Check out: Music, Symbian, New Platinum Partners, Enterprise, The Phones, more to come....

Music

It would seem that if there had been a theme to this years 3GSM in Cannes it would have been music. In a move which is so clearly obvious it makes you wonder why they did not do it before Sony Ericsson have announced that it will be creating Walkman phones. What is perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is that one of the key features of these new phones will "enable users to transfer their existing CD collections to their phones via a PC" with versions for downloading and playing copy-protected music files coming later. The first Walkman phone will be announced in March.

Nokia music play has come in the form of a white label service created with long time Microsoft partner Loudeye. The service is very much a mobile PC hybrid allowing the customer to download and transfer music between their PC and Nokia phone. This announcement has created the somewhat incongruous situation of Microsoft and Nokia collaborating to essentially swap supported music format support on Nokia handsets and Windows XP PCs. Quite clearly this deal opens up additional music content to Nokia handsets and the opportunity for music from the Loudeye service to be played on PCs but it does beg the question, often asked, why can Microsoft not simply use the standards everyone else does?

Symbian

The headline news from Symbian is that 2004 full year shipments of phones based on Symbian OS totalled 14.38m in 2003 6.67m phones shipped, this gives a year on year growth of 116%, the third consecutive year in which Symbian OS phone shipments have grown by more than 100%. This brings the total number of Symbian OS phone shipped to just under 25 million. Similar growth this year could see in excess of 55 million Symbian OS phones in the market by the end of this year.

The announcement that Symbian is working with Renesas and NTT DoCoMo to port Symbian OS for 3G phones will not be to much of a surprise to regular readers given the emphasis on security in Symbian OS v9 and the fact that Renesas has already licensed Discretix's hardware encryption technology.

Motricity, who until recently have been best known for its retail support for Palm products, has now opened the SymbianGear.com store. One of the areas where Motricity has strength is in the eBook domain and it has also released it eReader for Series 60 and UIQ.

NDS is a less obvious addition to the program as its core business is in delivery of secure programming for cable TV. However it has already joined with Discretix to deliver its mVideoGuard™ technology to mobile phones.

It is undoubtedly similar thinking whish also sees Cloakware joining the Platinum program with a view to bringing its Robustness Solutions to Symbian OS.

Enterprise

A second Nokia - Microsoft announcements between sees Nokia licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol, which frankly however regrettable is a necessary move as our current experience trying sync our Nokia 9500 graphically illustrates. We will be moaning more about this in a forthcoming article.

Sony Ericsson has seem its P series of UIQ phones as strong enterprise players from launch. Sony Ericsson have moved to formalize the enterprise supplier ecosystem around these, and other phones in the range, with the launch of the Business Partner Program whish initially includes AppForge, Intellisync and JP Mobile.

The Phones

Series 60 based devices seem to have prominence at 3GSM and the strong music theme is already reflected i some of these announcements. Sendo's follow up to the Sendo X2 with support for 1GB of memory and AAC and AAC+ formats in addition to MP3. The phone is expected to be in shops in the summer.

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Nokia has also unveiled two new Nokia 6681. The Nokia 6680 is the first Nokia Series 60 phone with dual cameras for 3G and EDGE that allows two way video calling. The Nokia 6681 is very similar to the Nokia 6680 but lack support for 3G and the forward facing camera.

Adding to the Series 60 line up is the first product from Chinese licensee Leveno with its P930. It interestingly comes with a pen input in addition to the standard keyboard but there are few details on whether the pen input is a touchscreen or separate scribble area.

Samsung have also reportedly announced the D720 a Series 60 slider phone which, at last, they say will be its first commercial Series 60 phone. Panasonic are also showing the X800 an update of the X700.

The buzz around UIQ has been largely limited to the launch of 3.0. Motorola however have slipped in the A1010 using UIQ 2.1. Largely an upgrade to the A1000 the A1010 sports the first 2 mega-pixel camera on a UIQ phone and facilities to edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint file supplied by viewer specialist Piscel.