Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri announced the Finnish company's intention to return to the sector it once dominated during a press conference at MWC 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, today, according to CNET.

"There's no timeline, there's no rush," said Suri at the event. "It could happen in 2016, it could happen later."

Nokia, a 150-year-old company, started life in the forestry and power industries before becoming a hit mobile manufacturer during the growth years of the feature phone era in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Mobile phones such as the 3210 and 3310 were ubiquitous consumer devices during their heyday, but the arrival of Apple's first iPhone in 2007 changed Nokia's fortunes and the mobile industry completely.

Failing to keep pace with Apple, Samsung and other rivals, Nokia partnered with Microsoft, ditching its Symbian OS in favour of Windows Phone in 2011. Three years later, Microsoft bought Nokia's mobile division in a doomed bid to belatedly enter the smartphone market.

The deal between the two companies meant Nokia was barred from making smartphones until the second half of 2016, according to VentureBeat.

Suri hinted that it might return to the smartphone market last summer, saying the company won't produce the phones itself, but license the Nokia brand to a manufacturer.

Today, the CEO told the audience at MWC that Nokia is holding on for the right partner instead of leaping back into the market with a "premium" offering.

But he suggested that Nokia would like to retain a level of creative control.

"We want to be in a position to design the devices in question with appropriate control measures in case they don't meet expectations," he said.

Suri added that he believes Nokia can still make an impact on the modern mobile market, saying: "The recognition of the brand is still very high in all the major markets. We think it's a good business model."

Since being locked out of making devices, Nokia has sold off its mapping business, HERE maps, to German carmakers and has been exploring 5G networks in its home country. It has also announced plans for new datacentres in the UK.

Finnish TV Station MTV made the claim. It said that about six years ago, criminals who had access to the source code behind the Symbian mobile operating system blackmailed the phone company.

The crooks reportedly threatened the firm that they would leak this if they weren't given a large sum of money, thought to run into several million Euro.

Finnish police confirmed that they were investigating the matter and that the case is still open.

"We are investigating felony blackmail, with Nokia the injured party," Detective Chief Inspector Tero Haapala told Reuters. The police declined to give any further details.

MTV claimed that the criminals hacked into Nokia's systems and stole part of the source code of its Symbian OS, the platform that used to use almost all of Nokia's range of phones.

The hackers then demanded money in return of the source code snippet and threatened to release the code if Nokia did not comply. The TV station (no relation to music channel MTV) said the blackmailers had acquired the encryption key for a core part of Symbian. Had this key been made public, any criminal could have created malware using the key that would make it virtually indistinguishable from legitimate software.

It is alleged that Nokia decided to pay the money and then contacted the police.

At the time of the incident, Nokia had around 50 per cent market share and Symbian was in use by not just Nokia but other phone companies as well. Today, Nokia phones run mostly on the Windows Phone platform. Nokia's market share has declined markedly within the last seven years.

We contacted Nokia for a comment on the story but it hadn't responded at the time of publication.

So claims researcher Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, which has published figures depicting sales in the last quarter ending September 2013. The majority of Windows Phone sales have been driven by Nokia, the firm suggests.

Android remains the preferred OS across Europe - with 71.9 per cent share of the market, compared to Windows Phone's combined 9.8 per cent. But Windows Phone has overtaken iOS in Italy, showing there's still everything to play for.

In the UK, Windows Phone has 11.4 per cent of the market, compared to Android's 58.4 per cent. Apple's iOS stands at 27 per cent, while BlackBerry now just has 3.1 per cent of the market. Windows Phone's popularity is grpwing in Microsoft's home territory, but US figures are still small - with Microsoft claiming 4.6 per cent of the market, compared with Android's 57.3 per cent share.

"With the smartphone market in developed countries so congested, it is emerging economies that now present manufacturers with the best opportunity for growth," said Dominic Sunnebo, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

"Nokia dominated in Latin America for many years, and while its popularity declined with the fortunes of Symbian it now has an opportunity to regain the top-spot. The majority of consumers in Latin America still own a Nokia feature phone and upgrading to an entry level Lumia is a logical next step. Price is the main barrier in developing markets and the budget Lumia 520 opens the door to smartphone ownership for many."

However, the fact that Windows Phone isn't stealing Android's lead may not actually be as bothersome to Microsoft as the figures suggest. Indeed, for each Android success, Microsoft gets a little bit of cash due to patent royalties - this equates to a whopping $2 billion a year, according to Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura, as reported by Business Insider.

According to analyst outfit Gartner, worldwide smartphone sales reached 225 million units, up 46.5 per cent from the second quarter of 2012. Feature phone sales totaled 210 million units and declined 21 per cent year-over-year.

"Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Samsung maintained the top spot in the global smartphone market, as its share of smartphone sales reached 31.7 per cent, up from 29.7 per cent in the second quarter of 2012. Apple was number two but saw its market share fall from 18.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2012 to 14.2 per cent this year.

It was further bad news for Blackberry as Microsoft overtook the ailing Canadian firm for the first time, taking the number three spot with 3.3 per cent market share in the second quarter of 2013.

"While Microsoft has managed to increase share and volume in the quarter, Microsoft should continue to focus on growing interest from app developers to help grow its appeal among users," said Gupta.

Android continued to increase its lead, and now accounts for 79 per cent of the market.

Despite Microsoft's ascendence in the mobile OS market, its smartphone partner Nokia was feeling the effects of the decline in feature phone sales. Nokia's mobile phone sales totaled 61 million units, down from 83 million units a year ago.

One bright spot for the Finnish firm was its sales of Lumia smartphones. These grew 112.7 per cent in the second quarter of 2013 thanks to its expanded portfolio, which now include Lumia 520 and Lumia 720.

"With the recent announcement of the Lumia 1020, Nokia has built a wide portfolio of devices at multiple price points, which should boost Lumia sales in the second half of 2013," said Gupta."However, Nokia is facing tough competition from Android devices, especially from regional and Chinese manufacturers which are more aggressive in terms of price points."

Gupta said that sales were "broadly on track" and saw little need to adjust its forecasts of total worldwide sales to reach 1.82 billion units this year.

"Flagship devices brought to market in time for the holidays, and the continued price reduction of smartphones will drive consumer adoption in the second half of the year," he said.

The company, which along with Motorola was a pioneer of the consumer mobile phone market, launched the Symbian OS some 16 years ago and it quickly became the market leader.

Despite this strong start, the launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 seriously hurt Symbian's market share.

The subsequent arrival of Google's Android mobile OS only worsened the situation, resulting in Nokia's smartphone operating system holding only a single digit share in major markets.

The Nokia 808 PureView, released in 2012, was officially the last smartphone model to feature Symbian.

In the first quarter of 2013, the company sold just 500,000 Symbian units, accounting for less than five per cent of its overall smartphone sales.

The final shipment of Symbian devices will take place this summer, and Nokia will now throw its full weight behind Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.

Talking about the switch to Windows Phone, Nokia said: "It took 22 months to get a Symbian phone out of the door. With Windows Phone, it is less than a year. We spend less time having to tinker with deep-lying code and more time on crafting elements of the experience that make a big difference, such as around photography, maps and apps in general."

Nokia is not expected to formally announce shipments have stopped, as there will still be some stocks of the devices in various parts of the world that will need to be sold.

Its latest Windows Phone-based device, the Lumia 925, will go on sale in the UK before the end of June.

Mobiles are expected to be the main method of payment by 2020, and businesses will increasingly turn to peer-to-peer payment systems, rather than using banks.

Research, carried out by the payments team at KPMG, the professional services firm, paints a futuristic vision of a world where plastic cards, and even cash, will be replaced by more advanced technologies. And businesses will want to manage their own payments, in order to better capture the data that goes with everyday transactions.

More than half or 54 per cent of transactions will be carried out by mobile phones and other smart devices, such as watches equipped with microchips, by 2020. And as many as 12 per cent of purchases could be authorised by biometric identification, such as an iris scan or fingerprints. Some consumers might go further still, and opt for skin implants containing RFID chips instead of cash.

But interest in mobile payments is being driven by more than convenience, according to KPMG's head of payments, Mark Hale. Currently, when a customer pays for goods or services by cash, very little information is captured about the sale. A customer using a payment card, or better still a loyalty card, is a much richer source of data. Technologies such as m-payments can combine loyalty and payment cards in one device, improving both convenience and data capture.

And businesses are looking beyond consumers, to see whether electronic payments could also improve the speed of business-to-business transactions. At present, it can take up tp five days for a transaction to move between two business trading partners, said Hale. But such transactions can, and should, be near-instantaneous.

Businesses are responding by building their own payments systems or "payments factories", which KPMG argues, allows them to bypass the banks. And building such systems ensures that the business captures data that is currently lost in the banking chain. "With that information, an insurer could know that the average house insurance policy on your street costs 450, so if your policy costs 560 they will be able to talk to you about a better product," he said.

But in order to take advantage of a cashless world, companies will have to boost their IT skills in areas such as payments systems, mobile data communications and data analytics. "If they want to unlock the value of the transaction data they need to build up security and trust, as well as their knowledge of payment instruments," said Hale.

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Gartner figures showed Apple's record sales of iPhones made it the world's top smartphone vendor, with a market share of 23.8 per cent.

It also became the third biggest mobile vendor, leapfrogging LG in the quarter.

In 2011, they realised their issues and started the transition to a new Nokia.'

Apple was also the top smartphone seller in the whole of 2011, with a 19 per cent market share.

"Western Europe and North America led most of the smartphone growth for Apple during the fourth quarter of 2011," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"In Western Europe the spike in iPhone sales in the fourth quarter saved the overall smartphone market after two consecutive quarters of slow sales."

The iPhone maker has been battling it out with Samsung, which had been clinging onto the top spot until now.

The two companies have also been waging a patent war with one another in various countries across the world.

Nokia ready for resurgence?

Gartner had some positive words to say about Nokia something that has become a bit of a rarity in recent times. Although its mobile phone sales decreased 8.7 per cent year-over-year, Nokia "proved its ability to execute and deliver on time with its new Lumia 710 and 800 handsets," Cozza said.

"In 2011, they realised their issues and started the transition to a new Nokia.' In Q4 we started to see signs that the changes they have made are paying back," Gartner's Carolina Milanesi told IT Pro.

"They proved they can deliver, which has always been their issue. Nokia had vision but execution was the Achilles heel."

As for who could make their mark on the smartphone market this year, Milanesi pointed to Chinese manufacturers.

"ZTE and Huawei are growing in the mid and low end in Europe and US," she added.

"As operators are starting to pay the price for the success of iPhone and high-end Android phones they will look for cheaper alternatives to use for their mass market."

Its operating loss stood at 954 million (800 million) for the final quarter of 2011, compared to a profit of 884 million, as overall sales slumped 21 per cent.

In the third quarter of 2011, operating profit had slumped 71 million.

Smartphone sales dropped a massive 38 per cent, whilst mobile sales fell 23 per cent. This was despite the company bragging about the 1.5 billionth sale of its Series 40 phone earlier this week.

While we progressed in the right direction in 2011, we still have a tremendous amount to accomplish in 2012.

Nokia was still buoyed by sales of its Lumia devices, however, as CEO Stephen Elop claimed "well over one million" of the Windows Phone 7 devices had been sold.

Currently, UK citizens can only get hold of one of Nokia's Lumia devices the 800. However, the Lumia 710 is due for an imminent release.

The Lumia 900 could land in the UK too, possibly by the summer. Carphone Warehouse created a landing page for pre-registration for the phone this week before removing it. However, a tagline on the page indicated the device would land in June.

"From this beachhead of more than one million Lumia devices, you will see us push forward with the sales, marketing and successive product introductions necessary to be successful," Elop said.

"We also plan to bring the Lumia series to additional markets including China and Latin America in the first half of 2012.

"And, while we progressed in the right direction in 2011, we still have a tremendous amount to accomplish in 2012, and thus, it is my assessment that we are in the heart of our transition."

Nokia is less happy with its Symbian devices, revealing it expects to sell fewer than expected.

Furthermore, Nokia said it would not be appropriate to issue full-year financial forecasts, largely due to the fact it sees 2012 as another year of transition, alongside tough competition.

Last year, Nokia shocked the mobile world when it said it cancelled its yearly forecast for similar reasons.

Today's results came in the same week that Apple produced stellar results, in which it revealed sales had doubled from the previous year. Samsung, the number one smartphone seller globally, posted record profit early on in the year.

The tech sector has been no exception. Industry big guns have fallen, CEOs have been thrown out of board rooms, there's been bitching and mega-buck acquisitions, and one of the most significant deaths the industry has ever seen.

We take a look back at what went down in the IT industry in 2011

A lotta litigation

Let's start with the most insufferably depressing theme of the year: the never-ending patent wars. Recent charts resembling many-tentacled sea creatures have appeared online highlighting who is suing who and the utter absurdity of it all.

The main target appears to be Android. It's rather obvious why, considering the operating system's stratospheric growth in 2011. The OS became too popular for its own good in 2011, attracting litigation after litigation, leaving Android looking like the bullied school child.

Yet Google wasn't involved in the most serious legal war threatening Android. Apple and Samsung spent all of 2011 trying to ban each others' products, with the iPhone maker even gaining some success along the way with a number of Galaxy products banned in Europe.

The OS became too popular for its own good in 2011, attracting litigation after litigation, leaving Android looking like the bullied school child.

Microsoft took a different route to targeting Android, deciding to sign license agreements with manufacturers using the OS. By the middle of the year it claimed to have agreements with companies responsible for producing half of all Android devices.

That hasn't stopped it suing others though, and it recently won a little skirmish with Motorola Mobility. No doubt it is hoping Windows 8 will take tablet market share away from others, meanwhile, and it would love Windows Phone 7 to have the same levels of popularity as Android.

BT even joined the mass of companies claiming Android has infringed on its IP, which also includes Oracle who are seeking billions from their court case. So much for festive cheer and good will to all men then

Google retaliated with a surprising public outburst earlier in the year, which amounted to the internet giant essentially having a whinge that the bigger boys had ganged up on Android.

As 2011 comes to a close, hundreds of patent cases are still raging on and, even though they have provided us with a modicum of mirth, they've left a bitter taste too. Not only are the cases nightmarishly complex in their scope and detail, as if Kafka had rewritten Bleak House and it had magically become reality, but ultimately they only lead to harm for businesses and consumers alike.

Amongst the consequences of these costly legal battles are lost innovation and less competition if products are banned. So thanks guys for damaging the tech industry with all your petty squabbling.

Bickering was rife in the UK telecoms sector too, again preventing people from accessing genuinely necessary technologies.

Even though plenty of other nations are enjoying 4G right now, the UK won't get decent coverage until around 2017. This sluggish progress has come about partly thanks to operators squabbling over the 4G auction, which was due to take place at the start of next year, but has been delayed until the end of the 2012.

All this industry in-fighting only means rural areas will have to wait longer for superfast speeds.

O2 even went so far as to claim Ofcom's proposed auction was illegal under EU law, saying the floors designed to ensure at least four providers got some spectrum amounted to "state aid." Vodafone also raised issues with Ofcom's proposals, claiming the regulator was inadvertently guaranteeing 800MHz spectrum for Everything Everywhere in its desire to protect 3.

In the wonderful world of fibre, BT was accused by practically every other important ISP of charging too much for its wholesale infrastructure. Even after BT cut its prices, Geo Networks went ballistic, claiming the pricing of Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) had helped create a "non contestable" market.

All this industry in-fighting only means rural areas will have to wait longer for superfast speeds. Again, thanks guys.

Acquisition action

Rather than buck the trend and spend billions on research and development of fresh products, tech giants continued to acquire others for megalithic sums of money.

Google sealed the biggest deal of the year with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility, although many suspected the purpose of the deal was to gain a rather expensive patent war chest rather than mark any positive move into actually producing phones.

Many eyebrows were raised to the heavens when Microsoft confirmed the $8.5 billion purchase of Skype. Some saw it as another Ballmer balls-up, others a handy way for the Redmond giant to gain plenty of user data, whilst owning a rather popular product. Nothing will hide the fact that it bought a company with astronomic debt, however.

HP, in the midst of major turmoil, decided to splash a whopping $12 billion on British firm Autonomy. It formed part of major changes announced by Leo Apotheker which would have seen HP move away from the PC, tablet and smartphone space if the chief hadn't been shown the door just months later. With Meg Whitman now in charge, things are looking a little steadier, but 2011's been a chaotic one for HP.

As for Autonomy, we had to wave goodbye to one of Britain's finest IT vendors. In the face of vast sums of money, it seems UK firms are willing to sacrifice control over their businesses to Silicon Valley. Sad, really.

Nokia nightmare?

Another company staring endgame right in the face this year was Nokia. With sales dropping like Eddy the Eagle off an Alpine cliff, the proverbial excrement hit the fan when the Finnish phone maker said it just wasn't going to provide a full-year outlook as things had gotten so shaky.

In February, the company announced its partnership with Microsoft and in November the first Nokia Windows Phone 7 device appeared. The Lumia 800 received positive reviews, but one phone will not save Nokia's bacon. 2012 will really be the sink or swim year for the once-mighty mobile maker.

Not that Nokia was the only mobile firm standing on quicksand. RIM has had a torrid time too, posting a sharp drop in profit in December and delaying shipments of its QNX OS devices to late 2012. The company is also sitting on a tonne of unwanted PlayBooks, praying someone somewhere will make it cool. The iPad 2's popularity didn't do it many favours either.

RIM could only look on green with jealousy at Samsung, which became the number one smartphone seller on the planet, with Apple in second.

The social revolution

Few saw how much of an impact social networks would have on the world in 2011. The Arab Spring showed what could be done through cooperation and conviction, supported by collaborative web platforms.

That was something apparently lost on Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff, however, who spent much of his company's Dreamforce event proselytising about how businesses should take inspiration from the Arab Spring. He warned CEOs of a Corporate Spring, where workers might depose their leaders, although didn't seem worried about such an uprising in Salesforce.com.

Government goods

Whilst having to deal with the Leveson inquiry, strikes, riots and various Vince Cable gaffes, the Government also had to sort out its IT.

The G-Cloud was here, then it wasn't, then it was, then it was kind of there and now it definitely, definitely is real. For whatever reason, HP's MD told IT Pro[i/] the G-Cloud was being killed off, which the Government denied, although refused to use the name G-Cloud. It left us with a cloud strategy as clear as mud, although it appears plans are now finally moving on.

Francis Maude produced the official IT strategy, in which cloud and open source were key. Overall, it received a positive response but given the way in which Government plans tend to go rapidly downhill after they're announced, don't expect the slickest IT to appear in Whitehall anytime soon.

Security scares

A year wouldn't be complete without some major security scares. There were some massive breaches this year, with Sony and RSA suffering the worst.

After hackers hit the PlayStation Network and other Sony services, over 100 million customers saw their data compromised. The company finally got round to employing a chief information security officer this summer.

RSA had data on one of its security products put in danger after a nasty attack believed to come from a nation state. The SecureID information was later used to hit Government contractors, really proving how big a data breach fallout can be.

Goodbye, Steve

Despite the whirlwind of the past 12 months, in the tech world 2011 will be remembered largely as the last year of Steve Jobs' life. It should have been a chance for the community to drop their petty quarrels and look back at the life of one of the industry's most fascinating men. That opportunity was taken by some.

But many chose instead to polemicise, to make myopic claims about Jobs and his work. This was not limited to the anti-Apple brigade either.

That's chiefly why we will miss him. He was the biggest character the tech world has ever seen.

Some labeled the ex-Apple CEO as 'just a great marketer.' Others suggested he was a visionary, the creator of iconic products like the iPhone. Neither was right.

Jobs was evidently more than 'just' something. He was a complex man. Testament to this can be found in the sizable biography released just weeks after his death.

Yes, Jobs was a man who knew fine marketing. Sure, he led the company that produced great technology. But he was also a hugely capable CEO, a ruthless chief, a man who knew to surround himself with immensely talented people, an obsessive, disturbingly competitive, often seemingly heartless, often gloriously rude about competitors, and many, many more things.

That's chiefly why we will miss him. He was the biggest character the tech world has ever seen. And he leaves not just a gaping hole where his big personality once was, but one of the most important legacies left by any businessman in the past 50 years. Goodbye, Steve.

You're most likely thinking: Who are these people? There can't be enough 1-2-3 users left to fill a phone booth at the airport, let alone two giant Disney hotels can there?

The answer is that what had been Lotus, was by then deeply embedded within IBM: and IBM had only one product in mind when it bought the whole company. That product was Lotus Domino. The original architect of Lotus Domino, way back in 1991, was Ray Ozzie. These days he's rather more famous for having defined and designed Microsoft Azure, which to my mind makes him one of the two principal founders (the other one being Paul Maritz of VMWare) of the whole concept of cloud computing.

So how come he's got a hand in the BYOC philosophy too?

Back in early 2005, Mr Ozzie was in a quite fascinating situation. It was only a month or so before the announcement of his new job as Bill Gates' successor, and for IBM to get him along to Lotusphere was considered quite a coup.

Ozzie, you see, hadn't come to IBM as part of the Lotus "merger". He was founder of IRIS Associates, which had been funded by Lotus to develop Notes (later Domino). By the time I met him at Lotusphere he was running Groove networks, a small software house with a groupware product which embodied many of the ideas that have later come to define our computing experience, since it was in essence a light-touch collaboration suite with a hybrid cloud architecture. In retrospect it was obvious that by coming along to Lotusphere with the Microsoft deal in his back pocket, he was saying farewell to the faithful the quality of the greeting he got stepping out on stage in front of 18,000 delegates would make Justin Bieber sulky and jealous.

In chatting to this man with all that as background, later at the press conference, I mentioned a project I'd started with a UK charity, to roll out Domino in countries with broken or expensive telecoms infrastructures. This got Ray straight on to the topic of how he'd been using Groove around the entire subject of the Boxing Day Tsunami. He spent quite a bit of his time, apparently, visiting with long term Notes/Domino fans in companies and organisations of all sizes, and what he saw even back then was a sickness he described as "too much IT".

I'm sure you will share my sense of envy at the lifestyle revealed by these snippets. I'd love to be swanning round the world with an open invite to every blue-chip operation on the planet, from the US Navy to the owner of the Maltese Falcon (the boat, not the fictitious statue), and then get the chance to listen to how they really get things done. Ray was seeing was chief execs and MDs who had two laptops. One from their corporate IT team, and the other they had their secretary sneak out and buy on the company card. The logic being that they needed to get things done, out of the purview of their often-obstructive IT people, and this was the easy way to do it.

Ray then developed this theme further by mentioning that for the Tsunami, Groove networks had facilitated lots of "agencies" (sic) with a presence in the Indian Ocean to share information with one another, without their IT teams having to go away for a six month love-in to accommodate everyone's diverse security, compatibility and what-all else paranoias. His view was that a massive natural disaster was the best possible test of flexibility in information technology, and that the whole edifice of justifications and limitations set up around massive IT departments just made them inherently incapable of responding quickly enough to a force majeure situation. Cloud-based servers, talking to light-touch installed apps on any old PC anyone could lay their hands on, were the right fix for that problem.

I know: While it's very easy for management and users to blame "The IT guys" in these situations, and there's a heavy dose of starving-baby, bedraggled-dog emotional blackmail to the whole scenario just to make it feel even worse, the fact is that most of those limitations on behaviour are imposed by the business itself. I'm one of those who takes the view that leaving IT to be run by the finance director is a very good way to flash-freeze all the responsiveness, all the flexibility, all the good stuff, out of an IT function. If ever there was a case study in which what was really needed was a bit of the classic Warp Factor Nine engineer's headroom for slack, it's when a massive disaster hits an entire quadrant of the planet.

So when I read IT Pro's recent Q&A with RIM's Tim Hodkinson, I was mildly sceptical. Like a lot of senior industry people, Tim believes there will be quite a turnaround in computing experience for a lot of everyday users inside businesses in the coming year. One part of this is the Many Rice-Davies riposte of course someone at Blackberry thinks there will be more activity in mobile devices, and naturally after RIM has found it necessary to regroup from the assault of the iPhone on business toy-buyers' sensibilities, they will want to trade on the strongest part of its brand perception within corporate IT. But just because he's inside a position fraught with natural bias doesn't mean he's wrong, or that RIM is wrong either (Playbook notwithstanding): There's definitely a type of business who can be trusted to take over control of smartphone and "viewer appliance" type products that are actually the property of staff members.

I can think of at least three clients who would jump at the idea of rolling out a consistent stack of icons on the diverse screens of all their eager staff members' phones: But that's because those are three exceptionally open, friendly and civilised businesses. Let's face it: the reality of BYOD is a massive minefield, a huge territory richly populated with wrong-ended sticks for both management and workforce. What happens, we wonder, when a smartphone under company management via a utility like Blackberry Mobile Fusion falls into the scope of something as nightmarishly legal as the Leveson Inquiry, or (god forbid) embroiled in the next big murder investigation.

As with Ray Ozzie's cross-section of multi laptop toting chief execs, there can be very simple reasons why "work phone" and "personal phone" are kept clearly distinct. In his earlier scenario, quite a lot of the Boss Men had business interests outside their post as CEO or MD: family interests, shareholdings, properties and so on, and it's almost inevitable that the same can be said of almost any worker at any level with their smartphone.

My understanding of the BYOD concept for phones, from an IT department point of view, is that it's a driver for standardising presentation of data to only two or three narrow delivery methods - web browsers, App Store apps (for interacting with customers, more than staff) and thin client computing access to traditional Windows desktop apps (or Hybrid Cloud SAAS, if you are under about 22 years old in 2012). That means there's almost nothing out on the "your own" bits of kit, save a collection of web bookmarks and a few RDP connections: Even though Smartphones don't generally include RDP as standard, this is fixable with a single app: Wyse Pocket Cloud. One app is hardly a demand for a wide ranging central management platform to suck in everybody's phones in a company.

Bring Your Own Device/Computer is already a reality. Writers and consultants like me have been doing it for ages; but we are certainly not on the minimum wage, nor do we have to share the sole family PC with our kids, nor are we prohibited from claiming our computing expenses against taxes. But that model is very unlikely to work in the wider world of business.

Alas, many of the types of business who will find the idea of BYOD most interesting are likely to be the ones who exploit the opportunity most painfully, for their workforce.

The OS doubled its share, up from 25.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2011, whilst Apple, RIM and Microsoft all saw their mobile operating systems lose ground, Gartner reported.

"Android benefited from more mass-market offerings, a weaker competitive environment and the lack of exciting new products on alternative operating systems such as Windows Phone 7 and RIM," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"Apple's iOS market share suffered from delayed purchases as consumers waited for the new iPhone. Continued pressure is impacting RIM's performance, and its smartphone share reached its lowest point so far in the US market, where it dropped to 10 per cent."

Google has been helped out by Samsung, which became the number one smartphone seller worldwide. The South Korean giant saw its sales to end users triple year-over-year to hit 24 million.

Android benefited from more mass-market offerings, a weaker competitive environment and the lack of exciting new products on alternative operating systems.

Android recently overtook Apple's iOS to become the world's biggest mobile app seller in the second quarter.

Apple may have lost ground, seeing a three million drop in iPhone sales from the second quarter, but analysts expect the iPhone 4S, 4 and 3GS to steal some market share back from Android.

Symbian continued its rapid decline losing over half of its market share, whilst Microsoft didn't fair much better despite major manufacturers signing license deals for Windows Phone 7. The Redmond giant's market share fell from 2.7 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

However, the release of the Nokia Lumia 800 and the strong marketing push surrounding the phone could boost Microsoft's position in the market.

Nokia remained the number one seller of mobile devices overall, although its market share declined again, from 28.2 per cent to 23.9 per cent year-over-year.

Overall smartphone sales to consumers hit 115 million in the third quarter, up 42 per cent from the same period last year. Mobile devices grew just 5.6 per cent, indicating the tipping point, where more users have smartphones than feature phones, is coming soon.

Turning around an entire smartphone strategy and especially the strategy of a company the size of Nokia in under nine months is no mean feat. And the resulting phones, shown for the first time at the Nokia World conference in London, seem to have integrated "Mango", or Windows Phone 7.5, and Nokia's hardware, reasonably well. The flagship Lumia 800 phone does rather resemble the Meego-powered N9, although that is in itself, no bad thing. And it is certainly slicker than most other Windows Phone 7 devices currently on sale.

The issue lies more in the way Nokia is positioning the phone, and in the software; in fact, the two issues are tightly connected. Nokia is not really presenting the Lumia as a business phone, but rather a rival to Android, and at a push, the iPhone. During Stephen Elop's Nokia World keynote, there was plenty of emphasis on consumer-friendly apps such as social media and entertainment, but precious little talk about the enterprise.

And the enterprise functionality of Mango, at least in its current incarnation, seems rather limited. Although there is support for Exchange email, support for Exchange Active Sync (AES) is described only as "partial". It lacks business critical features such as device and memory card encryption.

But Windows Mobile 6.5 had full AES support, and Nokia's previous, Symbian-based e-series phones, supported encryption as well as other, business friendly features. In the same vein, Office on Windows Phone 7 is slick, but in terms of features, falls short of earlier versions or even of the version of Office that ships next year for Nokia's Symbian Belle phones.

None of this may matter, if Nokia's true focus is on the consumer. But cracking the consumer market with a Windows Phone handset, even a good one, will be very tough (one analyst IT Pro spoke to described it as "dads disco dancing").

The business phone market, on the other hand, is calling out for more competition. Not every business wants, or can afford, the iPhone, and IT directors' faith in BlackBerry has been shaken by its network outage earlier this month. And there are still plenty of companies using older Windows Mobile devices, which are now due for an upgrade.

There is still a chance for Nokia to take on the enterprise market, perhaps with a Windows version of the E-6 or even the N8. But Nokia is hampered by the limitations posed on its designers by the Windows OS. Unless, or until, Microsoft updates Windows Phone so it at least has full Exchange ActiveSync support, enterprises are unlikely to adopt the Lumia. And it may be too great a stretch to convince them to buy Symbian phones instead.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

Elop knocked competing Microsoft licensees HTC and Samsung by calling the Lumia 800 'the first real Windows Phone'.

The Lumia 800 will be available imminently, while the cheaper Lumia 710 has yet to receive a confirmed UK release date. It is due to be released in Russia and certain Asian countries before the end of the year.

This doesn't include the massive mainland Chinese market though, which isn't due to get the Lumia range until sometime next year. The US, where Nokia had traditionally been weak, will also have to wait until 2012 for a 'portfolio of products' as Elop put it, suggesting an America-specific range of Windows Phones. Unsurprisingly, Elop confirmed that LTE 4G models are in the works, but didn't go into specifics.

Nokia isn't ignoring price-sensitive emerging markets such as Mexico and India, which the company is targeting with its new range of Asha phones which use the ageing Symbian Series 40 operating system. These phones, some of which will have physical QWERTY keyboards, will be able to run apps such as Nokia's answer to BBM, WhatsApp Messenger, and a browser that uses the cloud to speed up rendering times, similar to Opera and the Amazon Kindle Fire's browser. The Asha phones will become available later this year with prices ranging from 85-115.

The new Lumia series Windows Phones are central to Nokia's plan to regain market share and influence in the lucrative smartphone market, currently dominated by the iPhone and Google Android phones. Elop stated that while Nokia had a 'reliable, durable and trustworthy' image, that was no longer enough since people now 'expect something special' from their phones. The Lumia phones are evidence that Nokia is 'investing in key differentiators and changing the way we operate'.

Judging from our initial first look, both Lumia Windows Phones look promising.

It's important to realise that today's smartphone is as vital to conducting business as your laptop, and just like your laptop there are certain things that every smartphone will do. Just like laptops, where you have two flavours to choose from (either a Windows based laptop or an Apple Mac OS-based device) you have a similar choice in the world of smartphones. You can either choose a smartphone powered by the Symbian OS, or one powered by an alternative OS (most likely Microsoft's Windows Mobile).

Symbian was founded in 1999 by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion, as "a co-operative approach between the world's leading innovators... to establish EPOC [now Symbian OS] as the de facto operating system."

A Symbian smartphone is not built by Symbian, but rather by a handset manufacturer (such as Nokia or Sony Ericsson). The manufacturer will licence the Symbian operating system and then choose a graphical user interface to sit between the user and the operating system. Two major interfaces are available for the latest version of the OS, one from Nokia (S60, formerly Series 60) and one from Sony Ericsson (the recently purchased UIQ). These interfaces are proprietary to the respective companies although they do license them to other manufacturers.

S60 is Nokia's major smartphone interface, and has the largest installed base of any smartphone interface. It is designed to be used with one hand, and does not have a touch screen. Because of this, the screens can be a lot sharper and easier to read in sunlight than the touch sensitive UIQ screens. The handsets are based around a numeric keypad, with two function buttons (on the left and right of the screens) and a cursor pad. It's a very traditional approach and has allowed S60 to grow steadily in the mass market - as demographic groups ask for 'an MP3 music phones' for example, Nokia can simply put together a music player application and bundle it in the firmware.

UIQ on the other hand, has appealed to the PDA owner. While the devices sport keypads of either regular numbers of mini Qwerty keyboards, the main interface is a touch screen. Paired up with character recognition software, it feels more like a Palm or Pocket PC than a regular phone, so there can be a steeper learning curve for new users, although it does give PDA owners a route into the smartphone market, bringing them a comfortable idiom all the benefits of third party software, PC integration and multimedia.

There's not much functionality to differentiate UIQ and S60 now (much like the laptop market) but there are a number of different form factors and bundled software suites that give each phone a different appeal. Being computers, these smartphones can all have third party software installed to increase their capabilities. One major thing to point out is that while UIQ and S60 are both Symbian OS powered, an application that runs on S60 will not run under UIQ (nor vice versa). If you are likely to use third party software, decide what areas you want to stress on and investigate beforehand which platform is best for you - generally S60 will have more leisure software, while UIQ will focus on business and 'power' applications, although many authors will port software for both.

At first glance, you'd be hard pushed to recognise the N73 as a smartphone - it appears in the regular mobile phone candy bar shape that was popular a few years ago (the fashion world has decided that sliders are the way forward for low and mid range phones), but it hides a powerful secret. The camera is fantastic.

At 3.2 megapixles, the styling of the device has been built around making the camera the prime reason to choose this phone. With the obligatory Carl Zeiss optics that all the Nokia high end phones are sporting, it adds to this an adequate auto focus lens and a mechanical shutter to give the best picture from a Nokia yet. In many cases it surpasses the N93 but as with all camera phones, the relatively small area of the light sensor behind the lens means that low light performance is much worse than a standalone camera, although the built in LED flash does help.

In good conditions though, the N73 results would be easily publishable on the web, and scale well to print publishing, although I would like a way to sharpen the focus very slightly as I take them. Calling up the camera application is done with the spine buttons and there can be some problems here, because while two of the the three buttons (a rocker zoom and the shutter button) will only work when the camera is on (which happens automatically when the sliding cover is moved), the third button which calls up the Gallery/Viewer application can be hit at any time. Given the button sits just under your ring finger when holding the phone accidental presses easily happen.

Build quality on the N73 is adequate, there is a sense of 'plastic' when holding the phone and there's no real feeling of strength in the design. Luckily the keypad is very usable, with ridges along the top of each key to increase the tactile contact. Thanks to this, and a good positive feedback when you press a key, the N73 has the strongest numeric keypad of any Symbian phone on test here.

The application suite inside the N73 is pretty much standard - but as a multimedia phone the inclusion of support for Windows Media Player means that you can synchronise music from your PC as the N73 shows up as a digital audio capable device in the Microsoft application. Full PIM support is available (as with every Symbian phone here), and the addition of viewers for Microsoft Office documents and Adobe PDF files so you'll be able to read most email attachments.

One huge omission for the business user, there is no Wi-Fi, but the addition of Quad-band support means it truly is a phone that should work anywhere in the world. The N73 my be seen as the budget phone, but it is a good all rounder in terms of functionality, and your best choice if you are looking for something discreet.

Get Nokia N73 tips, user guides and downloads at Know Your Mobile

Verdict

The smartphone in sheep's clothing, the N73 may look like a regular phone, but packs a powerful punch.

If nothing else, the N93 looks like a smartphone. Perhaps a bit too much like a smartphone, with it's 'Transformers' hinged screen that allows the device to act as a flip phone, a clamshell PDA and a handheld video camera. This makes the phone an almost perfect example of why people tend to avoid smartphones. It's big, has more functionality than anyone would need, and would take too long to do anything with.

Which isn't an entirely fair critique of the N93. As a Series 60 Symbian-based phone, it works in exactly the same way as the E61 and N73. It has the regular number-pad of keys with the function keys, cursor pad and call/hang up buttons exactly where they should be. The natural inclination is to use this phone as a flip phone, and it works perfectly well. It's when you flip the screen lengthways so it turns into a clamshell that the multimedia strength of the N93 becomes apparent.

The N93 is a great device for video content. The screen (QVGA again) is as clear as a Video iPod, and while it might not have the 60gb capacity, the micro SD cards will be great for carrying large media files from your PC around with you. One of the more practical features of the N93 is the TV out. Through a supplied pop-port attachment, you'll be able to hook the smartphone into any TV or Video that takes a composite (red/white/yellow pugs) cable and have the main display of the phone replicated on the big screen, allowing you to use it as the source for presentations and video demonstrations when hooked to a large display or projector.

Couple this with the video recording capability of the N93 and you have a phone that screams multimedia. Where the N73 will suffice for picture taking, if you have any inclination for recording video while on the move, the 30fps recording (at VGA resolution) is currently unparallel on any other smartphone (the N73 will cope with 15fps and a much smaller capture resolution). The results will not be as good as dedicated camcorder, but for capturing 'in the moment' shots and memories it is definitely suitable - you'll have this phone with you all the time, not something you can say about a camcorder.

In true camcorder mode, the keyboard section becomes a pistol grip, while the screen rotates to act as a large viewfinder. Under your thumb is the shutter button, and a circular toggle that controls the 3x optical zoom available (using Carl Zeiss optics again).

There's a satisfying clunk as you move the screen around through these modes, and there is no sense of weakness in construction. It can be a touch bulky, especially when opened and held up to your ear, but the advantage of this larger volume means the keys are not cramped, it's easy to reach all the buttons, and the cursor pad isn't limited in its movement. Some people will worry that when flipped open the screen and keyboard are just too far apart to be comfortable (and the centre of gravity makes it a bit unbalanced when opened) but the N93's size is in its favour.

Again, it's not an all rounder phone, the size will put off a lot of people, and the focus on media is perhaps a touch strong if you're looking for a day to day phone for communicating, but as a leisure phone it is unsurpassed. I wouldn't grab this for a business trip, but it would be the first phone in the bag when going away on a family holiday.

Nokia user guides, FAQs, reviews & downloads at Know Your Mobile

Verdict

Instantly recognisable as something special, with three different physical modes it is geared more towards multimedia than any other phone on test.

Looking rather like the Blackberry mobile device, the Nokia E61 is clearly targeted at people who need a proper keyboard on the move who need to work with documents and stay in email contact. A quick glance at the specs shows two welcome additions that help (and the lack of a camera means that you'll be able to use this phone when data policies forbid devices with cameras).

The first is Wi-Fi, which allows almost seamless connectivity via a hotspot when you don't want to pay the mobile phone chargers. The Series 60 Symbian-based operating system is set up to ask which connection point an application will use whenever it is asked to go online. So when you request a web page you get a dialog coming up asking you how to connect to the internet, either search for a hotspot, or through your network. And there's very little headache setting up the network, as the E61 has a built in database of all the settings for the majority of the world's providers. It checks your SIM, decides the most appropriate network, and does the setup itself in the background. Very nice, and another little touch that helps the mass market adopt these phones - they'll just work out the box for you.

The E61 has one of the largest amounts of built in flash memory with 1GB of storage, which is a lot more than you need for a few names and addresses (if this isn't enough the E61 takes an SD card for even more storage). This is so you can make best use of the second major addition... the built in office software. The E61 comes bundled with a full word processor, spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation editor, all of which use the Microsoft Office file formats. This coupled with both the default email client and the PC connectivity means that you can work on your documents while away from your computer.

The PC Suite allows seamless synchronisation of your PIM Data (Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes or Lotus Organiser) and contrary to what you may have heard, it's as reliable as Palm's HotSync or MS ActiveSync. The PC Suite is now a very mature product and you will see your E61 show up as another disk drive in Windows Explorer, allowing you to move files back and forward to work on them as needed.

Sporting a landscape orientated QVGA screen that feels larger than on the other (portrait orientated) Nokia devices, the E61 can put a lot on display if needed - the email client shows as many inbox messages as it can. Compare this to the contacts screen, where the font size is increased. The assumption being that you need a clearer view when dialling as you bounce down the street is borne out in practice. The large screen is a great bonus in pretty much every operation, from reading email and browsing the web, to the aforementioned document editing.

Can the E61 replace a laptop? Not completely, but it is the smartphone that comes the closest to doing so. If you're on a day trip away from the office, then you can certainly rely on the E61 to keep you working, connected.

Nokia user guides, FAQs, reviews & downloads at Know Your Mobile

Verdict

It looks like a smartphone, does everything you'd expect, and has plenty left over to continue to surprise you.

While Nokia and the Series 60 platform may be the base of the smartphone world, the Sony Ericsson P series devices have been perceived as the flagship devices. This is partly because they are the closest form factor to a regular PDA, with a large portrait screen and a stylus for character recognition and input. People used to Palm and Pocket PC devices could easily make the transition.

The P990i was one of the first phones to run Symbian OS 9.1, and Sony Ericsson has said that it under-estimated the complexity of the challenge. As a result the device has only recently become available in significant numbers, and is still a bit rough around the edges. A user-installable firmware update is promised before the end of the year, which should sort out a lot of the smaller problems in the device.

Aside from that, the P990i is a powerhouse of a phone, pretty much everything you could want in a smartphone (with the possible exception of a GPS receiver). We've got the Opera web browser for surfing. Multimedia support for digital music playback (MP3, AAC, and others), video playback and recording (at 320x240 pixels), an FM radio , There is support for a number of push email clients (including Microsoft Exchange's Active Sync server and RIM's Blackberry Connect) alongside the QuickOffice suite that allows you to view and edit Word, Sheet and PowerPoint presentations, which gives you the same document editing capability as Nokia's E61.

As with all the Symbian phones here, it runs the QVGA screen at 240x320 pixels in the same space , the number of pixels per inch is much higher than on previous Pxxx models, and gives a wonderful pin-sharp quality to the screen. It also sits half way between a tablet style PDA and a flip phone. Underneath the regular number pad flip, you'll find a small Qwerty keyboard that would not look out of place on a Palm Treo or Blackberry. It's suited mainly for typing with your thumbs, but there is good definition to the keys. As long as you don't try to type too fast you'll get accurate results. I still feel that the character recognition is sufficiently accurate (and faster) than a keyboard, which is there simply to give confidence to the mainstream user. With the flip closed, roughly half the screen is still on show, giving you access to all of the PIM and calling functionality.

Allowing you to run the device as a phone in this closed mode is a great advantage - having a candy bar phone to hand, but getting the extra screen size and computing functionality when open gives a successful dual personality to the P990i. This is one of the advantages of the UIQ platform in that it supports a number of different user interfaces - the P990i carries two of them, one for open, one for closed, and I confidently expect third party developers to take advantage of this flexibility in the future.

The P990I has one of the largest built in application suites I have seen on a smartphone. Picking up this phone and out the box it should have all the functionality that any professional will reasonably need. If you could rely on the Nokia devices for a short trip away from the office then the P990i should allow you to manage an entire week. There is a higher level of complexity to the interface, and as such the learning curve is steeper, but the reward for perseverance is worth it.

Sony Ericsson user guides, FAQs, reviews & downloads at Know Your Mobile

Verdict

The Swiss army knife of smartphones - will do pretty much anything that you ask of it.

Where the P990i is the classic all-rounder, all things to all people device, the M600 represents a tight focus on messaging. There are subtle differences in the UIQ interface between the two devices - the M600 leans more to being used in one hand with a thumb touching the screen, rather than a pointer - but that doesn't change the fact that the messaging application in the M600 is essentially the same as that in the P990i. So why have two different devices?

Have a look at what's missing. First of all there is no Wi-Fi. This isn't as much of a problem as you'd expect given that most people on this device are going to be using a 3G or GPRS data plan to go online and pick up their emails. As in the P990i, there is Push Email support for the popular brands, and you can still check POP3 quickly with a few thumb presses.

Along with losing Wi-Fi support, the M600 lacks a camera, primarily for the same reasons the E61 lacks one. Most businesses (particularly those involved in sensitive research and development, or handling sensitive customer/supplier data are wary of devices with cameras and tend to ban them. So the lack of one is an advantage for the M600. It also means that much less space is required inside the case. The result is one of the slimmest, most stylish phones out there.

The size means a small Qwerty keyboard would be very cramped in terms of button size, so the solution here is to double up the buttons in a similar fashion to the BlackBerry Pearl device. Each key can be pressed on the left hand or right hand side - each one gives a deferent letter, so the first key gives 'q' to the left and 'w' to the right (giving us a Qw Er Ty Ui Op over the top row of five buttons). Technically it's a great solution - in practice it does take some time to be comfortable with it, and it is slower than a full Qwerty solution. But to balance that off the keys are easily rocked to either side, and the size of them means there's very little problems with hitting the wrong key. When switching to numbers, either directional press will suffice to dial a digit.

And where the P990i has two interfaces, the M600, although only having one style of interface, actually has two ways it can be used, one handed with your thumb hitting the large onscreen buttons, and another using the stylus in the traditional two handed way. There in a touch too much compromise for each mode to work to make the M600 an easy device to use - the lack of a direction pad (you have a scroll wheel and on-screen buttons) contributes to this - most people expect a d-pad on a high end phone.

The M600 is good smartphone, and it does one job really well - the compromises mean that most people looking for a good multi function device will be disappointed. Sony Ericsson is looking to capture both the BlackBerry user with this device and the fashion conscious user.

Sony Ericsson user guides, FAQs, reviews & downloads at Know Your Mobile

Verdict

Equally at home on the catwalks of Milan to the Starbucks in the City of London, will keep you looking cool and in touch with everything in the office.

Nokia has been having a bit of a hard time of late. The Finnish mobile phone giant recently ditched the ailing Symbian as its mobile operating system of choice (in favour of Windows Phone 7) and then announced 7,000 job losses in April as part of a 1 billion cost-cutting measure. So, with the future of both the company and Symbian still uncertain, now might not seem like an ideal time to invest in a new Symbian smartphone from Nokia, which is unfortunate, as that's just what the E7 is.

To Nokia's credit, the E7 is an extremely stylish smartphone. It has a sleek, all-aluminium shell with rounded edges and neatly capped-off ends, along with a 4in screen that fills the entire front of the handset. It sits nicely in the hand too, although the finish does make it rather slippy. At 176g, it isn't too heavy to tote around in a jacket pocket.

All-screen it may be, but the E7 also packs a physical Qwerty keyboard although it takes a short while to figure where this lurks. As with similar smartphones from other manufacturers, the keyboard is actually hidden beneath the screen, but the two halves of the case fit together so snugly that it isn't immediately obvious how to get at it.

Flipping up the E7's screen to reveal the keyboard is a Herculean task.

Unfortunately, even when armed with the requisite knowledge, getting the case to open still isn't easy. The E7's smooth, rounded edges don't give much purchase for a finger and it takes two hands and two thumbs to push the screen out of the way. With a firm shove though, the screen slides up (in landscape orientation) to sit at a 30-degree tilt that's ideal for use while typing.

Keyboard side, the Nokia E7 has a flush-fitting button on its top edge that provides the usual Symbian options for powering off and switching profiles, plus a metallic slider on the left for quickly locking and unlocking the screen. There's a similar slider on the right for the volume control, plus a button that activates digital camera mode and then works as a shutter release. Lastly, a wide button below the screen returns the Symbian Home screen when pressed in any application, and brings up a list of installed apps when pressed at the Home screen itself.

The image quality of photos taken with camera is best described as average. The eight-megapixel photos look little better than those from lower resolution smartphone cameras.

The 4in AMOLED screen on the E7 looks great. It's bright and vibrant, but the 640 x 360 pixel resolution seems a little meagre with 800 x 480 displays now commonplace, even if it still renders text relatively crisply. The capacitive glass screen feels fine under the finger, but the super-snappy response that's a trademark of iOS and (to a lesser degree) Android is absent and that's where the E7's problems really lie.

version of Symbian^3 used on the E7 has been reworked for touchscreen use and, superficially, it looks the part. Start to use it, however, and it soon becomes an exercise in frustration, with its counter-intuitive controls and cryptic settings squirrelled away in the menu system.

This kind of OS silliness simply has no place on a smartphone in this day and age.

The web browser, for example, feels wholly inadequate and struggles to render some web pages accurately. The screen lacks the resolution to render text-based pages readable in full-page view, but double-tap to zoom in and rather than the main column of body text being enlarged to fit the screen width (a standard feature on other smartphone OSes), the whole page is simply magnified by some seemingly random amount.

Pinch the screen to get a better text fit and everything jerkily steps up and down in size, with embedded images still usually left half off-screen. It's a similar annoying story with other apps Maps doggedly refused to download any maps data, despite incessant prompts to do so, for instance. This kind of OS silliness simply has no place on a smartphone in this day and age.

As for other modern smartphone hardware features, the E7 packs them all including a mini HDMI-out port and call quality is commendable enough. The non-removable 1200mAh battery is rated by Nokia at up to 9 hours talk time and 430 hours standby, and ran for just over five and a half hours in a video playback test.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

A few fiddly aspects aside, the Nokia E7 is a lovely piece of hardware, but the Symbian^3 operating system is just out of its depth when compared to the competition — and the fact that Nokia has also lost faith in Symbian is hardly encouraging either. So, unless the operating system is inexplicably a must-have for operational purposes, either the Android-powered HTC Desire Z or the Windows Phone 7 Dell Venue Pro are far superior hardware keyboard-equipped alternatives.

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850/900/1700/1900/ 2100 Display: 360 x 640 pixels, 4 inches OS: Symbian^3 Camera: eight megapixels rear facing, 0.3 megapixels forward facing GPS: A-GPS Processor: 680 MHz ARM 11 processor with Broadcom BCM2727 GPU Bluetooth: 3.0 Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g/n Storage: 16GB internal RAM: not disclosed Dimensions: 124 x 63 x 14mm Weight: 176g Battery: Lithium Ion 1200 mAh

Most of the jobs would be cut in Denmark, Finland and the UK, as part of plans to reduce operating expenses by 1 billion (886.2 million) between 2010 and 2013, the mobile giant said today.

Earlier this year, CEO Stephen Elop said the company was in dire need of saving, having seen profits decline and competitors like Google's Android and Apple's iPhone eat away at its market share.

Nokia said it could not go into further detail on how many jobs would go in the UK, or elsewhere, but the manufacturer confirmed discussions started today with employee representatives about reductions.

"At Nokia, we have new clarity around our path forward, which is focused on our leadership across smart devices, mobile phones and future disruptions," Elop said today.

"However, with this new focus, we also will face reductions in our workforce. This is a difficult reality, and we are working closely with our employees and partners to identify long-term re-employment programmes for the talented people of Nokia."

Elop said those facing the chop will be provided with a range of options, including individual re-employment support, re-training and help on making investments "to promote innovation."

Employees will be let go in a phased manner through to the end of 2012, said Nokia, yet during this time the provider will ramp up its work on developing Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

Symbian switcharoo

Around 3,000 Nokia employees will be shipped over to Accenture, which has taken control of Symbian software activities.

Accenture will provide Symbian-based software development and support services as part of the outsourcing agreement, which is expected to close in mid-2011.

Employees from the UK, China, Finland, India and the US will make the move across and initially work on Symbian, although Accenture and Nokia indicated these staff members will be moved onto other projects.

In a joint statement, the pair said over time they "will seek opportunities to retrain and redeploy transitioned employees."

"This collaboration demonstrates our ongoing commitment to enhance our Symbian offering and serve our smartphone customers," said Jo Harlow, executive vice president for smart devices at Nokia.

"As we move our primary smartphone platform to Windows Phone, this transition of skilled talent to Accenture shows our commitment to provide our Symbian employees with potential new career opportunities."

Earlier this month, Nokia appeared to end Symbian as an open source platform, giving code access only to Japanese OEMs and the "relatively small community" of developers already working on the operating system.

Love it or loathe it, the Symbian mobile operating system gets our sympathy after being ditched by Nokia for the trendy new kid in town, Windows Phone 7.

However, it seems Nokia didn't want to part on bad terms and this week made a peace offering in the shape of an update.

Along with Symbian Anna, the Finnish manufacturer also released two new handsets to be based on the OS.

It was a sweet attempt to paper over the cracks, but there is no hiding the fact Symbian has taken the backseat to the flashier Microsoft boys.

Browser wars again

It seems the minute one battle is over between the latest releases from Mozilla and Microsoft, we can scarcely draw breath before the next one kicks off.

This week saw both browser giants give some hints towards their next updates of Internet Explorer and Firefox, along with a ramped up release schedule.

Mozilla confirmed Firefox 5 would land in June, whilst Microsoft released a preview version of IE10, both just a month after the previous generation was unleashed.

It makes us tired thinking about even more updates, but then Google's six week Chrome cycle should have prepared us.

PC market going bust?

The Marmite of the technology world award has to go to tablets. However, they seem to have won another accolade this week as the sole destroyer of the PC market.

OK, sole' is probably too strong, but both IDC and Gartner showed PC shipments declining in the first quarter of 2011 and the growth of tablets was cited as a pretty major factor.

We have seen plenty a tablet creeping into our offices and numerous displays all over the tube, but wiping out the home PC? I think we will need to see a few more quarters of decline until we are convinced

The store's catalogue has increased by more than 40,000 apps, most of which are based on the manufacturer's recent Symbian devices, such as the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01 and Nokia E7.

Tero Ojanpera, executive vice president of services and developer experience at the firm, was satisfied by the growth in his company's app store.

"This momentum continues to demonstrate consumers' appetite for Nokia's global and locally relevant apps, and will help us plan the future apps store experience for improved and new Symbian devices, as well as Nokia smartphones based on the planned collaborative opportunities with Microsoft," he said.

Ojanpera also claimed it was a great opportunity for developers to reach consumers worldwide, given the rapid growth of the Ovi store and the up to 150 million Symbian devices Nokia plans to ship in the coming years.

The growth was made public after Nokia announced an update for Symbian entitled Symbian Anna was on its way. It also confirmed two new Symbian-based handsets, despite the operating system being pushed out by Windows Phone 7.

The company has also appointed Conor Pierce as its new UK managing director.

The Finnish manufacturer confirmed the update known as Symbian Anna on its blog, along with two new smartphones the Nokia E6 and the Nokia X7.

After reiterating its plans to sell 150 million devices based on the mobile OS in the coming years, Nokia listed a raft of new features included in Symbian Anna, such as fresh icons, split screen for typing, virtual portrait QWERTY and a revamped version of Ovi Maps.

It will ship on the new phones but will be available as an update to the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6 and Nokia E7 soon.

Handsets unveiled

The Nokia E6 is a full QWERTY device with the appearance of a BlackBerry. With a 2.4 inch screen and 640 x 480 resolution, it is hardly a top of the range device, but added features such as an eight mega-pixel camera and 8GB mass storage memory might entice users.

The Nokia X7 is a more modern looking touchscreen stainless steel device, which has already been confirmed to be sold on 3 in the UK. Along with its four inch OLED ClearBlack display, it features an eight mega-pixel camera, HD video recording capabilities and a 680MHz CPU.

Loyal to Symbian?

Although Nokia has made a song and dance about its new releases and software update today, the company has its focus elsewhere.

Back in February, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft to make Windows Phone 7 the primary software on its devices.

Although handsets have yet to be launched, rumours are rife about what is on the way and how much money both Microsoft and Nokia stand to make from the deal.

Today's announcements might just be Symbian's last hoorah with its previous backer.

Entitled not open source, just open for business,' the statement said Symbian was being delivered in a different way, giving access to Japanese OEMs and the "relatively small community" of developers already working with the operating system. However, the source code would be kept locked away from anyone else.

"Through these pages we are releasing source code to these collaborators, but are not maintaining Symbian as an open source development project," the blog read.

Nokia said it was working through a backlog of applications to register as a licensee for the code but it is "processing continuously."

The blog has received a number of responses from disappointed Symbian fans, including one taking the ultimate dig at the company saying: "Now I like Android more."

A post from an anonymous user added: "I was excited about Symbian going open source. It had a name of a good pedigree and such. I even bought a Symbian phone in hopes of being able to roll my own OS image and tinkering with it."

"Now you're playing the wooly words game again. Semantics shemantics. Your "open" is a lie. You aren't an enabler. You can't be trusted to keep your own promises. You aren't even an innovator any longer."

This is the latest knock back from Nokia for the Symbian platform in a relatively short space of time.

Back in February, the manufacturer announced it would be putting the mobile OS on the backburner and making Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 its primary platform.

Stephen Elop, chief executive of Nokia and previous corporate bigwig at Microsoft, said Symbian would become a "franchise platform" and the company still hoped to sell 150 million devices based on the OS in the coming years.

The analyst firm claimed Google's mobile operating system would run on half of all smartphones by the end of 2012. If Gartner's predictions for sales also prove to be correct, this could equate to more than 300 million handsets.

"As vendors delivering Android-based devices continue to fight for market share, price will decrease to further benefit consumers," said Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

"Android's position at the high end of the market will remain strong, but its greatest volume opportunity in the longer term will be in the mid to low-cost smartphones, above all in emerging markets."

This isn't just good news for Google though, as the report claimed all open operating systems would reap the benefits over the coming years.

It claimed open software would be on 26 per cent of mobiles shipped this year and reach 47 per cent by 2015 translating to over one billion devices.

"By 2015, 67 per cent of all open OS devices will have an average selling price of $300 [184] or below, proving that smartphones have been finally truly democratised," added Cozza.

But where there are winners, there have to be losers too and the biggest fall from grace will happen to Symbian, if Gartner predictions are to be believed.

In 2010, the OS held 37.6 per cent market share. However, Gartner predicted this would almost halve to 19.2 per cent this year as its previous backer, Nokia, moved over to Windows Phone 7 as its primary software.

Microsoft will be happy to see Gartner predict steady growth for its mobile OS, reaching a market share of 10.8 per cent in 2012.

It seems the glory days of Apple's iOS might soon be over.

Whilst market share was expected to rise again this year up to 19.4 per cent from 15.7 per cent in 2010 the analyst firm predicted the years following will see it fall to 18.9 per cent in 2012 and 17.2 per cent in 2015.

These figures will still see Apple retain the second spot for most popular mobile OS though.

Earlier this week, a survey conducted by YouGov showed Android was already the most popular OS in the UK, accounting for 28 per cent of all mobile use.

The Trojans were used in attacks in Poland, targeting customers of ING Bank, Polish security consultant and blogger Piotr Konieczny reported.

Both versions attempted to steal data from victims' smartphones and resemble older variants of the malware.

Targets were asked to enter their mobile phone number and smartphone model for a purported certificate update'.

A component was then installed on victims' smartphones, which intercepted text messages and relayed them to another mobile number.

Both Zeus variants reported back to a British command and control mobile phone number once they successfully infiltrated a device.

"If users would have downloaded and installed this malicious file, their incoming SMS messages (with mTAN authentication codes also) would have been resent silently to a predefined cell phone number," explained Denis Maslennikov, a malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

He said the Trojans show how cyber criminals continue to target new platforms and remain determined in their attempts to acquire user data from an array of devices.

Benjamin Boulnois, manager of DigitalPersona for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said mobile devices need better security software to keep up with new threats.

"There's clearly an urgent need for stronger software on mobile devices that can not only recognise Trojans themselves, but can also prevent users from unwittingly accessing fraudulent bank websites, which is often how devices become infected," Boulnois said.

"What's more, security software must be able to detect any anomalies in how accounts are being accessed - for example if someone is logging in from a different device or location, or at different times, compared to normal."

Foreign Secretary William Hague recently revealed the UK Government had been targeted by a Zeus Trojan.

At the first press conference of Mobile World Congress 2011 (MWC), Nokia chief executive (CEO) Stephen Elop took to the stage to give more details on his company's tie up with Microsoft.

However, the more exciting news came from the new senior vice president (SVP) of smart devices, Jo Harlow, who confirmed the first handset would be launched in 2011.

"We have had teams working together to solidify the timing of the first Windows Phone product," she said, "but my boss has told me that he would be much happier if that was in 2011 Boss, I aim to please."

Harlow also confirmed the leaked photos from earlier in the week were genuine devices engineers had been working on and showed an extra photo to get tongues wagging.

The newly appointed SVP had some comfort for Symbian fans too. She said a "significant short term investment" would be made into the platform in the coming months, with a revamp of the user interface and improvements in graphics being made available on new devices and through software updates.

Elop tried to allay fears for MeeGo fans as well, claiming he had been in regular contact with Intel whilst working out the deal with Microsoft. He also confirmed he would be meeting Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, on Tuesday to discuss the operating system strategy going forward.

Focusing on the new Microsoft partnership, Elop continued to refer to the deal as creating a "three horse race" between Nokia, Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS. However, IT PRO asked the CEO if he was missing one out in the form of BlackBerry, especially for enterprise customers.

He shrugged the question off, however, saying with the likes of the Nokia C3 "the biggest selling block QWERTY device" according to Elop Nokia had the business market covered.

Tivoli Endpoint Manager uses the technology acquired when IBM bought BigFix, bringing endpoint and security management onto one platform.

Administrators will be able to use this one solution to keep an eye on both physical and virtual endpoints.

The software is capable of identifying which devices are not in compliance with corporate IT policies and will recommend fixes and updates for up to 500,000 machines in minutes.

"From electrical grids to mobile devices, transportation systems and buildings, the proliferation of these intelligent systems is creating new security loopholes that businesses need to address," said Steve Robinson, general manager at IBM Security Solutions.

"On today's smarter planet, everything is an endpoint, and must be managed and secured like any other critical business asset."

IBM has also teamed up with partner Juniper Networks on producing a security solution for the top mobile platforms, including Apple iOS, Android, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7 and Symbian.

The service uses policy based enforcement to ensure only authorised personnel can access corporate data.

Elsewhere, Big Blue announced further investment into research and development projects based around security.

IBM developers are looking at creating a single management platform to manage any mobile device on a business network, allowing administrators to remotely set policies, monitor employee devices and wipe data.

The tech giant said it was also exploring technology to secure smart meters.

The analyst's report claimed 100.9 million smartphones were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010, which equated to a rise of 87.2 per cent year on year.

IDC also claimed overall smartphone shipments for the whole 12 months hit an astounding 302.6 million, translating to a 74.4 per cent rise when compared to 2009.

Google felt a lot of the benefits, claimed Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's mobile phone technology and trends team, whilst Symbian suffered.

"Android continues to gain by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market," he said. "It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors' smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian."

"Although Symbian has the backing of market leader Nokia, Android has multiple vendors, including HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola, Samsung and a growing list of companies deploying Android on their devices."

However, all was not lost for Symbian as the launch of Symbian^3 helped Nokia shift five million handsets.

The introduction of Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft also helped the overall smartphone market, with over 1.5 million handsets shipped in the quarter.

"Now, with the holiday quarter over, both platforms will need to sustain this initial growth in the quarters to come," added Llamas.

But IDC doesn't seem to concerned about the upcoming months and expected 2011 to be even more successful, despite a change in handset tactics.

Llamas concluded: "The high-end of the market has been important to help grow the smartphone market in recent years. IDC expects vendors to provide more mid-range and low-end smartphones at lower prices to reach the mass market."

"In the same manner, even high-end devices will become available at lower prices. This will result in greater competition and more selection for users."

This represented the most significant jump in comparison to other platforms, claimed mobile security specialists AdaptiveMobile.

Reported exploits targeting the iPhone fell, as did new Symbian malware, which dropped by 11 per cent.

However, the overall number of mobile malware infections reported went up 33 per cent, again compared with 2009 figures.

"With the increasing pervasiveness of smartphone devices, 2010 has undoubtedly been the year that fraudsters have truly turned their attention to mobile platforms," said Gareth Maclachlan, chief operating officer at AdaptiveMobile.

"The vast majority of consumers are acutely aware of the threats that PC-based viruses, spam messages and phishing emails pose, but many are still unaware of the risks associated with their mobile devices."

A EU issue

The threat to smartphones is also being highlighted by European officials.

The EU's cyber protection body, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), recently released a report on mobile security, urging people to consider the rising threat.

In the report, ENISA outlined a number of key dangers related to smartphone security, including accidental data loss and data theft through malicious apps.

It also pointed to "diallerware" - malicious software that steals money via unauthorised phone calls.

"Given the growing importance of smartphones for EU businesses, governments and citizens, we consider it essential to assess their security and privacy implications," said Dr Udo Helmbrecht, executive director of ENISA.

"Smartphones are a goldmine of sensitive and personal information it's vital to understand how to maintain our control over this data," added Dr Giles Hogben, co-author of the report.

The announcement will enable Visual Basic developers to submit Silverlight applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Last week, Microsoft revealed there were nearly 3,000 apps and games in Windows Marketplace and 15,000 developers were creating apps for the platform.

However, last week also saw the release of a jailbreaking app for Windows phones called ChevronWP7, which could allow users to create their own apps.

The ChevronWP7 developers have been quick to state, however, they do not condone piracy.

"Our intention is to enable and create WP7 homebrew applications that cannot be submitted to the Marketplace in the first place," the developers said in a blog.

Meanwhile, e-retailer Mobilesplease.co.uk reported this week Windows Phone 7 phones made up just under two per cent of its overall sales.

Symbian 3 handsets were found to have outsold Windows 7 Phones by three to one from the site.

"The 800,000 people who visit these mobile channels a month are enough to show that the initial public reaction to Windows Phone 7 is luke warm at best," a blog from the company read.

In more positive news, there have been reports Microsoft is to release a massive update for its new mobile OS in January, with some suggesting copy and paste features along with multi-tasking capabilities will be included.

Windows Phone 7 was launched in the UK in October, having initially announced it in February at Mobile World Congress.

In doing so, it will be taking the OS source code offline, although it will be made available "in some form," the Symbian Foundation said.

Whatever form it comes in, be it via USB or DVD, developers who want to access the source code will have to put in a request and wait until 31 January 2011 onwards before they will receive anything.

They may also have to pay a charge for media and shipping.

Last month, Symbian said the shift to software licensing would lead to some members of the team losing their jobs, while operations would be reduced.

Nokia today reiterated its backing for the Symbian platform, amidst talk of the operating system losing popularity.

When asked whether the Finnish mobile manufacturer would ever move away from Symbian, Ilari Nurmi, vice president for business smartphones at Nokia, stressed the firm will not look elsewhere for another operating system.

"Symbian is definitely serving us very, very well," Nurmi told IT PRO at a meeting this morning.

"The latest Symbian smartphones that have the new Symbian experience, I think we are very happy with these devices."

As for Meego, Nurmi had little to say on its development at Nokia.

"We currently have no news related to Meego. In Nokia World in September we said we will concentrate on the things that we have going out now," he added.

Whilst Meego seems to be a no-go for now, and the various changes the Finnish firm has seen this year including a new chief executive (CEO) in the form of Stephen Elop, Nurmi still felt excited about Nokia's future.

"I think we are definitely living in exciting times," Nurmi added.

"We are very happy with the new CEO."

Recent research from GfK, meanwhile, has shown Nokia Symbian users are not particularly loyal, with 24 per cent of owners surveyed saying they would not necessarily stick with the manufacturer.

Apple users were the most loyal at 59 per cent, while RIM had 35 per cent loyalty and Google Android 28 per cent. Microsoft had the lowest with 21 per cent.

It announced today it would be leaving its non-profit organisation tag behind and become a "legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property," including the Symbian trademark itself.

As a result of the change in direction, the Symbian Foundation said the first phase would involve cutting staff numbers and reducing operations. However, no numbers were given and only the promise they would be revealed at a later date.

"The founding board members took a bold strategic step in setting up the foundation, which was absolutely the right decision at the time," said Tim Holbrow, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

"There has since been a seismic change in the mobile market but also more generally in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members. The result of this is that the current governance structure for the Symbian platform the foundation is no longer appropriate."

Spokespeople were keen to point out the Symbian platform itself was not dead in the water and claimed it still had the support of major manufacturers, as well as managing to ship over 400 million devices so far this year.

"Nokia remains committed to Symbian as the most used smartphone platform around the world," said Jo Harlow, senior vice president of smartphones at the Finish mobile manufacturer.

"The Nokia N8 generated the highest online pre-orders we've ever experienced and we have a family of Symbian^3 smartphones available now. Nokia expects to sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 smartphones."

Nokia will now take on the responsibility of developing the operating system.

The Cupertino company achieved a record 18 per cent market share, as Nokia's share dropped from 37.8 per cent in the third quarter of 2009 to 34.4 per cent in the same period this year.

This was despite Nokia shipping a record number of smartphones with more 26 million units during the period.

The Finnish company has been experiencing some turbulence lately and yesterday announced it will let 1,800 workers go in the coming months.

RIM's market share, meanwhile, fell from 19.6 per cent to 16.1 per cent and, according to Strategy Analytics, the manufacturer is suffering due to its limited presence in the touchscreen market.

Meanwhile, worldwide smartphone shipments grew 78 per cent to reach a record 77 million units in the third quarter of 2010.

However, Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics, had some words of warning for the expanding market.

"The surging volumes are placing heavy demands on component suppliers and moderate shortages of select components are emerging ahead of the Q4 holiday season," Mawston added.

A Gartner report released this week suggested Symbian's market share was going to be eroded over the coming four years by both Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

The analyst firm also predicted the mobility market will be worth more than $1 trillion (638 billion) a year by 2014.

Revenue will derive from mobile voice and data, as well as context, advertising, application and service sales, among other areas, the analyst firm said.

In the future, cloud services will also become an even bigger area of growth in the mobility sector, Gartner claimed.

"Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterised by cloud services and streaming media," explained Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

"Applications will survive, but often as a component of a more complex end-to-end experience involving the cloud."

In terms of device developments, smartphones and laptops will remain dominant in the enterprise segment, even though tablets and e-book readers will become more prominent within businesses, according to the analyst body.

It also predicted Symbian would continue to have its market share eaten into by both Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

"As the platform wars rage, a variety of new tools are becoming platforms' in the sense that they provide a user experience and framework for delivering applications," Jones added.

"These include the mobile web, where HTML5 will be very influential, OS independent platforms' such as Flash, and scriptable tools such as augmented reality browsers and mapping systems. In the long term, some will be absorbed into the OS or browser."

Context services will become increasingly important as phone providers look to offer the best services based around where users are and what they are interested in, Gartner said.

"Many mobile business systems will exploit contextual cloud services hosted by others. It will also be a major commercial battleground with powerful vendors such as Nokia, Google, and Apple striving to own the consumer's context," Jones added.

"Context will also be bound up with social relationships and social networks, illustrated today by services such as location-tagged posts to Facebook and Twitter."

Lee M Williams, who was executive director for two years, has not released his own statement but instead given the task to Steve Warner, head of HR at Symbian, to offer a vague account of his reasoning.

"The Symbian Foundation is today announcing that Lee M Williams has stepped down from his position as executive director for personal reasons," said Warner. "We thank Lee for his work over the past two years and wish him all the best in his future ventures."

Williams came to the foundation after heading up Nokia's S60 organisation. Before this he was the head of product development and delivery at Palm.

His resignation has been accepted with immediate effect and his post will be taken over by current chief financial officer (CFO) Tim Holbrow by decision of the board of directors. "We congratulate Tim and welcome him to his new role," added Warner.

In an email sent out to its developers, and in a posting on its developer forums, the Korean mobile phone giant announced that it will no longer support developers who wish to develop applications for its Symbian phones.

This is hardly a surprising move given Samsung's success with Android-powered smartphones, such as the Galaxy S, the development of its own in-house Bada operating system and the recent announcement that Samsung would produce one of the first Windows Phone 7 handsets. It also makes Nokia the last major mobile phone manufacturer still making new phones using the Symbian operating system.

According to Gartner, Symbian still held 41 per cent of the smartphone market share in Q2 2010, with Android and RIM way behind at 17 and 18 per cent respectively.

While all seems good with Nokia's popularity rating in terms of shipments, this is predicted to drop in the future as Android grows in popularity as a mobile platform.

IDC predicted the Symbian market share would drop to 32.9 per cent by 2014, while Android will shoot out in front.

Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's mobile devices technology and trends team told us earlier in the year that "Android is the wild card, deserving close observation for the rest of this year and the years to come."

Not is all rosy within the Nokia corporation either, with two key executives leaving the Finnish company in quick succession and a third announcing he would stay until 2012'.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was the first to leave Nokia. He'll be replaced by Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business division.

In a statement, Nokia justified the replacement of Kallasvuo by announcing it needs to promote a fresher image.

"The time is right to accelerate the company's renewal; to bring in new executive leadership with different skills and strengths in order to drive company success," it said.

Mobile solutions chief Anssi Vanjoki was next to announce he was leaving, although Nokia issued an official statement, emphasising he had resigned rather than been replaced.

The day before Nokia World, Vanjki defended his position, saying in a statement: "I felt the time has come to seek new opportunities in my life At the same time, I am one hundred per cent committed to doing my best for Nokia until my very last working day."

So what is causing so much unrest?

Nokia's user interface has remained pretty constant since the introduction of S60 third edition and it's time for a refresh after the launch of the iPhone and Android, even with the Symbian^3 OS.

Other operating systems are shooting ahead in terms of design and usability, while Nokia's changes have come pretty slowly.

However, things could be changing with Nokia's new Symbian^3 OS, to be followed by Symbian^4 and MeeGo in 2011.

Symbian^3

Symbian^3 was first announced at Mobile World Congress in 2010, along with MeeGo, and is the first fully open source version of the Symbian OS.

Nokia has been using the Symbian platform since 2001 when the Nokia 9210 Communicator was launched, based on Symbian OS 6.0.

Sybain^3 introduces a tweaked UI and a refreshed set of features including multiple home screens, multitouch, TV out (using HDMI), full multitasking, and a speed boost thanks to the graphics engine.

However, all of these features are already available on newer operating systems including Android, Symbian's biggest threat in the smartphone world, and have been for some two years.

The UI of Nokia Symbian^3 phones is a little too similar to previous Nokia Symbian devices, although Nokia decided to do this in order to make it feel familiar to existing users.

Nokia is expecting a lot from Symbian^3 though. In fact, Niklas Savander, executive vice president of markets at the company told the audience at Nokia World 2010's keynote that the company expects to ship 50 million Symbian^3 devices, adding it was a "very conservative prediction" too.

Symbian^4 is expected to be released in the first half of 2011, along with a number of Nokia devices.

Symbian^4's major focus is user experience including a direct UI, and it is this version of Symbian that could provide more success for a company that has a traditionally antiquated operating system.

New features on the Symbian^4 UI include:

Tap indicators to access notification panel

Virtual back button along top toolbar

Integrated drop down menu on every screen

Titlebar and toolbar can be hidden to give more screen space

Long touch unlocks context-specific actions

Bottom toolbar provides access to extra services, such as Ovi Store, Maps and menu

MeeGo

Intel and Nokia announced MeeGo at Mobile World Congress in February 2010 in a joint press conference.

The OS is open source, but based on Linux and merged between Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms.

MeeGo is actually an operating system that can be used across a range of devices, although the first devices will be launched as smartphones by Nokia.

Nokia hasn't revealed much about its devices yet, but the operating system offers a whole range of new features including a flexible UI and speed enhancements.

MeeGo will support multiple chip architectures including ARM and x86, while allowing developers to produce application compatible across multiple platforms using the Qt development environment.

Although MeeGo is another place where Nokia could see success, it's another platform for the manufacturer to create devices for, and detracts from Nokia concentrating on getting Symbian^3 right.

Nokia argues that the reason it decided to develop MeeGo with Intel was to offer an alternative to its customers, although it tried this with Maemo and, after producing one device, the platform was abandoned.

Devices

In another attempt to get people excited about the brand, Nokia has introduced a decent-looking line-up of devices. The first to be released was the Nokia N8 and its spec list is pretty special.

With a 12-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera and onboard video and photo editing, it's clearly designed for multimedia junkies. Vanjoki told the audience at Nokia World that the Nokia N8 has had more pre orders than any other Nokia device.

The Nokia E7 is the most business-centric with a sliding QWERTY keyboard in an ultra-thin shell.

The Nokia N9 has not officially been announced yet, but a Nokia representative close to the situation has said the N9 will be coming out in January.

The Nokia N9 will be the first MeeGo-based device and although few details are known, the N9 does look very similar to the E7, also with a sliding QWERTY keyboard.

Applications

The apps market is somewhere Nokia has not managed to break yet.

The manufacturer current only offers 6,000 applications for users to download and these are limited by which phone you have.

Many developers have had more than 10 million application download and, of late, the Ovi Store has been experiencing two million downloads a day.

Nokia's Ovi Store has failed to take off in the same way with developers as the iPhone and Android stores have, but the store is now getting attention and Nokia has just released the Qt SDK to developers.

Nokia also announced at Nokia World that developers can now offer in-app purchases and the company has made it easier for developers to produce apps by slimming down the Qt code to make it more accessible.

To appeal to more consumers, developers can now charge for their app via subscription, micro transaction or try and buy' so you can download applications on trial before committing to buy them.

To try and drum up interest from networks, Nokia is also working with Orange to offer Ovi applications through its Orange Application Shop.

Nokia's Ovi Store with Orange will be accessible by Orange customers in the UK and France in 2011 and Orange customers will be able to buy applications through their Orange bill.

Nokia is certainly attempting to reinvigorate the brand by introducing new executives (and scrapping old ones), redeveloping its operating systems after a fair while using antiquated platforms and launching premium devices.

However, Android is growing in momentum and that could topple Nokia's power. Until Nokia has proven success with Symbian^3, Symbian^4 and MeeGo, the Finnish company has a very real struggle ahead.

Nokia has designed its E5 smartphone with dual home screens, a feature it hopes will help you achieve this work-life balance. However, the E5 is unlike the iPhone and Android smartphones which have home screens with multiple pages that allow you to organise your apps and widgets to suit you.

The E5 has a single home screen which can be configured with different sets of apps, shortcuts and widgets, as well as different wallpapers so you can tell them apart at a glance. You then switch between them using an on-screen shortcut.

For example, you could configure one screen to provide access to the Wi-Fi sniffer and email notifications when you're working, while the 'home' screen provides shortcuts to Facebook and Twitter updates when you are not.

The Nokia E5 has Wi-Fi, HSDPA. assisted GPS and Bluetooth - features which will appeal to both business and leisure users. A measly 256MB of storage is built in to the handset itself, but a 2GB microSD card is also included.

Most importantly, the keyboard is well constructed which is just as well. Since the screen isn't touch-sensitive, it's what you'll use to control the E5 with. The keys are large and give a satisfying amount of feedback when pressed. The all-important @ key sits to the right of the space bar. There's a shortcut for turning Bluetooth on and off, which will please those who like to have an earpiece in for phone calls or want to use stereo Bluetooth for music or listening to the built in FM radio.

Another useful shortcut is the space bar - press and hold it to turn the camera flash on or off. This allows it to easily double as a flashlight with resorting to an app.

Above the keyboard are the Call and End buttons as well as the two soft keys all of which lie flush with the casing. The long and thin Home and Messaging buttons stand out since they have a more raised profile. A short press on the Messaging button takes you to the main Messaging menu. A long press creates a new SMS message. Pressing the Home button takes you back to the home screen, but a long press activates the application switcher. All of these shortcuts work very well.

What we aren't so happy about is the screen. As already mentioned, it is not touch sensitive. It doesn't rotate as there is no accelerometer, so you are stuck with its landscape format. It is sharp and clear enough, but it only has a meagre resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.

This low resolution combined with its small size of 2.36 inches means it simply isn't large enough for serious web browsing. This is a shame since the browser itself works well, since it's based on the same WebKit rendering engine as Apple's Safari browser and Google's Android Browser.

Partially making up for the lack of a multitouch screen, there are keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out of individual web pages and an overview of a page which lets you manoeuvre a zoom box around so you can choose precisely what you want to focus on. Moving around within a page is done by using the very responsive D-pad which controls a tiny cursor that turns into a pointy finger when you pass it over a link.

You'll have to use these controls a lot to read most web pages due to the small, low resolution screen. A useful workaround to avoid lots of tedious zooming and panning would have been to have text reflow' and reformat so that lines break at the end the screen.

Flash Lite support is present, but this isn't equivalent to the full Flash Player found on PCs and Android 2.2 phones. Although it's enough to play YouTube videos, it's not good enough to play videos from other popular streaming sites, such as BBC iPlayer. This is particularly disappointing, as the iPlayer app available from the Nokia Ovi app store isn't compatible with the E5.

The camera shoots stills at 5 megapixels and has the unusual option of sequence shooting at intervals up to 30 minutes. Image quality is not as good as we'd have liked, with photos lacking in vibrancy and colour reproduction. There is a panorama mode which works automatically as you pan the phone around. It takes a while to process the final image though and it produces ridiculously wide and narrow photos at a resolution of 715 x 7056 pixels. Video shooting is limited to 640 x 480 pixels.

When it comes to social networking integration, the Nokia E5 will pick up info from Facebook relating to contacts already stored on the phone. For each of your contacts, it can download the Facebook profile picture and you can send Facebook messages too. However, you synchronise your contacts in their entirety with either Facebook or GMail. Nokia would rather you use its own Ovi online service to store and manage your contacts.

Alongside the support we'd expect for Microsoft Exchange, the E5 also works with Lotus Notes Traveller and Nokia's own Ovi Mail. The E5 supports up to ten email accounts which should be more than enough. While we are on the subject of Ovi, Ovi Maps is also included which is a good alternative to the Google Maps with Navigation app for Android phones.

With its comfortable keyboard and extensive email support, the Nokia E5 is more of a budget-priced alternative to a BlackBerry than it is to an Android handset or iPhone. In this respect it is a competent if basic business smartphone. However, we're not convinced that Nokia's dual home screens are any more useful than the multipage home screens on an iPhone or Android phone. The E5 would've been more useful as an all-round smartphone, both for business and leisure use, if it had a bigger, higher resolution screen as well as a wider selection of apps and a better quality camera.

Verdict

The Nokia E5 is a keenly priced rival to RIM’s BlackBerry line of smartphones with its responsive qwerty keyboard and support for Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes Traveller. However, it's let down by its small, low resolution screen which makes it unsuited for web browsing.

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G 850, 1900, 2100 Display: 320 x 240 pixels, 2.36 inches OS: S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, Symbian OS v9.3 Camera: Five megapixels GPS: Assisted GPS Processor: not disclosed Bluetooth: v2.0 Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g Dimensions: 115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm Weight: 126g Battery: Li-Ion 1200 mAh

Speaking at the opening of Nokia World, Niklas Savander, executive vice president of markets at the Finnish firm, said this was a "very conservative" prediction as well.

"I'm the head of sales, so I guess I should know. We expect big things," he added.

The newly announced phones include the Nokia E7, C7 and C6 devices, which will line up alongside the N8 to form the new Symbian family of products.

Savander also made a somewhat mocking remark over the Apple Antennagate saga, saying Nokia devices perform "day in, day out, no matter how you hold them."

Developer announcement

Hardware is just part of the story at Nokia World and the manufacturer has also announced improvements to its developer tools to make it easier for people to build apps for the company's phones.

The enhancements have achieved a 70 per cent reduction in the number of lines of code needed when developing for the company's Symbian devices.

Nokia has also claimed to have created the first touch-enabled software development kit in the industry, again designed to offer greater simplicity.

As for the Ovi Store, it has been given a new look to make it quicker to both find and make apps.

"We have made it much simpler, removed obstacles and made it more lucrative for people to build apps for our phones," said Purnima Kochikar, vice president for Forum Nokia.

"We believe that this will convince more developers to build apps for the millions of people, in more than 190 countries, that are using the Ovi Store on their Nokia devices."

The announcements come less than a week after Apple made some changes to its own developer tools, relaxing them to open the door for Adobe Flash.

Apple also published its App Store Review Guidelines to specify how apps submissions are reviewed for App Store inclusion.

Combined, Google's and Nokia's mobile operating systems will make up 59.8 per cent of all mobile OS sales by that time, Gartner claimed.

Open-source platforms will dominate over 60 per cent of the market for smartphones by 2014, while growth of propriety platforms, like the Apple iOS and Research In Motion's OS will be sub-market average.

Single-source systems like Apple's, however, will increase in unit terms.

"Launches of updated operating systems such as Apple iOS 4, BlackBerry OS 6, Symbian 3 and Symbian 4, and Windows Phone 7 - will help maintain strong growth in smartphones in 2010 and 2011 and spur innovation," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"However, we believe that market share in the OS space will consolidate around a few key OS providers that have the most support from CSPs [communication service providers] and developers and strong brand awareness with consumer and enterprise customers."

Cozza suggested both CSPs and manufacturers alike will have to review platform strategies and "balance the need to pursue platforms with the highest current demand against the need to maintain differentiation with unique devices."

The Gartner predictions come hot on the heels of an IDC report that suggested Google's mobile OS will grow its market share from 16.3 per cent to 24.6 per cent by 2014.

This would put Android in second behind Symbian, as indicated in Gartner's suggestions.

Dedicated Nokia fans can get hold of the device even sooner if they buy it from the company's online shop for 429 SIM free. This will be an option from the last week of September, with pre-order available now.

Otherwise customers can get the handset on contract from 35 per month from Carphone Warehouse, O2, Orange, Phones4u, T-Mobile, Tesco, 3, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone from the beginning of next month.

The N8 will be Nokia's first handset with the new Symbian^3 mobile operating system. The company hopes the phone will help it regain control over the mobile space as market share has continued to slide in favour of the likes of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android devices.

For a first look review of the device, click here.

IDC expects 269.6 million smartphones to be shipped over 2010 10 per cent more than the analyst's earlier predictions compared to 173.5 million in 2009.

"The smartphone is the catalyst behind the rebound in the worldwide mobile phone market this year," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

"Additional product introductions and an expected flurry of smartphone buying activity in the second half of the year will push the market well above previous expectations."

Nokia's Symbian mobile operating system (OS) has dominated the market this year with a 40.1 per cent share, but IDC predicted this would drop to 32.9 per cent by 2014, with one particular mobile OS stealing the percentage points.

"Android is the wild card, deserving close observation for the rest of this year and the years to come," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team.

"Phone vendors have been drawn to Android because it allows them to present their own approach to what a smartphone experience can be. In addition, users have quickly warmed to Android, comparing it to iOS due to its ease of use and a growing mobile application storefront."

With the likes of HTC and Motorola getting on board with the mobile OS, and devices from vendors such as Dell, Kyocera, LG and Samsung on their way, IDC claimed the Google mobile OS will grow its market share from 16.3 per cent to 24.6 per cent by 2014.

Although still behind Symbian, it would mean Android would top BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile and even Apple's iOS market shares.

"Windows Mobile is expected to regain some of the share it has lost over the past two years and BlackBerry's share will remain relatively constant while that of iOS will decline gradually," concluded IDC.

Some 60 million smartphone units were shipped in the three months to June, according to Strategy Analytics, a 43 per cent increase on 2009 levels. Smartphones now account for nearly one in every five mobile phones sold worldwide.

Nokia managed to increase its market dominance despite its announcement yesterday of a sharp drop in profits, while as expected Apple's widely publicised signal strength issue on the iPhone 4 saw its own share of the market recede somewhat.

Strategy Analytics pinpointed operator subsidies, competition between vendors and an increasing number of low-cost smartphones built on Android and Symbian operating systems, as the key drivers behind the increase.

In Nokia's case, subsidies and heavy promotion seem to have played an especially big part in boosting sales. Reversing an earlier slide that saw it slip to 38.8 per cent share at the end of March, the Finnish handset maker has now pushed back past the 40 per cent barrier.

Apple, meanwhile, saw its market share slide to 14.1 per cent from the previous quarter's 15.9 per cent the inevitable result of the adverse publicity of its month-long public relations woes over reception problems on the new iPhone. It remains up on the 12.5 per cent share it held at the equivalent point last year, however.

"The Apple 'antenna-gate' saga highlights two key issues facing the global smartphone industry," Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston wrote. "First, the risk of device failure for all vendors will continue to rise as smartphones become more complex to design. And second, smartphone vendors and operators can differentiate their brands by offering good after-sales service when things go wrong."

Last week Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the company will be supplying new iPhones with free rubber bumpers, which solve the reception problem, and would refund anyone who had already invested in one. However, this only came after a month of playing down the problem and advising customers to buy a bumper themselves.

RIM and its BlackBerry brand remained in second place behind Nokia, with its market share slipping slightly to 18.8 per cent, a drop of 0.3 per cent.

Strategy Analytics' Mawston warned that with levels of competition now matching levels of growth in the smartphone market, it was going to become more and more difficult for even established industry giants to make any significant inroads.

"The global smartphone industry is growing volume, but the industry's value is beginning to feel the effects of intensifying competition," Mawston wrote.

"Dozens of vendors from the telecoms, PC and consumer electronics industries are piling into the market and driving down prices. Even established brands such as Nokia, RIM, and Apple are finding it increasingly hard to raise prices and profits in the face of such fierce competition."

Variations in tariffs, contract length and even geography, brought about contrasts in the way mobile phones are purchased, but smartphones like the iPhone have challenged the norm for users on the prowl for a new mobile.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president of mobile devices at Gartner, said a greater range of subsidies from UK providers allows consumers to choose devices with desired features and then pick that device from the provider with the best deal, a contrast to in the US.

"In the US, it's always been about the provider and the data and voice plan that best fitted your needs," Milanesi told IT PRO. "Then, you would get whatever phone the provider would put on that package."

This is evident in the different ways mobile websites show their content. The UK site Know Your Mobile displays handsets upfront whereas its sister US site, Know Your Cell, lists carriers and then shows products to consumers.

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester, geographical scale was the one significant difference between the UK and US, impacting the level of coverage on which mobile phone users rely a matter that is still a challenge to the US.

Contract lengths also vary between the two countries, with two thirds of UK consumers on prepay phones and the majority of US mobile consumers on long-term contracts.

Different technology

Market differences are also a result of varying technologies used by UK and US providers, according to Fogg.

UK mobile users have a much easier time switching SIM cards between phones than they would in the US because UK carriers use essentially the same technology on the same frequencies, he added.

"Any phone can work on any network, unless it has been locked to a network, but that lock can be undone very easily," Fogg told IT PRO. "That means if consumers want to switch networks, it's relatively easy for them to do so."

However, US companies have a mix of technology, with AT&T and T-Mobile using SIM cards with CDMA technology similar to UK carriers and Sprint and Verizon use GSM.

iPhone in the market

This is why Apple's iPhone is currently exclusive to AT&T in the US, because Apple would have to make a separate handset for companies like Verizon or Sprint, Fogg added.

As for the iPhone, Fogg said it is having a major impact on both UK and US carriers, causing them to look into how they price data, avoid congestion and manage their mobile networks.

"The iPhone is actually, if anything, more of a unifying force in terms of the experience of carriers on either side of the Atlantic," he said." The experience is more similar than it is different. "

Both the lead carriers for the iPhone the US, AT&T, and in the UK, O2, have both reported congestion in network quality problems.

Future of subsidising

As for the US, historically subsidy levels have been lower than in Europe, but with the shift to higher end devices, subsidy level has increased closer to the European model.

Milanesi said it would be interesting to see changes in subsidy levels in Europe, like what was seen with the iPad. In this case nonsubsidised hardware was sold at a fairly high cost but consumers still purchased it as there wasn't a two year contract or high monthly plan tied to it.

She said when operators in other countries cut the level of subsidy, sales dropped in the short term, but then picked up again and sales went back to normal.

"That would allow carriers to lower their cost and may be a truer marker of who really the consumers are going after as far as brand, and who they like, rather than unnecessarily going with a brand that gets the highest subsidy from the carrier," Milanesi added.

Mobile phone innovation

Rob Bamforth, principal communications analyst at Quocirca, said the market is headed not only toward devices, but also toward applications.

"After all, most people talk about having an Android device, not a Samsung Android device," Bamforth told IT PRO. "That's because that's an app platform."

He said those involved in the market are trying to capture and understand the mobile application market and development stores.

This could ultimately weaken the carrier and device brand, he added.

"Despite the strength of the brands, I think people are typically looking to the devices," Bamforth added. "The iPhone reinforces that and the counter-marketing that's going on from the other manufacturers is also reinforcing that."

Fogg said, specifically in the smartphone area and in the arrival of mobile internet, North American companies RIM with the BlackBerry, Google with the Android and Apple with the iPhone have been the most innovative.

"Those three firms have really driven the smartphone market for the past two or three years," he said.

European handset makers like Nokia and the smartphone platform Symbian have been on the back end, fighting against the new wave of innovation coming from North America, he added.

As for the iPhone, Milanesi said the difference occurring in the UK, US and beyond is that it has generated an attention to user interfaces and intuitiveness.

"This is what Apple has done to the industry, moving away basically from focusing just on the hardware features and looking at the overall experience that a high end device should be able to deliver," Milanesi concluded.

Pointing to soon-to-be-released data showing the rate of decline in Symbian's market share is in fact accelerating, Jones argues on the Gartner blog that Symbian simply doesn't match the user experience offered by the increasingly popular Android and iPhone OS 4.0, and suggests little in the latest Symbian^3 update as seen in the new Nokia N8 is likely to change that.

This despite the Symbian Foundation having made the operating system's code open source in February in a bid to spur its popularity with developers and handset makers.

"The main reason Symbian is losing share is the user experience, which isn't competitive with Apple or Android. Based on the early previews I've seen Symbian^3 looks to have polished a few of the rough edges, but doesn't fix the problem."

The bedrock of Symbian's majority market share comes from so-called "dumb phones", which sell high volumes at the lower end of the market because of their simplicity and affordability.

However, the increasing market shift to app-supported smartphones such as those running Google's Android and Apple's iPhone OS is leaving Symbian with an increasingly narrow wedge, one that is now comfortably smaller than 50 per cent worldwide and shrinking all the time.

Even long-standing mainstay Nokia, which bought the platform in 2008 and set up the Symbian Foundation, has chosen to subtly shift priorities towards MeeGo, the Linux-based OS it has developed alongside Intel.

Despite that, Jones claims the Symbian Foundation appears to be completely unconcerned, and with "the weak UI threatening Symbian's very survival", warns that the next Symbian^4 release may be the last if this doesn't change.

"I just looked on the Foundation website and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases," Jones revealed. "What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn't matter. Forget elegant architecture, forget better multitasking, forget Chinese developers, forget release schedules that don't deliver Symbian^4 devices with a new user experience until 2011.

"People will never use the features if they don't buy the phone. The situation is now serious enough that any developer who isn't working on something directly related to a new UI is wasting their time. The Symbian^4 UI is a 'bet the platform' project. For any organisation to be in a situation where its survival depends on one project is very dangerous, especially when their track record in the area isn't outstanding.

"I think the Symbian Foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the Android iceberg ahead."

Mobile security firm NetQin discovered that botnets using popular topics such as the World Cup to spread have been initiated to trick users of the Symbian S60 third and fifth generation operating systems.

Once on a device, the botnets will either send messages to all contacts in the user's address book directly, or to random phone numbers by connecting to a server.

These messages contain URLs linking to malicious websites and the viruses will also delete sent messages from the outbox and SMS log.

"So, to make the long story short, these new botnet viruses have started causing trouble on mobile devices. Our team at NetQin has managed to detect them and we're getting together with operators to try and put a stop to them," a blog post from NetQin read.

"Make sure you update your virus database to be protected from the new botnet generation of viruses," it advised.

At the time of publication, the Symbian Foundation had not responded to a request for more information on whether it had come across the botnets and if it was helping prevent such attacks.

Read on to look at our report on the mobile security threat.

A similar early build of the operating system, which is built on the foundations of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin platforms, appeared for netbook developers last month, with the smartphone version promised by the end of June a promise Nokia and Intel managed to keep... just.

Alongside the MeeGo Core OS with middleware components, the release also includes MeeGo APIs, a reference user interface and a selection of applications that cover basic functions: a status bar, lock screen, application launcher, on-screen keyboard, phone dialler, short message service client, browser, contacts application and photo viewer.

The build is compatible with Intel Atom-based devices, as well as Nokia's N900 smartphone the only Nokia handset that appeared running the final build of Maemo before it was incorporated into the MeeGo project.

In a blog post to mark the release of the preview build, MeeGo Technical Steering Group members Valtteri Halla and Imad Sousou said the OS' arrival cemented Nokia and Intel's relationship on the project.

"This milestone marks the completion of the merger of Moblin and Maemo as major architecture decisions and technical selections have been determined," the post wrote.

MeeGo is crucial to Nokia's hopes of regaining a foothold in the high-end smartphone market. After the successful N95 and N96, the Finnish phone maker's flagship N-series line has increasingly struggled to compete against the likes of the Apple iPhone and high-powered Android devices from the likes of HTC.

At the end of last year, Nokia announced that the Symbian OS that previously was to be found on its entire range of mobile phones would in future be restricted solely to its mass-market "feature phones", while the N-series would run the newer, more powerful Maemo OS as seen in the N900.

Maemo may not have disappeared from the scene but MeeGo now holds the key to its smartphone fortunes. Nokia confirmed as much recently when it said the newly launched Nokia N8 would be the last Symbian-based N-series phone.

The first final version of MeeGo is due to be released around October, with actual handsets running the platform set to arrive shortly thereafter.

The pre-release build of the new operating system can be downloaded directly from the MeeGo website, which also has screenshots and video clips of the OS in action.

The N8 is set to take its place at the head of Nokia's lineup in late August running Symbian^3, but from that point on Symbian will be restricted to the firm's cheaper devices.

"Going forward, N-series devices will be based on MeeGo" a Nokia spokesman told Reuters.

This largely just confirms what Nokia has already been saying for some time back in November the company announced a dual-OS strategy that would see Symbian appearing on entry-level smartphones and feature phones such as the X, C and E-series and the more powerful Maemo, as seen on the Nokia N900, used in N-series handsets.

Since then, of course, Maemo has been incorporated into MeeGo the platform developed jointly with Intel but otherwise not much has changed.

One significant aspect about today's announcement is that it seriously diminishes the N8's appeal before it even appears on the market, as N8 owners will find themselves cut off from apps and services developed for MeeGo N-series devices.

And given Nokia's vision for Symbian specifically as an everyman OS aimed at lower-end devices, apps for the platform are unlikely to be a match for those on MeeGo, never mind the likes of iOS 4 and Android.

Earlier this week, it emerged that the Nokia N8 smartphone, set to be released in the third quarter of this year, is

The Symbian platform, acquired by Nokia in 2008, was moved fully open source in February and S^3 is the first OS release since this transition.

However, those eager to get their hands on the N8 will have to wait until the third quarter of 2010 when the smartphone will hit the market at an estimated price of 370 (320).

The new OS offers Nokia N8 users HDMI support, allowing them to plug their phone into a TV and watch high-definition video content at 1080p resolution. The homescreen, meanwhile, supports numerous pages of widgets, which users can switch between with a simple flick gesture.

For improved efficiency with memory management, a Writeable Data Paging feature enables applications to run simultaneously for improved multi-tasking abilities.

The new Skype for Symbian software is available immediately for free from Nokia's Ovi Store and has an addressable base of some 200 million smartphones based on the platform.

Skype made its first major leap into mobile phones in mid February, striking a deal with the largest US mobile carrier Verizon Wireless.

"Symbian enables us to bring smartphones to more and more people and ensures scale for our solutions and compelling services, such as Skype," said Jo Harlow, senior vice president of Nokia's smartphones arm, in a statement.

"We're seeing around 1.5 million downloads a day on Ovi Store now and believe that the Skype client for Nokia smartphones will have wide appeal to Symbian users."

Skype's free calls on computers have become an internet phenomenon since start in 2003 and it has some 520 million registered users around the globe. But so far it has made little progress in wireless, as most telecoms operators have seen it as a risk to their core business of voice calls.

"With Skype for Nokia smartphones, more than 200 million smartphone users worldwide will be able to take the Skype features they love with them on the move," added Russ Shaw, general manager of mobile at Skype, in a statement.

"Alongside Skype's relationships with operators and handset manufacturers worldwide, making Skype available direct to consumers will help millions of users keep in contact with the people that are important to them without worrying about the cost, distance or whether they are away from a computer."

Additional reporting by Maggie Holland, IT PRO

After the success experienced by the previous-generation N95 and N96, Nokia had high hopes for the N97 when it launched last summer, especially as it was Nokia's first touchscreen N-series handset.

However, Anssi Vanjoki, the company's executive vice president of markets, has conceded that the end result left a lot to be desired. In a video interview with All About Symbian, Vanjoki said while the N97 was a success in terms of sales, "it has been a tremendous disappointment in terms of the experience quality for the consumers".

Vanjoki admitted that Nokia hadn't expected such a negative reaction. And while the N97's performance was improved significantly by the release of version 20 and 21 of the N97 firmware, by then the damage had largely been done. "It has been an unbelievable cycle of things for us," Vanjoki said, "that has taken far too long to repair and mitigate".

Delays seem to have been the N97's nemesis almost since its existence first came to light. It was first announced in December 2008, with Nokia proudly proclaiming its touch screen interface as a significant step forward for its Symbian operating system.

But despite making fleeting appearances at trade events and being the subject of much speculation in the first half of 2009, it was June before the N97 was finally launched, by which time the Symbian^1 OS foundation was already showing its age.

"We stretched for too long, something which should not have been stretched," Vanjoki admitted.

He did, however, insist that Nokia had learned from the experience, and promised that the significant new Symbian^3 platform which has switched to an open source model would be much better: "we have taken the learnings and when Symbian^3 comes out you can rest assured it will be perfect," he said.