A free exhibition is currently running at the London Design Museum (28 Shad Thames, London SE1), entitled, 'People Made - Nokia products that changed the world' and tells the 'inside story of Nokia - past, present and future'. The exhibition is free to enter, but is only running from October 28th to November 2nd, leaving you three days to go along and take a look.
The 361 Degrees Podcast has returned for season 2. To kick off our second season we headed to Nokia World and recorded our first ever 'live' edition in front of an invited audience of bloggers and mobile gurus. The episode primarily consists of a conversation, based on a question and answer format, between the audience and the three hosts (Ben Smith, Ewan MacLeod, and Rafe Blandford).
I did report on Nokia's (beta) launch of its Maps Suite last week and was intending to write up my thoughts, but I've been beaten to it by The Mobile Tech Bishop in an excellently argued piece, in which the positives are acknowledged but the phrase "bloated mass" also makes a justified appearance.
Tucked away in the online manual for the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone (now available online) are details of the Contacts Transfer application we spotted last week at Nokia World. This allows you to pair your existing phone over Bluetooth and transfer your contacts from the older phone.
Tucked away in the press releases from Nokia World was a small note that Nokia would be working with the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA). Given that the MTA announced this trial without mentioning the hardware partner earlier in the year, it's great to see Nokia has picked up a high visibility hardware trial (at least in business circles) in America.
Here's an interesting one that's going to raise some eyebrows - it's an interactive multimedia preview of the Lumia 800, so you can get a tiny taster of the Metro UI on your Symbian device. While a number of die-hard Symbian fans are going to be very upset at the slightest hint of a possibility of a transition, it's another smart move from the marketing teams working on the Lumia launch.
The focus at Nokia World 2011 was, of course, very much on the launch of Nokia's first Windows Phone devices (Lumia 800 and 710), but there was plenty of Symbian Anna and Belle goodness across the various booths and stands too. To give you a flavour of the Symbian presence at the event, here's a virtual tour of (some of) what was on display.
Alongside the main Nokia World announcements, Nokia Beta Labs has announced an update to Nokia Maps, introducing the concept of Nokia Maps Suite (version 2.00, in fact), with four big new features; Pulse, Places, Live View and Public Transport. As always for beta software, you'll need to head over to the Beta Labs, and be aware it might not be consumer ready in terms of stability, but all your feedback will be appreciated.
Nokia announced a new hardware partnership with Monster on the stage of Nokia World today. Known for high-performance audio (in the same way that Carl Zeiss are known for high performance lenses), the relationship promises to be both long-term and exclusive with Nokia. The first collaborative product is the Purity range of HD stereo headsets.
The bad news - no new Symbian hardware at Nokia World 2011. The good news is that mention was specifically made of the existing ten next-gen Symbian^3/Anna/Belle handsets and commitment to keep the updates coming - it's safe to say that Belle will be on all ten devices fairly soon, variants and versions notwithstanding. Six new phones were launched today at the event, four using Series 40 and two running Windows Phone.
Nokia World 2011 starts today and the team is on the ground to bring you live coverage from Nokia's premier event. Over the next two days we'll be bringing you the key news, views and information. This news story contains our live coverage, where you can see the latest images and text updates; you can also interact with the team, asking questions and adding your own thoughts. Alternatively you can keep up to date by following our @aas or @aa_wp accounts on Twitter, where we will be posting text updates and images.
Being rolled out with only a day or so to spare before Nokia World hits is a 'service pack' for Symbian Anna, claimed to bring performance and usability benefits, plus faster email and messaging, quicker GPS fixes and a mysterious 'more' (presumably including minor bug fixes). So far we've only seen this (today) for our Nokia N8s, though I'd expect other Anna devices to also get offered this fairly soon. What's not to like?
Nokia Maps 3D is a desktop browser-based 3D mapping tech demo, with (currently) 23 major cities around the world mapped in glorious, true 3D, with data and textures gathered from satellites, planes and cars, using conventional cameras and laser rangefinders. Anyway, Nokia just released a rather cute 'making of' video, demonstrating in public-friendly form, roughly how it all gets put together. It's embedded below - comments welcome. Oh, and apparently you'll soon not even have to install a plug-in into your browser...
Nokia World 2011 kicks off tomorrow, Wednesday 26th October and the entire 90 minute opening keynote is being webcast in video form to the world - so there's no excuse not to tune in and watch for yourself. Links below. We're expecting several Windows Phone handsets to be announced and we're very much hoping for some Symbian hardware too. Watch All About Symbian and All About Windows Phone for detailed stories on the announcements on the day!
You might have noticed that the team behind All About Symbian launched a new web site today. All About Windows Phone is now live and already stocked with content, covering Nokia's other smartphone platform going forwards. We did think a few words of reassurance appropriate for the AAS audience, however - we're not going anywhere!
