04/07, 9:55am
SE Idou Smartphone Dated
Hot on the heels of Sony Ericsson's release of a couple of entry-level handsets at CTIA comes news of the company's Idou smartphone ship dates. A Sony Ericsson rep from Germany was cited as the source of the news, according to Swedish site Mobil, and has the touchscreen handset launching in October with a fallback date planned for sometime in November. Sony Ericsson Sweden would only go on record as saying the Idou will ship sometime in the second half of the year.
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03/20, 2:50pm
Sony Ericsson Warns Q1 09
Sony Ericsson concluded its week with a warning on Friday that it will likely record a loss of between $461 million and $529 million for its current financial quarter, which ends at the conclusion of the month. The cellphone designer directly blames the shortfall on "weak consumer demand" and in clearing stock for its existing supply and sales chain. It also expects to ship just 14 million phones with a typical asking price of about $163.
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03/13, 9:10am
Symbian OS Ramps Up
The Symbian Foundation late Thursday outlined a release schedule for its core mobile OS that should impact its future. Each version will take just six months between being feature-complete and being "hardened," or brought to a reliable and finished state. Releases will overlap such that a substantially new version of Symbian will always be available in similar intervals for the public.
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02/19, 2:10pm
Nokia Borrows 636m
Nokia in an unusual move today said it will borrow 500 million Euros ($636 million) from the European Investment Bank to improve its smartphone software. The loan will be stretched out over the course of the next five years and is specifically tailored towards research and development projects due between now and 2011 to render Symbian phones "more competitive." Nokia sees the money as mostly intended for its own, internal work but says the research coming out of the loan will also help the Symbian Foundation and non-Nokia Symbian devices as a result.
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02/15, 2:10pm
Sony Ericsson Idou
Continuing its introductions, Sony Ericsson provided an early glance at the Idou, its second-ever full touchscreen phone. The handset will be one of the firm's first to be based on pure Symbian instead of UIQ and will use a custom touch interface with an emphasis on media playback. Appropriately, it will also have a 3.5-inch, 16:9 ratio display and appears to rely solely on the screen for keyboard input. Sony Ericsson can also claim to be the first with a 12-megapixel camera onboard a phone and will give the device both a xenon flash and a retractable lens cover.
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02/12, 9:55am
HP Joins Symbian Found
Nokia today bolstered the Symbian Foundation with the addition of multiple key new members. HP, MySpace and SanDisk lead the new sign-ons and each have their own different reasons for joining the open-source mobile OS project. HP hopes to improve its support for managing Symbian; MySpace hopes to further refine its MySpace app for the phone throuhg the open code; SanDisk hopes to improve the use of storage for multimedia apps. None of the three has given clues as to how soon products will appear that take advantage of Foundation membership.
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11/07, 2:10pm
UIQ employees on dismissal
Cell phone makers Motorola's and Sony Ericsson's recent decision to drop the UIQ-developed platform from its future products has left the software-development company in an uncertain position. On Thursday, UIQ Technology's 270 employees were put on notice of dismissal, according to a Friday report. Sony Ericsson will continue to fund the company on a monthly basis to allow it to consider its future options during this transitional period. It is not known how long Sony Ericsson's funding will remain in place, and Motorola, UIQ's other shareholder, is not involved in the plan.
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10/21, 4:30pm
Symbian Foundation grows
The list of supporters for the Symbian Foundation is set to grow yet again, with credit card company Visa, British chip designer ARM, Chinese technology group Huawei and nine other, unnamed companies planning on joining the group to get access to its software, according to a Tuesday Reuters report. The Symbian Foundation, a not-for-profit group started by cellphone maker Nokia to promote the Symbian operating system for mobile devices, is growing and includes all the major mobile phone makers, giving it an edge over rival Google and its upcoming Android operating system.
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09/09, 4:05pm
Symbian gets 9 new members
The Symbian Foundation announced on Tuesday that Sharp Electronics, Opera Software, KTF wireless provider and six other companies have on Tuesday joined the Foundation to help bring open source software and applications to mobile devices more quickly and efficiently. As members of the Symbian Foundation, companies will not have to pay for software developed by its members.
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