Thanks to a reminder from WebProNews, it's instructive to look again at the smartphone world via StatCounter, a pro service embedded on many web sites which tracks the browser and OS used to access them. And, reflecting the still enormous installed base of Symbian-powered smartphones across the world, Symbian still (for web access, at least) still dominates the world, at 31%.
The counter-intuitive nature of the chart, i.e. that Symbian still dominates despite Android and iOS activations reportedly running very high through 2011, is explained by the difference between sales marketshare and installed base 'share'. Earlier this year, actual sales of Android-powered smartphones per quarter overtook Symbian. But the 300 million or so active Symbian users across the world - regardless of whether they're using a three year old Nokia 5800 or even an older N95 - is a statistic that can't be ignored for actual use. You may remember that I've talked before about not underestimating the inertia behind Symbian's installed base - the numbers boggle the mind.
Added to the huge installed base of Symbian smartphones is the factor of the rise and rise of affordable data, even on pay as you go SIM cards, across the world. In other words, just about everyone is now getting online. In StatCounter's eyes, web access is web access." via allaboutsymbian.com

"It's the end of an era as Adobe has confirmed that it will no longer be developing its Flash Player for mobile devices. Instead Adobe will be focusing on HTML5 and Adobe-AIR native apps for the major mobile platforms. Adobe's VP Danny Winokur explained the decision:
Our future work with Flash onmobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash develoeprs to package native apps with Adobe-AIR for all major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations. " via mobile-review.com

French business Wysips is focusing on a whole new system which could cause mobile phone touch screens to accomplish double duty as pv power panels to recharge cell phones.

The thought is fairly interesting [1] since it consists of laying an extremely thin transparent pv film layer together with the cellphone screen. The film may get energy not only from the sun, but any nearby source of light.

Probable recharge times will be about six hours from sunlight and some moments longer from leaching power from in house lights. Wysips is at work for the 2nd new release of the technology, which seems to offer half an hour of talk-time after just 1 hour under the sun. (more inside)

"Every day seems to bring along yet another statistic that shows Android briskly marching past the competition and today is no different. In the graph below you can see Android overtaking BlackBerry OS in web traffic requests for the first time. The data comes from StatCounter, which monitors some 3 million pages and 15 billion page hits so the data sample is pretty wide. Symbian, despite being the sick man of the mobile platforms, still manages to retain the top position with around a 30% share of traffic. BlackBerry OS has been steadily declining since November of last year and currently stands at 14.52% whilst Android, which has been steadily climbing since June of last year now stands at 15.16%. It's arguably a testament to BlackBerry users' loyalty that the difference between them isn't more (at the moment anyway), but looking at the trends here that probably won't be the case for much longer. A quick note on Apple's performance here; iOS is still in second place and comfortably so, but there has been a slight decline over the past few months. That might reverse itself once the Verizon iPhone has had time to kick in though." via mobile-review.com

"Despite the shift towards Windows Phone 7, Nokia will still ship a MeeGo device this year. It's going to be the successor to the Nokia N900 and will be called the N950. We don't have a photo of the device yet, but Nokia gave reassurances that they are committed to MeeGo, Symbian, Qt and S40 too. At Nokia's Developer Day, Nokia's CTO Rich Green gave an extensive talk about the future of current Nokia platforms, MeeGo included. He said that they're working hard on the N950 and have come up with some "very elegant" hardware and interesting UI. That's all we have on the Nokia N950 - the Nokia N9 (which was rumored as the coming MeeGo device) might have been canceled and Nokia showed absolutely no new devices at the MWC. Green assured the attending developers that the Nokia N950 is well-stocked as a developer platform and says "we'll see how that goes". It sounds like the N950 is aimed more towards devs than the mass market user (not surprising since MeeGo was re-targeted towards long-term market exploration). Nokia's strategy still relies on Qt development for both Symbian and MeeGo and pushing forward with Java on Series 40, so work on those platforms continues. S40 will be getting a new Ovi Browser that aims to bring mobile Internet connectivity to hundreds of millions of people" via gsmarena.com

Our first Firefox 4 beta for mobile is now available to download and test. It’s built on the same technology platform as Firefox for the desktop and optimized for browsing on a mobile phone. Firefox beta for mobile comes with many of your favorite Firefox desktop features like Firefox Sync, Add-ons and the Awesome Bar.A major focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness. Two of the big architecture changes are Electrolysis and Layers. Our alpha contained Electrolysis which allowed the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content, resulting in a much more responsive browser. This beta brings the Layers pieces which improve overall performance and in graphics areas such as scrolling, zooming and animations. For more technical details, see Mozilla mobile engineer Matt Brubeck’s blog.Firefox 4 Beta includes Firefox Sync to create a seamless Web browsing experience between desktop and mobile. With Firefox Sync, you can take your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, passwords and form-fill data with you anywhere so you never have to retype passwords or long URLs again. Your Firefox data is completely encrypted end-to-end between your computers so that only you have access to it. (For those using Firefox Sync, be sure you’re up to date.)This release delivers a rich set of features, including pinch-to-zoom, which is now supported on multitouch-capable devices, and the Awesome Screen, which instantly gives you access to your recent history, bookmarks and tabs just by tapping in the Awesome Bar. See the release notes for a full list of features included in this release.Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is significant step forward in sharing a personalized, seamless and encrypted Web experience across devices. Developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach millions of devices.

"With the current smartphone battle focus on Android and iPhone OS, will Nokia able to make a boost with its new MeeGo? A prototype called Nokia N9 has been leaked on the wild today. It comes in full metallic body, slide out QWERTY keyboard and a full touch screen. According to the post on tieba.baidu, Nokia is planning to announce / release the phone by week 48 this year. As the leaked prototype is not completely same as the latest drawing, there should be some changes on the final production model." More photos here:

"With the current smartphone battle focus on Android and iPhone OS, will Nokia able to make a boost with its new MeeGo? A prototype called Nokia N9 has been leaked on the wild today. It comes in full metallic body, slide out QWERTY keyboard and a full touch screen. According to the post on tieba.baidu, Nokia is planning to announce / release the phone by week 48 this year. As the leaked prototype is not completely same as the latest drawing, there should be some changes on the final production model." More photos here:

"With the current smartphone battle focus on Android and iPhone OS, will Nokia able to make a boost with its new MeeGo? A prototype called Nokia N9 has been leaked on the wild today. It comes in full metallic body, slide out QWERTY keyboard and a full touch screen. According to the post on tieba.baidu, Nokia is planning to announce / release the phone by week 48 this year. As the leaked prototype is not completely same as the latest drawing, there should be some changes on the final production model." More photos here: