last phone running the operating system to launch, and that will be that.

Although other Symbian devices were in development, they’ve now been cancelled following lower than expected sales figures, with CEO Stephen Elop hinting the demand for low-cost smartphones is making it too difficult to compete.

Symbian could be going out with a bang though, as its rumoured swansong is to be a Nokia N8 sequel. The N8 has long been the best camera-phone on the market, and is one of the few devices still to feature a xenon flash; but it’s 16 months old and ripe for a refresh.

While new hardware may not continue, Nokia has repeatedly promised to continue supporting the software for several years yet – with 2016 often provided as an end date. There’s no reason not to think they’ll stick to their word, as we’ve got Nokia Belle coming soon, plus there has been talk of other updates for the future.

Perhaps we’ll find out more during Mobile World Congress, where there’s a chance we may meet the final phone too.

More than half of the Android devices have Gingerbread operating system in them, according to a latest report of Google which is the maker of the OS.

According to Google, 58 percent of the Android devices are now running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The Android Honeycomb currently has 3.4 per cent market share, whereas Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is there only on one per cent of devices.

These figures help the users find out which operating system to prioritise while choosing their smartphones.

While Android users have often talked about the fragmentation issue, the Google chairman Eric Schmidt, has said variation in devices give more choices to the end users. It is due to variation that Android will likely move up in the consumer preferences. The company, however, did not clarify how many devices were covered in this data.

Reports surface earlier this week concerning malware discovered in the Android Market, which security specialists Symantec labelled it the ‘biggest ever’ threat found and estimated up to 5 million infections to date.

There were 13 apps discovered to contain the trojan dubbed Android.Counterclank, which recorded information such as the brand of phone it was installed on, various unique numbers such as the IMEI, as well as setting an alternative browser homepage and adding a new search shortcut to the homescreen.

After continued examination of the apps, and Counterclank’s relationship with another Android trojan named Tonclank, Symantec has confirmed the code comes from the same company. Subsequently, it now believes that rather than being malicious, Counterclank is actually part of an advertising network.

This doesn’t mean it’s not annoying though, but seems to put it more in the category of ‘adware’ rather than ‘malware’. Symantec has asked Google to remove the apps anyway, but so far Google has refused, saying they meet its Terms of Service.

In its official blog post on the subject, Symantec recognizes that to begin calling problematic software found on mobile platforms ‘adware’, ‘spyware’ or ‘malware’, could cause the same level of confusion it did when referring to Windows several years ago.

Instead, the plan is to inform users of what it calls ‘undesired applications’ and let them make up their own minds on what to do. Its security software won’t delete this software either. Whether this approach will see an increase in apps using Counterclank’s aggressive style of delivering ads remains to be seen.

New data from market intelligence firm IDC this week places Apple as the third largest manufacturer of mobile phones, in a fourth quarter of 2011 which overall showed surprisingly little growth on the same period of 2010.

Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S, was partly responsible for a jump of almost double the number of units shipped over the last calendar year compared to 2010, increasing from 47.5 million to 93.2 million in a jump of over 96%.

With Apple gaining so much ground in the smartphone race for market share, there had to be losers and the primary victim of the surge was LG, whose reported drop of almost 25 percentage points in smartphone sales between the end of 2010 and two months ago has badly affected shareholder confidence.

The Korean manufacturer’s overall market share is only down from 8.4% to 5.7%, though considering the huge amount of smartphones purchased in that year (nearly one and a half billion, up 11.1% on 2010), LG’s growth has certainly slowed compared to the iPhone’s success story.

The top two mobile makers remained unchanged with Samsung in second after near one-fifth growth year-on-year, whilst leaders Nokia, who also reported a loss of ground to Apple maintain top spot despite sales down from 453 million during 2010 to 417 over the last calendar year.

New data from market intelligence firm IDC this week places Apple as the third largest manufacturer of mobile phones, in a fourth quarter of 2011 which overall showed surprisingly little growth on the same period of 2010.

Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S, was partly responsible for a jump of almost double the number of units shipped over the last calendar year compared to 2010, increasing from 47.5 million to 93.2 million in a jump of over 96%.

With Apple gaining so much ground in the smartphone race for market share, there had to be losers and the primary victim of the surge was LG, whose reported drop of almost 25 percentage points in smartphone sales between the end of 2010 and two months ago has badly affected shareholder confidence.

The Korean manufacturer’s overall market share is only down from 8.4% to 5.7%, though considering the huge amount of smartphones purchased in that year (nearly one and a half billion, up 11.1% on 2010), LG’s growth has certainly slowed compared to the iPhone’s success story.

The top two mobile makers remained unchanged with Samsung in second after near one-fifth growth year-on-year, whilst leaders Nokia, who also reported a loss of ground to Apple maintain top spot despite sales down from 453 million during 2010 to 417 over the last calendar year.

Mozilla has released the Firefox version 10 for different platforms like PCs and Android smartphones. The Android version of Firefox 10 comes with many improvements over its older cousins apart from the bug fixes.

With Firefox 10, users will now have the ability to use web applications that leverage the entire screen. Hence, web apps will look exactly like native apps on the device and also work like one with the new browser.

Firefox Sync – which enables users to access their bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and open tabs across various devices like smartphone, PCs and tablets – is now much easier to manage and doesn’t require a desktop PC as it can be done through tablets and smartphones as well.

With the new browser, Firefox updates also become smoother and easier to manage as incompatible add-ons are automatically disabled and all other add-ons will be updated to become compatible with devices. Add-ons will get the updates in the background so users don’t need to bother.

Mozilla has also provided several features in the Firefox 10 that will be of use to developers. The browser comes with the ability to transform two-dimensional elements into 3D through HTML5 without the need for third-party plugins which will result in more 3D content for the users (even in devices that do not have 3D support).

In the past 9 months, Firefox has seen six new versions from Firefox 4 to Fire 10 now, and this means that the browser is being updated every six weeks bringing better features.

Usually, Mozilla releases the Nightly version (strictly for developers and testers) followed by Aurora version of its browsers for the enthusiasts and developers who then help in identifying the problems. The company then brings the ‘beta’ version, which is for a wider audience but is still not the final release. Here also mistakes are pointed out and rectified after which the final release happens.

This way a more stable yet faster updates happen and it seems people are enjoying the process as is evident from the downloads that are happening.