Tech QQ

Gartner just released it’s Q3 report over mobile and smartphone sales. Mobile phone sales are up 35 percent and smartphone sales are up a whooping 95 percent and now totaling 19.3 percent of overall mobile sales.

Hardware wise Nokia is dropping about 10 percent market share. Apple continue to flourish with almost twice as many units sold as last Q3, but only increasing market share slightly. HTC is more than doubling the amount of sold units compared to last Q3, and almost doubling the market share.

Looking at the figures from an OS perspective the rise of Android is clear. Even though some have had very good sales (Apple) and other still doing quite decent (RIM) it’s obvious that Android is the strongest trend. Symbian is loosing almost 10 percent market share, RIM although selling over 3 million units more is still loosing 4 percent market share. Apple gaining about 1 percent market share even though doubling sales. Meanwhile Android sold over 19 million units more than last Q3 and thus increased market share by 22 percent to 25.5 percent.

This changes the placings in the top 5 sold units by OS category making Symbian still no1 at 36.6%, Android second at 25.5%, iOS third at 16.7%, RIM at 14.8% and at fifth place Microsoft Windows Mobile at 2.8%.
I’m predicting that Microsoft will rise considerably from the 2.8% to Q32011 with the sales of Windows Phone 7 driving their sales.

Windows Phone 7 so far is a very good OS, and has great potential with good performance and a steady influx of new apps to it’s marketplace. However, there are still a few things that feel very “v 1.0” about it so Microsoft needs to keep development pace up and start getting patches out there.

I’m very interested in seeing if the WP7 update process will be as good as the regular Microsoft PC OS updates, if so they’ll have a major advantage over competition. However, they need to start using it soon!

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Article about smartphone statistics for Q4 2010.
More articles about statistics on mobilemancer.

One of my favorite programs are finally being ported to WinMo - Spotify!

WinMobile.se is reporting that it will be supporting WinMo 6.5, works great with 480*800 screen resolution but will have mult resolution support. And it will support multitasking. It will of course support offline mode, and save music in the phone memory or on the storage card.

And all this goodness will be released within a month. For all you that haven't tried Spotify I highly recommend you too, if you like music that is. Get Spotify here.

Combined with the launch of the Motorola ES400 Steve Ballmer announced a new mobile OS form Microsoft, named "Windows Embedded Handheld". The new OS will be based on Windows Mobile 6.5 technology and will be aimed at the enterprise market.

Check out the annoying video presentation by Steve Ballmer below:

This new OS is planned for release during 2010. Later on an updated platform based on Windows 7 technologies will be released, this will be named "Windows Embedded Compact 7". The Windows Embedded Compact 7 version is scheduled for release during the second half of 2011.

So, Microsoft will soon have 5 mobile platforms (assuming it will take some time phasing out Windows Mobile 6.5): Windows Mobile 6.5, Kin, Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Handheld and Windows Embedded Compact 7. Or are they hoping that the 6.5 version and the Embedded Handheld will be replaced in a jiffy by Compact 7 so that the platforms will be so scattered?

At the moment I can't help but feel that they are just creating a bigger mess for themselves, it probably looked good on all the excel sheets, but it's just turning out to be confusing in reality.

It is indeed good that there is a enterprise focused mobile OS that will keep the Mobile 6.5 legacy and let those companies that invested heavily in that platform keep their investments. But I think some where inside I was kind of hoping for Windows Phone 7 to shoulder that responsibility. So I had some initial issues with WP7 because I felt they were making it impossible for us developers to write solid enterprise apps on it, but now it become clear as to why WP7's limitations are what they are.

Check this link for more information.

Today Samsung revealed the Omnia Pro 4, sadly it's not a Windows Phone 7 device, but a Windows Mobile 6.5 device.

It's got a touch-screen, 2.62" screen with 320*320 resolution, full qwerty-keyboard, A-GPS, FM-radio, 3.2MP camera, 200MB memory and flash card up to 32GB

If you got an old Windows Mobile phone with resistive screen and enviously glare at the people that have multitouch on their new phones with capacitive screens, there is now hope!

Adel Al Zubeir figured out a way to calculate different gestures form the input you get from dualtouch on the screen, and can figure out if you pinch to zoom or rotate among other things. Check the vid below for a look at how it handles rotation.

If you are a developer and want to use this in your apps there is an SDK for it made available on windowsphoneme.com and you can get it here.

If the wait for a Windows Phone 7 device in your hand feels long and you want to experience the Metro UI now, there is a few skins that you might want to try out.

For Windows 7 there is a beautiful skin (see picture below) created for Rainmeter. You can download it here.


If you have a device running Windows Mobile 6.x you can get a skin for that here. A sample oh the home screen shown below.


If you feel like changing the look of your Firefox, you can try a Metro inspired theme found here.

Happy modding!

So I've been thinking about getting a smartphone, I've been a bit late to get on that bandwagon.

As I like coding more for mobile devices on the .NET platform more than the Java platform, I've been thinking looking at phones with Windows Mobile as OS. I would also be able to read documents on it if possible, I know the phone isn't designed for that, but a fairly large screen would enable at least some readability. So far I feel the HTC HD2 would be the best suited phone for my needs. It seems pretty cool with a big screen, fast processor and windows mobile 6.5 as OS. HTC has put a version of their own Sense interface on it, and so far that's gotten very good reviews.


But now Microsoft has said they'll release Windows Mobile 7 on Mobile World beeing held in Barcelona in February. So question is if it's time to wait until I can get my hands on a phone with Windows Mobile 7 instead? LG seems to be first out, saying they got a planned release for the first Win Mobile 7 phone in September.

But September is awfully far away.

I got several friends that got iPhones and I'm not really a big fan, but today I saw an app called iSamJackson that made me want to get one actually!