TamsWMS - the Windows Mobile Smartphone Blog

In the last years, Handango has grown to become the dominant ESD – in fact, the folks felt strong enough to do an insane price hike recently(which will probably reduce their importance significantly). Their Yardstick reports have always provided an interesting insight into the mobile software market – here’s my take on the 2007-yardstick.

First of all, let’s look at the number of new applications/software houses added. Symbian has dominated the list, the Palm OS grew the slowest(suffering significantly from last year):

The average application price and order size have both decreased slightly – which is interesting, as I predict the recent rate hike to increase prices significantly:

From a top-seller point of view, SPB’s domination of the PocketPC market has not changed – in fact, SPB now has of the top-ten titles coming from its portfolio. Other platforms show a more balanced app/house ratio, although games are notably absent from the top-ten lists this year(except for a few casual-gamer exceptions):

Overall

Palm OS

1. PocketMirror Std. (Outlook synchronization) - $29.95
2. Agendus Professional Edition (PIM enhancement) - $39.95
3. SplashID (information security) - $29.95
4. Ringo Pro (ringtone player) - $29.95
5. Agendus Premier Edition (Outlook synchronization) - $59.95
6. Snap (data entry tool) - $9.95
7. Agendus Desktop Edition (Outlook synchronization) - $39.95
8. Diet & Exercise Assistant (_tness assistant) - $24.95
9. PocketMirror Std. Upgrade (Outlook synchronization) - $19.95
10. SplashWallet Suite (personal ID manager) - $59.95

PPC

1. Spb Pocket Plus (today screen plug in) - $29.95
2. Spb Mobile Shell (today screen plug in) - $29.95
3. Pocket Informant 8 (today screen plug in) - $29.95
4. MobiTV (streaming television) - $9.99
5. SPB Backup - $19.95
6. MIcrosoft Voice Command (voice control) - $39.9Microsoft 39.99
7. Spb Diary (today screen plug in) - $19.95
8. Spb Time (clock) - $14.95
9. Spb Phone Suite (phone features) - 19.95
10. Spb Brain Evolution (brain trainer) - $19.95

Windows Mobile® Standard

1. Ringtone Megaplex (ringtone library) - $19.95
2. SBSH Facade (home screen plug in) - $14.95
3. MobiTV (streaming television) - $9.99
4. HandiTV (streaming television) - $24.95
5. Fizz Weather (weather monitor) - $16.95
6. SmartphoneNotes (note manager) - $17.95
7. Agendus Standard Edition (calendar manager) - $19.95
8. Agenda One (calendar manager) - $29.95
9. PocketStreamer Deluxe (streaming media) - $24.95
10. IM+ (instant messenger consolidator) - $29.95

Symbian

1. SBSH Papyrus (time manager) - $19.95
2. Handy Calendar for S60 (calendar manager) - $39.95
3. LCG Jukebox (music player) - $24.99
4. Pro_Mail (email viewer) - $27.99
5. Quickoffice Premier (document manager) - $49.95
6. Handy Weather for S60 (weather monitor) - $19.95
7. Advanced Call Manager (call manager) - $19.99
8. WorldMate Professional (travel assistant) - $69.95
9. Ultimate Voice Recorder (voice recorder) - $14.95
10. IM+ (instant messenger consolidator) - $29.95

From a sales/device perspective, the trend is clear. The adoption of new devices has slowed down somewhat, especially in the established platforms but also in the Symbian space. Interestingly, the Treo 650 still is the single-strongest sales getter. As for application categories, producitivity apps and gaming stuff seem to take the lead this year(see above).

For me, the trends in this yardstick are clear. The established platforms have begun to see market saturation(for PPC, the Palm OS situation should rather be called catastrophic). Windows Mobile Smartphone is currently at a turning point; and Symbian and BlackBerry are growing insanely fast.

What do you think?

The QTEK 8500 may not be the best Windows Mobile Smartphone on the market - others have stronger processors and more memory. However, the machine is available for cheap(100€) and is very small…if it had a little more memory and WM6, it would be a cutting-edge flip phone. Read on to update your QTEK 8500 to Windows Mobile 6(and get 23MB of free storage memory)!

First of all, here are a few photos proving my claims. The phone on the left runs WM6, the one on the right is still on Windows Mobile 5(click for bigger versions):
Home screen

Launcher

OS version, storage size

RAM size

The update process essentially runs in three steps. First of all, connect your phone to your PC and run SDAUnlocker, which will unlock your phone.

After that, a slightly weird process called CID unlocking awaits you. Download version itsutilsbin-20070705 of the tools, and do the following(more news here):

1. Get itsutils: http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme/projects/xda/tools.html
2. Run pdocread.exe with no args. Take a note of the “uniqueid” value.
3. Run “pdocread -n 1 0×000000 0×10000 -b 0×4000 original-bdk1.nb” - you’ll get a file.
4. Head over to http://www.spv-developers.com/strtrkCID/. Feed it the DOCID and the file you got from steps 2 and 3. It’ll give you back anoter file.
5. Run “pdocwrite -n 1 patchedfile.bin 0×000000 0×10000 -b 0×4000″ where patchedfile.bin is obviously to be replaced with the patched file you got from step 4.

Once this is done, you are ready to go. Get a firmware update of choice from this xda-developers thread(I used one from here), unpack it and run the flasher. Once the flashing process is done, you are ready to go!

A big thank-you goes out to Franz Lax for providing us with a second QTEK 8500 for experimentation!