BillDay.com

Nokia Q2 numbers are out. In a nutshell:

• NOK shipped 78.4 million phones in Q2 2006 compared to 60.8 million units in Q2 2005
• Smart phone (Nokia Multimedia unit) revenues rose 37% to 1.89 billion euros ($2.36 billion)
• Average selling price declined to 102 euros ($127) from 105 euros, due to large volumes of cheap phones in emerging markets
• Sales rose 22% to 9.81 billion euros ($12.24 billion), from 8.06 billion euros Q2 2005
• Net profit up 43% to 1.14 billion euros ($1.42 billion), up from 799 million euros Q2 2005
• Global market share of 34%, down 1% from Q1 2006 but up from 33% in Q2 2005
• Gains in market share in Europe and Asia offset by loss of share in North America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa

Compare the above with Motorola’s results released the previous day:

• Motorola shipped 51.9 million cell phones in Q2 2006
• Sales in the cell-phone unit rose 46 percent to $7.14 billion, nearly two-thirds of the MOT total
• Shipped 50 millionth RAZR V3 this week (RAZR line launched Q4 2004)
• Sales rose 29% to $10.9 billion, from $8.4 billion in Q2 2005
• Net profit increased 48% to $1.38 billion, up from $933 million in Q2 2005
• Increased its global market share to 22% in Q2 of this year, up from 13% eighteen months again
• Motorola has enjoyed 7 consecutive quarters of market share growth, based largely upon the longevity of RAZR’s success

One has to wonder how Nokia’s withdrawal from CDMA development will affect things in coming quarters, especially with Motorola delivering some very interesting EVDO devices and doing everything right to support them (check out their Q Wiki). Clearly the short term trend is Moto gaining ground on Nokia. Whether or not this will continue and Motorola will retake the world market share lead it lost in 1998 is debatable. What’s clear, however, is that MOT and NOK are both pulling away from the rest of their competitors.

Is mobile handset design and marketing now a two horse race?

David Pogue recently blogged about a vision of flash drives “of the future”:

you’d carry around your whole world–not just documents, but programs, settings, e-mail, the works–on your keychain. You’d just plug in to public terminals whenever you wanted to do work.

The only problem with David’s vision is that his “flash future” is here today, in the form of U3 enabled USB flash drives.

U3 drives work just like any other USB drive for data storage and retrieval. In addition they implement the U3 Hardware Specification and a U3 Device API which enables properly packaged Windows applications to execute from within the U3 container. Everything about the apps, including their configuration settings and any personal data generated during execution, resides on the U3 drive. Docs, check. Programs, check. Settings, email, any other bits that you’d need to run your apps, check check check. This enables you to unplug from your PC at work and reconnect to a terminal in the airport, a partner’s laptop at a conference, or anywhere else you can find a system with a USB port. Your apps, configured the way your like them, everywhere.

It all sounds very mobile Java-esque, only I’ve yet to see a cell phone or PDA the size of my thumbnail.

Security is an obvious concern anytime you start carrying around “your digital life” in a tiny little key fob. You could lose the drive (the “I spend half of my life looking for my keys” phenomenon). There are also data security concerns, not the least of which is whether or not a savvy attack on a host computer’s memory might be able to ferret out critical data at runtime. I’d want to dig into the specs before I put anything too terribly sensitive on one myself. And one of the biggest potential problems I see is not being able to find anyone willing to loan you a system and trust (yes, the ‘t’ word surfaces again) that your little USB thingy really does have antivirus software and will keep things clean.

Nonetheless, for many people this could be a handy solution to the problem of having bookmarks and address books and files scattered between at work, home, and laptop computers. If you’re not quite willing to put everything online a la del.icio.us and Yahoo Mail, this just might be workable. Especially since U3 goes much farther than just bookmarks and email. Click here to see a catalog of U3 apps ranging from Mozilla and Skype to OpenOffice and EditPad, and even some games and photo apps and podcast software to boot.

How did we get all of these apps? A developer forum and kit, silly! Click here to get the full details or here to read the dev blog.

David goes on to discuss a reader’s comments that such devices could be a boon for school children since they could allow each student to cheaply carry their books, school work, MySpace bookmarks (oops, not that) wherever they were. In theory this could also cut down on the number of computers required by said USB-toting students. As other readers’ comments point out, though, kids would probably be bad about losing their drives.

I’m convinced the better scenario is for someone like my mother: A PC at work and one at home. Checks email and browses the Web. Edits a document once in a while. Values having the same environment and tools on each computer, and would prefer one archive of docs that’s always available. Not really a Web 2.0 kind of person. U3, we have a winner!

Right now many major USB drive manufacturers are making U3 drives. You can actually get one for pretty cheap if you shop around. In fact, I just bought a SanDisk 1GB Cruzer Micro with U3 last weekend for $20 after rebate. Not bad.

Heck, for that price, maybe I should outfit my Mom with one too. Sure would save me a lot of “Bill, can you help me with my computer” problems…

I like to travel and take pictures in my gratuitous free time.

Sun and Nokia didn’t give me a lot of free time, but they did give me travel. So I did my best to squeeze in a camera or two and take as many pics as possible while out and about in the big beautiful world.

I’ve been meaning to blog the best of these pics for some time now, but just haven’t found, you guessed it, time to do it. Fear not, though, because today I finally allow the small but mighty Flickr badge to fulfill its promise on top of my sidebar, thus ensuring my latest and greatest pictures are available for all to see. Thank goodness for Web 2.0!

Up next on my to do list: Find the time to take more pictures. Blog about a photo now and then. I promise I’ll try, I really will.