Reporting second-quarter earnings today, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that the worst may be over. He had better hope so, because the world’s largest handset maker is clearly having a tough time of it. Nokia posted a gruesome 66 percent drop in profit in what the company generously described as a “tough” second quarter.
Nokia will not debut a new Android-based handset at its annual Nokia World conference in early September because the company has no new Android-based handset to debut. That’s the word from Nokia, which vehemently denied reports this morning that it is just months away from launching its first mobile phone based on Google’s mobile OS.
A noteworthy metric in the latest mobile browser share report from StatCounter: RIM’s BlackBerry has been making some meaningful gains in the world-wide mobile browser market. According to the research house, which tracks page views by browser on mobile devices and the desktop, RIM has boosted its share of the market quite a bit since the beginning of this year.
“We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” Intel CFO Stacy Smith told Bloomberg earlier this year. “We’re lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.” Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia.
The Ovi Store, Nokia’s much anticipated response to the wildly popular Apple App Store, debuted this morning–ignominiously by most accounts. Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection of apps, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Not the sort of grand opening you hope for when your smartphone market share has been tumbling, largely thanks to the growth of the iPhone and BlackBerry and their respective app stores.
Global mobile handset sales fell at a record pace in the first quarter of 2009. And they’re likely to do so once again in the second. With the exception of smart phones, which are apparently doing quite well despite the recession.
Apple and Research in Motion may disagree on many things, but they’re of the same mind when it comes to the the netbook phenomenon: It will be short-lived. Asked about Apple’s interest in the category during a late-April earnings call, COO Tim Cook said the company has none. Turns out, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie feels pretty much the same way.
Verizon Wireless is reportedly working with Microsoft to develop a new smart-phone. Plus, layoffs at Nokia and Microsoft’s “societal network.”
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s ambitions in that area, and Apple’s success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices.
Nokia is following up the voluntary redundancies it announced last month with a few involuntary ones. Its hand forced by the continued deterioration of the mobile phone market, the company said this morning that it will sack 1,700 employees.
Palm hasn’t yet set its price or launch date, but it already has a winner on its hands in the Pre. That’s the word from RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, who gave the device one hell of a write-up this morning. Seems Abramsky, who had previously been neutral on Palm, now believes the company has a chance at “smartphone leadership.”
Sack yourself now or risk being sacked by us later. That’s the choice Nokia presented to its employees today, announcing plans to offer severance packages to the first 1,000 workers who resign their posts. The resignation-for-severance deal is aimed at reducing personnel-related costs and, in the words of Hallstein Moerk, Nokia’s head of human resources, “lessening the need for involuntary redundancies.”
“iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” Turns out Apple CEO Steve Jobs was off by about two years when he made that statement in January of 2007. Looking over the announcements coming out of GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, it’s clear that many owe a debt of thanks to Apple, whose presence is felt at the event even though it can’t be bothered to attend.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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