DvDand Solutions, LLC

Clearly the current economic climate is beginning to affect the mobile business. Last week RIM released stellar Q2 earnings but with downward guidance for Q3. Another sign of that is today’s announcement by Nokia that it was “renewing” its business mobility strategy. It is shutting down its behind-the-firewall mobility solutions business and is in talks to sell its security appliance business. It is also talking up its relationship with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others. To me it appears that Nokia has decided that it does not expect enterprises to invest in mobility solutions until such time as the economic climate improves. As a result of this, Nokia realizes that it will have an uphill task to win sales against entrenched solution providers like the ones named above.

Nokia today announced Nokia Data Gathering, a new software solution to help public sector and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) quickly and accurately collect data on critical issues such as disease outbreaks or disaster relief via mobile devices. This software will be launched in Brazil first in the Northern Brazilian city of Manaus to help fight degue fever there. Nokia will donate this software to NGOs and public sector free of charge. This software can be used to create questionnaire and distribute it to mobile devices via the network.

Self-Promo Alert! Here is an article I wrote for Mobile Marketing in which I talk about the challenges companies face in launching mobile campaigns in this tough economic climate. Justifying the investment is just the first hurdle. If you can successfully get past that, you have to consider other issues which I talk about in the article. So, click on the link to read it and then come back and let me know what your take is.

In a recent patent application, Microsoft describes how multiple mobile phones (presumably running Windows Mobile, of course) can be brought together to form a single system which would pool the otherwise limited resources of individual phones. According to this patent, one could dynamically bring together several phone screens that would act as a single big screen. This type collaboration is not limited to just phone screens, but also to the CPU, memory, and other resources to form interesting collaborations. This type of collaboration will have several usage including video which is described in the patent as:

The collaborative architecture applies an adaptive video decoder so that each mobile device can participate in playing back a larger and higher-resolution video across combined display screens than any single mobile device could playback alone.

In addition to video display aggregation, Microsoft also envisages following scenarios:

• drag and drop file transfer
• microphone aggregation
• speaker aggregation
• camera aggregation
• antenna aggregation

Clearly, Microsoft is eyeing the future of mobile devices coming together to form ad-hoc network for collaboration at various levels. I certainly hope that this patent becomes a reality in some future version of Windows Mobile.

Gartner, today followed up with a press release reporting that the smartphones sales grew 15.7% in Q2 2008 over Q2, 2007. This amounts to 32.2m units sold in Q2. This is pretty much in line with what other research companies have recently reported and also what Nokia said in its forecast for Q3. Here is the breakup of sales according to Gartner:

What is interesting is that Samsung and LG do not make it on this list considering that they are 2nd and 3rd mobile phone makers worldwide.

comScore is reporting today that the US experienced an 80% growth in 3G subscriber base during the last 12 months ending June 2008. This growth equals 28.4% of US mobile subscribers versus 28.3% of the mobile subscriber base in UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy combined. Now, this is great news for the US mobile network operators. However, to put it in perspective, the European numbers only take 5 countries into account. It leaves out major players like Russia and Finland, not to mention the Asian countries.