Via: Cnet & Source: Gartner

Microsoft’s Windows Phone is a pretty neat OS and analysts predict that by 2015, Windows Phone would be among major market share holder in smartphone category.

We knew that Windows Phone sales are a bit disappointing and then  LG’s Marketing Strategy and Planning Team Director said bluntly that Windows Phone is boring. But how boring really? According to research firm , Gartner, Microsoft’s Windows Phone market share has slipped even below 2 percent. Even Samsung’s homebrewed OS Bada has managed to gain more market share than Microsoft’s Windows Phone. At 1.9% market share, Bada is above Windows Phone’s 1.6% market share.

This questions Nokia’s decision to go all way Windows Phone. But if rumors are to be believed that Microsoft will be releasing Tango update for low end phones that Nokia plans to bring in market, Windows Phone does have a hope to conquer a few more percents. But having said that, Samsung’s Bada OS is one of the most polished OS I have seen considering it’s age.

This is from techknots.com

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop:
Nokia’s Windows Phone devices flop

Stephen Elop

Nokia (NYSE:NOK) CEO Stephen Elop  last week unveiled the company’s first smartphones running Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone platform, the opening gambit in whether Nokia’s bet on the new software will help revive its flagging fortunes. The Lumia 800 and 710 will be available in November in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, with support from 31 operators and retail partners. By the end of the year, both devices will be available in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan.

For the United States, Nokia did not announce any specific products, but Elop said a portfolio of devices will be coming in early 2012, meaning Nokia will miss the crucial holiday shopping season for the U.S. market. There are lots of unknowns in this gambit: Will Nokia’s Windows Phone devices be differentiated enough from those from HTC, LG and Samsung? Will consumers warm to Nokia’s brand, which has taken a beating in recent years, especially in North America? How will Nokia break through with carriers and retail sales representatives, two crucial constituencies? The pressure is on Elop and Nokia to deliver. If they don’t, Nokia might not last.

Sony has reportedly announced that it will acquire Ericsson’s stake of 50 percent in mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson for $1.46 billion. Consequently, Sony Ericsson will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony and will be integrated into the company’s platform of network-connected consumer electronics products.

As per sources, Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson said that when the joint venture was formed ten years ago, thereby combining Sony’s consumer products knowledge with Ericsson’s telecommunication technology expertise, it was a perfect match to drive the development of feature phones. However, today they take an equally logical step as Sony acquires their stake in Sony Ericsson and makes it a part of its broad range of consumer devices.

Sony President, Chairman, and CEO, Howard Stringer has reportedly said that this acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want. Further, Ericsson reportedly plans to focus on the global wireless market as a whole as well as how wireless connectivity can benefit people, business and society beyond just phones. The agreement, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in January 2012.  According to reports, the transaction also includes a patent deal enabling Sony to receive the five sets of patents that are essential to making the phones and a licensing agreement on any other intellectual property.

Reports suggest that shares in Ericsson rose by 5.1 percent to $10.7, while Sony’s share price rose 5.4 percent to $21.7 at the time of closing.

Yahoo expanded its mobile presence today to include mobile messaging. The company debuted a beta version of Hub, a free device-agnostic texting app available through Google’s Android Market.

Unlike Apple’s iMessage or Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Messenger, Hub users can text contacts using any carrier or device, even feature phones. In addition, contacts receiving messages are not required to have the app themselves. iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger only work among users of those services.

Hub messages are sent over Wi-Fi or data connections, and users will not incur traditional texting fees regardless of how many messages they send. Hub offers group messaging, instant notifications and free local and international messaging to select countries.
Hub users must have a device running Android 2.2 or above, a U.S. SIM card and a texting plan.

Yahoo is one of many entering the field for mobile messaging. In August, Facebook revealed its own free texting app, Messenger. The app allows users to message Facebook friends in real-time and is available for devices running iOS, Android or BlackBerry. And earlier this year Microsoft’s Skype acquired group messaging solutions startup GroupMe, and device maker Samsung Electronics launched ChatON, a carrier-agnostic mobile messaging app.

The move toward application-based texting, highlighted by Yahoo’s new Hub, likely will cut into wireless carriers’ SMS revenues as more and more users sign on to such services. Chetan Sharma, from Chetan Sharm Consulting, said in a new report that the United States unseated Philippines as the king of text messaging with almost 664 messages per subscriber per month, compared with the Philippines which is seeing a sharp decline in per user messaging due to IP messaging. He said some of the European operators are also experiencing the pain of declining SMS usage. But analysts have pointed out that any reduction in SMS revenues (most wireless carriers charge 10 cents per SMS) will be more than offset by increases in carriers’ data revenues.

While voice control has been part of Android since the dawn of time, Siri came along and ruined the fun with its superior search and understanding capabilities. However, an industrious team of folks from Dexetra.com, led by Narayan Babu, built a Siri-alike in just 8 hours during a hackathon.

Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions, art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?” and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned friends.

The app will soon be available soon from the Android Marketplace but I tried it recently and found it a bit sparse but quite cool. It uses Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand basic questions and Narayan and his buddies are improving the app all the time.
The coolest thing? The finished the app in eight hours.

When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input, Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late evening we decided on the name “iris.”, which would be Siri in reverse. And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it the results were actually good, really good.

You can grab the early, early beta APK here but I recommend waiting for the official version to arrive this week. It just goes to show you that amazing things can pop up everywhere.

Google has launched a new resource page : http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/ There are many cool features but what is best is that all of this info is at our fingertips.

Whether you are creating a business plan, writing an article or planning a new mobile strategy these figures and tools are going to be useful. Bravo Google.

Sometimes we come across an idea that is so interesting or innovative, we have to report on it even if it is not yet clear what the uptake will be.

One such idea is the “QR code service from Space“, recently launched by Phillips & Company.

Check it out.

The idea is that more and more people are using tools such as Google Maps or Google Earth to look at locations on the ground. For example, Google Earth has reportedly been downloaded over 400 million times!

So why not use this opportunity to connect with these people for marketing purposes.

The concept makes use of the fact that services such as Google get new satellite photos of the earth on a regular basis. So, for any company that has a building which is viewable for example on Google Maps, Phillips will arrange to place a large QR code on top of your building, just when the satellites are coming by to refresh their images of their location.

The result is that when someone looks on Google Maps, the will see the building with a QR code on it (see image below). Consumers can then use the QR code scanner in their mobile phone to learn more about the business. Scanning the QR code will cause them to be directed to any sort of website or information source that the business chooses.

Phillips calls this marketing service “Blue Marble“. Whether or not companies are willing to pay the money to have a QR code appear on their building in Google Maps is not clear, only time will tell. But in any case, this is one of the most innovative ideas for communicating with consumers.

This is from mobiadnews.com

Android smartphones already outsell the iPhone in the U.S. and many other markets, but one area where iOS still reigns supreme is app downloads. That may not last, though: research firm Xyologic estimates that if current trends continue, downloads from the Android market will surpass the iOS App Store in June of 2012. That’s around the same time that the number of available apps are expected to be equal.

Right now, at least 494 million iOS apps are downloaded by users every month. The same figure across most Android devices is just 279 million, but in a short eight months Android will have caught up worldwide, at least by Xyologic’s math. Certain markets already have a heavy Android dominance, including the Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal. It appears that Apple’s tablet dominance will take a lot longer to fall by the wayside – iPad app downloads make up an impressive 15% of its download space. Whatever the equivalent number is for Android’ Honeycomb-optimize apps, it’s nowhere near that.

Notably, Xyologic’s research does not include figures from China, where Android is growing by leaps and bounds despite the (suspected) best efforts of the Chinese government. It also doesn’t include third-party app downloads from the Amazon App Store and others, a factor that might increase exponentially as more and more tablets use the popular solution, to say nothing of the upcoming Amazon Kindle Fire. Keep in mind that all of these estimates are tentative and based upon usage as of August, 2011.

[via Taiwan News]