Wireless Archive

In case you were still doubting whether or not Apple's lawsuits against Samsung were a case of 'if you can't compete, litigate', Samsung's financial results should seal the deal. The company shipped round and about 50 million smartphones, twice as many smartphones as Apple shipped. So, not only is Android doing better on smartphones than iOS, there's now also a single manufacturer outselling Apple. Oh, the next avenue for de-emphasizing this achievement has already reared its head: Samsung has a wider portfolio, and as such, the comparison isn't fair. Nonsense, of course - Volkswagen sells lots more models than, say, Mazda, but that doesn't mean you can't compare them. Maybe, just maybe, having a wide portfolio of devices to meet the various different needs of the market is simply a very good strategy. It'll be interesting to see just how much Apple can take back with the next iPhone, especially since the full potential of the Galaxy SIII hasn't been realised yet and will be accounted for in Samsung's next quarter as well. Fun, such a fight between titans. Just too bad one of the two titans plays dirty by opting for the courtroom.

"Nokia is set to market their first Windows Phone 8 hardware differently, according to a report by the Financial Times. The manufacturer will be entering into partnerships with a handful of EU carriers to exclusively launch their next generation Windows Phone. The newspaper states the company has already entered into talks with a number of operators including France Telecom." Not to be a spoilsport or anything, but doesn't carrier exclusivity kind of rely on people actually, you know, desperately wanting a certain device? It's like Nokia's executives live in this fairytale land where people are actually buying Lumias and plan their actions accordingly. It's uncanny.

Nokia just posted its quarterly results - including shipped devices - and it's not looking good. Massive losses, sales dropping, and no growth in Lumia sales in the US. The company is losing money hand-over-fist, and with Windows Phone 8 still months away, the company warns the next quarter will be just as bad.

"We're excited to announce that Enyo 2 is officially moving out of beta! Today's release marks a major milestone as we declare Enyo 2 production-ready, from both a functionality and quality point of view. That first Enyo 2 beta was pretty minimal, but we were excited to share it with the world, start developing in the open, and begin building a new community of Enyo developers. Now, less than 6 months later, Enyo 2 boasts an an amazing community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform UI widgets, and a powerful layout library for building apps that work across all form factors from phones to desktops."

"If we then use comScore's figure for total smartphone users (110 million) then the data would suggest that there are 330k Lumias in use in the US. This would have been accumulated over a sales period of about four months." Ouch. For a phone with such a huge marketing push, this is quite painful.

Stefan Constantinescu interviews the CEO of JollaMobile, the company that will continue the work that Nokia started with Maemo/MeeGo before ditching it for Windows Phone. This answer indicates just how far these guys already are: "In order to make a smartphone these days you need chipset vendor support, ODM support, and some other companies too. We're currently in the negotiations phase, and we're really close to being able to communicate what partners we actually use. This is our present situation."

I've been flashing CyanogenMod 9 nightlies for months now, and the process to do so has become pretty much muscle memory at this point (if cwm ever changes its menu order I'm screwed). One step of this process has always fascinated me simply because I have no idea what exactly it does and why I have to do it: clearing Dalvik cache.

Sorry for the delay in writing a story about this, but here we finally are: Nokia's MeeGo (or Maemo or whatever it's called this hour) is getting its successor. Yes, MeeGo, the short-lived but beloved platform running on the unicorn phone, the Nokia N9, will continue onwards in a slightly different form. Its new home? Jolla - a company formed by former Nokia chief operating officer Marc Dillon, who was the principal engineer for MeeGo/Maemo at Nokia since 2006.

The only MeeGo device to ever be released, the Nokia N9, has been updated to MeeGo/Harmattan 1.3. Among the improvements are improved performance, updated applications, improved NFC support, improved copy/paste, and more. In other news, the team behind MeeGo and Maemo is now leaving Nokia, probably making this the last update for the N9.

Nokia board chairman Risto Siilasmaa went on a Finnish television show, and stated that while he is confident in Windows Phone 8, the company does have a back-up plan if it doesn't work out. Speculation aplenty - what is this backup plan? The answer's pretty easy, if you ask me.

And so, Flash on mobile is now completely dead. "There will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1. Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th."

RIM just announced some pretty disastrous financial results, but in the press release, there's something very telling, and quite worrisome for those of us rooting for the Canadian company: BlackBerry 10 has been delayed until the first quarter of 2013. I don't want to call it at this point, but it ain't looking good.

Only a few more hours until the last of the big three has its big event (Google i/o, after WWDC and Microsoft's Surface and WP8 events). They will most likely announce a Nexus tablet, as well as Android 4.1, Jelly Bean. While many of you are still on Gingerbread with your top-of-the-line phones - let me poke a few eyes out with mikegapinski's Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich port... To the Samsung Wave. Dual-booting Bada 2 and ICS, right here.

"It wasn't quick or easy, but we are extremely proud of this release and what it represents for us as a group. The jump from 2.3.7 to 4.0.4 in many ways was a fresh start for this project, and as much as the code changed, the structure and organization of CM as a whole changed as well. It meant a lot of hard work, and late nights, but also a ton of fun. We are in this for the challenge, and the reward is always the satisfaction received when we release it to the masses as a 'stable' product. This RC1 brings us a step forward toward that payoff." CyanogenMod is an absolutely amazing project, an amazing piece of software. Been running CM9 on my SII for months, virtually without issues. It absolutely baffles me OEMs don't just use this instead of their own Sense or TouchWiz crap. This is so much better it's just not funny anymore.