Version 10.2 of the management platform gives IT staff more flexibility when managing iOS and Android-based devices

BlackBerry has upgraded its management platform Enterprise Server 10 (BES10) with more features for managing Android and iOS smartphones and has also improved scalability to lower overall costs.

BlackBerry’s problems are well documented, but the company is soldiering on. On Monday, the company posted an open letter from CEO John Chen that emphasized its renewed focus on the enterprise market.

One of the key products in this effort is BES10, with version 10.2 released on Tuesday. To make it more competitive in a cutthroat sector, BlackBerry has extended its cross-platform support.

Enterprises can now activate iOS and Android-based devices using what the company calls “true BYOD mode,” where management is confined to the Secure Work Space container only. This feature is a good fit for environments where full mobile device management control for iOS and Android devices is not preferred, according to BlackBerry.

Secure Work Space started shipping in June and adds a managed container to protect corporate data and applications. It now works with smartphones running iOS7 and Android 4.3.

Management of iOS and Android devices can also be automated using BlackBerry Web Services (BWS). By exposing BWS APIs, Blackberry will enable others to develop applications that automate and combine various administrative tasks for the management of iOS and Android devices.

BlackBerry has also worked to improve BES scalability: the new version can support 100,000 devices per domain, with any mix of BlackBerry, iOS and Android devices. That reduces the number of servers and resources required for large scale deployments, which, in turn, lowers costs, according to the company.

BlackBerry has also added a self-service portal that allows users to perform device management tasks on their own, which could result in fewer calls to IT. Users can view and manage all their devices, view device details, and set activation passwords, according to BlackBerry.

Morgan Stanley, Boeing, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board and Secusmart are participating in the early adopter and beta programs, and are running version 10.2 in a test environment, according to BlackBerry.

The argument over which type of code to build our apps in masks the need to update our architecture and provide better analytical tools.

Jolla was founded by a group of ex-Nokia employees who strongly believed that MeeGo deserved a second chance. Two years on, the Finish startup is launching its first smartphone with a new take on the forgotten platform, called Sailfish OS.

I went hands-on with an early version of the Jolla smartphone in June and came away feeling curious, but unconvinced by the execution. Today, I was able to examine a final build of the device and see if my earlier reservations were unfounded. Can a reinvigorated MeeGo compete with Windows Phone, Firefox OS and Tizen for third place in the smartphone market?

Design

The Jolla smartphone is dense, compact and regimented. From afar, the two-part design gives the device a thick, slightly bulbous look, but it’s actually less than 10mm thick and in the hand, it feels surprisingly slim.

The 4.5-inch display is the focal point of the handet. Aside from the power button and volume rocker, the device is devoid of any hardware buttons. This gives the front of the Jolla smartphone a clean, minimalist look whenever you lay it down on a flat surface.

As soon as you turn the device over, the scrappy startup’s design aspirations are apparent. Every Jolla smartphone comes in a reserved matte black on the front, but the back cover is available in a range of colors including red, teal and navy blue. These two halves were designed specifically to contrast with one another: The front panel is flat along the top but rounded on the sides, while the back is precisely the opposite. They clash in a way that we haven’t seen in a smartphone before: It’s an unfamiliar look, but one that slowly grew on me.

Two small speaker grilles lie on the bottom of the handset, alongside a standard headphone jack and microUSB port up top. Jolla has etched its rather beautiful logo on the top of the device and on the standard rear back covers, but otherwise there is very little branding or blemishes on the device.

Jolla has opted for a brave, memorable design here, but it’s not the most attractive or premium smartphone on the market. The first Sailfish OS smartphone is certainly distinct and different, but that doesn’t mean it’s any better than what’s already out there.

The ‘Other Half’

Jolla is pushing the idea of a smartphone formed from two different halves. Each removable back cover is light and flimsy, but through an NFC chip it can be used to activate specific content normally dormant on the device or the Jolla Store. The company’s own offerings tweak the look of the UI to match the color of the cover, creating a harmonious design between software and hardware.

The hope is that third-party brands will create their own covers, which consumers can then buy to unlock new content from within the Jolla store, including apps, wallpapers, fonts and sounds. Barcelona Football Club, for example, could offer a background image of the team and a well-known chant or anthem as the ringtone.

The startup also hinted that these covers could be used to add new hardware features. Throughout my fairly brief testing period, I was able to use a few of Jolla’s self-produced covers, but the scope and ambition of the concept is evident. These covers are yet to be used in a truly meaningful way, but that could change once third-parties start experimenting with the device.

Software

For the most part, the design of Sailfish OS remains unchanged since I last saw the Jolla smartphone. The power button or a concise double-tap on the screen wakes the device, revealing a lock screen with the time, your recent notifications, connectivity and sound profile.

None of these icons are actionable though. It’s a static visualization, so to find any of your emails, text messages or Facebook alerts, you’ll need to dig a little deeper into the UI of the Jolla smartphone. Pulling down from the top of the screen reveals a pulley menu with quick actions based on where you are within Sailfish OS. For the lock screen, this includes quick access to the camera, the contacts in your address book and system settings.

Sailfish OS is constructed using a vertical UI though, rather than the horizontal design that most of us have grown accustomed to on Android and iOS. It’s no less intuitive than these platforms, but it’s certainly different. After waking the device, a swipe up reveals the home screen with an app dock and app switcher.

It’s a three-by-three grid that offers a small preview of the nine most recently used apps. An immediate concern is that as soon as you boot a tenth app, the ninth will immediately disappear from the switcher. Most days, I’m rarely using more than nine apps simultaneously, but the cap is certainly notable. There is a workaround though: When you long-press to close a piece of software, the device will show all of the apps that are currently running on the device.

Tapping on the thumbnail once will launch the app, but with a long-press you can also slide to the left or right to access one of two shortcuts. The address book app, for instance, lets you jump to either the dialer or your list of contacts.

Swiping up from the home screen reveals the app drawer. Immediately, you’re hit by the quality of the app icons. They’re bright and beautiful, with an unusual cuboid shape that Jolla has rounded off at two opposing corners. Hands down, I think these designs are better than the stock offerings on iOS and Android.

Unfortunately, the handset that I used was plagued with technical issues. The Jolla team warned us of a few known bugs going in, but there were a number of unforeseen problems. Apps would crash, stutter or launch randomly, and many of the gestures didn’t behave as expected. Even if a small percentage of these problems make their way into the retail version, I suspect Jolla’s customer support team is going to have their work cut out.

Notification Center

Unlike iOS and Android, you can swipe up from the bottom of the display to access the Sailfish OS notification center, known as Events. Tapping on the alert will send you to the app in question, while a long-press will dismiss it from your list. Deleting notifications in this fashion is a little slow, especially in comparison to the fantastic swipe-to-dismiss gestures found in Android.

Camera

Android smartphones have a reputation for sub-par cameras, so Jolla had the opportunity to differentiate with its first smartphone.

The handset is equipped with an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, but sadly it produces some pretty underwhelming images. Files are recorded with an unacceptable amount of noise, even in optimal lighting conditions.

The camera app is fairly intuitive, with limited white balance, focusing and flash options from a pull-down at the top of the screen. Experimenting with these tools can offer some small improvements, but it’s not enough to rectify the underlying problems.

Apps

Jolla offers some basic Sailfish OS apps covering email, maps, notes, calendar appointments and more. The Jolla Store is almost empty though, with few high-profile names aside from Wikipedia.

The saviour is Android. Once you’ve downloaded the relevant app from Jolla’s marketplace, the Yandex Store will be added to the device and you can download a number of apps that support Android 4.2. These reside in the app drawer and are integrated with the home screen app switcher, just like any other piece of Sailfish OS software.

Android and Sailfish OS have a different design language, so using apps conceived for Google’s mobile operating system can be pretty jarring sometimes. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome solution for the app support problem.

BlackBerry and Windows Phone have struggled to boost their native app offerings, however if Jolla can keep up with Google’s firmware updates, it might be able to avoid that problem entirely. Unlike BlackBerry 10, Android feels like an embedded part of the Sailfish OS experience. Access to the Google Play store would have been ideal, but the Yandex Store is a serviceable alternative.

The bottom line

The Jolla smartphone is certainly unique. The styling of the hardware is unusual and the gesture-based Sailfish OS is intriguing. I enjoyed my time with the device, but I’m still not sure who this handset is for.

If you’re not happy with iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Jolla smartphone is worth looking at. But how many people feel that way? Power users and tech aficionados perhaps, but my gut feeling is that most consumers will be satisfied with one of those three platforms.

It’s too early to make a final judgement on the Jolla smartphone, but it surprised me in ways that I didn’t expect. A flawed, but unashamedly atypical device.

Jolla smartphone uses an OS based on the Nokia’s former MeeGo project and will be sold in 135 countries

Just what the world needs — another smartphone platform. From Nokia, no less.

For two years now, Jolla, a crew of ex-Nokia engineers based in both Finland and Hong Kong, has been working on a smartphone powered by Sailfish, a variant of Nokia’s previously abandoned, Linux-based MeeGo OS. Now the first Jolla phone is ready to ship and will go on sale tonight in Finland (pre-orders were €399), with many other territories to follow afterward.

Not much is known about the phone yet, other than that it uses a dual-core processor, sports 16GB of memory and a spare SD card slot, and eschews buttons (save for possibly a volume rocker) in favor of a gesture-based UI. As for Sailfish, it’s billed as an “independent, open, partner-friendly” mobile OS that uses the Mer project (itself derived from the earlier MeeGo) for its UI.

It’s going to be tough, to say the least, for the Jolla and for Sailfish to make a dent in the smartphone market. But the Jolla, and Sailfish itself, have a feature that may give it a slight edge: Sailfish runs existing Android apps via a third-party runtime. Apps for Sailfish can be built either using the native Qt interface (Qt itself being a former Nokia property) or via HTML5. The Sailfish folks claim to be looking into compatibility with Firefox OS APIs as well.

It’s a wise move to allow Sailfish to be compatible with at least one of the existing phone-app ecosystems, given that Nokia has tried and failed before to make MeeGo into a workable platform. The Nokia N9 phone was released in 2011 but made no detectable splash in the marketplace — and that was right on the heels of Nokia deciding to use Windows Phone as its platform of choice.

Analyst Geoff Blaber, when interviewed by the BBC about Jolla and Sailfish, theorized that Jolla’s long-term strategy was to create a phone platform that could be licensed out to other manufacturers. It’s an approach similar to what Mozilla is attempting to do with Firefox OS, with the big differentiators being Sailfish’s (and Firefox OS’s) alleged greater openness over Android.

InfoWorld’s Simon Phipps has written before about how Nokia and BlackBerry could have been major competition for Apple had they embraced more open ecosystems. It’s unlikely Jolla and Sailfish will make much of a dent in a marketplace already ruled by Android, despite Sailfish’s Android compatibility. But given how much ex-Nokia talent is bound up in this project, it’ll be worth watching just to see how their approach unfolds and whether it’ll become its own animal or just another way to run Android.

Few things in the tech world have been so frustrating to watch develop as using your smartphone to pay for things, but Americans are finally getting some options to consider. ISIS, the carrier-supported mobile payment system, is finally available for customers to try out.

The past couple of years have been painfully slow in the US for anyone who is a fan of the idea that you can use your phone to pay for things just by tapping the back of your device to a receiving pad in a grocery store or vending machine. Google attempted to control the market with their Wallet application, which required a secure element to process transactions that only Google had access to. This has since been fixed on the Nexus 5 with Android 4.4, but it’s been a long road to this particular solution.

Meanwhile, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T have been slowly working on ISIS. While similar in function, the mechanism for actually transmitting payment data is a little different with this service. ISIS requires a special SIM card that has NFC transmitting capabilities, instead of relying on NFC built into the device. This means that you don’t have to use a phone with NFC, but you do have to use one of their special SIM cards.

If you head into your local carrier store and ask for an ISIS SIM, you should be able to just swap out the card in your phone and start making payments as soon as you install the Google Play app on your Android phone. More devices will be supported in the future, but right now each carrier has a list of supported devices. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is supported for all carriers, and Verizon made sure their new range of Motorola Droid phones are on the list as well.

With any luck, making payments with your phone in the US will start becoming more common.

The next Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the de facto chip for flagship Android handsets, will support the Ultra-HD standard, while the next Intel chips will bring 64-bit processing to tablets.

Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 805 could start appearing in new phones and tablets as soon as next year and will bring a host of processing performance upgrades.

And while many tech-savvy and film-loving consumers could well be won over by being able to view ultra-high definition content on a tablet, it’s not clear how the same feature would enhance smartphone use. However, if mobile devices are able to capture and play UHD content, it could be the solution to kick-starting the UHDTV market. At the moment the television sets are sold at a premium and there is very little native content available for them.

Not to be outdone, Intel has also this week announced that it has started building 64-bit Bay Trail processors optimized for Android tablets and that the first devices will be hitting the shelves in 2014. To make this happen, Intel is having to develop a 64-bit version of the Android operating system, but the company claims that the new devices could retail for as little as $150.

Currently, with the exception of Apple’s iPhone 5S — the world’s first 64-bit phone — smartphones and tablets have 32-bit processors and run 32-bit software. And for the moment, that’s not a problem. But, as consumers start to expect more from their devices — i.e., creation rather than just consumption or just running lots of apps side by side, current phones and tablets are going to struggle to perform.

A 64-bit processor — a standard piece of kit on a desktop or notebook computer — can address and use more RAM, and RAM is what’s needed for running heavier software such as photo and video editing packages and for using multiple apps simultaneously. And of course, more RAM means more speed too, but as with ultra-high definition support, this speed and performance needs more energy.

Now, if only a company would make a similar announcement about a smartphone or tablet with a two-day battery life.

Vodafone is rolling out its Near Feld Communications-based mobile wallet service in Europe, and said this is the first European mobile payment service to be based on the open-standard GlobalPayment platform.

The Vodafone SmartPass service is the first application designed for Vodafone Wallet and has been developed in partnership with Visa. Vodafone SmartPass can be funded when needed and enables customers to pay for goods with their smartphone at any Visa contactless payment terminal in retailers around the world, including more than 1.2 million in Europe, Vodafone added.

Vodafone Wallet and Vodafone SmartPass will launch in Spain today, Germany in mid-December, and the Netherlands, the UK and Italy in spring of 2014. Vodafone said it is also working with major European banks to integrate their card portfolios into the wallet and will announce further details in due course.

Vodafone joins other operators by launching mobile wallet services in Europe. For example in the UK, EE offers the Cash on Tap service and Orange and Barclaycard launched the UK’s first NFC-based payment service with Quick Tap. In France, Orange France is teaming up with Visa Europe to launch a prepaid NFC service called Orange Cash in 2014.

Vodafone, O2 UK and EE are also the co-founders of Weve, a company working on setting up unified platform for NFC mobile phone payments in the UK. Weve will launch its platform, which will feature discounts, automated loyalty schemes and the ability to pay bills, during 2014.

The GlobalPlatform standard is a cross industry, non-profit association with financial services, manufacturers and telecommunications companies among its members. It identifies, develops and publishes specifications that promote the secure and interoperable deployment and management of multiple applications on secure chip technology.

Ubuntu’s touch-based (read: mobile) OS is still finding its footing with users (and a hardware home to call its own), but the outfit’s paving the way for developers to get onboard. An experimental emulator for the mobile OS has just been released that apes much of the feel, and occasionally the look, of Android’s own emulator for desktop. As it’s currently a work-in-progress, not all of the functionality is available at the outset.  ADB, SSH access and serial console are all turned ‘on’ by default, but you’ll need to fuss with the emulator to enable things like Powerd and “a few other services.” There are also some non-responsive UI bits to deal with, since the provided keyboard layout is somewhat unworkable, but no doubt future releases will see these rough edges ironed out. That said, it’s a good way for devs and non-devs alike to glimpse the Ubuntu experience on mobile.

Google’s new Android RunTime (ART) is available to use on the Nexus 5 as a part of Android 4.4, but is it really worth turning on and using? After spending the last couple of days with the heir apparent to Dalvik for Android, it’s safe to say that while there are no earth shattering changes to the overall experience, it certainly doesn’t hurt to make the switch.

ART is very simple to enable, as long as you’ve got a few minutes and about 8% of your total battery to spare if you’re not connected to an outlet). You’ll need to enable the developer settings first. Head to About Phone in your Settings and violently bash the Build Number with your finger until the OS tells you that you’re a developer. When you press the back button, there will be a new section for Developer options. Inside that menu you’ll find runtime options, where you can select ART and reboot your phone.

Once the fun has started, here what you can expect…

Your new Nexus 5 is going to feel just a touch snappier when you first boot with ART. This isn’t ART being awesome, this is your phone operating with a completely empty cache. The truth is the Snapdragon 800 processor in that Nexus 5 is already screaming fast, so it’s not like it really needs to be any faster for navigating the OS or launching apps. The most impressive thing here is that there really isn’t any noticeable difference. Despite being not quite ready for prime time — which is why it isn’t the default — ART is already just as capable as Dalvik.

After three whole days of use, making sure every app I would normally use was run and played with, there wasn’t a single experience that felt any different. I didn’t expect there to be any real issues because everything’s being compiled in such a way that the apps themselves shouldn’t be different, but it was worth testing all the same. Games ran just fine, no apps crashed, and everything was very much business as usual.

I wandered through a few forums to see if anyone was having problems with specific apps, but when I installed them on my phone I found no issues. ART, by and large, is just as stable as Dalvik.

Battery life is the biggest difference I see with ART, which is something that should make any smartphone user happy. In our battery tests with the Nexus 5, I found that the phone was capable of getting you through a whole day as long as you only had the screen on for about three and a half hours total. This isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. With ART running I found that the screen on experience is still very much the same. If you’ve got more than three hours of screen on time, there’s a good chance your phone is almost dead. The difference is in how the phone consumes battery in an idle state. With ART running, the Nexus 5 could easily go a full 24 hours of idling and performing casual tasks, while with Dalvik running that same workload would only get the phone to 17 or 18 hours.

Ultimately, ART is not going to wildly change your phone just yet. This is something Google has been working on for a little while now, and it’s something that will eventually become the default runtime for Android. This is a really great thing for the future, when Android as an OS can be optimized to take advantage ART, but for right now it’s not going to offer you any kind of mind blowingly different experiences. Still, it never hurts to poke around and play with new things. As I see no negatives to running ART, I don’t think I’ll be going to back to Dalvik on this Nexus 5.