Nokia’s declining fortunes lead to it’s bonds being rated as junk, after falling to No 2 mobile phone maker, behind Samsung:

S.&P. Downgrades Nokia’s Bonds to Junk - Brian X Chen via NYTimes.com

S.& P.’s announcement came as Samsung dethroned Nokia as the world’s No. 1 maker of mobile phones, which includes traditional cellphones and smartphones. Samsung sold 92 million phones over the last quarter, and Nokia sold 83 million, according to estimates by IHS iSuppli, the research firm. It is the first time since 1998 that Nokia is not the No. 1 phone maker in the world.

In the smartphone category, Nokia slips to third place behind Apple, the leader with 35 million phones shipped, and Samsung, with 32 million devices, according to iSuppli. In that category, Nokia is slipping faster than Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. The smartphone segment is the only part of the handset market that is showing any growth.

Nokia’s long-term rating was dropped to a noninvestment rating, BB+, from the investment-grade rating BBB–, with a negative outlook, S.& P. said. Its short-term rating dropped to B from A-3, S.& P. said.

Nokia has been struggling to reverse its declining fortunes with its Lumia smartphones, which include Microsoft’s newer operating system, Windows Phone 7. In the United States, AT&T and Nokia have been aggressively promoting the Lumia 900, a $100 smartphone that has been a strong seller on Amazon.com.

Trying to be the world’s leading maker of Windows mobile phones is like being the world’s tallest midget.

(via stoweboyd)

iPad 3 Mania Explained - Technology - Rebecca Greenfield via The Atlantic Wire

Thirty percent of those surveyed by inMobi said that they intend to buy an iPad, with 44 percent of respondents saying they would not consider anything other than an Apple-branded tablet. That matches estimates by analysts, which guess that Apple will sell between 55 and 60 million iPads this year, doubling sales since the device debuted in April 2010.

And these estimates are based on analysts ho-hum expectations for the new iPad. Imagine if it has a more revolutionary feel.

Qualcomm, Ericsson just brought mobile calls into the IP age - Kevin Fitchard via Broadband News and Analysis — Qualcomm and Ericsson have prototyped SRVCC – single-radio voice call continuity – the next step in migrating today’s creaky circuit-switched voice networks to the IP world of VoLTE, or voice over LTE. This is all very important because cell phones are a kludge of multiple radio channels of varying speeds and relying on old old tech, like Ma Bell’s switches instead of the Internet’s IP. Also, this will likely increase battery life for mobile devices.

Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It! -  John Battelle — John Battelle once again declares RSS dead, since he has 400,000 RSS subscribers but only 644 clicks on a recent post. The action has moved away from RSS to streamed URLs, and RSS is becoming obsolete?

Twitter – A Wiser Way to Censor? - Eric Sander via Big Think — Eric Sander thinks that Twitter’s new censorship policy (which he explains) might be considered an improvement, not cause for opprobrium.

Mythbusters Banned From Discussing RFID By Visa And Mastercard - Jacob Sloan via Disinformation — Mythbusters host Adam Savage says that Mastercard and Visa ‘banned’ the show from detailing how easy it is to hack RFID chips in many credit cards.

First: Apple’s rank in mobile phone profitability and revenues - Horace Dediu via asymco — Apple captures about 90% of the profits of the mobile phone market.

Found on GigaOm, by Stacey Higginbotham: “Siri may be the hottest personal assistant since I Dream of Jeannie, but Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data and new methods of AI and programming into a truly connected network. Instead of connecting people to people as Facebook or even some of the cooler services like Turntable.fm do, the web of the future will connect machines to machines and connect those machines back to people. What Om calls the “alive web” is still people talking to other people, but the next generation of the web is far more interesting. It’s when machines start talking to each other and then to people. The emergence of the Internet of things is well documented but in order to get there, we’ll need several advancements in technology from low-power, cheap sensors to …read on.”

Raven Zachary of Small Society: Presentation “iPad - One Year Later” held at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on March 30, 2011.

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