Anecdotally, the Proporta chargers have been hugely popular amongst my Phones Show viewership and 'All About' readers generally - and there's a new monster version now available, clocking in at a stunning 7000mAh. The Turbocharger 7000 has two USB output ports as usual, along with a facelifted exterior, weighs only 175g, and comes with charging heads for all major phone and gadget ports and a carrying case. Watch this space for a full review.
Everyone's favourite flight simulator for Windows Phone, Infinite Flight, just got itself a big update, v2.1 (changelog below), adding in two major new planes as well as a number of enhancements and fixes. You can grab the update yourself by going into 'Marketplace' on your Windows Phone and looking for 'Updates' at the bottom of the home screen.
Revealed in one of the launch videos for the Nokia Lumia 800 were screens of the generic Nokia Maps for Windows Phone, the software that will be made available to all Windows Phone licensees as part of the agreement between Nokia and Microsoft. We've shown the relevant images below, along with the full video - suffice it to say that Nokia Maps is effectively Bing Maps on steroids, but keeping away from the real time sat-nav features of Nokia Drive.
Figures are now in from IDC for the world phone market in Quarter 3, 2011, showing the market flattening in the USA and Western Europe as saturation sets in. However, the proportion of smartphones in the overall mix continues to rise. Nokia is still king in terms of sheer numbers, selling over a hundred million phones in the quarter, although Samsung is catching up relatively quickly. IDC's stats table is quoted below, though we don't yet have a breakdown of smartphone-only sales.
Nokia announced a new hardware partnership with Monster on the stage of Nokia World today. Known for high-performance audio (in the same way that Carl Zeiss are known for high performance lenses), the relationship promises to be both long-term and exclusive with Nokia. The first collaborative product is the Purity range of HD stereo headsets.
Nokia World 2011 starts today and the team is on the ground to bring you live coverage from Nokia's premier event. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest images and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas or @aa_wp accounts on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and images.
Tomorrow sees the start of Nokia World 2011, where the Finnish mobile giant comes out to the ball firmly arm in arm with Microsoft's Windows Phone. By now, we all know the story of why Nokia felt it had to do this, whether you agree or not. Just how much is riding on Elop's Redmond bet?
Nokia has released its Q3 2011 results, reporting an operating loss of -€71 million, with net sales of €8.980 billion (down 13% YoY). Nokia's Devices and Services division's profits were €132 million. Margins in devices and services were 2.4% (down from 11.3 % in Q3 2010 and up from -4.2% in Q2 2011). Total smartphone device sales were 16.8 million, compared with 27.2 million units in Q3 2010 (down 34% YoY) and 16.7 million units in Q2 2011 (up 1%, QoQ). The results were ahead of expectations and suggest the company has started on the road to recovery.
Todd Brix has announced, through the Windows Blog, a tightening of the submission process on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Starting last week, developers will no longer be able to publish 20 apps in a single day to the Marketplace. The limit is now 10. This is to maintain a good spread of unique applications into the Marketplace and featuring in the new and updated lists.
We presume that Nokia's debut of their Windows Phone device will happen in October, but their Windows phone efforts have already been stepped up, as their first application appears in the store. It's called "Top Apps" and while visible in the Zune Marketplace on your desktop, it's not yet available on Windows Phone handsets (reports WP Central). The assumption has to be that these are Mango based applications, and are going to be available only to Nokia's Windows Phone devices, at least in the first instance.