For completeness, following on from the inclusion here of the official Nokia-produced summary of day 1 of their event last week, here (embedded below) is the summary of day 2, edited in similar 'party line' fashion, but interesting nonetheless.
As you'll see from the photo below, 12 megapixel camera phones are now starting to be sold on the High Street. On the face of it, more is usually better in a specifications battle, so why should I be so irritated by the latest battlefront? Read on for my thoughts on why the entire phone market is being somewhat misled.
While horribly biased (of course), Nokia's Conversations team has done a good job in producing a snack size 3 minute video summary of the main things launched or emphasised at Nokia World 09 Day 1, and it's embedded below. Good if you're short of time! For much more detail, see our other stories and, mostly, wait for Rafe to get back to base with his own hands-on material.
The Progress Project is a new initiative between Nokia and Lonely Planet, dedicated to promoting projects across the world that demonstrate technology making a difference in people's lives. There are a handful of examples up on the rather swish, heavily-video-enabled Flash site at the moment, well worth checking out and bookmarking.
Red Bend, the company behind the Firmware Over The Air update system in most of the smartphones covered here (with the notable exception of Samsung, which doesn't appear to have FOTA yet), has just announced that its FOTA software is now used by just over half a billion mobile devices worldwide, over 413 different devices. This represents a 60% share of the FOTA-enabled mobile phone market. See Red Bend's site for more information.
Bah, who need planes, taxis and hotels? You can watch the presentations from Nokia World in the comfort of your own living room or office, thanks to Nokia's events team, with a live page to bookmark and then keep an eye on throughout tomorrow and Thursday. The first keynote kicks off at 8am BST, 9am CET, so you might want to set an alarm if you're in the UK! See also the main AAS Twitter account, which is worth following and which will be feeding you updates straight from Rafe's keyboard....
You've got to love the consistency of the Carnival of the Mobilists. Week in, week out, there are articles to read, even through the summer. Carnival 189 is here at MSearchGroove and not only provides some interesting reading, it also rounds up the other CotM editions that we may have missed over the summer. Happy reading!
In All About Symbian Insight 85 (AAS Podcast 147), Rafe, Steve and Ewan discuss the glut of Nokia news ahead of this week's Nokia World. We cover the Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia 5230, Nokia Money (an under appreciated announcement) and the Nokia N900. There's also some discussion of Maemo 5, service strategy and the Sony Ericsson Satio. You can listen to AAS Insight 85 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Steve Litchfield explores the Nokia N95's continuing legacy in something of a tribute to the original dual-sliding smartphone... In terms of features, build quality and longevity, how do its successors stand up? And is there an 'ultimate' N95? Find out here. I look at the N95, the N95 8GB, the N96, the N85 and the N86 8MP - it's a veritable N95-fest!
It seems that when you're trucking along (in the USA, UK, France or China, at least), navigating using Google Maps on your smartphone, you're actually helping crowd source traffic data for Google, i.e. the application is reporting back to Google on your position and speed, a process described here in detail. While there are possible privacy implications in this, it does seem an interesting approach - or at least it would be if there were enough people using the system - so far in the UK, only motorways seem to be tagged for traffic status. Comments welcome.
Nokia has announced the Nokia N900, a Maemo 5-powered device. Maemo 5 is the evolution of Nokia's previous generation of Internet Tablets and aims to occupy the space created by the convergence of mobile phones, laptops and the Internet. The N900 features a horizontal slider design with a three line QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5 inch WVGA (800 x 600) touch screen, ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor with 256MB of RAM (and 768MB of virtual memory), 5.0 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, tri-band WCDMA and WiFi connectivity, integrated A-GPS, 3.5 mm AV jack (audio and TV-out), and 32GB of flash storage and a microSD card slot. The N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009 at a cost of €500 before taxes and subsidies. Read on for further details and comment.
Nokia today introduced Nokia Money, a mobile financial service, which will offer basic financial management and payments from a mobile phone. It will allow you to send money to another person, using just their mobile phone number, pay for goods, services and bills or recharge pre-pad SIM cards. Financial services are widely considered a very significant market opprtunity for the future: there are 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.
The Nokia Music Store India was formally launched today at the Music Connects conference. More than 3 million tracks are available and, as with Nokia Music Stores in other countries, there is a heavy emphasis on including local music. Nokia has signed up India's major independent labels including Tseries, Yashraj Music, Saregama, BIG Music and Venus; it has also partnered with India's leading music body, the Indian Music Industry. Nokia also announced that its Comes with Music service would be arriving in India later this year.
You'll know Tim Salmon if you've been around All About Symbian for a while, he's a regular commenter to news stories. And he now joins me in soft-launching a new audio podcast, a companion publication to my main Phones Show video podcast. Phones Show Chat episode 1, the pilot, is up now, with the main subjects being the Nokia N97 and E55/52. Note that it's a pilot and the audio quality is a little rough in places. Measures are in place to drastically improve things for episode 2. Be gentle in your comments, please!
We here at All About Symbian have been using Ovi Store for quite a while now, and have noticed a number of things that need to be fixed or could be improved. We don't doubt the effort and resources that Nokia has put into this so far, but we think it's fair to demand that Ovi Store lives up to the same general standards as other online content shops. Here are 23 suggestions for the Ovi Store team's to do list, neatly categorised into 'urgent', 'gripes' and 'suggestions'!
