Interesting reports over the weekend following RIMS earnings announcements pointing to strong growth in smart phone markets, for some manufacturers. I followed up the reports – with my mind half on a chat with the leadership team here Friday about Symbian’s future direction – with a little research around areas that mobile apps might diversify into strongly in the next 12 months.

Here’s the Guardian on RIMs increased revenues and profits:

Strong sales of BlackBerry devices helped RIM increase quarterly revenues by 11% to $3.92bn (£2.4bn) and the company expects that to rise to between $4.2bn and $4.4bn in the three months to February – its fiscal fourth quarter. Profits in the three months to November were $628.4m, up from $475.6m in the previous three months and $396.3m in the same quarter last year.

In the quarter to end November, RIM shipped over 10m smart phones. Palm in contrast shipped only 785,000 smart phones in the same period despite having what’s generally perceived as a better UI.

RIM’s results are partly a consequence of its business phone reaching a wider audience,  illustrative of a general trend and RIM’s strategy to enter  consumer markets.

So the battle is brewing for the wider market for smart phones.  Nokia’s recent endorsement of the Symbian platform is worth reiterating because it points to the place where competition will really heat up – price and diverse services.

As an operating system, Symbian has reach and flexibility like no other platform, and we have measures in place to push smartphones down to new price points globally, while growing margins. I see great opportunity for Nokia to capture new growth in our industry, by creating what we expect to be the world’s biggest platform for services on the mobile.

Symbian is currently thinking through the implications of becoming the platform for “smart phone for the masses.” That’s an attractive proposition though we shouldn’t lost sight of the fact that the enterprise mobile apps market is in its infancy.

Keeping an eye on the market is something the community has questioned lately – why do we write about it here on the blog? Because one of the services we can provide is drawing attention to the growing potential of the platform. One of the things we try to avoid is carrying views that are in some sense definitive or authoritative around that.

Most of the processes Symbian has put in place this year are ways to involve as many of the eco-system as practicable in sharing in the ideas generation rather than dictating them from the cente.

With clarity on Symbian’s direction we can give more shape to that in 2010. One of the first parts of that missions is to begin imagining how the developer and applications community shapes up as the smart phone reaches into a much wider market.

Scott Monson will be on soon with some thoughts about the role of apps in Symbian’s journey into a wider market – in fact driving a range of apps into mass markets globally, in places that will benefit in a rich variety of ways from low cost smart phones. It’s a theme we’re going to explore through January.

Hopefully we can generate some debate around what it means for our developer community and end-users, the types of applications, and the markets that are going to carry most interest.

Recently  (1st December) Vodafone announced a new focus on the healthcare sector:

Vodafone Group PLC Chief Executive Vittorio Colao said Tuesday the company will launch new unit to work with pharmaceutical companies and government organizations to provide healthcare services using mobile phone technology. Vodafone’s new mobile healthcare unit, comprising a team of around 10 people “will focus on health care solutions and will work alongside other organizations including pharmaceuticals and government organizations, which can help us to fully understand the needs of healthcare professionals,” Colao told delegates at the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit in London.

In India health care costs are the second most significant reason for  indebtedness of rural families. In fact looking around the India Together web site you can see many examples of information gaps that mobile communications might solve. – that’s an important area for Symbian to address. In Europe there’s surprisingly little use of mobile technology for tasks like creating records where immediacy is vital, for example in post-op, or sharing data with patients.

We carried a post recently we carried a post recently on mobile payments and as David Durrant pointed out it did not reference Nokia Money – so a reference to Nokia Money. Maybe David will be back to write about it soon. We’d l to see some vision for how social networks will evolve around mobile finance or how maybe rural entrepreneurs can connect across the globe.

And of course the auto industry now sees mobile as the big value-add for the next generation of car. My impression here is the auto industry has done a lot of work around the promotional side of this without yet being hard headed enough about the business case – yes there is one but it’s not well made: