Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Mobile at Mozilla, runs through Firefox for Maemo on the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900 in the video below and shows off how tabs work, the “awesome bar”, and extensions. You may be asking yourself what’s the point of Mozilla building Firefox for Mobile? WebKit has the largest share of the mobile browser space, and they’re doing a damn fine job at what they do, but you have to remember that WebKit isn’t a browser, it’s just a rendering engine. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), RIM, they’re all building browsers that are powered by WebKit, whereas Mozilla is actually building a complete browser that you as a consumer can install on your mobile device similar to how you install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows today. Key difference. No clue as to when Firefox Mobile will be finished, and what platforms it will support, but at least you can sleep soundly at night knowing that there is a company fighting to make the internet a better experience regardless of the device you use.

[Hat tip to @luovanto aka Jussi Mäkinen, Marketing Maemo Devices @ Nokia]

I’ve received enough emails and tweets pointing me to an article VentureBeat published titled “Nokia to invade U.S. market — will launch new phone with AT&T” that I feel compelled to tell you why I didn’t write about it on IntoMobile.

It isn’t news. Period.

Here is the original press release detailing the plans Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) have to cooperate. The first paragraph says it all really:

Nokia and Qualcomm plan to develop advanced mobile devices

February 17, 2009

Nokia and Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that the two companies are planning to work together to develop advanced UMTS mobile devices, initially for North America. The companies intend for the devices to be based on S60 software on Symbian OS, the world’s most used software for smartphones, and leverage Qualcomm’s advanced Mobile Station Modem MSM7xxx-series and MSM8xxx-series chipsets for cutting-edge processing performance and ubiquitous mobile broadband capabilities. The first mobile devices based on this collaboration are expected to launch in mid-2010 and be compatible with the forthcoming Symbian Foundation platform.

“Nokia is very pleased to be in discussions with Qualcomm around designing mobile devices that can benefit from the high level of integration found on MSM chipsets,” said Kai Oistamo, executive vice president, Devices, Nokia. “We are eager to demonstrate to the industry the possibilities that exist when innovative and open software is combined with advanced hardware solutions.”

“Nokia and Qualcomm are leaders in advanced wireless technologies, and this new level of cooperation will bring exceptional leaps in mobile performance to people around the world,” said Steve Mollenkopf, executive vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “We are very excited about leveraging the substantial synergies between S60 software and MSM chipsets.”

Why is VentureBeat taking the facts from a 9 month old press release and repackaging them as “tips” from an “insider” is beyond me, but hey, what do I know about journalism?

I’m just a blogger.

We dig the idea of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900’s expandable feature set. And to prove just how tweaking-friendly the Maemo-powered device is, this guy managed to make it run the good ol’ Windows 3.11. Yap, you’ve read that correctly – it’s running Win 3.11 from DOS. But I said enough, just watch the video and enjoy!

[Via: JampBLOG]

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) just posted an entry to their N-Gage blog saying that the N-Gage publishing platform is going to die in less than a year. Games will now be sold through the Ovi Store, which on face value makes sense, giving consumers a single location to purchase applications, whether that be a new alarm clock, or Super Monkey Ball, but all the community features that many of you have come to love will be gone. Stuff like high scores, messaging, and keeping up with your friends in the N-Gage Arena, that stuff is gone.

If you’re an N-Gage addict, make sure you read the complete blog post to get the details on what’s changing and when.

[Hat tip to @stevelitchfield from All About Symbian]

Yesterday Google launched Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 and with it crushed the stock prices of Tom Tom and Garmin, makers of dedicated navigation devices. The question of whether or not we’ll see Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps Navigation come to other platforms has yet to be answered, but knowing Google’s previous moves in the mapping space, it’s pretty much an inevitability.

Why is Google dominating the mapping space with such force? The answer lies with the cost of maps. If anyone with enough entrepreneurial spirit wanted to create a competitor to Google Maps, Bing Maps, or Ovi Maps, they would soon realize that they would have to secure mapping data, at a great cost mind you, from the two largest players on the market: Tom Tom, who purchased Tele Atlas in 2007, or NAVTEQ, who was purchased by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) during the same year. Entering the mapping space is not easy financially and that is why we’ve seen little competition.

Google Maps is fantastic, I use it on a near daily basis, but how much better could it be if anyone could build a mapping service? I’m not talking about using the Google Maps API to overlay your data on top of a Google Map, or the Ovi Maps Player API, which is an exact clone of Google’s, I’m talking about making mapping data open and free and allowing the same city center to be rendered in millions of different ways depending on the context of what a user wants to visualize. There is already an effort taking place on the internet right now to do just that, and it’s called OpenStreetMap (OSM), but they need help.

If I was Nokia I would donate every last bit of mapping data collected by NAVTEQ to OSM and just sit back and watch to see what happens. Anyone in the world would be able to use that data, and with it usher in a long due renaissance in the world of mapping. This isn’t about OpenStreetMap beating Google Maps, this is about allowing the creation of many mapping services.

If you think about it, honestly, how much better has Google Maps become since it was launched in February 2005? Sure, we now have Google Maps on mobile, but that’s because we had to wait for Google to make their maps available on the go. If access to the data of all the buildings, and all the streets on this Earth was available for anyone to build upon, with no licensing fees, and no strict conformity to the aesthetic dictated by one company, a 3rd party could have not only beaten Google to the mobile maps game, but may have created an entirely new user experience.

Think about it Nokia. You’ve been playing the open card a lot lately. First with Maemo, then with Symbian, now do the same thing with NAVTEQ. It’s the only way you’re going to beat Google at maps. They’ve got smarter people, more of them, and they stand the most to lose so they’re going to defend what they’ve got to the death if you try to out innovate them with Ovi Maps.

Google disrupted the mapping space by making navigation free, your turn to disrupt the mapping space by making maps free as in speech.

As expected, the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Surge 6790 has arrived on Rogers (NYSE: RCI) for the rabid texters out there. An unexpected bonus is a cheaper price point than the originally anticipated: a mere $29.99 on three-year contract. This is one of the cheapest new smartphones you’ll find out there, though the form factor might seem awkward to a lot of folks. Still, it’s packing a 2 megapixel camera, GPS, microSD memory card slot, and a 2.4″ QVGA display. It’s not in Rogers’ online store just yet, but it should be up soon.

[via Nokia]

T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) UK will be offering a special, Chrome coloured (not pictured above, but just imagining what it would look like makes me go ewww), edition of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 5800 on Sunday, sources tell Mobile Entertainment. The device will be free on a 2 year contract, 30£/month. Note that the Comes with Music subscription only lasts for 1 year, so if you’re picking this up then you better start downloading the second you turn the device on. If you’d rather have the 5800 without Comes with Music, then you’ll only have to pay £15/month. Do yourself a favor: buy an HTC Hero and a 1 year subscription to Spotify. You’ll be a happier person, with a better phone, better music selection, and a better overall experience. Comes with Music has been out for roughly a year and they’ve barely managed to get 110,000 people to sign up. Old devices, limited selection, higher prices, I’m not surprised Nokia is having a hard time getting customers.

While listening to All About Symbian podcast epsiode 154, one sound bite jumped out at me. At around 21 minutes and 20 seconds in, Rafe Blandford asked Jan Ole Suhr, the one man development shop who is best known for his Twitter client called Gravity, what is the revenue split from the Ovi Store, Handango, and other application stores versus his own website. Bit of back story: on June 2 of this year, Eric John from the Ovi Store team posted a blog entry stating that Gravity was the number one selling application. The statistics haven’t been updated since then, but hypothetically speaking let us pretend that today it is still the number one selling application. Jan said that “around 90%, probably even more than 90% came from my own website”. Is this a sign of how badly Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Ovi Store is doing right now? One would think that with the millions of devices out on the market now with Ovi Store built in that they would launch it, discover Gravity, and buy it, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. There are even commercials running in the UK, a country where Twitter is very popular, showcasing Gravity and the Ovi Store.

The whole point of application stores is to expose people to the applications they can install on their devices, and to give developers an easy way to monetize their applications. If the revenue coming from the number one selling application in the Ovi Store is less than 10% of total sales, then what the hell happened?

The Wall Street Journal takes a stab at reviewing the Nokia Booklet 3G, the first laptop to come from the Finnish handset maker hellbent on becoming an “internet company”. Katherine Boehret loves the battery life, saying “after running it through a harsh test with its screen cranked up to the brightest setting, Wi-Fi on, music playing on a continuous loop and all power-saving features turned off, it ran for almost eight hours straight”. That’s where the praise end however, she urges readers to “beware its tiny keyboard”. Whatever happened to the 12 hours Nokia (NYSE: NOK) promised at Nokia World?

You’ll be able to pick up the Booklet 3G for $300 from AT&T with a 2 year contract, $60/month, that gives you 5 GB of data per month, or you can buy it without contract for $600. Note: The Booklet 3G comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition, which has a whole lot of limitations. Are you doing to pick up this HDMI port packing, underpowered Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) MacBook Pro clone? I’m curious, leave a reply below.

[Hat tip to @samin, Creative Director at Nordkapp]

I posted this video on the @IntoMobile Twitter account, which if you haven’t followed already may be due to head trauma suffered as a child, and I wasn’t going to blog it … that is until I read what Ewan MacLeod had to say about it:

Brilliant, brilliant video from the Phoneage / Tehkseven chaps. Genius. Provided this video doesn’t hit the mainstream and Twitter doesn’t pick this up, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) will be perfectly fine.

To which I have to reply let the spreading begin: