Apple became the world’s most profitable handset vendor in the third quarter of this year, reports Strategy Analytics. “We estimate Apple’s operating profit for its iPhone handset division stood at $1.6 billion in the third quarter of 2009,” wrote analyst Alex Spektor. That means Apple overtook Nokia, whose operating profit came in at just $1.1 billion. As Spektor noted, “With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, the PC vendor has successfully broken into the mobile phone market in just two years.” Continue »

Nokia is hoping to recapture some of its lost glory in the smartphone space with the N900, the flagship device that began shipping today. The long-awaited handset runs Nokia’s new Maemo 5 operating system and boasts some pretty impressive features, including 32GB on onboard memory, multitasking functionality, and a 5-megapixel camera with video capability. Continue »

A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the complexity of making that happen. 4G networks are all IP-based, while voice calls are still routed over circuit-switched networks, which could cause communication problems. Figuring out how to deliver circuit-switched calls on a packet network was going to result in compromises and costs I detailed back in April. Continue »

If you’re as interested in the inner workings of the mobile phone business as I am, then there’s a good chance that you are familiar with Christian Lindholm, partner and director at Fjord, a convergence design agency — or if you are a mobile phone user who has bought a Nokia device over the past decade or so, then you at least have been exposed to his work. He invented the Nokia Navi-key user interface, and he’s viewed as the father of the Series 60 user interface.

Let’s just say Lindholm knows mobile user interfaces really well. In this video interview, he chats with me about the iPhone, Android, and the current problems Nokia faces. He discusses the Maemo platform, Nokia tablets, and how difficult it is to build a mobile operating system. Lindholm talks about why a typical mobile OS has a shelf life of nearly 10 years, and from that perspective, both Android and the iPhone have a good future. If you have time, watch this video interview with him. Continue »

The worldwide handset market appears to be coming out of its funk, but that’s not entirely good news if you’re a phone maker. The top five worldwide manufacturers saw a combined 7 percent year-over-year decrease in handset volumes during the third quarter, according to a report from Deutsche Bank this morning, with 228 million handsets shipped. But the shrinkage was a vast improvement over the previous three quarters, each of which saw double-digit percentage declines from 2008 volumes. The figures indicate “a sign of renewed growth for next year,” Deutsche Bank analysts said, but that maturation could lead to brutal price wars and thinning margins for manufacturers. Continue »

Nokia is now zero for three when it comes to mobile gaming; the company said it will shut down down its N-Gage service next year and fold it into its Ovi brand of mobile data offerings. The doomed service rose from the ashes of the game-centric phone of the same name that proved an epic failure after its 2003 launch.

The emergence of the iPhone has proven that a real market exists for mobile games, but Nokia for years has failed to grow its gaming business beyond a small crowd of users on high-end phones. There may yet be a market for a phone built specifically for gamers (as opposed to a mass-market handset with decent gaming features like the iPhone),which is why Sony Ericsson should try its hand with a PSP phone.

But the N-Gage service seemed unnecessary and confusing given the presence of Ovi, an umbrella brand that includes an app store for Nokia users. If Ovi truly gains mass market traction among smartphone users in Western markets, the existence of a separately branded service exclusively for gamers doesn’t make sense anyway.