Nokia has released its quarterly results today and has also made a number of other significant announcements. The results show sales revenue to be relatively stable, with smartphone sales up.
Net sales for the quarter were 10.3 billion Euro (£9.1 billion), up 5% year-on-year and 3% on the previous quarter – both figures helped a little by exchange rates. 110.4 million mobile devices were sold, up 2% year-on-year and down 1% sequentially, with smartphone and mobile computer sales up 61% year-on-year to 26.5 million units. Reported operating profit for the quarter increased to 403 million Euro, compared with a loss of 426 million Euro in the third quarter of 2009 and an operating profit of 295 Euro million in the second quarter of 2010.
There's less good news in the Smartphones and Services business units, where streamlining plans are expected to result in a reduction of up to 1,800 employees globally.
In addition, Nokia says it's focussing on Qt as the sole application development framework for its devices, encouraging developers to create applications that'll work on the Symbian and MeeGo platforms. Future improvements to Symbian will be developed in Qt and will be compatible with the existing Symbian^3 platform release; as a result, Nokia will no longer refer to Symbian^3 or Symbian^4 but will "change to a model of continuous evolution" instead of new OS versions.