Blackberry Plans New Tablet

BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.

The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.

BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.

The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.

The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.

There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.

“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”

Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.

The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.

The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.

Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.

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Nokia And Ford Team Up

Ford has teamed up with Nokia to equip its cloud-connected vehicles with the Finnish phone maker’s Location Platform.

The Nokia Location Platform consists of a suite of client and server-side programming interfaces that allow developers to build interactive applications with maps and map-related services.

The possible integration of the service into Ford vehicles in the future could help Ford learn driver behaviour and control, improve and personalize vehicle performance.

“Another area of Ford’s research is designed to optimise hybrid powertrain efficiency,” Nokia said in a press release. “The Nokia Location Platform could automatically regulate a car’s powertrain as it travels through established or driver-specified ‘Green Zones’.”

Christof Hellmis, VP of the Map Platform in Nokia’s Location and Commerce business unit said the integration of Nokia’s Location Platform is not scheduled for production and has so far only been seen in the Ford Evos concept car.

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Nokia Sold 1 Million Lumina Smartphones

Nokia reported a one billion year over year loss for the quarter ended 30 December 2011, only slightly offset by its launch of Lumia Windows Phone smartphones.

The firm shipped 113.5 million mobile phones during the quarter, down eight per cent from the same period in 2010. However, the figures were up from the 106.6 million units shipped in the third quarter of 2011, as the company benefited from its launch of the Lumia 800 smartphone in October, its first Windows Phone handset since it announced its deal with Microsoft.

Nokia shipped 19.6 million smartphones during the final quarter of 2011, down from the 28.6 million it shipped a year earlier, but up 17 percent from the 16.8 million sold in the third quarter of 2011.

The company reported net sales of $10 billion for the quarter, 20 percent down from the same quarter a year earlier. Full year sales were $38.7 billion, a nine percent decline from 2010.

Nokia reported that it sold one million of its Lumia smartphones since they went on sale in October. The firm said it is accelerating investment in its Lumia range of devices running Microsoft Windows Phone, claiming it has sold “well over one million Lumia devices to date”.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said, “Just six months after signing an agreement with Microsoft, we introduced our first two devices based on the Windows Phones platform – the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710. We brought the new devices to market ahead of schedule, demonstrating that we are changing the clock speed of Nokia. To date, we have introduced Lumia to consumers in Europe, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

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Nokia’s Lumina 800 Receives An Update

Nokia has started rolling out a software update to its Lumia 800 smartphone starting today.

The company has kept the promise it gave last month to upgrade the Lumia 800 to fix power efficiency problems. There is more than one patch in the update, which will also bring new features on top of the power fix.

Nokia said, “Starting today and rolling out over the next few weeks we will be releasing software updates to deliver exciting new features and performance enhancements including charging improvements to the award winning Lumia 800.”

“With the fastest growing app store and the highest positive user feedback, the Windows Phone experience on the Lumia 800 is setting the pace in the mobile community. Additional updates will come in early 2012.”

We’ve updated our Lumia 800 today but the notification mentioned only fixes for email and voicemail issues. We haven’t experienced any power problems with our particular handset since we’ve had it.

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