Powered by Symbian Belle – the Nokia 700, Nokia 701 and Nokia 600 – brings single-tap near-field communication (NFC) sharing and pairing.
Oct 042011
Sep 192011
HP has introduced new mobile printing solutions, which allows for increased control and broader capabilities that contribute to an enhanced printing experience.
- The HP Printer Control mobile app transforms the screen on a mobile device into the HP printer display to provide wireless control over printing, copying and scanning.
- The new HP ePrint Home & Biz mobile app is a free tool for Android, iOS, and Symbian smartphones, making it easy to locate a printer and print from anywhere in the world.
- With Social ID, new and existing customers can now customize their ePrint email addresses, making it as much a part of their “social ID” as their email addresses.
About 100 print apps are now available in the Asia Pacific region, with a quarter of them offering local content. Users can easily program for Scheduled Delivery of selected content to their Web-connected printers.
HP continues to grow its suite of local print apps to provide content that matters to our users and announces today its partnership with five new content providers in Asia Pacific. Anyschool (Korea), Magic Hanja (Korea) and Modern Educational Research Society, Ltd. (Hong Kong) will provide educational print-outs for young children, alongside Sesame Street which will provide local content for users in China. Meishi China will also offer recipes for users in China. In addition, HP announced the development of the HP Go Family China print app that will provide family gifts-greeting cards, wrapping paper, and calendars for special occasions.
Notably is the new Facebook app which will allow you to print your photos directly from Facebook.
Aug 252011
Nokia launched three feature-packed, mass market smartphones, bringing the latest smartphone functionality at attractive price points and including market-leading innovation with Symbian Belle. The Nokia 700, Nokia 701 and Nokia 600 extend the range of available designs, features and functionality in the Nokia Symbian smartphone range. Symbian Belle powers all three, with single-tap NFC technology sharing and pairing, the most personal user interface so far and a more powerful mobile Web browsing experience.
While all three smartphones contain recognizable Nokia features, they each represent a very distinct set of priorities to allow users to choose what matters most in a smartphone. The most compact touch screen monoblock smartphone in the world (Nokia 700); a sleek and stylish smartphone with the world’s brightest mobile display for indoor or outdoor use (Nokia 701), and Nokia’s loudest entertainment smartphone (Nokia 600) all bring firsts to the Nokia product portfolio. Continue reading »
Aug 232011
Symbian Anna significantly enhances the user experience on the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01, and Nokia E7. A new user interface, virtual QWERTY keypad in portrait mode, enhanced Nokia Maps, better web browsing and stronger security are just a few of the improvements that people will be able to enjoy. Symbian Anna can be downloaded using the latest version of Ovi Suite (version 3.1.1) on a PC.
Symbian Anna software update in Singapore will be available for download via www.nokia.com.sg/anna. Symbian users are advised to check the website from 2 September 2011 for upgrade user guide and local variant availability.
Key features with Symbian Anna:
- User interface: Symbian Anna brings a fresh new look and feel to the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01, and Nokia E7 with crisp icons and multiple usability enhancements. Typing on the virtual QWERTY keypad is now available in portrait mode.
- Maps and navigation: Symbian Anna enhances Nokia Maps with better search functionality, new public transportation routes and the ability to check-in to favorite geo-social network sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter
- Browsing: A faster, easier-to-use browser, delivering quicker page loads and improved device navigation allowing people to connect more easily to their favorite sites on the go.
- Better for business: Symbian Anna brings true business-grade security with improved data encryption on Nokia smartphones. Business users with a Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01 or Nokia E7 can now easily and securely access their company intranet with IPSEC and SSL VPN enablers.
- Near Field Communications (NFC): The Symbian Anna software update also activates the NFC hardware in the Nokia C7, so people can now simply tap their Nokia C7s together to share contacts, photos, videos and play games; easily pair with NFC-enabled accessories from Nokia and others; and read NFC tags to check-in and more
Check out Tech65′s first look video on Symbian Anna.
Aug 042011
The Nokia 500 is built on the latest Symbian Anna user experience with enhanced software features, a faster Web browser and new Ovi Maps, and is one of the fastest smartphones at its price point, allowing people to have lots of apps open at the same time, switch between apps quickly and easily, and run the most demanding apps without slowing down the phone.
Nokia 500 Key Features
- 1 GHz processor and WLAN for fast access to applications and entertainment
- 5 MP camera, video capture
- Ovi Maps with free global drive and walk navigation, Here and Now to find great events near you
- Ovi Store for apps and other entertainment content
- Music player, stereo FM radio, internet radio
- New Symbian Anna for faster browsing and enhanced touch user interface including portrait QWERTY keyboard and split-screen messaging
- Easy access to WLAN through home screen widget
The Nokia 500 is available from the third quarter of 2011 in black, quickly followed by the Nokia 500 white at the end of the year. Both will come with two different interchangeable back covers. New back covers with more colours and designs will also be available later this year – including purple, azure blue, pink, coral red, orange and dark silver. The Nokia 500 retails at EUR 150 before taxes and subsidies.
Jun 062011
Symbian Anna is the first major software update from Nokia. The newly release Nokia E6 and X7 will come with Symbian Anna, and updates for the rest of the Symbian^3 phones, namely Nokia N8, C7, C6-01 and E7 will be made available in Q3/2011.
Symbian Anna comes with the following improvements from Symbian^3:
New icons, enhanced usability
- New squircle style icons for applications
- Folders are denoted by a squircle that looks like a folder
- Portrait QWERTY keyboard for text input (can change back to T9 keypad)
- A split screen when entering text into web pages and apps (not a separate input text)
Better web browser
- New Webkit (AppleWebKit/533.4)
- Faster (about 3x) JavaScript engine
- Improved website error prompts/security warnings
- IDN support
- Better performance and memory optimization, including page load time
- Improved webpage rendering with hardware acceleration
- Smoother and sharper font rendering
- CSS3 animations
- Support for high DPI screens
- Smooth scrolling (up to 60 fps)
- Better fit to mobile screen with view-port tag support
- Achieved score of 111 on html5test.com
- UI/UX improvements:
- Simplified UI
- Back-button always visible
- URL field always visible
- Integrated Search
- Open to Homepage by default
- Easy exit from extension
- Long tap to copy/open links in new window
New Ovi maps
- Predictive Search
- Integrated social media features with check-in to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare
- New public transport lines
- Ability to download and update full country maps directly to smartphone via WiFi
- Ability to share places via email and SMS, and also with friends using non-Nokia phones
Business users
- Instant messaging and presence with Microsoft Communicator Mobile
- Email enhancements that include full meeting request support
- Business grade security hardware-accelerated device encryption
Jun 042011
Nordkapp, a group of experienced designers, strategists and technologists, recently made available a downloadable Windows Phone 7 Cheat Sheet to help mobile interaction designers with designing Windows Phone 7 apps. This A3 size cheat sheet is based on Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Design Guideline document(s) with only the important bits, added some other comments and highlighted the parts that might come as a surprise of existing Symbian, iOS or Android designers and developers.
Extremely useful if you’re trying to design a proper app UI for Windows Phone 7. Head down to nordkapp.fi/blog/2011/05/wp7-for-designers-cheatsheet/ to download the cheat sheet.
May 132011
The Nokia E7 is very similar in terms of look and feel to the Nokia N8, an equally handsome phone, that comes with the latest Symbian^3 OS for Nokia. However, the Nokia E7 is slightly bigger and heavier with a full qwerty slide-out keyboard, 8MP camera with Extended Depth of Field (read full focus, not autofocus), Nokia ClearBlack display, and geared towards business use. But does it really live up to its claim of being “The Ultimate Business Smartphone”? Continue reading »
Dec 032010
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a Nokia Roundtable where the group executives from Nokia talked about the current Nokia strategies goals in the SEAP region, and globally. Nokia’s strategic goals are to deliver the right solutions to the right segments of the market; win the market with new Symbian smartphones; create a vibrant ecosystem for apps; enable consumer access to mobility anywhere in the world.
Currently, the strengths of Nokia that’s keeping Nokia afloat is really its trusted brand, worldwide presence, localization within different markets, wide portfolio of devices, existing partnership with telco operators for carrier billing and other partnerships, together with a fairly comprehensive offering of applications in their Ovi store.
Given, Nokia makes great phones, in terms of hardware. They’ve knowledge and experience in creating the best phone for communication as a phone (i.e. talking, SMS-ing). With their recent N8, they have create another awesome phone with an awesome camera, brilliantly tough casing, and stunning screen.
However, Nokia’s sole (besides the not-released-yet Meego) operating system, Symbian, and its fragmentation of developer tools (QT, WRT – HTML5 + Javascript, Adobe Flash, Java, Symbian C++ Native), frameworks, and difficulty in creating visually complex applications is Nokia’s greates weakness in their whole strategy. If you are as unfortunate to have to create a native app for Nokia’s newest Symbian^3 OS (e.g. N8), you’ll realize Nokia’s Symbian SDK is half-baked and not quite polished (read as buggy), with a lot of the hardware graphics capabilities (OpenGL as of this writing) not there yet.
Nokia is working hard to fix those various problems mentioned above, by unifying all development into 1 platform – QT. Hopefully, this is the right choice that will allow the reunification of a fragmented industry created by Nokia’s wide range of phones.
Nokia currently owns the emerging market with their slew of cheap and wide range of phones appealing to the consumers of the emerging market. With Samsung Bada coming strong with its better and consistent developer experience (although it’s using C++), it is quite a stable OS that provides a decent, responsive and modern user interface (Samsung’s TouchWiz) which blows away whatever Nokia has currently with their aging Symbian^3 UI.
Will Meego, Nokia’s latest efforts to revamp and modernize their operating system, be able to compete with the rest of the smartphone OS? As of now, it doesn’t look promising though, but maybe they will be able to surprise all of us. Nokia is planning to get Meego ready some time next year. The success or failure of Meego will determine the fate of Nokia.
Will Nokia survive the onslaught of the current mobile market, with the rise of the smartphones like the iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and Android – with Android targeting the lower cheaper segment of the Nokia’s pie with cheaper phones from Huawei and other manufacturers and Samsung Bada taking over the emerging market? Only time will tell provided they play on their strengths to survive and fix their weaknesses in order to gain back the title of what Nokia was once known as THE mobile company.
To summarize, Nokia’s strong points:
- Existing partnership with Telcos
- Localization of various markets
- Great phone hardware
Nokia’s weak points:
- Outdated and clunky User Interface/User Experience
- Fragmented and half-baked Software Development Kits
- Fragmentation of devices and OS versions