The Motorola Droid X

Keeping up the pace with its successful Android-based handset foray, Motorola on Thursday announced the latest addition to its Droid portfolio – the Droid X. The forthcoming device will see the US vendor continue its partnership with local CDMA carrier Verizon Wireless, which will offer the device from July 15.

The Droid X boasts a 4.3-inch high-resolution screen; dual-flash, eight megapixel camera; HD camcorder; as well as DLNA and HDMI connectivity; and a 1Ghz processor; video platform Blockbuster On Demand will also be integrated as part of the V Cast Video service.

Users of the Droid X will also get to upgrade to Android 2.2 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 with an over-the-air update in the latter half of the summer.

The device will cost $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year customer agreement and the option to add the 3G Mobile Hotspot service for $20 per month, allowing customers to turn the phone into a wireless modem for up to five compatible wifi devices.

“It has been an exciting time for Android momentum and global consumer adoption since the announcement of Droid by Motorola nine months ago,” said Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering for Google. “There are 160,000 new Android-powered devices activated daily and Android Market has grown to over 65,000 applications. Plus later this summer, Verizon Wireless and Motorola will update all the Droid by Motorola phones to the latest 2.2 software. For customers, this means great new features and improved browser performance. For developers, this will provide new tools such as cloud-to-device messaging and enhanced enterprise functionality.”

Meanwhile, in other news, the Apple iPhone 4 went on sale in the US and Europe, with eager consumers queuing from the very early hours of Thursday morning to get their hands on the device.

Apple has already said that stocks might run short after pre-orders for the iPhone 4 topped more than 600,000 in a single day, when hotlines opened June 17, causing problems with the reservation system.

An O2 store in Central London at 9am on Thursday

Eager consumers were queuing overnight

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The HTC Droid Incredible

HTC continues to fly the flag for Android, this time with a CDMA2000 1xEV-DO handset designed for the Verizon Wireless network in the US.

Cashing in on the popularity of the ‘Droid’ branding, which worked wonders for the first Motorola made device also available on Verizon, the Droid Incredible will be available in the US from April 29.

The device builds on HTC’s Sense user interface, with a seven panel home screen packed with different widgets as well as a unified interface for Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

The hardware is supported by Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon process, which is making its mark as the de facto choice for Android gadgets, as well as an eight megapixel camera and a 3.7 inch WVGA (480×800) AMOLED capacitive touch display.

The Droid Incredible will cost $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a two year contract, with voice plans beginning at $39.99 and data plans from $29.99 for unlimited monthly access.

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The Motorola Backflip

US vendor Motorola is set to beef up the arsenal available to its Android-based devices by bringing Adobe’s Flash Player to the platform.

Working in conjunction with Adobe, as part of the Open Screen Project, Motorola is helping to develop Flash Player 10.1 so it works on Android. Integration of Flash browser extensions in Motorola’s Android devices is expected in the first half of 2010.

Motorola said it will be deploying the full Flash Player broadly across its Android product portfolio going forward and will also release Flash Player updates for existing devices such as the Droid once Adobe releases the software.

Flash is increasingly seen as an essential part of the web experience, and Flash Player 10.1 has been designed to work on smartphones, smartbooks and netbooks as well as PCs and other internet-connected devices to extend this experience. Yet its absence has been a persistent blight on the iPhone’s spec sheet.

The closest the iPhone will get to Flash is as a native application rather than the in-browser player. Developers will be able to use Flash Professional CS5 to export applications for the iPhone, but this only means they can create standalone applications that can be downloaded from the App Store and not incorporate Flash into websites for display in the iPhone’s Safari browser.

In other news, Motorola has announced another device in its Android lineup in the shape of the Backflip, which will be available in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia during the first quarter.

Trying hard to differentiate itself, Motorola has given the Backflip a “reverse clamshell design,” which means opening the phone up reveals a hard QWERTY keyboard with a trackpad on the back side, so users can navigate around the touchscreen without getting their fingers in the way.

Once again, Motorola has skinned the OS in its own style with the interface known as MotoBlur that focuses on social networking and streams all contacts, posts, messages and photos from sources such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Gmail in once place on the home screen.

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Droid may save Motorola

Motorola’s big bet on the Android-powered Droid device may just pay off and help the reinvented company turn its fortunes around.

According to estimates release by up-start mobile apps analytics firm Flurry this week, US carrier Verizon Wireless may have shifted in the region of 250,000 Droids during the device’s first week of launch.

The Motorola Droid, the first Android-based device to use version 2.0 of the operating system, launched on Verizon’s network in the US on November 6, backed by what is believed to be a $100m marketing campaign.

Through its analytics service, Flurry monitors usage of over 10,000 applications on the iPhone and Android platforms and claims to track apps two thirds of unique iPhone and Android handsets in the market, including over 15,000 million user sessions per day.

To estimate first week sales totals for the myTouch 3G (HTC Magic), Droid and iPhone 3GS, Flurry detected new handsets within its system, and then made adjustments to account for varying levels of Flurry application penetration by handset.

While Apple sold approximately 1.6 million 3GS units over its first week of sales, the device was simultaneously launched across eight countries, while the Droid launched only in the US.

Moreover, the iPhone commanded an installed base of over 25 million at the time the 3GS launched, including six million first generation iPhone users who were expected to upgrade to the 3GS. Taking this into account, Droid sales of 250,000 units during its first week from a standing start and in just one country, is a strong result for Motorola and Verizon.

Flurry’s statistics also show that the average Android session length is four minutes versus two minutes for iPhone apps.

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Orange UK reveals iPhone data limit

UK mobile operator Orange is attracting criticism this week as it prepares to go up against O2 with its own iPhone offer.

The bulk of the criticism is directed at Orange’s terms & conditions, which have revealed a fair usage policy of just 750MB per month on each of wifi and 3G.

Moreover, “non-Orange internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing, non-Orange internet based video” are all banned under Orange’s rules. This could be interpreted to mean no YouTube, Spotify or social networking such as Twitter or Facebook, and no GoogleTalk.

To be fair however, this part of Orange’s Ts&Cs isn’t that different from O2’s, and plenty of stuff, including the apps mentioned above, seem to work fine on that network.

But this usage cap, which O2 does  not have, raises the ugly prospect of network congestion, and has prompted some of our readers to comment on how well Orange’s 3G network stands up to the onslaught of data usage, when the iPhone launches November 10. Saying that, the carrier isn’t shying away from offering tethering options for the iPhone, so it is a least expecting some customers to use the handset as a modem.

With pricing pretty much identical and Vodafone set to launch the device too, it looks like the UK battle for iPhone customers will come down to the quality of service each network operator can offer.

In other iPhone news, the device has apparently gone down a storm in China – only 5,000 or so devices were sold in the first weekend.

Meanwhile, the Motorola Droid, the company’s first Android 2.0 handset, has got a funky big budget advert running, see below.

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The Droid will be known as the Milestone in Europe

The Motorola Droid, unveiled last week as the first Android-powered handset to use the version 2.0 firmware, is on its way to Europe under the guise of the Motorola Milestone.

Italy and Germany will be the first markets in Europe to stock the Milestone, with further availability to be announced at a later date.  It is believed T-Mobile, Vodafone and O2 will launch the device in Germany, while Italian carriers are not yet confirmed.

In a slider form factor with a full QWERTY keyboard, the Droid/Milestone boasts a 3.7” high-resolution capacitive touchscreen, with a width of 854 pixels and more than 400,000 pixels in total. The camera weighs in at five megapixels, with a dual-LED flash and video capture, backed up by 16GB of removable storage.

Connectivity is provided by 3G, wifi and Bluetooth as well as A-GPS, while the operating system is Android 2.0, supporting multitasking for six apps, and access to more than 12,000 applications via the Android app store. Droid is also the first device to support Google Maps Navigation (Beta), which provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps and can also be voice controlled.

But perhaps the most advantageous thing Droid has got going for it is a Webkit HTML5, Flash 10 ready browser, and an ARM Cortex A8 processor, making it roughly twice as fast as existing Android handsets.

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The excitement was soon over however, as it quickly emerged that the three metre deep pit, complete with flaming material at the bottom, was a hoax. A hoax carried out by Baltic operator Tele2 as the premise to an ‘out of this world’ marketing campaign. Since then the incident has become an exercise in how not to do PR. Not only did the Latvian government have to fork out to send a specialist military unit to the location to conduct tests for radiation, the prank also caused concern for nearby residents. As a result, the Latvian government, which is a customer of Tele2, will yank its contract. Whoops.

PR go home.

Still, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and perhaps Tele2 only wanted to draw attention to the fact that it’s not performing too shabbily in the face of the recession. Profits came in at SEK2.2bn (€212m) for the third quarter of 2009, compared to SEK156m in the same period in 2008, although this jump was largely due to impairment charges in the year ago quarter. Sales were up just three per cent at SEK9.8bn.

The industry’s eyes were also turned heavenward to watch the arrival of the Droid – Motorola’s first handset to be based on the Android 2.0 platform. Now Motorola’s results are usually a B movie horror themselves, but this time they were pleasantly surprising. The firm is back, yeah back, back in black. Profit for the third quarter of 2009 swung to $12m, compared to a loss of $397m in the same period last year. Net sales were still down, from $7.5bn in the third quarter of 2008 to $5.4bn in 2009, although things were looking up at the handset unit.

Mobile device sales were down 46 per cent year on year to $1.7bn, but the operating loss shrank from $840m to $183m, also reporting a 28 per cent sequential shift in the right direction. The firm, which shipped 13.6 million handsets, giving it an estimated global handset market share of 4.7 per cent, is betting the farm on Android. The Droid handset will land November 6 on Verizon Wireless’ network, in the wake of a vendor funded advertising campaign pitching the device against the Apple iPhone. This week Verizon reported that net income for the three months to the end of September fell 9.8 per cent year on year to $2.8bn, while operating revenues climbed just over ten per cent year on year to $27bn. Wireless revenues for the quarter were up 23 per cent year on year to $13.5bn, although net adds fell 38 per cent year on year to 1.3 million in the third quarter leaving the company with 89 million subscribers.

In a slider form factor with a full QWERTY keyboard, the Droid boasts a 3.7″ high-resolution capacitive touchscreen, with a width of 854 pixels and more than 400,000 pixels in total. The camera weighs in at five megapixels, with a dual-LED flash and video capture, backed up by 16GB of removable storage. Connectivity is provided by 3G EV-DO, wifi and Bluetooth as well as A-GPS, while the operating system is Android 2.0, supporting multitasking for six apps, and access to more than 12,000 applications via the Android app store. Droid is also the first device to support Google Maps Navigation (Beta), which provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps and can also be voice controlled.

It sounds impressive, especially for a Motorola device, but probably the most advantageous thing Droid has got going for it is a Webkit HTML5, Flash 10 ready browser, and an ARM Cortex A8 processor, making it roughly twice as fast as existing Android handsets including the recently launched Motorola Cliq/Dext. And perhaps as reward for getting the company back into profit, Edward Fitzpatrick, who has served as acting CFO since February, has been appointed full time chief financial officer, effective immediately.

Not content with taking over your handset, the robots are also taking over your network, with Austrian carrier T-Mobile and Chinese equipment vendor Huawei completing testing of what they claim is the world’s first LTE self organising network (SON). The tests were carried out in Innsbruck, Austria, and demonstrated the technology’s ability to configure and optimise the network and recover automatically. As network topology changes to an all IP infrastructure with migration to LTE, a SON deployment claims to ensure a high level of connectivity and optimisation of performance network wide.

The Austrian tests used T-Mobile’s existing base stations and were conducted to verify Automatic Neighbour Relation (ANR) functionality, and how the SON platform is able to automatically establish and optimise neighbour relations.

Optimising neighbour relations sounds all well and good – the flat next to the Informer’s hovel is presently occupied by students who are apparently taking a night course in Xbox and whooping – but all this intelligent networking stuff makes the Informer’s head spin. Since checking out ex-Symbian employee and ‘futurist’ David Wood’s blog and reading about the Singularity, the Informer’s not so sure intelligent machines are a good idea.

Sticking with Symbian, the Informer was down at London’s Earls Court this week, attending the Symbian Exchange and Expo (SEE) show, where the Symbian Foundation officially launched its application publishing platform – Horizon. The Foundation said that there are now a total of five app stores supporting Horizon. Along with the initial stores – the Ovi Store by Nokia, Samsung Applications Store and AT&T’s MEdia Mall, new additions include China Mobile’s Mobile Market, and Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow arena.

The Informer had a good chat with John Forsyth, whose business card says “leadership team” for the Symbian Foundation. Does this mean he is the team? Sometimes the Informer feels like an army of one so he can sympathise. Anyway, Forsyth explained the Foundation’s strategy and explained that the organisation had a new way of looking at the open source model. He said the idea is to be as transparent as possible in governance of the organisation, adding that most backers of the Foundation, and its concepts, are geeks and are passionate about the Symbian OS.

Well, the initiative is certainly striking some chords. Finnish handset vendor Nokia launched its assault on China’s 3G market this week, introducing its first device built for China’s homegrown TD-SCDMA technology. The 6788 is the result of close collaboration between Nokia and China Mobile, which apparently is a big fan of open source Symbian. “We had meetings with China Mobile, which is very much in alignment with our open source vision – they want an open, independent platform for devices,” Forsyth said.

This might seem like a paradox but Qualcomm’s another one jumping on the open source bandwagon. The US chip shop has announced a shiny new wholly-owned subsidiary focused on mobile open source platforms. The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) is formed of a dedicated group of engineers, headed up by Rob Chandhok, senior vice president of software strategy for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. QuIC’s mandate is to use open software to spur the development of advanced services for traditional handsets as well as sophisticated smartphones and mobile computing devices. “Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry,” said Chandhok. “These engineers will focus on such important open source initiatives as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems such as Symbian, Android and Chrome.” Check that out.

Android backer Google landed a major coup in the mobile market on Wednesday, when Orange announced a deal to put Google Mobile Apps on the homescreens of customers in Europe. The multi-year strategic agreement will see Orange launch Google apps across its footprint in a phased approach across a large range of Orange Signature phones including those based on Android. Google Mobile App will later be made available across a wider range of Signature devices operating on Symbian S60, RIM (BlackBerry) and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

Orange’s big daddy was just about holding the fort meanwhile, with France Telecom reporting that EBITDA dropped 5.4 per cent year on year during the third quarter of 2009 to €4.56bn from €4.8bn last year. Group revenues also took a slight hit, falling 3.7 per cent year on year to €12.7bn, with the weakest performing units identified as Poland and the UK. The company is also setting aside €1bn to fund a stress reduction programme for staff in a bid to tackle the recent spate of suicides affecting its workers.

Ca plane pour moi,

The Informer

Motorola swings back into black

It’s been a good week for struggling vendor Motorola so far, with the company reporting its second helping of good news in as many days.

The US firm swung to a $12m profit during the third quarter of 2009, compared to a loss of $397m in the same period last year. Net sales were still down, from $7.5bn in the third quarter of 2008 to $5.4bn in 2009, although things were looking up at the handset unit.

Mobile device sales were down 46 per cent year on year to $1.7bn, although operating loss shrank from $840m to $183m, also reporting a 28 per cent sequential shift in the right direction.

The firm, which shipped 13.6 million handsets, giving it an estimated global handset market share of 4.7 per cent, is betting the farm on Android.

Yesterday Moto released information on the forthcoming Droid device – its first such handset to run Android 2.0. The Droid will land on November 6 on Verizon Wireless’ network, in the wake of a vendor funded advertising campaign pitching the device against the Apple iPhone.

In a slider form factor with a full QWERTY keyboard, the Droid boasts a 3.7” high-resolution capacitive touchscreen, with a width of 854 pixels and more than 400,000 pixels in total. The camera weighs in at five megapixels, with a dual-LED flash and video capture, backed up by 16GB of removable storage.

Connectivity is provided by 3G EV-DO, wifi and Bluetooth as well as A-GPS, while the operating system is Android 2.0, supporting multitasking for six apps, and access to more than 12,000 applications via the Android app store. Droid is also the first device to support Google Maps Navigation (Beta), which provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps and can also be voice controlled.

It sounds impressive, especially for a Motorola device, but probably the most advantageous thing Droid has got going for it is a Webkit HTML5, Flash 10 ready browser, and an ARM Cortex A8 processor, making it roughly twice as fast as existing Android handsets.

The firm recently launched the Cliq/Dext Android-powered phone and its social networking focused Motoblur platform.

In related news, perhaps as reward for getting the company back into profit, Edward Fitzpatrick, who has served as acting CFO since February, has been appointed full time chief financial officer, effective immediately.

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The Droid runs Android 2.0

Struggling handset vendor Motorola put an end to the rumours on Wednesday, finally releasing more information on its Droid device – its first such handset to run Android 2.0.

The Droid will appear on November 6 on Verizon Wireless’ network, in the wake of a vendor funded advertising campaign pitching the device against the Apple iPhone.

The device will cost $199.99 with a two year contract after a $100 mail-in rebate, and will need to be accompanied by a nationwide voice plan and an Email and Web for Smartphone plan. Voice plans begin at $39.99 for monthly access for 450 minutes and an Email and Web for Smartphone plan is $29.99 for monthly access.

In a slider form factor with a full QWERTY keyboard, the Droid boasts a 3.7” high-resolution capacitive touchscreen, with a width of 854 pixels and more than 400,000 pixels in total. The camera weighs in at five megapixels, with a dual-LED flash and video capture, backed up by 16GB of removable storage.

The Droid packs an ARM Cortex A8 processor

Connectivity is provided by 3G EV-DO, wifi and Bluetooth as well as A-GPS, while the operating system is Android 2.0, supporting multitasking for six apps, and access to more than 12,000 applications via the Android app store. Droid is also the first device to support Google Maps Navigation (Beta), which provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps and can also be voice controlled.

It sounds impressive, especially for a Motorola device, but probably the most advantageous thing Droid has got going for it is a Webkit HTML5, Flash 10 ready browser, and an ARM Cortex A8 processor, making it roughly twice as fast as existing Android handsets. It will be interesting to see how it’s received this holiday season.

This week Verizon reported that net income for the three months to the end of September fell 9.8 per cent year on year to $2.8bn, while operating revenues climbed just over ten per cent year on year to $27bn.

Wireless revenues for the quarter were up 23 per cent year on year to $13.5bn, although net adds fell 38 per cent year on year to 1.3 million in the third quarter leaving the company with 89 million subscribers.

Wireline revenues were flat at $4.9bn, as fixed line subs continued to plummet, dropping ten per cent year on year to 33 million. FIOS picked up steam however with internet subscribers jumping 49 per cent year on year in the nine months to end-September to reach 3.2 million, and IPTV subs up 67 per cent to 2.7 million.

Motorola

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These are the droids you are looking for

The driving forces behind Google’s foray into the mobile platform space  -  The Open Handset Alliance and the Android Open Source Project – have shown off developments for the operating system which will allow handset builders to deploy the platform on yet more devices, even as it is gaining some significant traction in the market.

The latest flavour of the Android SDK version 1.6 also known as ‘donut’, introduces a number of new features including support for CDMA and additional screen sizes like QVGA and WVG; gesture APIs to support finger gestures in apps; a text-to-speech engine; and a quick search box that developers can use to integrate Google Search services within any application.

An experimental Android feature out of Google Labs also promises users a new browsing experience in the shape of Fast Flip that claims to “combine the best elements of print and online articles.” Fast Flip allows users to ‘flip’ left and right through news headlines and feeds, while tapping the screen brings up a short summary of the page and zooming allows users to see the content in greater detail. Google said the offering is designed to speed up the web browsing experience by making the flow ‘seamless’ and delivering more personalized content.

Devices running Android 1.6 are expected as early as October, 2009, and handset vendors are falling over themselves at present to get their own Android-based devices onto shelves before the lucrative holiday period starts.

Among those joining the throng are South Korea’s LG Electronics with the announcement of its first Android-based device. The company said that the LG-GW620 features a three-inch, full touchscreen and slide out QWERTY hardware keypad, with a focus on email and social networking services, although finer details were scant. More details on the device will be revealed closer to its launch in Europe in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile struggling US vendor Motorola has started its fight back, with the unveiling of its first Android powered smartphone known as the Cliq in the US and the Dext elsewhere. With a somewhat similar form factor to LG’s offering, the Cliq/Dext features a 3.1 inch HVGA touchscreen, with a full size, slide out QWERTY keyboard nestled underneath, a five megapixel camera, 3.5mm headset jack, wifi, GPS, and support for up to 32GB of removable memory.

As is the trend among most vendors that have adopted the Android platform, Motorola has skinned the OS in its own style and developed an interface known as MotoBlur. The Cliq will be available exclusively via Android fan T-Mobile USA in the US in time for Christmas. Under the name of Dext, the device will also be available with Orange in the UK and France, Telefonica in Spain and America Movil in Latin America. None of the operators have yet revealed pricing or tariffs for the device.

The forthcoming Cliq is expected to be the first of many Android-powered devices from Motorola. The beleaguered US manufacturer has been ratcheting up its Android strategy over the summer, hiring developers and sinking yet more resources into the platform. Christy Wyatt, vice president of software platforms and ecosystem at Motorola recently said: “We believe Android and open software has the freedom and flexibility to foster innovation, accelerate time to market, and deliver the most personal and customized mobile experiences for consumers.”

But if the rumours are correct, the Cliq might not be the first Motorola Android handset to hit the shelves in 2009. In an advertisement that started broadcasting mid-October, Verizon Wireless turned Apple’s marketing on itself with a video that proclaims, “IDon’t have a real keyboard, run simultaneous apps, take five megapixel pictures, customise, run widgets, allow open development, or have interchangeable batteries. Everything iDon’t, Droid does.”

While it’s entirely possible that ‘Droid’ will just be the name given to Verizon’s forthcoming portfolio of Android-based devices, it is thought that the an Android-based handset to emerge from Motorola’s labs will be officially named the Droid, and is none other than the device code named the Sholes. The word on the web is that the handset will hit shelves in the first week of November, which ties in nicely with the recent advertising pitch.

Late in 2008, Moto announced plans to slim down its handset platforms portfolio, from over 20 different combinations of operating system, silicon and user interface (UI), to just three handset platforms—Android, Windows Mobile, and its own proprietary OS, P2K, which is used on devices such as the RAZR. As a result, Motorola’s portfolio will shift to the higher end of the handset tier, although the company is gambling that over the next few years, the Android and Windows Mobile platforms will filter down through the mid-level so it can still address the mass market.

And finally, Android has won further support from its biggest cheerleader to date   Taiwan’s HTC – which recently unveiled what it is pitching as a mass market device   the Tattoo. The handset, which owes its moniker to the fact that it is highly customisable, was available in Europe first at the beginning of October, and will roll out in markets around the world in the following months.

The Tattoo is the second phone to use HTC’s in house designed Sense interface, the first being the Hero. Speaking at the recent launch of the Sense UI, HTC CEO Peter Chou said: “Our strategy with HTC Sense is to allow us to differentiate ourselves, and also to build a closer relationship with people.” Chou revealed that HTC has spent the last three years covertly developing a ’specialist software team’ to sit alongside its hardware unit. This has brought hundreds of software engineers to the company, which specialises in Windows Mobile and now Android handsets, he said.

“Today we probably have the most Android and Windows Mobile developers outside of Google and Microsoft,” Chou said. “HTC has spent millions of man-hours developing a better HTC-branded software experience that makes all of this simple and engaging to customers.” Buyers of the Tattoo will also be able to design and purchase their own unique handset covers to alter the physical look of the phone as well. The device includes Google Maps, search, Google Mail, and Android market. It also features a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5mm stereo headset jack and expandable microSD memory.

Nokia sees future in Windows, Linux

Meanwhile, handset king Nokia is looking further afield. In August, the Finnish handset giant gave its clearest indication yet that it is looking to reduce its reliance on the Symbian platform by announcing a collaboration with Microsoft and making another foray into the mobile Linux space.

Nokia clearly feels the need to make some changes. The firm is feeling the pressure from its rivals and has seen its market share shrink in recent quarters. Second quarter 2009 handset market data from Gartner revealed that while Nokia leads the market overall—and is still number one in the crucial, high-growth smartphone sector—it is losing points across the board. The Finnish vendor’s handset portfolio is skewed towards the low end, where the market is contracting, and Gartner said that Nokia’s flagship smartphone—the long-awaited N97, which it was hoped would cement Nokia’s position in the high end—“met with little enthusiasm at its launch” earlier this year.

As a result, the vendor is reaching beyond its Symbian heritage in a bid to plug gaps in its line-up. One such move is an expansion into the burgeoning ultra-portable computer market, in partnership with Microsoft. In what is one of the most significant developments in the firm’s recent history, Nokia unveiled its first mini-laptop product, the Booklet 3G, in late August and revealed that the device will run a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Analysts said that Nokia’s decision to go with Windows, rather than a Linux-based OS, which had been anticipated, was the most surprising element of the announcement. But there was identifiable logic in the decision. “There has been some disappointment with Linux netbooks so far,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. “Nokia’s brand is big in the mobile phone space but not in the PC space. Having Microsoft on board will give Nokia a little more strength in that market.”

Powered by Intel’s Atom processor and weighing in at 1.25kg, the Booklet features HSPA and wifi connectivity as well as A-GPS and integrated Bluetooth. But while the Booklet represents Nokia’s bid to get a foothold in a new hardware sector, it was also designed to showcase the firm’s Ovi service portfolio. The launch, Nokia said, was “another important ingredient in the move towards becoming a mobile solutions company.”

Milanesi conceded that the provision of a device and service ecosystem will be a key differentiator in the netbook space and will help Nokia to distinguish itself from the likes of Asus and Acer. But she stressed that Nokia is floundering at the top end of the mobile handset market, having not done enough to compete with the slick new wave of user interfaces led by Apple’s iPhone. “Usability issues have made it difficult for Nokia to exploit the potential of its phones,” she said.

The introduction of the Booklet came shortly after Nokia and Microsoft announced an alliance that will see the two companies collaborate on the design, development and marketing of mobile enterprise platforms, including Microsoft Office Mobile and other business communications software for Symbian devices. The initiative will look to introduce software for a broad range of Nokia smartphones, starting with the business-focused E-series range.

The two companies will also jointly market these offerings to enterprises, carriers and end users. New business products are expected to appear in 2010 and dedicated teams will be established in both companies to work on the new initiative. Microsoft business division president Stephen Elop said the deal would focus on email, collaboration, Web 2.0, SharePoint, instant messaging, presence and other rich Office mobile applications, including the ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents with mobile-optimised versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote.

Less than a week later, the Finnish company announced plans to introduce more high end devices on the Linux-based Maemo platform. The first of these is the N900, which follows on from Nokia’s previous generation of internet tablets such as the N810, and uses the latest Maemo 5 software, which supports multitasking and allows users to have dozens of application windows open and running simultaneously.

The N900 improves on Nokia’s previous tablet devices by actually giving it cellular connectivity and phone features. However, the device still boasts a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard, supported by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, a five megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics, with 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card.

“With Linux software, Mozilla-based browser technology and now also with cellular connectivity, the Nokia N900 delivers a powerful mobile experience,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president, markets, at Nokia. “The Nokia N900 shows where we are going with Maemo and we’ll continue to work with the community to push the software forward. What we have with Maemo is something that is fusing the power of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone, and it is great to see that it is evolving in exciting ways.” The Nokia N900 will be available from October with an estimated retail price of €500 excluding sales taxes and subsidies.

Back in June Nokia hooked up with Intel to “define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks” using Linux and open source technologies such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio, sparking rumours that the company was preparing to branch out beyond Symbian. When MCI recently quizzed Nokia on its commitment to Symbian, the company would only say that it “remains strongly committed to its current open OS software strategy for smartphones, which is based on the world leading Symbian software.”