Top Selling Windows Mobile Devices of All Time

During the Windows Mobile talk at CntrStg @ CES, Greg Sullivan mentioned that there are 11 phones that have sold in excess of 1 million units. That’s a pretty impressive achievement. I was curious to know more about these 11 devices. Like, how many are touch screen vs non-touch screen? And what manufacturers have made the best selling devices.  I’m sure you can guess some of the devices and companies that made it to the list.  But I wanted to know them all.  Thankfully, Greg provided me with a list of all the devices that have reached the 1 Million+ milestone.

The following list is in no particular order.  Other than some minor formatting changes, it’s exactly how I received it.

• Samsung Omnia (SGH-i900/908/SCH-i910/M490)
• Samsung Blackjack II (SGH-i617)
• Samsung Blackjack (SGH-i607/600)
• Motorola Q
• HTC Touch Diamond (Diamond/Diamond-C)
• Audiovox SMT 5600 (HTC)
• HTC Dash (Excalibur)
• HTC xv6800  (Titan)
• HTC TyTN II (Tilt/Kaiser)
• HTC Touch (Elf/Vogue)
• HTC P800W (Artemis)

There’s a total of 4 different manufacturers on the list, 3 if you consider that the Audiovox device was made by HTC.  Of the top 11 best selling Windows Mobile devices, 7 are from HTC including the Audiovox device, 3 from Samsung and 1 from Motorola. Further, there are 6 Windows Mobile Pro devices (touch screen) and 5 Windows Mobile Standard (non-touch) devices. And of those non-touch screen devices, 4 out of 5 are messenger style devices – that’s devices with a front facing QWERTY. Another interesting fact is that 7 out of 11, or just over 63% of these devices have a QWERTY on them. 

I really have to wonder if the current trend by carriers and manufacturers to focus on iPhone like devices is such a smart move. With QWERTY being so predominate on the top selling devices, and over 45% of the top selling devices are non-touch screen, there is a definite trend of successful non-iphone like devices. I hope the manufacturers and carriers can see past the iPhone and work towards being original and different once again.

Removing the Application Lock on HTC s740 Smartphone

Windows Mobile has this concept of Application Lock that defines the amount of access an application has to certain parts of the phone. No Application Lock means that applications can do and access pretty much anything.  To the other extreme, full Application Lock means that no applications can even be installed.  Now, most devices ship with some level in-between. Where signed applications are allowed and some unsigned applications are also allowed. But not every unsigned application. Those that write to restricted parts of the device are no allowed to install. As most devices do, HTC’s latest non-touch screen device, the s740, falls somewhere in the middle.  Overall, this is a good thing because it protects the average user from installing harmful applications.  But for those of us that want more, it’s a pain. With the s740, it appears to be a little more restrictive than in the past. I’ve had problems installing some of my everyday applications that normally have not caused me any problems.

For whatever reason, removing the application lock on the s740 is not the same as past devices and requires a little more effort.  I’ve detailed the steps required below.  Simply follow these steps and you’ll be able to install any application you like.

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Talking with Windows Mobile at CntrStg

During CES, Senior Product Manager for Windows Mobile – Greg Sullivan, came out to CntrStg to talk to us in more detail about what Steve Ballmer showed off during his keynote a couple days earlier. Greg walked us through the new Netflix application that allows you to control and rank your downloads as well as start a movie download so that it will be ready for watching when you get home from work. NetFlix and Microsoft have worked hard on this and it looks very nice! If only NetFlix had a Canadian presence.

Greg also talked about the long awaited IE Mobile 6. This was announced last year at Mobile World Congress and was promised as something that would be widely available “soon”. Ultimately, the problem came down to performance and the default setup of devices didn’t allow for optimal performance of the application. So instead of releasing it early and having a mediocre response, they decided to bundle it with new devices that would be better optimized to handle it. You can expect devices to begin to ship with IE Mobile 6 in Q1 of this year. That pretty much means any day now.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone; Microsoft has been focusing Windows Mobile on the enterprise market in the past. To bring the phones to a wider consumer adoption, Microsoft understands that changes are needed and they are working on those changes – whatever they may be. According to Greg, a platform update that is set to ship later this year will dramatically change the user experience and help to extend Windows Mobile into the consumer market. Try as we did, Greg wouldn’t expand on this comment. I guess all we can do is wait and see. Hopefully we’ll get an announcement or some sneak peak at the upcoming MWC. [ ..Read More.. ]

Eye-Fi Changes How You Deal with Digital Pictures

One of the first companies I saw at CES was Eye-Fi.  They dropped by CntrStg early on Thursday and showed off their products. Ziv Gillat, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, showed off the latest in Eye-Fi goodness. I had never heard of Eye-Fi prior to CES this year, but now that I have seen this product in action, you can bet that I’ll be buying one shortly!  So what is so great about these Eye-Fi guys? Easy, they take your standard SD card and add in wireless plus a little smarts. So now when you take a picture, it will automatically upload your pictures over your wireless router to your home computer or to your flickr account. That means you will never have to take the card out of your camera, insert it into your computer, and manually copy pictures off it again and that’s hands down cool.

Ziv told us about their latest announcement – video support.  With the latest card, you can automatically upload videos you take from your camera right to YouTube! Or, if you really feel the need, you can put a copy on your computer as well.

The Eye-Fi cards support all of the popular online photo sharing sites, including SmugMug and Flickr. Certain cards also support Geo-Tagging of your photos through the use of SkyHook. The idea behind SkyHook is actually pretty slick. It uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi Positioning to get a fast, accurate and dependable location information for your pictures. And unlike GPS, it works great indoors.

Eye-Fi has been in operation for approximentaly 2 years, and have had product available for about 1 year. In that year, they have seen over 5 million pictures uploaded to online photo sharing sites via their Eye-Fi cards.  That number does not include the pictures people have had sent to their computers.

I’m going to be adding one to my gadget bag shortly.  I’m just trying to decide if I should wait for my local store to carry the Geo-Tagging card, or just grab the regular version and do without the location goodies. I highly recommend this card to anyone that snaps pictures on a regular basis.  You won’t be disappointed.

Motorola Quietly Announces New Windows Mobile Devices at CES

During CES Motorola quietly rolled out 2 new Windows Mobile devices – 1 touch screen and 1 non-touch screen device. I was taking a short walk across the show floor when I spotted some devices in the Motorola booth. Upon closer examination, I realized that these are new Windows Mobile devices. I asked the Motorola rep when these where released and was told that the devices had been announced here at CES. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any talk or coverage of these devices. I shouldn’t be surprised, Moto could have done more to get the word and buzz going. In fact, they should have come out to CntrStg and announced the devices directly to mobile focused bloggers. Anyway…

The first device is a oval touch screen device with a new interface on top of the professional version of Windows Mobile. Unfortunately, my pictures of this device didn’t turn out very well. You’ll have to suffer with this image that I clipped from the Moto site. The A3100 or Moto Surf has a cool little trackball for navigation, which actually works very well. I really like the use of these little trackballs on mobile devices. The Surf is a quad-band GSM phone with a 3MP camera, Windows Mobile 6.1, 256MB Flash, 128MB RAM, and a nice standby time of 12 days!

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HTC’s 2009 Mobile Device Line Up Leaked

It’s next to impossible to keep something a secret in today’s connected world. Once again, HTC’s product roadmap for the coming year has been leaked on the internet. There’s a number of new devices displayed in the pictures, unfortunately, there is no specifications to go along withe the images. Which means we can only guess what coolness these devices have inside their beautiful looks.

One of the leaked images is a 3G follow-up to the Excalibur code named Maple. I’ve been longing for a messenger style, 3G device from HTC since the Dash was released. While the Dash was nice, it lacked the speed that I’ve grown accustom too.

There are a couple other messenger style devices in the roadmap, however there is no clear indication if these are touch screen or not. Code named Willow and Cedar, these devices will take HTC from zero devices with physical non-sliding keyboards to 3 in the spam of a year. It looks like HTC is paying attention to the competition and feedback from members of the community. I, for one, am looking forward to their release! There’s a couple more pics after the break.

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CntrStg, CES 2009 and Twitter

I’ve written about CntrStg here in the past. This past week I’ve been down here in Vegas for CES and running CntrStg. It’s been such a busy weekend that I haven’t had a time to make any posts.  CntrStg was a huge success and we’re definitely looking to do it again and maybe even at other trade shows besides CES. I’ve made a lot of connections and talked with numerous companies.  As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more reviews and in-depth articles about various products. I also have pages of notes that I took at various sessions and events. I will be writingt them up over the coming days. So stay tuned!

As an aside, I’ve setup a Twitter feed for Mobile Jaw. If you’re looking to get the latest Mobile Jaw posts in your twitter feed, simply follow http://twitter.com/MobileJaw