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 they leave their phones idle.

About an hour of solar charging offers around 5-10 minutes of talk time. Selling at around US$60 (NZ$81), Samsung Solar Guru features FM radio, MP3 ring tones, embedded games, and a torch light. [source]

[image via textually.org]

Post from: Cellphone9

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 boxes of other people’s accounts given proper permissions. This is great for collating images for parties and functions!

Post from: Cellphone9

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 a dedicated audio player and a 3.5mm jack with earphones. A great buy.

Post from: Cellphone9

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 new and if you’ve been fans of Nokia’s voice commands feature, you’d be quick to realize that this was the next logical step. The device comes with a 4GB memory card.

The Nokia 5730 XpressMusic has a suggested retail price of roughly $ 450 USD while the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic retails for about $340 USD.PhP13,020 and comes in black with red accent or grey with blue accent.

[photo c/o Nokia SEA PR]

Post from: Cellphone9

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 group.

Post from: Cellphone9

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 to see more details on the Ovi Store.

[photos from author]

Post from: Cellphone9

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]

Post from: Cellphone9

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 email addresses. Better yet, you can open a new email account from Ovi by Nokia – a free, easy-to-use email system that can be accessed straight from your Nokia phone or over the web,” says William Hamilton-Whyte, General Manager, Nokia Philippines. With single SMS sending rates reaching up to P30 and voice rates that range from P80 to P100 depending on an international region, it’s relatively cheaper to use mobile email to get in touch with friends and family in places like the Middle East, US, Australia, or Europe. [release]

Photos provided by Nokia PR

Post from: Cellphone9

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

Where I’m from, I’m able to purchase and download apps from my local iTunes store (Philippines). When I want to download and subscribe to new podcasts however, the system won’t allow me unless I login to the USA store. The problem arises when I do OTA downloads of apps once again from my iPod touch — I’ll get an error message saying that the feature is only limited to the PH store.

Hassle?

[image c/o Share on Ovi website]

Post from: Cellphone9

Aki Jarvilehto from Nokia told a panel at Develop Mobile 2008 conference that they are looking to expand their Ngage games into other platforms. He said they are looking into “concepts where we use the same assets for Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Online.” This is interesting because it could mean that I can play a game on my phone, save my stats, then continue playing on the Xbox when I get home.

Yes, there is a possibility that the Nokia N-Gage and the XBOX Live and PSN store will see some sort of collaboration. They say that Web 3.0 is going to be all about mobile phones and application scaling. This might actually spearhead the industry.

Rumors, rumors, rumors. But wow.

Post from: Cellphone9