Dell's devices head resigns

Garriques will leave Dell at the end of January after nearly four years on the job. Prior to Dell, Garriques had been the mobile device chief at Motorola until early 2007.

via Dell’s Device Plan Reboots, Exec is Out – TheStreet.

Here is how Ed Zander (the former CEO of Motorola) described Garriques soon after he left the company.

…Zander didn’t have a lot of good to say about the former team running Motorola’s cell-phone business. “The management in mobile devices made calls that were dead wrong,” he said, referring not so much to massive price slashing on the popular Razr as to the slow-footed move into so-called 3G (for third-generation) multimedia phones. That particular slam was directed at a young guy named Ron Garriques, who headed that division, which is most of Motorola’s business today, before high-tailing it out of Motorola just before the you-know-what hit the fan. Garriques today is part of the crack team turning around Dell.

His move to Dell caused quite a lot of speculation that Dell was going to be a serious contender in the mobile device space (despite their previous failures).

Apparently the launch of the Android-powered Streak was not enough to cement his future at Dell.

Nokia's Ovi Store downloads hit 3 million a day

More than 400 000 new developers in past 12 months; 92 developers each top 1 million download mark; 1.5 million downloads of Qt software development toolkits

via Nokia – Show Press Release.

See the following chart comparing Ovi with iTunes Music and iTunes Apps download rates. Continue reading “Nokia's Ovi Store downloads hit 3 million a day”

iTunes App Store submission rate holding at 20k/mo, Android Market on par

Thanks to 148apps.biz we know how many apps are being submitted to the App Store.

For the year so far the average has been almost exactly 20k apps per month. Toward the last half of last year, 10k/mo was the norm. Continue reading “iTunes App Store submission rate holding at 20k/mo, Android Market on par”

China Unicom Says It Will Introduce own smartphone OS by Year-End

The UPhone will run on a “totally new” operating system that Unicom developed based on Linux, Zhang Zhijiang, who heads the company’s technology department, said in an interview today at the Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong. The phone is being developed with Okwap, Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., he said.

via China Unicom Says It Will Introduce Self-Developed Smartphone by Year-End – Bloomberg.

Operators are still considering bespoke operating systems.

See also: European Operators contemplate own OS. Why not just fork Android?