Symbian is dead. I know it, you know it. Nokia knows it.

Whether you loved Symbian or not, the OS has fallen behind over the years as Nokia has instead pushed hard into Windows Phone territory. While it has been obvious for a while now that Symbian wasn’t a priority, Nokia is now reportedly killing off the OS this summer.

Part of this change is because while Nokia still sold 500,000 Symbian smartphones in 1st quarter 2013, Windows Phone 8 is finally starting to outsell the aging platform. There has also been several high-quality Nokia handsets that are low enough in cost to compete in the developing space in the way Symbian previously has — the Lumia 520 series comes to mind.

While the days of Symbian might be winding down, we can’t help but applaud the OS for a good, long run. After all it was only around two years ago that Symbian still retained its position as the best-selling smartphone platform in the world.

Do you feel that Nokia made the right decision by pushing away from Symbian and moving over to Windows Phone? Anyone still clinging to Symbian OS, other than for possible financial reasons? Share your thoughts below.

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Nokia first showed off the 808 PureView in February 2012 at Mobile World Congress, with the main feature of the device being its 41 megapixel camera. In addition, the 808 PureView featured Nokia’s Sybmian as its operating system, an odd choice considering Nokia’s close partnership with Microsoft these days.

As part of their Q4 report, Nokia released the following statement about the future of Symbian.

During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian. The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.

This news comes alongside Nokia’s earnings report that boasts $585 million profit and $10.83 billion in revenue. In terms of cash flow, the company is doing great. However, Symbian was not pulling its fair share of sales this last quarter. Nokia managed to sell 2.2 million Symbian smartphones, 9.3 million touch Asha handsets and 4.4 million Lumia Windows Phones. These numbers were enough for Nokia to call for the end of Symbian. Interestingly enough, rumors of a 41MP Windows Phone 8 replacement to the 808 PureView have now started to surface as well.

As for Symbian? Now that iOS and Android rule the mobile market, it is hard to believe that anyone will truly miss the aging OS. My best guess is that Symbian will make a quiet exit like webOS did. If you just asked yourself what webOS is, you proved my point.

That said, Nokia isn’t leaving Symbian users in the dark when it comes to support. Nokia has now made an agreement with Accenture, a technology and outsourcing company, to provide software development and support for Symbian through 2016. In October of 2011, 2800 Nokia employees were given jobs at Accenture.

Are you going to miss Symbian? Or was it time for Nokia’s Symbian to take an exit? Let us know in the comments below.

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When it comes to premium handsets, it may be all about iPhones and Androids these days, but every now and then there’s a product that pops up with a ridiculous price-tag usually made of a precious material like gold or diamond, but here, Gresso have manufactured a phone made of titanium. The phone runs on Symbian S40 and has a simple bar shape that we would have seen on mobiles maybe 5 to 10 years ago, and the innards are of a similar standard. The Gresso has a measly 30MB internal storage and an expandable micro SD slot for an extra 2GB, an FM radio, Bluetooth capability, media playback and a 2 Megapixel camera.

If you showed this phone to your friends or collegues, they’d probably smirk and snigger at first, but it’s the ultra-sturdy build of the phone that makes it a huge $4,500.

The titanium Gresso is strong enough to withstand a heavy battering, can be stood on and will be resistant to corrosion, moisture and sunlight. Gresso have done a good job at creating a super scratch-proof phone that weighs at only 130 grams, which is only slightly heavier than the iPhone 5, and lighter than the Galaxy S3.

There is only a limited supply of these handsets, which isn’t surprising as the new Gresso Regal seems like a phone that would be bought by those with more sense than money.

Would you purchase the titanium Gresso Regal if you were rich and wealthy? I think I’d prefer the £18k diamond beveled iPhone 4S.

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Remember in the 1990s and early into 2000s when Nokia was riding high? It was at the top of the mobile phone world, selling more devices than any other company. Then, something changed and somehow we find ourselves here today with Nokia revealing an operating loss of 826 million Euro. That’s right around $1 billion US. What happened?

Well, the good news is that the operating loss is offset by licensing royalties and a regular cheque from Microsoft, getting them to a net cash rise of 102 million Euro (about US$125 million). You have to keep in mind, though, that Nokia enjoyed an operating profit of 344 million Euro just one year earlier. To make matters worse, Nokia announced its Q2 results today and it’s nothing but gloom; only 4 million Lumia’s sold worldwide, and 600,000 handsets sold in the USA.

You know Nokia was once the number one cell phone company in the world? It lost that throne too. Samsung now sells more mobile phones than its Finnish competitor. Nokia is also losing on the low-end from other competitors, mostly in emerging markets. Back in 2007, Nokia had a 40.4% market share. That dropped to 27% last year and 21% in the first quarter of this year. It’s a slow and painful bleed.

It’s not like Nokia isn’t trying to innovate. It has spent $40 billion in R&D–roughly four times what Apple has spent–in the last decade working on new devices, but there’s a problem. Many of these never made it past R&D. Frank Nuovo is a former designer at Nokia and he already envisioned a smartphone with a color touchscreen above a single button seven years before the iPhone. In the late 90s, Nokia also had an iPad-esque tablet in the works that never materialized. As Nuovo put it, “We had it completely nailed.” The company culture encouraged research, “but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.”

Yes, Nokia spent a lot of money on innovation, but it didn’t really produce “winning devices or software.” Instead, it now has at least two abandoned operating systems and a bunch of patents. In fact, the patents, worth about $6 billion, are said to make up the bulk of Nokia’s overall value. Even Stephen Elop agrees that if they had “been landed in products…I think Nokia would have been in a different place.” They spent too much time selling to the low-end and not enough time pushing the higher-end devices to market. And the iPhone arrived and gobbled it all up.

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So, why does the Remote Device Access matter to us today? As it turns out, Nokia has listed no fewer than six yet unannounced cell phones on that service and developers can presumably book some time with them. Well, they can book some remote access time with them. The six devices are the Nokia 510, Nokia Belle 805, Nokia Lumia 910, Nokia Lumia 920, Nokia Lumia 950, and Nokia Lumia 1001.

Now, we know nothing except for the model names, but the names should give us some indication as to what to expect. The Nokia 510, for instance, is likely a budget-level Symbian-powered successor to the Nokia 500. The Nokia Belle 805 could be a cheaper, lower-spec’d version of the Nokia 808 PureView. All of the Lumia devices will likely be powered by Windows Phone 8 and hopefully not just WP7.5. The larger number of the Lumia 1001 may point toward a Windows tablet, but that’s little more than conjecture at this point.

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Back in February Mobile Magazine reported on the upcoming Nokia 808 PureView. At the time we were impressed by its amazing 41MP camera, Carl Zeiss lens, and the PureView imaging technology within it. Now, promotional advertising has began to circulate that is equally impressive, considering it was crafted using video and image stills taken directly by the smartphone itself.

Check out the video and expect to be surprised just how good it looks. The 808 PureView is all about a gorgeous design (at least in my opinion), a 4-inch 16:9 nHD AMOLED display (640×360), has a 1.3GHz Single-Core SoC, 512 MB of RAM, and 16 GB of internal memory. Oh, and of course its outstanding 41MP camera.

Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect thanks to one flaw, it runs Symbian OS not Windows Phone. I’m not saying Symbian wasn’t a good OS in its time, but its become rather outdated and the lack of apps will make it a little boring for some users. Hopefully its great video and photo-taking capabilities will make up for it, though.

The Nokia 808 PureView is expected to start shipping in May, though Nokia has yet to release official pricing information.

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Nokia recently announced a brand new handset that is making quite an interesting splash thanks to its 41-megapixel camera. No, 41 was not a typo. It’s hard not to be impressed with such a huge MP amount in a camera. Of course, without a quality lense, megapixels don’t mean much. Luckily this doesn’t seem to be a problem for the PureView. To check out the beautiful pictures that the PureView takes, visit the  Nokia’s ZIP file archive  for some impressive, totally uncompressed samples.

The downside? While Nokia’s de facto operating system standard has recently become Windows Phone, apparently the PureView 808 didn’t get the memo about change of operating systems and comes equipped with Symbian as its OS. Essentially this means you get an awesome camera, but you’re stuck with a platform that largely doesn’t have any apps or support worth talking about.

According to Nokia, the choice mainly had to do with the device being in development for five years, so it started as a Symbian project and apparently finished as one. While this is certainly an interesting device, what I personally am waiting for is the PureView’s 41MP camera technology to come to a Windows Phone device, perhaps a Lumia?

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It doesn’t quite work in the most conventional of ways, though, since the Nokia 808 PureView uses oversampling. What this means is that the image data is taken from seven neighboring pixels, consolidating them into a single pixel. As a result, you end up with a 5MP image as the default. It can produce 8MP and 38MP pictures too. The Carl Zeiss involvement certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Strangely, the phone is powered by the Nokia Belle operating system. Considering the waves that the Finnish company is making with Windows Phone, it’s odd that they’d take half a step back to the Symbian ecosystem. Other specs include the 4-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display, 1.3GHz single-core processor, 512MB RAM, and 16GB storage.

Expect to find this phone in May for 450 Euro ($600).

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It appears like iOS users are the ones who are crazy about mobile web browsing. According to the latest data, Apple’s operating system has finished 2011 on top with a 52.1 percent market share of mobile web, although that’s a fall from a 54.06 percent lead back in January 2011.

The new info comes to us courtesy of NetMarketShare which keeps track of the visitors to their network of websites. And surprisingly, their data suggests that Android users are not too much into mobile web.

Google’s OS is in the third spot with a 16.2% share behind Java ME with 21.27% market share. The ones which failed to get into the top three include Symbian (5.76%), BlackBerry (3.51%) and “Other” (1.07%) which should include Windows Phone.

The dominance of the Apple OS in mobile web browsing has been steady throughout 2011, with only slight fluctuations.

The highest numbers for iOS are in October when its market share climbed to 61.5 percent, most probably as a result of the iPhone 4S launch. The lowest was in February when its share dropped to 46.57 percent, likely due to customers selling their iPads to get their hands on the iPad 2 which was released in March.

Going a bit deeper into the info, Apple’s iPhone has a 25.24% share, while the iPad accounts for 24.53% and the iPod Touch is at 2.32%.

It’s certainly surprising that the Android platform’s share is far behind, especially when we consider the fact that Android has dominated the market when it comes to the number of devices sold and activated.

The post Apple iOS Ends 2011 With 52% Share Of Mobile Web Browsing appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The idea here is to “add some serious business productivity tools for… anybody looking to upgrade from Symbian Anna to Symbian Belle.” Microsoft Apps will be available as a free download in the fourth quarter of this year. It includes Microsoft Lync 2010 Mobile for instant messaging, Microsoft PowerPoint Broadcast for presentations, Microsoft OneNote for note-taking (plus Microsoft SkyDrive sync), and Microsoft Document Connection for viewing documents. SharePoint sync support for OneNote will come in early 2012.

The other big update coming in early 2012 is the addition of Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications outside of the Windows platform for the first time. This goes to show that the relationship between Microsoft and Nokia is running deep, going well beyond WP7. Today’s announcement is largely designed to give some hope to all the Symbian folks that Nokia hasn’t completely abandoned the platform just yet and that it’s still worth buying into. Whether you buy into that assertion is up to you.

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