Mobility TechZone Week in Review

It is getting mighty close to Super Bowl time, and this week, our Apps on Tap columnist Brooke Neuman has pulled together a stellar collection of the best Super Bowl apps out there. Download them now and get up to speed so you will be ready to roll , whether you are hanging out on the couch or handling a little tail-gaiting action.

This past week has also been the Super Bowl week of earnings calls, with the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Nokia getting the word out on how they did during the holiday season. Google did quite well, pulling in revenue of $50 billion for 2012. But perhaps the most interesting thing coming out of Google this week isn’t about money but rather about a new “mystery” wireless network it is building in Mountian View. We wonder what it can be.

Nokia didn’t do nearly that well, but still managed to demonstrate that it may be on the verge of a turn around. The company is also working on a new aluminum-based high end Lumia phone we are very much looking forward to seeing.

At long last. Microsoft did OK, proving once again that it remains unchallenged in the enterprise, but remains as well woefully lacking on the consumer end of things. Microsoft is also hard at work preparing to launch the Surface Pro tablet. We hope they don’t screw it up like they did Surface RT sales.

Then there is Apple. The monster had a monster quarter yet somehow managed to disappoint the financial community. 48.7 million iPhones sold in three months wasn’t enough to make them happy! Meanwhile, the company has noted that China is a massive market it needs to tackle, and the company is now working on reassessing its marketing approaches there.

We can through into the week’s earnings call as well Samsung, which had a prolific quarter, and has clearly fired up the afterburners. It did quite well for itself. Samsung is clearly the king of the hill when it comes to total smartphones sold globally and managed to sell 1 in every 3 of them in Q4 2012. Samsung and Apple remain neck and neck – it will be interesting to see how things pan out in Q1 2013 as Samsung prepares for its own next super smartphone launch.

And let’s not forget BlackBerry, which by the time we get around to writing next week’s Week in Review will have – finally, at long last – officially launched its BlackBerry 10 operating system and its new devices. Research in Motion (RIM) CEO Thorsten Heins must be going through dual moments of sheer joy and sheer panic. This week RIM began to set the stage for the launch, with BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, its flagship enterprise mobile management platform going out the door ahead of the launch. The company is also hinting that licensing the operating system is something they will be taking a long hard look at. We don’t see this happening ourselves, but stranger things have happened.

We’ll wrap up this week with a look at three enterprise mobility platforms. The first we’ll point to is from Bradford Networks, which has just launched a 50,000 BYOD mobile management deployment. More than anything it proves large numbers of devices can be managed. Also on the mobile device management end of things, it is well worth pointing out that global ICT vendor Dimension Data has joined forces with AirWatch, a major MDM and MAM player. Finally, we’ll note that well known mobile application development platform vendor Appcelerator has now partnered with a very interesting startup, Crittercism, which has developed a perhaps unique platform to measure mobile application performance. The two companies have tightly integrated their products to make it easy for enterprise and other mobile app developers to get up and running on both platforms.

That is a wrap for this week.