Day: February 1, 2010

“2009 was a really good year for almost all of Samsung’s divisions. And as the just published financial report shows Q4 was just the icing of the cake. Quarter by quarter the number of shipped Samsung mobile phones grew and grew despite the world financial crisis. The summary shows that Samsung managed to ship nearly 227 million units, which is good 16% more than the 196 phones sold in 2008. Of those 68.8 million were shipped in Q4 alone. That is a 31% increase over the last quarter of 2008 and approximately 14% more than the phones sold in 2009’s Q3. Those have generated operating profit of approximately 850 million US dollars which is a 4% decrease Quarter-on-Quarter (due to the decreased average selling price which dropped in the last quarter by 4% to 115 US dollars). When it comes to the whole year though, the situation is even better: the operating profit is around 3.56 billion US dollars while in 2008 it was only 2.57 billion US dollars. Samsung estimates their market share to be about 23%, which is better than both the 18% in Q4 2008 and the 21% in Q3 2009. Those numbers are the result of company’s strategy to launch a wide range of touchscreen equipped mobile phones as well as numerous smartphones. The company also managed to increase the number of localized models it offers and joint-promotions with the carriers.” via gsmarena.com

“Talk about procrastination. My final Nokia review for the Smartphone Round Robin should have been up last Friday, but here it is a week late. Everytime I sat down to start writing it, I always managed to find a distraction compelling enough to pull me away. This one is definitely tough for me to write. For every other platform I’ve looked at over the past 6+ weeks that the Round Robin has been on, it has never been difficult for me to find something to say; in fact, I have had the problem of always having too much to say (apologies for some of those lonnnng articles). But writing is easy when you have strong opinions and I definitely had my viewpoints on the Droid, iPhone, Palm’s WebOS and even Windows Phones – both for specific devices looked at and the platforms and where they fit into the Smartphone Hierarchy of Needs and the greater smartphone market.” Read more here:

“Well, it missed the original rumoured deadline (last Thursday), but it’s here now – v21.0.045 firmware for the Nokia N97 (classic), available via NSU as a 143MB download, featuring ‘better call reliability and smoother touchscreen scrolling’. Comments welcome if you can add to the changelog/overview below. In view of the limited free space on disk C:, see below for my installation recommendations. (The previous firmware version was v20, the first to bring in Symbian^2-like full kinetic scrolling in all screens.)
The software contains many fixes and improvements on the earlier releases including:

• More free RAM after booting
• Improved call reliability
  
• Smooth touchscreen scrolling
  
• Browser improvements (among other changes, the toolbar stays out of the way more)
  
• Music player improvements
  
• Cleaner default (black) theme
  
• Improved image and video stability

• After a hard reset, there’s now 53MB free on disk C:
  
• After removing the Facebook and AccuWeather homescreen widgets, the N97 now boots up with around 59MB of RAM free
  
• Disappointingly, Ovi Maps 3.3 (free) isn’t in the firmware, though of course, it’s an easy add-on from ‘Software update’ on the device, from maps.nokia.com or from the Ovi Store.” via allaboutsymbian.com