Alcatel OT-209

The economy faces glaring uncertainties going into the new year and shoppers are being exceptionally careful on where they spend their money. This has lead to the return of the sub £20 mobile phones.

As smart phoneS took off around 4 years ago, so did the average price of mobile phones. However simpler models have now made a comeback. Leading the pack are Samsung, LG and Alcatel.

The Alcatel OT-209 is one such example. It is a simple phone that does its job, plus it has FM radio for music on the go. With bigger buttons, Alcatel seems to have stuck to the idea of making a simple phone, that is easy to use.

Mobile phones for under £20

Come 4^th November, Apple users across the globe will get to download a web browser which can play Flash content from the Apple App store. The browser from Skyfire is surely gonna fire up the raging battle in the Smartphone / Tablet space.

The Skyfire browser will be the first Flash app on Apple’s App store. Skyfire has made this possible by turning Flash into HTML5 web standard content and then iPhone users will stream the same from Skyfire’s servers.

Though Apple denied to support Flash-based content on its flagship iOS platform and Jobs made all kinds of statements in the same regard, Apple had to give a leeway to allow Flash compatible apps at the end.

Jobs ran the extra mile too when he made a scathing attack on Flash and advised the Wall Street Journal to drop the software. Adobe retorted that Flash is for a multi-platform world, but Microsoft dumping Flash on its flagship Windows Phone 7 platform is another thing to note.

In a survey conducted by a research firm called Open First, among 104 Nokia Ovi store developers, who also post their apps on non Nokia platforms, reveal that, 84 percent of responders feel that Apple’s store is better than Nokia Ovi and 40 percent feel that android based stores are better than, Nokia’s Symbian based stores.

Some of the reasons for this level of dissatisfaction, which publishers account to are lack of required levels of promotion by Nokia and complexity in finding apps over store. While 63 percent of responders still vote their loyalty to Nokia Ovi store, 69 percent feel the revenues are low and reasons for which, they attribute to above mentioned reasons.  Overall findings reveal that still 50 percent of responders are pretty much satisfied with Ovi Stores.

Other major reason surfaced is slower or inconsistent quality approval process, for which responders anticipate Nokia to take improvement measures. Nokia in that direction is offering end user support for development community, which needs to be communicated better for Nokia app development group to take maximum benefit.

Symbian is one of the oldest open source Smartphone Operating Systems, almost it is a decade old in market. Across the world  more than 300 million handsets must have been manufactured on this OS.

With the advent of latest Operating Systems like Android, Symbian started losing its charm.

But still it is out shipping number of handsets when compared to its new competitors, it definitely started losing its charm.

Symbian lacks advanced features of current Operating Systems and its touch sensitiveness is also treated to be not so impressive. Like an old toy on the shelf, most of its ineffective capabilities are being surfaced in recent times.  It is very slow and is equipped with not friendly user interface to develop apps over it.

All major handset manufacturers like Samsung and Sony Ericsson has already declared their decision not to manufacture any handset based on this old horse. This leaves behind, Nokia the only major handset manufacturer along with small players like ZTE and Sharp, who are not able to make any mark in Smartphones market.

Some of the market analyst says that though definitely there is a drastic reduction in its adoption worldwide, it is very far from end of Symbian.

Nokia as another step in its continued efforts in augmenting its support for its users and developers, company announced that it is betting high on QT platform as a platform to seamlessly integrate its development environments across device platforms. Which means it is trying to push QT as sole application development platform to bring in compatibility platform across applications.

This means for end users more number of applications compatible over their Nokia Smartphones not bothering much about other supporting software related components. For developers it means wider customer base.

Now this will ensure developers that their applications developed on QT applications can be deployed on Nokia handsets based on Symbian and Meego platforms. Nokia is also planning to extend its support to QT platform by developing its own applications and a user interface based on QT platform.  This entire blueprint is going to be on HTML5 standard.

Now this will ensure the users purchasing Nokia mobile phones that their handsets will be compatible to adapt any kind of upgrades in software done in the later part of time. This will increase confidence of customers in Nokia and ensuring developers of applications for Nokia a wider customer base.

Tesco, the supermarket chain started to accept pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy Tab to match the £529 price of the Apple iPad which the CarphoneWarehouse announced earlier in the week.

The retail major seems to have had intentions of pricing the tablet PC at £599 and might have lowered the price to £529 so that it could match competition in the segment. The reason behind this is that when we hover on the price banner on Tesco’s website, the alt text reads “Pre-order Samsung Galaxy Tab for £599”.

Samsung Galaxy Tab is feared to have overpriced itself from the market leader, Apple iPad as its tablet with 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G at £529 is priced £100 more than the Wi-Fi only tablet from Apple with same storage. Tesco is accepting pre-orders for the SIM-Free Samsung Galaxy Tab at the moment while there is no communication about any future subsidised deals on contract.

The 7-inch Android 2.2 powered Tablet with a 1 GHz processor, touted as Samsung’s reply to Apple iPad weighs 380g and thus turns out to be easy on the pocket. Thanks to the dual cameras that it sports, the Galaxy Tab can handle video calls and it can be helpful for a lot of business use with it browser an email credentials.

HTC is teaming up with TomTom so that it could offer maps and directions to all its handset users in a more accurate and faster way. HTC is gearing up to get the maps and directions service in-built on its handsets.

Christened as HTC Locations, the Taiwanese mobile major’s Navigation and Maps service will be pre-loaded with rich maps from TomTom. HTC Desire and HTC Desire Z are the first two Smartphones being targeted for the new service in Asian and European markets.

TomTom has a niche in providing rich and accurate maps and with the maps pre-loaded on handsets, users will be able to have instant access to the maps. HTC Smartphone users will get to experience TomTom’s navigation in their pockets.

Despite the fact that the TomTom maps and locations will be bundled for free with the mobile phones, people who need more specific directions will have to buy the maps and download the same through HTC Sync or HTC Locations. TomTom Maps and HTC Locations will have to compete with the free Google Maps service which has made a mark on many Android handsets and other phones.

TomTom has not been doing so well after the onset of mobile phone based maps and directions services as GPS market became very competitive. They want to make a leeway out of the same and HTC Locations might be one of the answers.

Nokia has turned lights on to Ovi Calendar service and the result id the Ovi Calendar 2.0 beta which is being tried its Beta Labs. Let’s have a closer look at Ovi Calendar 2.0 beta to see what’s new and interesting.

The Ovi Calendar service is a good one to keep track of events and it can help you sync the same between your PC and phone. An array of changes is bundled with Ovi Calendar 2.0, the latest version being tested by Nokia Beta Labs.

Ovi Calendar 2.0 lets you share events and invite people from your address book straight away. Event reminders can be set using the service apart from accepting requests from others who use Ovi. You can also check the attendance status, thanks to an event dashboard.

You can subscribe to any of your favourite public calendars like sports or business holidays and get everything in a common location using Ovi Calendar 2.0. More about the service can be known in a couple of weeks as reviews and comments pour in.

HTC Desire customers on 3 have finally made it to Android 2.2 (Froyo) with updates rolled out this week. Other networks viz., Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, and Orange have already upgraded their HTC Desire customers to Froyo.

With the Froyo update, the customers can experience improved performance, a faster browser along with better Android Market that includes a handy bug reporting feature. Adobe Flash player 10.1 is one of the important things in the Froyo which enables faster web browsing.

As reported by ZDNet UK, not many HTC Desire users on 3 Mobile were happy before the upgrade was rolled out as they were kept in the dark by the service provider about the expected dates in addition to the delay in upgrade.

HTC Desire has finally got an upgrade to Android 2.2 on all the networks. Google provided the update by July end and it is not a rosy picture that the service providers had to put in 2 months to test and upgrade the users. Users expect that the lessons learnt for Froyo will help the operators provide glitch-free Android upgrades in the future.

Samsung Galaxy S, the most popular Android-based handset from the Korean Electronics Conglomerate, Samsung is also geared up to taste the Froyo flavour of Google’s Android OS soon. The company plans to release the update on all the networks simultaneously and we need to keep our fingers crossed to see if the process is any better compared to HTC Desire.

Come next week, some of the Motorola Milestone users in UK will have a reason to celebrate as Motorola starts to roll out Android 2.2 (Froyo). Motorola made this announcement from its Facebook page that some of the European customers would get the updates next week.

Despite the fact that Froyo has been around for months, Motorola wants to run the upgrade through a trial by launching it on select users’ handsets before the proper update gets rolled out by 2010 end to all. This trial is intended to assess any pending work for optimisation of the upgrade before approval.

The user community left indifferent comments on the Facebook page and they seem to be unhappy as some of them expected the upgrade to reach them months ago. However, the fact is that there are very few handsets with Froyo in the market like the Google N1 and the HTC Desire.

Back in August, Motorola had to resort to send out letters to websites which offered Froyo download for its handsets to stay away from the activity. We can only keep our fingers crossed and wait for things to go positive.