Two interesting announcements

** Update ** - of the reasons regarding why Nokia would buy Trolltech, VisionMobile has a detailed case saying why it's all linked to Ovi

Nokia to buy Trolltech QT...
QT is Trolltech's GUI libraries / framework.

How will Nokia incorporate this purchase, I wonder ? Here's hoping for a complete overhaul of the S60 menu-based ui(!)

Heavyweight Amazon to release DRM-free music mp3 downloads Internationally (after success in the US) with its music store.

From a mobile perspective this will be another option for consumers, alongside the existing ones from Operators (eg. OmniFone), Device OEMs (eg.Nokia's "Comes with music"/Music Store, Sony Ericsson's "Play Now" etc..), Apple iTunes and 3rd party (eg Last.FM,) subscription based services that can be accessed from the mobile for purchasing and playing music (streamed or downloaded).

I wonder if Amazon will produce a dedicted optimised mobile web front end or client to the music store ?

Moto-roll-over

As Motorola announces big losses, Nokia announce 40% Market share, despite lower US sales for the quarter.

Whilst I've never been a great fan of Moto's recent handsets (the keypads or the awful user interfaces in the past), I hope they can turn it round - competition is good between the big device OEMs.(And the North American market, where Nokia continues to struggle is perhaps a chance for them to capitalise upon).

Having played briefly with their new top end handsets the RokrE8 (interesting...) and Z10 (which I liked) - it seems at least, the message of needing to create some competitive high-end handsets got through...

Mobile Trends for 2008 by Vision Mobile

Interesting analysis from Andreas, particularly points 2,3 and 14.

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Welcome 2008

There was a flurry of mobile realted content and application news during December - much of which I did not get to post about, but already as CES kicks off in Jan 2008 with lots of mobile related news - it looks to be another hot year ahead for the mobile industry ... maybe this will be the year mobile data (web, widgets, video etc..) goes mainstream ...

I posted last year about Psiloc's GSync which works really well at backing up your SMS's from your mobile direct as emails to your GMail account. I use it regularly, to store messages I want to keep and refer to.

Treasure my Text is relaunching their service to include SMS backup/archiving and management online and a twitter-like broadcasting of texts to be shared with different groups (controlled by you), as well as your SMS's as an RSS feed and the ability to send texts from your PC based browser (similarly to Dashwire and Nokia's PC beta phone browser plugin).

I predicted last year we will increasingly see "LifeStreaming" services for mobile and for the twitter / jaiku afficianados, you can already receive and send tweets/jaikus via text/SMS. Similarly with Treasure my Text you can start a "text stream".
I need to review the beta a bit longer before highlighting the differences as well as the usecase of why you might want to expose public texts (certainly private text archiving is useful), so stay tuned, but so far I like it. (I'd like the option to be able to forward my texts from TreasureMyText dashboard to a 3rd party email site in addition as well such as GMail though).

Thanks to the excellent SMS Text for the link.

Yahoo Go are announcing the 3rd beta of their mobile app based around widgets.
I'm not a big fan of the Yahoo Go 2.0 J2ME client as an on-device-portal - it was painfully slow and closed to Yahoo's home-grown services - flickr and Yahoo mail fine but weather and stock information was easier for me to consume in other ways when mobile than wait for the client to initiate in phone memory and connect to download the latest info, that's not to mention the myriad of dedicated on-device client apps that do the same thing.

Perhaps I'll try it on other non-symbian devices as lots of people do seem to like it. It will be interesting to see how the new Yahoo solution now potentially including 3rd party widgets has evolved, purporting to be open and with a WDK/SDK for developers to create/port widgets quickly.

To round out this blog post, FlipSilent (turn your phone on its face to put in silent profile) - for S60 platform is here, (the first version is a little buggy so it might be worth waiting a day or two for the next release).

Finally this application is in the wild, after this simple-but-great idea was thought of years ago.