Nokia World Here We Come!!

Today I received an email that  every Nokia ‘fanboy’ would dream of getting.  I had an email inviting me along to attend Nokia World this year in Stuttgart to blog live from the event!.

Now I dont mind admitting, I might have been a bit of a pain in the arse at times as I love attending these type of events but a lot are invite only, and with World Of Nokia still progressing in the rankings of Nokia sites, I might have got a bit carried away with the amount of emails I was sending to people (this was just to get the name out as much as I could) so if your reading…. apologies if I was a bit of a pain.

Anyway onto the big news!.  So, Nokia World as I reported a few months back is to be held in Stuttgart, Germany this year and with the rumors flying around the internet about some new device names and possible announcements I am sure just like me, everyone is buzzing with excitement at what will be unveiled.  Last year we saw the Nokia N97 announced to the world at this very same event.

I asked this question but will ask it again… What do you think will be announced, and what are you looking forward too?

I will be posting more news about the event as and when it comes out so please check back for updates.

Nokia 6760, What’s The Point?

The new Nokia 6760 sports a slide out qwerty keyboard, but wannabe World of Nokia writer Mark asks, “what’s the point?”

OK, so it’s a quad-band 3G phone, but what isn’t these days. It has a 3 megapixel camera, which isn’t awful but it’s not exactly ground-breaking either. It’s dimensions are smaller than other recently released keyboard-come-phones but they aren’t much smaller.

The seller here is supposed to be messaging. I love the qwerty on my N97, I can quickly knock out a text or an email and i’m slowly getting out of the habit of proof reading my message for predictive text mistakes because well, there aren’t going to be any. Worst case scenario I fat-finger the wrong key, but I usually catch myself doing that at the time. But I digress.

This is a phone not just all about messaging, but only about messaging. It’s a poor man’s N97. If you want the keyboard then why not have a lot more? Like wifi connectivity, a touch-screen and 32gb of internal memory. The cheaper price suggests its targeted at the younger market. But that’s where it really swings and misses. I don’t think the younger generation give a stuff about qwerty keyboards. They love predictive text. They’re good at it, fast at it. And i’ve seen a lot of young people really struggle with a qwerty keyboard when they’re sat at a PC. One finger typing is painfully slow.

It’s not even particularly good looking either. Which is a shame. Mostly it seems like there was plenty more room for screen real estate, but they just didn’t bother. What we’re left with is an odd blank space at the top of the phone. It also looks like it’s supposed to be permanently used sideways, but at the same time it doesn’t. It’s almost gender confused.

Worst worst worst of all, if the rumours of the smaller but just as well spec’d N97 Mini are true (and its starting to look like they could be) then the 6760 really will be left out in the cold.

Let me know what you think of the 6760 in a comment below.

Vodafone To Sell Nokia E52

Vodafone have been on a bit of a roll recently, especially with new Nokia devices.

Recently we brought you the news that Vodafone UK will be stocking the E72 in Q4 and there were also talks of the ‘N97 Mini’ which no one has managed to find anything about, and that they will also be selling the Nokia E63 soon.

Today on picking up a new Vodafone UK Business Guide, I came across news that the UK network will be selling the Nokia E52 from August and it will be available on business contracts and handset only (PAYG).  A PAYG price will set you back just £225.00 £233.00 which should also be unlocked to be used on any network you wish.

I expect this will also be available on personal contracts just like the E71 was, but with the ESeries being aimed at business you might have to ask for the E52 if you want one

Expect to see a full review on this device in the next month or so here at World Of Nokia

Teach a Technophobe Challenge 2 and 3

Sorry about the delay for the latest Teach a technophobe challenge. The original Technophobe had to leave the country at the last minute to sort some things out and he will be gone for a few weeks, so I had to find a new technopobe to take up the challenge.

Challenge 2

So here was challenge number 2. After changing my technophobe my new has really picked it up quickly. Before he owned a N95 8GB and has recently brought a new N97 after seeing mine that I won, but he rarely uses most of the features, especially the email side of things. Here is challenge number 2 I received.

So, I awaited the email from my friend. Here is what I go through:

To be honest, its what I least expected and certainly got an unexpected reaction! Turns out that he had been to London Zoo a couple of weeks ago and took a load of pictures. The text that went along side it said “Christian I saw your relative in the zoo so I thought I would snap a pic for you!”.

My Technophobe (and I to be honest) were both very surprised at how easy it is to attach a photo or image in an email and send it. Its something that I haven’t really tried out before or used very much, but its very fast and again, like I said in challenge 1, its a lot cheaper then texting or MMS, so if you want to send someone a picture but not have the silly charges the networks charge then its just as easy and quick, and cheaper! After having used it or a few weeks now, its hard to get used to a phone again which doesn’t have the QWERTY keypad. You grow so accustom to it, it’s hard to let it go!

Challenge 3

Here was challenge 3 I was sent.

Here was the picture I received.

Now to most people this picture wont mean anything, but to me, its priceless. The person in the picture is my technophobe, and its his favorite shop ever, Pepe Jeans. This picture was taken by one of my friends on one of our many trips up to London, one which I couldn’t make as I was working, and the shop that we have to visit at least 3 times every time we go! He would spend hours in there and we always have a good laugh about it, and he always comes out with the whole shop!

Again, he found it really easy to attach the picture and email it off. He’s starting to really use the benefits of the E75, but also now his N97. Before, he used the camera and the internet, and that was about it. Now he has all his emails on there, uses ovi maps and ovi share on there, and is really getting to grips with the “convergence” in the latest Nokia phones!

I am looking forward to getting the final challenge through, and will update you all when I get it!

Pre-Order E63 At Vodafone Business

The Nokia E63 has shown up on the Vodafone Business website as ‘Coming Soon’ and as the E63 is already on sale over here in the UK on ‘3′, expect to see this phone on sale soon!

The E63 is the cheaper younger brother of the award winning E71 which has been on sale on Vodafone for a good few months already and is still selling well everywhere due to features and design of the phone.

The E63 has more of a plastic build to it instead of the premium metal design on the E71, It also drops to a 2.0 Mega Pixel camera, lacks HSDPA and also lacks GPS.

If none of that is important to you. the Nokia E63 is a serious smartphone and with Vodafone’s push on building a large and powerful 3G network, this phone will suit that very well.

Expect to see the E63 on sale in the next few weeks and be free from around the £20 mark on 18 month contracts.  This will be confirmed of course once the final details appear from Vodafone.

The E63 appears on the Business website only, there is no information if this will be available to Personal contract customers, however Vodafone do sell around 98% of their phones as ‘Box Only’ so anyone can pick one up.

If your interested why not check out the review we did on the E63 which is available in 2 parts.  Part 1 covers Hardware, Part 2 covers Software

To check out the website and put your name on the pre-order list check out http://www.vodafonebusinessshop.co.uk/Details-Phone-Nokia-E63-3099.html

Nokia 5630 Now ‘Comes With Music’ (And N85 Too!)

On checking the official Nokia store website today, it appears that yet another ‘Comes With Music’ device has just gone on sale in the form of the Nokia 5630

For £259.00 you get a brand new, unlocked Symbian Series 60 device with a 3.2 Mega Pixel Camera, HSDPA AND HSUPA so you can use the 5630 as a USB Modem, 4GB MicoSD card in the box…..oh yeah…. and 12 months of FREE music from the Nokia Music Store!.

Nokia have also quietly added the N85 as a ‘Comes With Music’ device for £375.00 making the current range of devices offering this service now at 6

Nokia N96 for £459.00
Nokia N95 8GB for £395.00
Nokia N85 for £375.00
Nokia 5800 for £299.00
Nokia 5630 for £259.00
Nokia 5310 for £169.99

ESeries or NSeries????

Your typical Nokia smartphone user could be summed up in 1 of 3 categories. First of all there is the NSeries catagory which usually has owners looking for:

• Carl Zeiss Optics
• At least 5 Mega Pixels
• LED/Xenon Flash
• Good video recording
• Easy ways to share content i.e. Share on Ovi
• Medium – High price range
• N-Gage Gaming

There are many phones which fit this type of user, The N97 and N86 are obvious choices because of the multimedia features, there is also the older models in the N85, N95 8GB, N96, N79.

These all tick the boxes above, some more than others but all the major features are covered.

Then you have the ESeries person who would be looking for:

• Long Battery Life
• Push Email Support
• Office Applications
• At least a 2 Mega Pixel Camera
• Quick Launch Apps (Mail/Diary/Phonebook)
• Premium Build Quality
• Vast Range Of Connectivity

These would be the E55, E52, E75 and E72 all due out soon (The E75 is already on sale).  Nokia also have some older models which do all this with the E71, E63, E66, E65… in fact the E71 is still a very popular handset across the world even after being on sale for over a year already. ESeries have always had a reputation for having a superior build quality over the NSeries devices as they are aimed for more business use so the feature set needs to be different

The last category would be for the Music fan so this leaves the XpressMusic range of devices.  At present just the 5800 runs Symbian S60 but there are a whole host of new devices about to hit the market such as the 5630 and 5530, All running Series 60, All geared up for music playback.

The the question is which camp are you in of the 3?.  I always thought I was a die-hard NSeries person and would not even look at ESeries as it did not interest me.

However all of that started to change when WOM World loaned me a Nokia E66 to trial many months back (I actually had one arrive on the launch day!).  From there I was sent a E71 and my whole view on ESeries changed overnight.  I find what i used to look for in a phone, no longer is as importaint to me, instead I am looking for more and more ways to connect and keep up to date with the world.  Running a Nokia based website, I get a lot of emails on a daily basis from loan agreements for new devices to your every day spam from a bank account i never knew I had.  I also move around a bit either on holiday’s, traveling for work up to head office on occasions, and just on days out so with checking email every 30 minutes I rely on having a battery that can last more than a day with my use.

I also need high speed internet access to HSDPA (and HSUPA if possible) is a must as well as WiFi if there is a free access point I can connect too at any time.

Email and Internet use is now my most important feature I look for in a mobile phone , when only a year ago the main feature I looked for was how good was the camera,

This must be the reason why for the last month I have planned to buy a N86, Talked about buying a N86, Had the money to buy a N86…… yet here I am N86less.

Instead I have been looking at the Nokia E55 and the E72 as my possible new handsets when they come out in September/October and for the first time I have to admit I think I have moved over from NSeries to ESeries!.

Which type of user are you?

N97 Tips & Tricks

Today I was contacted via email from someone I used to know many years back on another website.  Turns out he now works for a mobile network, came across World Of Nokia and has just bought a Nokia N97.

He kindly supplied a few tips and tricks so here they are shared with everyone.  If you have anything to add please comment and they will be added to the list below

Nokia N97: Tips, tricks and great apps

The N97 has had mixed reviews and i’m not going to bore you with another one. What I’d like to offer instead is a few helpful tricks, some neat features you may not know about and a couple of applications that enhance the device.

You can mark multiple items very quickly with the shift key. Hold the shift key and press an item on the touchscreen to mark it. Let go then hold again to select the next item you want to mark and so on. Alternatively, hold the shift key, select the first item, then with the shift key still held, select the last item and all the items between will also be marked. Backspace can be used to quickly delete an item (or all marked items).

Turn the phone over to snooze an alarm or silence a call. It always needs to be face down to work, so when your alarm goes off a second time you need to turn it face up then face down again to snooze a second time.

You can have a text message sent automatically to calls you reject. The default says “Sorry, I’ll call later” but there’s no reason you have to be so polite. To set this, go to Menu > Settings > Calling > Call. Set Reject call with message to Yes and set the message text in the setting directly below.

Neat features

I downloaded a few podcasts, The Geoff Show from Absolute Radio and some old downloads of Russell Brand’s podcast from BBC 6 Music in 2006. I copied these to a directory I created on the 32gb memory called “podcasts”, then refreshed the music library. I was really impressed to find they were automatically put in my library under the “podcast library”. I thought they perhaps had “podcast” in their genre, but the Geoff Show had a genre of Blues for some reason. It may have determined they were podcasts just based on their length. Either way, very clever.

You can set a profile to be “timed”. Go to menu > settings > profiles. Highlight the profile you want to activate and select options. Select “timed” and enter the time you want the profile to expire. This is obviously handy for things like if you know you’re going to be in a meeting for an hour and just want your phone to be silent for the meeting. I’m always forgetting to take my phone back off silent, particularly after I’ve been to the cinema because I’m too busy afterwards dissecting every detail of the film. On the home screen the profile appears with a little clock symbol next to it to show you that it’s timed.

Lost your phone? Think it’s been stolen? You can remotely lock it with a text message. To enable this feature, go to menu > settings > phone > phone mgmt. > security settings > phone and sim card > remote phone locking. Enable it and choose a “remote locking message” of at least 5 characters. Then a pin code to unlock the phone. To use it, grab a mates phone and text your locking message to your phone. Better still, find out what a friend’s locking message is and randomly send it to them to annoy them. Note when i tested this the remote locking message was case sensitive. What was great was I got an automated reply from my phone telling me it had been locked. The memory card is apparently also locked using the remote locking message.

Great apps

The built-in search application is really good, but for some reason Nokia bury it under the “applications” menu and half way down the list by default. I recommend you move it to the front menu. Simply open it up and then enter your search. It will start searching as soon as you type and it returns results from your messages, calendar, music, applications basically everything. It can also be configured to search either Google or Live.

Download photo browser from the Nokia Beta Labs. http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-photo-browser. With it you can quickly browse through thumbnails of your pictures by flicking your finger across the screen. It rotates all the thumbnails automatically when you tilt the screen. Open a picture with it and double tap to zoom in. Then click and drag to look around the picture. Double tap to zoom back out. press and hold gives you a fish-eye zoom that you can then move around with your finger. And of course flick left or right to move back and forth around your pictures. Press once to return to the thumbnails. It’s a really fun app and much cooler than the standard photo app. However the standard photo app does have more functionality for categorising your photos (it groups them by month by default for example). You can of course have both apps. The photo browser app will take a little while to generate thumbnails of your images on first use (depending on how many you have)

Download the Google Maps app http://www.google.com/gmm/GoogleMaps.sisx. You can also get it through the web browser of your phone by going to m.google.co.uk. It’s better than the built-in maps application as it features Google’s great map search for finding locations and destinations. It does however have to be connected to work (it won’t close if you lose data connectivity but it will complain a lot). I believe the data usage is pretty low though. It does directions, but it doesn’t have turn-by-turn voice. You’ll need the Nokia Maps app and the paid subscription for that (you get 3 months free with the phone).

WorldOfNokia Hits 300

Twitter has hit the internet with a bang and is now used by not only individuals but large businesses looking to keep in touch with real life experiences of their customers

Today I am happy to announce World Of Nokia now has 300 followers on it’s Twitter account since we first started using Twitter back in February 2009.

300 Followers in just 5 months is something I am very pleased at achieving , especially for a brand new website such as ours

I am sure I also speak for Christian when I say a big thank you for everyone who follows the site on Twitter and for those of you who have re-tweeted our messages to help spread the word.

With Nokia World coming up shortly, Twitter will be the place to be if you want all the breaking news as it happens and we will help be a part of it either live from Stuttgart or via the web.

So again, thank you everyone for your support and helping us hit 300 followers, next target is the magic 500 mark!

If you do not follow us on Twitter, simply look out for @worldofnokia or http://www.twitter.com/worldofnokia and start following us today… after all you have nothing to loose… its free

Files On Ovi Now Free

Devin from The Nokia Guide came across some very interesting news today, and that is Files On OVI is not free of charge instead of the previous subscription package they used to charge

Devin has posted:

Files on OVI, Nokia’s service that allows you access files on your computer from any remote PC (via Web browser) or mobile device, used to cost:

- 10GB Monthly: €6.99
- 10GB Annual: €49.99
- 30GB Monthly: €12.99
- 30GB Annual: €99.99

but as of today, the service is now completely free!. If you currently have a paid subscription, you will receive a refund for the remaining portion of your subscription. Why make it free? Nokia says that:“On-the-go file access is a basic component of a complete mobile lifestyle offering. Providing Ovi Files for free enables Nokia to connect more people to Ovi and accelerate the creation of even more advanced Files and Ovi features.”

Files On Ovi was a great idea I think, and I was only put off by having to pay for a service you can get from other sources free so by Nokia making this move maybe OVI will start to be a serious player in the mobile content market.

Nokia Messaging: In With The New

For the last 2 weeks I have had a Nokia E75 in the house and the main focus of the device for me was to compare the email facility from the older handsets like the N85 to the new built in Nokia Messaging solution you get with the E75.

Now one thing to remember is the N85 and Symbian phones like it have the older traditional email setup, but there is nothing stopping you from installing Nokia Messaging to give it a go, however the E75 has the Nokia Messaging as the one and only email solution built in.

The Setup

Unfortunately for me the setup on the E75 was not as easy as I had hoped. Part of having a website account for World Of Nokia is the email account I get with it for business use…. and this was the problem.

Nokia Messaging is designed to work with most traditional email providers like GMail, Yahoo and Google, anything else to Nokia would be an exchange account so would use Mail For Exchange. When I entered in a old GMail account username and password, within 30 seconds I was browsing my emails with ease.

Enter my World Of Nokia details and i kept getting an error message that it cannot connect to the server. I must have spent over 4 hours on and off trying to get the thing to work with no luck. Trying to use the website on my Mac gave me the same results…. as you can imagine I was frustrated and annoyed.

Don’t ask me how I managed it, but with hours of me hitting cancel or retry it FINALLY worked and from there everything was fine.

Now compare this to the older setup which asked you to enter your username and password, if the phone cannot find the server straight away you get asked if you want to enter the POP3 or IMAP settings, and once this is done you are ready to go. As long as you know the settings you can be setup ready to go in about 2 minutes.

Using The Service

Using the email service was much better I found with the new Nokia Messaging service. The home screen has a plugin which displayed if you had any emails or not. Once in the application you get 2 drop down boxes at the top, one if them lets you browse the folders like Inbox, Outbox and Sent Items. The other lets you sort the email into Date, Sender, Subject, Priority, Unread, Attachment and Size so you can really personalize how you want to use your email account.

Emails on screen are listed by date and a 2 line preview of the message showing you the sender, time and the first line or subject of the message. When you highlight the email you can even press the right directional button and get some shortcuts to Reply, Forward, Mark as Unread, Move Message and Delete

I did like the smooth scrolling of browsing through the emails on the phone, although opening could take a few seconds depending on the content.

Now look over at the older N85 and how appears on the device. As with the E75 you get a plugin on the main screen telling you how many emails you have.

Again, the same as the E75 you get 2 line display showing you the sender of the email and the subject

However the big difference once in the email application is the way you can sort through your emails. On the E75 there was a sorting box at the top, but with the older solution you have to go into Options > Sort By and you get the choice of Date, Sender or Subject

Not as much detail as the E75 but the emails do load quicker so it will all depend on what you need most, either loading faster emails for basic use or for the more advanced user then the E75 and Nokia Messaging offers the better solution.

The Conclusion

So after using both Nokia Messaging and the original Messaging applications on the E75 and the N85 my final opinion is this.

If you are serious about your email the Nokia Messaging is a must. If you have a webmail account then you will have no problems at all, just be prepared if you have a non standard email setup to spend a bit of time configuring the settings. Strangely enough AFTER my testing and during writing this review, I deleted my email account from the phone and when i go to add a new account i DO get the option to select POP3 or Exchange now which I did not get when first trying to get email setup.

Nokia Messaging is a great all-round service (as long as it stays free on your phone) and you are able to sort email in your own way with a wide range of options. This is what the ESeries range of phones will be shipping with in the future and pretty much most of the NSeries too.

However the older Messaging solution does do a good job. I was very impressed with the ease of setup, the speed of it running and just the general interface. Maybe this is because I have been used to using this setup for quite a while.

Would i recommend Nokia Messaging?… The answer has to be yes!. it has taken all of the best bits from the basic Messaging application and taken it up a level with improvements that will benefit both personal and business users.

Next Page »