Nokia have had a lot of negative press recently when it comes to their performance. While the Finnish phone giants hold the largest market share in the world, they have recently failed to release any handsets that have managed to capture the consumers imagination (and money) the way that the iPhone and Android phones have been doing. In fact, if you were to use advertising and hype as your gauge for the current mobile phone players, you could be forgiven for thinking that Nokia are dying out.

Not true, say Nokia.

Nokia have announced that they sell over a quarter of a million (260,000, to be exact) smartphones every day. In the linked article, comparisons are made to iPhone (80,000 a day) and Android (200,000 a day). This news doesn’t entirely surprise  me. Nokia have a strong customer base and, in my experience, people don’t associate Nokia with smartphones. My father, for example, owns a Nokia N95, but the only smartphone feature he uses is email.

That isn’t to say that Nokia aren’t in danger of falling behind, as they sometimes appear to be already. They need to start bringing out some sexy handsets, and soon.

This story is a little late, but I missed it last week and it is something I wanted to type about; NPD figures for August show that video games sales are down from last years, by about 10% for consoles, and 14% for software. It would be all too easy to declare the impending doom of the gaming industry, but I think it is worth noting that, last year, there wasn’t a slew of new hardware due out later in the year.

The impending release of Kinect and Move means new games that use the hardware. I’m not an expert in (most things) video game sales trends, but I suspect that a good number of consumers will be holding onto their cash until the new toys come out and, with them, the new games. Microsoft and Sony will be hoping that’s the case.

The University of Rochester, New York, has recently completed a study on non-gamers, which has been published Current Biology. The study took a group of people who have not played games regularly, and made them play games. Half the group were given fast paced shooters; Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament, while the other half were given the slow-paced strategy game; The Sims 2.

After playing the game, the subjects were given a task and a time limit, and the boffins found that the shooter group were able to complete their tasks much quicker. Further to this, there was no loss of accuracy.

It wouldn’t have surprised me to find that gamers who play fast-paced, reflex dependant shooting games would be quicker off the mark with certain tasks, what surprises me is that this was the case for people who weren’t gamers. Effectively, playing the game ‘prepared’ their brain for the tasks that they were given. So, now you know, if you are going to undertake a task against the clock, a game show, perhaps, you should play some Halo before you go!

Twitter are rolling out a new look twitter.com. The new design promises to be ‘faster and richer,’  and among its new features is a side pane that will pull in relevant information, as well as adding things like showing a list of people who have retweeted the post you are looking at, which, I feel, makes the retweet a heck of a lot like the Facebook ‘like.’ I’m typing about this story through CNET’s article as, right now, the new design hasn’t been rolled out to everyone, and I’m not one of those lucky people to get the new look Twitter.

Populate site redesigns usually make the news due to the overwhelmingly negative response from their users – who don’t like change – but as twitter.com has mostly stayed as the very basic core service that Twitter provides, this new design can be likened to a completely new service. Indeed, it may be bad news for the host of other services that have popped up around Twitter. I myself am a Brizzly user, mainly for the community-based trending topic descriptions, but the fact that Brizzly automatically embeds images from places like TwitPic, and videos from YouTube, and now Twitter do that also.

What will happen to these other services, now that Twitter is implementing their bullet point features? It is Twitter’s service, and they are fully within their right to put these other sites out of business by offering a better service.

Some other stuff

Boxee, the makers of the great Internet TV software, uh, Boxee, will be releasing their Boxee Box this November. The Boxee Box is a set top box aimed at bringing the Boxee experience to the living room in a way that the general consumer can easily enjoy. Boxee will also bring more competition into what seems to be an increasingly crowding market for set top boxes, with Apple recently putting out their latest version, and Google soon to release theirs. Boxee is notable because, unlike the current options on the market, Boxee aims to get everything (in terms of content) on their platform. Boxee will cost £199.

Boxee Boxee Boxee!

Finally, Bloomberg have reported that Steve Jobs, the über control freak known for black turtle necks and iPhones, was stopped from boarding his private jet because he was found to be carrying ninja stars. Ninja stars! Words cannot describe the randomness of this story.

That was John Bullock’s Thoughts on [tech and gaming] News for Wednesday, September 15, 2010. Check back tomorrow for some more.

Sorry about all the ‘Boxee’s.’

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