Although there’s miles to go before it is perfected, solar powered phones are here to stay. Where electricity is scarce, more and more people in the provinces are relying on mobile phones to do more than just call and SMS. RIght now, Nokia has led the pack in terms of offering two good things: phones that have built in flashlights and phones that have built in “Life Tools” services for farmers. Add email to the picture and you get more than just an Internet cafe on your hands. Solar charged phones complete the circle, allowing folks to do more while …read more

note: This contest is only open to people in the Philippines.

I’m running week 2 of the Nokia DiscOVIries contest beginning today (GMT+8) till the midnight of Sunday. This week’s theme is “Asian Poses.” All you need to do is upload as many of your own ‘Asian Pose’ to my OVI dropbox for a chance to win PHP 2,000 worth of Ayala eGC’s. The winner also gets a chance to win a Nokia phone in the final round come end of November.
You can UPLOAD HERE.
Ovi has an interesting photo sharing feature that allows you to upload photos into drop …read more

The Nokia 5130 is out with T-Mobile and though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it’s been a while since we’ve seen an affordable Series 40 device with a 2MP camera and XpressMusic capabilities. You see, the phone is out everywhere else.

This is a good addition to the line of music phones as it adds instant messaging and access to Ovi’s plethora of services. As an added treat, this phone comes with a resilient battery putting up its standby time to a maximum of 12 days on not-so-regular use.
Since it is an XpressMusic phone, it comes with …read more

The Nokia 5730 XpressMusic is the first every QWERTY device under the music line. Improved from the previous versions, this phone utilizes the new UI for the home screen allowing access to more things — music, games, email, calendar and up to 20 contacts from the scroll bar.
Integrated with the phone is Ovi contacts, which lets other users know if their friends are online given that they are signed up with Ovi.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic has voice controlled features allowing you to name songs using the “Say and Play” feature. Voice technology isn’t …read more

At Nokia Connection ‘09, the Philippine delegation took part in the Ovi Race, which was basically the easiest way to allow the media to experience the GPS and Maps functionality of Ovi. This photo was taken at the Singapore Merlion where the team had to do a creative pose. The more creative the direction, the more points you’d get. So this is us taking a water break.
We had to upload the photo to the Share on Ovi site using the built in widgets on the two Nokia phones issued to us, the N97 and N86.
Photo taken by our …read more

One week to go before Nokia Connect Singapore. Nokia can sure capture. They usually separate themselves from the rest of the GSM conference to shift focus from other “smaller” booth brands to just them. The media is usually housed all together in hotels with the press conferences / workshops and parties happening in the vicinity.

Last year’s Nokia Connect with the unveiling of the E71 and E66
This will be my third year in a row attending Nokia Connect and its no secret that this year, the launch of the N97 is perhaps the main kicker for the event. I’m also expecting …read more

With some criticism on the store launch, all in all the Nokia Ovi store delivers the promise of a central hub for purchasing applications and building a developer community base. What I found more intriguing was the transparency and quickness of reaction from the Nokia Conversations blog that did admit to some server hiccups. See, corporate blogs work!
[photo taken from Nokia Ovi Store screenshot]

If you own a S40 phone, you don’t need to be jealous of the more powerful S60 owners — even you can download your email into your S40 powered phones using Ovi. All you need to do is set up a Mail account with Ovi at www.mail.ovi.com and enjoy 1GB of virtual storage space.
If you’re from countries that have metered-based rates instead of data-based rates, this can be a boon. Take the Philippines for instance:

“Globe offers P5 for 15 minutes while Smart and Sun charges P10 for 30 minutes. That’s enough time to quickly download email from your existing …read more

Thanks to the power of GPS and IP addresses, developers are able to determine where in the world are you. But at the same time, this information can be used to offer location based items for purchase. Nokia Conversations makes an interesting point: the contextual buying of apps in relation to your location, hence a truly “mobile store.” When you travel to France, will your music store on your phone offer you French-inspired music?

I want to believe that this is how it should work, but in practice, it could offer hassles. Let me give you an example.

Only Nokia can pull something like this off. With the online gaming stores of XBOX Live, PSN and the Wii Shop fast gaining popularity, Nokia wants in. And they definitely have something to show for it. And yeah come to think of it, they are the only mobile phone hardware manufacturer that goes “360″ with its product line as tey support the hardware and software for quick deployment of applications to millions of phones around the world.

Aki Jarvilehto from Nokia told a panel at Develop Mobile 2008 conference that they are looking to expand their Ngage games into other …read more