Nokia phone a challenge to Apple
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Nokia Corp. unveiled services and cellphones yesterday that customers can use to download music and play games, a bid by the world's largest mobile phone maker to challenge Apple Inc.'s higher-end iPhone, as well as iTunes and the iPod.
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IN ANOTHER SIGN that Nokia is facing up to harsh realities, Nokia has performed something of a volte face by signing up to the SD Card Association.
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Apple Inc's  hefty iPhone  price cut pits it in direct competition with handsets from  Motorola Inc  and Palm Inc , which are  struggling to convince Wall Street they can turn around their  aging brands.
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Motorola or Nokia: Which one is this Fool's newest flame?
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Nokia didn't mention the iPhone, but told a disappointed audience at the Mobile World Congress that it is still working on bringing out touch capability to its phones.
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Apple's got the iPhone, but what do its competitors have? Nokia, Motorola and Research In Motion show off their latest at the giant 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
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InfoWorld - Nokia appears to be trying to work increasingly close with operators as a way to push its S60 mobile phone software. The strategy could result in more Symbian phones available to U.S. users.
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Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker, said Thursday it has filed a countersuit against Qualcomm Inc. in a patent infringement fight.
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Nokia , the world's top mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it has filed its first patent counter-suit against Qualcomm , seeking damages and an injunction against the U.S. company's chipsets.
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France Telecom  and Apple   are struggling to come to an agreement on the  distribution of the U.S. group's iPhone in France, Challenges  reported on Thursday on its website.
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InfoWorld - Nokia, the world&#39;s largest handset maker, is well known for its consumer devices but maintains a range of enterprise products.
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Sony Ericsson, LG, and Samsung have all caught &quot;iPhoneitis,&quot; joining in on one of the hottest trends at the Mobile World Congress -- touch-based user interfaces.All three launched mobile phones at the show in Barcelona, and they all use touch in different ways -- from LG&#39;s icons that change function depending on what part of the phone is being used to Sony Ericsson&#39;s ability to focus where a user touches while taking a picture.Sony Ericsson likes to point out that it has supported touch since the birth of the company. But it also gives Apple some credit.&quot;They are a source of inspiration,&quot; said Rikard Skogberg, category manager at Sony Ericsson.The point is to make mobile phones easier to use and to open the door for more features, such as mobile Internet.&quot;Sony Ericsson&#39;s goal is to make our phones as easy as possible to use, and touch is a big part of that. If people are going to buy more advanced phones, they must be able to use all the features -- and for that to happen, they must be intuitive,&quot; Skogberg said.LG&#39;s Channel Marketing Manager Heather Seabrooke agrees.&quot;It&#39;s all about usability. With touch, you don&#39;t need a million different buttons. Instead, you can use the same ones for different things,&quot; she said.But not all phone vendors seem to be convinced. Nokia was expected to show a new version of its S60 operating system with an integrated touch-based user interface, but it was nowhere to be seen.Nokia says it will use touch starting sometime during the second half of this year but not in a gimmicky way. And there must be a clear migration path for users.Several analysts are also skeptical.&quot;We believe that a good user interface must also support buttons to be effective and fast. And we will see a lot more innovation before this market becomes mature,&quot; said Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice president at Gartner.But at the same time he thinks that Nokia&#39;s lack of support for touch may hurt its sales in the short term.&quot;Nokia&#39;s new flagship phone, the N96, has an impressive spec, but it doesn&#39;t support touch. And that makes it a bit handicapped,&quot; said Wallin.Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight, has this warning for users: &quot;We think 2008 will be the year of crap touch phones.&quot;
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(InfoWorld) - When Apple launches the iPhone on Friday, it is set to get a jump on its competitors and spark a flurry of new phone designs, regardless of how well the device actually sells. By introducing a combined smartphone, mobile e-mail platform, and MP3 music player with a touchscreen interface, Apple has sent other hardware vendors running back to their drawing boards. And the company has enjoyed positive press coverage since CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January, analysts said. Apple is feeding the fire with strong advertising in its retail stores. On Monday, staffers at the Apple store in the Cambridgeside Galleria mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wore black T-shirts with the logo "the wait is almost over," printed above an image of a calendar page for Friday, June 29. iPhone anticipation has already created a "halo effect" of increased sales for Apple's notebook and desktop PCs, an impact that is likely to increase after the launch, according to a report from ChangeWave Research. Apple posted a strong profit for the last period despite struggling with a U.S. federal investigation into executives backdating their stock options. In April,Â Apple beat Wall Street expectations by posting a profit of $770 million for the second quarter, an 88 percent rise from that period last year. Because the company has already garnered media attention and a sales boost from iPhone demand, Apple will suffer little damage even if the device is a flop in retail sales, one analyst said. "No way Apple will seriously impact Nokia or Motorola or Samsung, who combined sell over a billion phones a year. But if Apple manages to sell several million, then that is probably pretty good for their overall business," said analyst Jack Gold, founder of the research firm J. Gold Associates. "I think the potential gold mine is in the services, not the phone hardware." The iPhone will bring new subscribers to Apple's iTunes online music store, and Apple could make more money if it decides to launch future wireless mobile products like navigation, location-based services, VoIP telephony, and video streaming, Gold said. In the meantime, Apple has already given a headache to competitors scurrying to catch up, such as Motorola, Samsung, and LG Electronics. Even vendors with comparable products -- like Nokia's N Series and High Tech Computer's HTC Touch phones -- lack Apple's cachet and will have trouble competing on store shelves, he said. In fact, some experts are warning that iPhone sales could fall short of Apple's high expectations. Their criticism includes potential user confusion about Apple's "virtual keyboard," a battery that may fade too fast and is not user-replaceable, andÂ resistance by some corporate IT departmentsÂ to the added expense and security risk of supporting mobile e-mail networks in addition to the servers they use to support Research in Motion's BlackBerry device. Those drawbacks could limit the iPhone's success in the business market, said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research. Still, the iPhone will be popular with those who tend to use smartphones more by scrolling through menus than typing long messages and who have made Apple's iPod music player a huge hit despite similar concerns about its battery, Wu said. Likewise, consumers will likely shrug off corporate security concerns and use mobile e-mail systems from GoogleÂ and Yahoo. In the long run, Apple will use the iPhone to beat its competitors in creating an end-to-end channel for digital media, spanning from Mac PCs to the mobile iPod music player, iTunes online store, and Apple TV set-top box for sharing Internet and television video content. The only thing Apple could do to spread that net even wider would be to offer iPhone models at less than the current $499 for a 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB, Wu said.
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Nokia Corp., the world's largest mobile phone maker, plans to bring 40 new handsets to the market next year as it seeks to expand its already dominant market share amid increased competition from rivals Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Ericsson.
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Apple's iPhone is locked to AT&T's telecom service, but now that the device is finally available for sale, a number of hackers are working to unlock it. The prognosis is promising.
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Phone fury (and carrier cringes) Letters After my piece lamenting how Nokia's high end phones had lost their ease of use and reliability, we got a letter from reader Brendon McLean. "It's not just Nokia!", wrote Brendon - "but an industry-wide problem". And he encapsulated his complaints very succinctly. So we invited him to expand a little, which he did here yesterday.â¦
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Nokia Corp. , the world's dominant cellphone maker, is positioning itself to compete against the likes of MySpace, iTunes, and Google, and is anchoring a key part of its new business in the Back Bay.