Nokia reveals new plans for SW development, publishes Q3 results

Nokia has just published its Q3 financial report and things are looking healthy. The company also let us in on their new plans concerning their smartphone platforms and changes ins software development.

Nokia managed to ship over 110 million handsets, bringing in over 7 billion euro in the process. The numbers of units sold is 1 percent down from the same quarter last year, while the revenue is 5 percent up.

The achieved operating profit stands at 403 million euro, which sounds much better than the 426 million euro loss recorded in Q3 of 2009. Mind you, the mobile division actually earned over 800 million but NAVTEQ and Nokia Siemens Network continue to lose money.

The average selling price of the Nokia feature phones is 42 euro (a 3 percent increase YoY), while smartphones cost 136 euro on average (28 percent decrease YoY).

Results are good, but market share is shrinking

Nokia still remains the largest cell phone manufacturer in terms of sher volumes but according to its own estimates their market share has slipped down to 30 percent (a serious decrease from the 34 percent share in Q3 2009). If current trends continue the company will be almost level with Samsung (their Q3 results aren't out yet) come the year end.

Still the Finns are having high hopes for Q4, as they will be offering a pretty interesting choice of devices. The N8 multimedia powerhouse is set to lead the fightback, while C7, E7 and C6-01 should also be on the front line. Nokia expects to see a great performance from entry-level devices such as E5 and X3 Touch and Type.

It's also about time that the Ovi store starts earning some cash to justify its existence. It's currently registering more than 2.7 million downloads per day, which is peanuts compared to iOS but still better than its own results for the same period of last year (1.7 million downloads per day).

Nokia also revealed its plans for further restructuring and optimization of its activities. Overall, the new streamlined functions will allow the company to let go 1800 employees globally.

New software plans

And the company is taking measures to catch up too. As of today the company is adopting Qt as its sole development platform. This means that all apps made available for Symbian from now on will be compatible with MeeGo and vice versa. So developers won't need to make the tough choice between the two operating systems used by Nokia.

Qt will also be getting HTML5 support for development of both web content and applications. The Nokia devices web browser will support the HTML5 standard as well.

Next Nokia announced that you won't be hearing any more talk of Symbian^4 from them. The improvements that were planned for Symbian^4 will be introduced as soon as they become available - so instead of one big release, it's going to be more of a series of iterative updates to the existing platforms.

That means that if you buy a Nokia device now, you won't need to wait for all the parts of the new interface to be ready and you will be able to get some of them sooner. Plus there is no risk of some devices not getting a Symbian^4 upgrade anymore.

Here's a video commentary on the issues at hand and today's announcement by Rich Green, Nokia CTO.

Sounds cool if you think about it - now all that we need is Nokia to up their game and bring those improvements as soon as possible.

New MeeGo devices next year

At the today's earning's call, Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, also officially confirmed that Nokia will announced a new MeeGo devices no earlier than 2011.

Financial report • Nokia software statement Nokia restructuring plans