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

Here’s a photo I took of all the gadgets I have stored in the room:

The photo above illustrates 75% of all the gadgets under my custody. I own 50% of that. Inside the boxes and crates are more gadgets, chargers, cables, and over 10 lenses for my SLR. Not seen in the photo are my podcasting equipment (mic, desktop and boom stands), 2 portable drives, ACER desktop, two MacBooks, all in one printer, Quad Core rig, my dive gear, my Randall amplifier, and extra LCD monitor.
Last week I advertised a contest I was running on behalf of Nokia. if you’re …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

It’s the last stretch of my Nokia DiscOVIries contest. I’ll be collating and choosing a winner of the best workstation photo come midnight GMT +8. If you still wish to join, all you need to do is follow the simple instructions and upload a photo of your workstation at home or in your work place. You don’t need to have a Nokia phone to do this, but you do need to be based in Manila, Philippines to join.

Samsung has associated itself with US Cellular by releasing two models — the Trill and Caliber. The Trill on the left is a music phone that hails from the Bang and Olufsen line. We’re not sure if it also runs a S60 based platform in the same way that its predecessor did, but we won’t be surprised if we start seeing Samsung run Nokia’s OVI apps.
The second phone is the Caliber, a touch screen phone with a 3.0MP camera for photos and video. No pricing available yet.
[photo via Engadget]

OK so this is a rare moment. I am currently a recruit for the Ovi by Nokia campaign here in the Philippines. This is a purely local effort that taps bloggers from different niches in the Philippines to help spread the word about Nokia’s shift to a software and services company. I’m classified under “tech” obviously.
So yeah, this was the second time I’ve been asked to participate (the last time was as an ambassador for the Xenon flash enabled N82) and the overall objective is to get more sign ups and create active users for the plethora of Ovi …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

One thing I really love about Nokia is their ability to stay away from being too hard sell. In this TED video, we see insights from the One Laptop Per Child project and footage using the Flip cameras. These are clearly two items that eat into Nokia’s stable of products — camera phones in general and the ‘NokiaBook.’ But there’s a bigger message here and Nokia wants us to participate in the universal call to advocacy, a billion miles beyond branding. Although you can use the website to communicate your thoughts, Nokia is using their Messaging platform as a means …read more

So the Finns are at it again. There was a time when a Nokia phone was branded with a “7″ isolating it as an experiment for the market. Later on, the “7″ became a fashion line. With the release of the 7705, it is a little of both. The 7705 is a messaging phone: threaded SMS, instant messaging, chat, huge QWERTY keypad and a big light on the bottom right allows you to do color coding for your contacts. The phone also comes with a 3.0MP camera.
The 7705 will be available for USD$99.00 from Verizon with a mail in rebate …read more

There were two criticisms towards Nokia when they launched the Ovi store for apps. First was the huge costs for java certification and second was the unavailability of the SDK for building apps that had anything to do with the maps function: you had the store, but no developer community for building applications. The software developer kit, currently on beta allows developers to deploy applications across multiple platforms for Nokia / Symbian devices.

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Launched alongside this is the Ovi Navigation Player API which allows developers to create applications built around the navigation and GPS functions of current Nokia phones.
You can try …read more