Smartphones market finally recovers from crisis

The Digitimes analytical resource has informed that smartphones market exceeded level of pre-crisis period (2007) for the first time in the first quarter of 2010. During the 1Q 55.2 millions of smartphones were sold, and market growth amounted to 67% (compared to the first quarter of 2009).

Nokia becomes a leader on the market; it shipped 21.4 millions of smartphones and considerably strengthened its position in all the regions, particularly in South America. It is also noteworthy that share of Nokia touch screen models for the first time exceeded 50%. So, mobile software developers should consider this fact as a good sign for their innovative applications.

The second player on the smartphones market is RIM: it sold 10.59 millions of devices in the first quarter. It also managed to improve its position in Latin America: the growth was an impressive (297 percent!!!).
Apple is on the third place with 16% of the market. Last year it had only 11%. We sure that specialists who work at apps development for iPhones are happy for their beloved company .

Nokia wants to launch own “App Store” for mobile apps developers

Graig Williams, Managing Director of Nokia in South-eastern Europe, has admitted in his recent interview to Die Presse (the Internet edition) that his company developed a new product, which main task is to press Apple on mobile market. So, Williams has promised that Nokia will introduce a direct competitor for iPhone this year. This device is supposed to focus on network services. According to experts’ opinions, the very App Store, connecting iPhone apps developers and users, has greatly contributed to success of iPhone on mobile market. According to Greig Williams’s words, Nokia is going to create a similar, but more open service (without total control, as in Apple’s project).

By the way, the last Nokia’s multitasking OS Meego is meant not only for smartphones but for Tablet PCs also. In addition, Nokia plans to produce some new devices, based on this OS. However, Williams refuses to tell anything about future competitors of iPad.

Worldwide smartphone sales grew by 39%

In the fourth quarter of 2009 world smartphone supply grew by 39% and reached a record peak of 54.4 million devices. Apple was the most active player in the smartphones market. Nokia was still on the first place by the quantity of produced devices (this figure grew to 20.8 million units, while market share was 38.2%). The second place gone to Research in Motion with 10.7 million smartphones. So the market share of the popular BlackBerry smartphone producer was increased to 19.6%.

Such a result shows great future prospects for companies that provide the following services:
• iPhone application programming;
• mobile apps development for BlackBerry platform.

According to the forecasts from business analytics more and more people in the world will gradually switch to smartphones. It means that mobile applications for such platforms as iPhone, BlackBerry, WM and Android will come to be in great demand.

Results for 2009: the companies produced 174.2 million smartphones and it was a 15% increase in deliveries comparing with the past year.

Integration platform for mobile developers Eclipse Pulsar gets new features

Eclipse Foundation has released a new version of Eclipse Pulsar, open tool for cross-platform mobile applications development.

RIM devices like Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson – In the near future Eclipse Pulsar will allow to develop mobile apps for these smartphones (RIM means “Research In Motion”, wireless communications).

Now creating applications for smartphones from different manufacturers mobile program developers have to use various SDK-sets corresponding to desired platform. It’s obvious that such conditions make their work more complicate, because they have to prepare different versions of the same program for different platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc.).

Pulsar creates a unified environment based on Eclipse, which will allow developing multi-platform mobile applications. Now Pulsar supports SDK for Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. However, developers still have to create separate versions of applications for different phones based on integrated Pulsar SDK.

Integrated development environment Eclipse Pulsar

Today Pulsar supports Java-phones. In the future it is expected to support RIM devices based on BlackBerry (Apple iPhone support is also possible).