NOKIA CUTTING 4,000 JOBS, MOVING 3,000 MORE IN CONTINUED RESTRUCTURING

Finnish handset giant Nokia continues its restructuring in an effort to trim overhead and return to profitability. The BBC is reporting that the company will cut 4,000 jobs worldwide and jettison an additional 3,000 positions to Accenture — the consulting company set to manage the Symbian mobile operating system going forward. ”With this new focus, we also will face reductions in our workforce,” said Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop. ”This is a difficult reality, and we are working closely with our employees and partners to identify long-term re-employment programmes for the talented people of Nokia.” The proposed moves are scheduled to take place sometime in 2012.

OPERA LAUNCHES APP STORE

Browser maker Opera has announced the a new application store for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, and Java based handsets that offers both free and paid applications for your mobile device. “The Opera Mobile Store is available to Opera users and users of other mobile browsers, on all popular mobile phone platforms in more than 200 countries,” reads the press release. “The Opera Mobile Store uses Appia’s storefront commerce technology and leverages a wide catalog of applications.”

The company boasts that its store attracted more than 15 million users from 200 countries, cultivating over 700,000 downloads per day, during its pilot stage this February. Opera has partnered with app store curator Appia to help launch the Opera Mobile Store globally. “The Opera Mobile Store presents a remarkable opportunity for mobile application developers to distribute localized content through a single, far-reaching marketplace,” said Appia’s CEO, Jud Bowman. “Appia is thrilled to partner with Opera to deliver an incredible storefront of applications to Opera users and beyond.” The Swedish company has put a “featured link” leading to the new store in the Speed Dial section of the Opera browser.

ANDROID OVERTAKES SYMBIAN AS WORLDS SMARTPHONE OS

Canalys is reporting Google's Android has surpassed Symbian as the world's best selling smartphone OS. Android rose to 33 million units sold in Q4 2010, while Symbian made it to 31 million. For comparison Apple's iPhone only sold around 17 million units for the same time period.

Android increased their sales by around 13 million over the previous quarter while Symbian grew by only 1.1 million.

RIM LOOKING AT COMPETITORS PLATFORMS TO INCREASE REVENUE

At an event last week in Boston, RIM VP Pete Devenyi said the company is exploring the possibility of introducing cross-platform solutions that would allow IT professionals to manage smartphones made by companies other than RIM. “BlackBerry is and will continue to be dominant in most corporations,” Devenyi said in an interview. “It’s not going to be the only device, given the fact that consumers have the choice to bring in their own devices, and IT departments are often letting them in. So there’s a question there: do those corporations have to manage those devices differently or is there the possibility that RIM might extend capabilities to make it easier for those corporations to manage those devices as well?” This is hardly the first time RIM has explored its competitors’ platforms as a possible way to widen its net. For years, RIM has been experimenting with a variety of cross-platform tools that might help the company develop new revenue channels. The most well-known example is likely RIM’s BlackBerry Application Suite, which we showed off exclusively two years ago. BAS would have allowed BlackBerry software to be installed on platforms like Windows Mobile and Symbian so that companies could deploy BlackBerry services on a variety of popular smartphone operating systems. The current state of RIM’s BAS software solution is unknown. [BGR]

SYMBIAN FOUNDATION SHUTTERING WEBSITES; SOURCE REPOSITORIES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST

Every official Symbian website will be shuttered on the 17th of next month. That goes for every page from symbian.org down to the Symbian Twitter and Facebook feeds, and the source code itself will be shelved. If you want access to any of it, even the databases of user-generated bug reports, you'll have to ask the Foundation for a hard copy and pay a nominal media and shipping fee after January 31st.

Assuming Nokia's promise to keep Symbian open-source still rings true, you might want to start stashing away the repositories and setting up mirrors before the Foundation drops off the face of the web -- and perhaps the Symbian crowdsource community, too. [Engadget]

SAMSUNG DROPS SYMBIAN

Symbian's problems just keep getting worse.  A couple of weeks ago Sony Ericsson announced they would not be using the popular but dying mobile OS and now Samsung has announced they will be dropping it as well.  In an email sent to registered Symbian developers, Samsung announce it is closing it's Symbian forum and remove all Symbian content by end of year.

This leaves only Nokia as the prominent manufacturer.  Of course Nokia is having its own problems and is working on its own OS, Bada.  With the emergence of not only the iOS but Android quickly taking market share, Symbian (the worlds most popular mobile OS) is quickly sliding into oblivion. [Engadget]

SYMBIAN DYING?

Sony Ericsson has announced they have no plans to for any new Symbian products.  As Aldo Liguori, spokesman for Sony Ericsson stated "we have no plans for the time being to develop any new products to the Symbian Foundation standard or operating system."

While this doesn't kill Symbian outright, other manufacturers still use the OS, it does put quite a damper on the popular (outside the U.S.) operating system.

NOKIA N8 TO LAUNCH IN SEPTEMBER

According to Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti, Tapani Kashinen, Nokia's senior communications manager, Nokia's N8 smartphone will be shipping as early as September 30th.  Nokia is promoting the N8 as the latest and greatest hardware technology wrapped in the Symbian operating system.

ECHOECHO MOBILE APP ALLOWS PERSONAL CHECK-INS

Cross platform mobile app EchoEcho allows the user to request the location of a single friend.  It integrates with your address book and sends a message to friends asking "Where are you?".  If your friend wants to reply, you are given their location, complete with distance between you and a map.  Definitely an interesting twist on geo-location and can come in handy for shopping, clubs, etc.

EchoEcho is available for Android, Blackberry, iOS, Symbian and Windows Mobile.