Nokia India has planned a tete-a-tete with Mr. Jonne Harju, Senior Design Manager, Nokia Design Studio in Bangalore today in an event named as “Nokia N-Tour-Age“. For the people who don’t know him, he is a part of Nokia Nseries global design team and works with a team of experts and researchers. He has also been responsible for designing the Nokia N97 Mini, which got launched in India yesterday.

He will be here to share a perspective on:

1. Nokia Nseries design strategy: how digital meets physical
2. User Insights: consumer research, behavioral trends
3. How Nokia takes these forward and makes it available through the hardware and digital interface
4. Nokia N97 Mini design story, India launch an availability
5. Nokia’s services strategy: How Nokia is creating an ecosystem and working with developers to give consumers a more content rich experience (Ovi store)

Additionally, he will also be holding sessions along with an Indian mobile content developer who works very closely with Nokia.

Fonearena Team will be there to cover the event, so keep watching at this space for more details or you could also follow us on twitter for live updates from the event.

So if you have any questions/queries to Mr Jonne Harju that you would want to get answered, do let us know. We will try to get it answered by him today.

• Making of Nokia N97 Exclusive behind the scenes Video
• Another whammy from Nokia , N-Theatre with the Nseries
• Nokia N97 to start selling in India for Rs.35000 on June 23rd
• Nokia N97 Event in Bangalore
• The Nokia N85 Review

Nokia India is having a little meeting with the Nokia Digital Design Team in Delhi tomorrow and FoneArena will be there

Here are the profiles of the folks from the Nokia Digital Design team we’ll be talking to (Profiles credit : vinu )

• Nikki Barton – Head of Digital Design – Nikki is heavily influenced by her design and cultural experiences. With 20 years of work in digital interaction worldwide, her experiences are fairly diversified by now. That said, she believes that her training and education has heavily influenced her work throughout her life. She considers solid, good design training as a real advantage. For Nikki, design and user experience are inextricably linked and should not be thought of as separate exercises.
• Robert Williams – Design Manager, Nokia Design Studio: London, UK – Rob was originally attracted to design because he always liked creating things that get into people’s hands. Trying to understand people and how one can make things that improve or enhance their everyday lives is really interesting to Rob.
• Younghee Jung – Senior Design Specialist, Nokia Design Studio: London, UK - When Younghee started university, she studied general science. She was good at mathematics and asked to join the math department. It got her thinking, and she realized she wanted to be closer to everyday life and people. She switched to the industrial design department after that semester. She has always been a very curious person. Being close to and able to study various aspects of human life is what drew her to design.
• Juliana Ferreira, (Design Specialist, Interaction Design), Nokia Design Studio, London, UK

Please send us your questions to the Digital Designers like about you phone icons , homescreen, we’ll try our best to get them answered.

• Get your free game by joining N-Gage Gamers Gang
• Nokia Charger Replacement is just for Nokia 7210 in India
• Nokia India launches Email with Ease Campaign
• Live from Nokia Take-Back Campaign in Chennai

As you might know the annual GSM Mobile Asia Congress is happening in Hong Kong this year from 18-19 November.The GSM Association has  announced a shortlist of 40 nominees for the Asia Mobile Awards 2009. The awards will be presented at the upcoming Mobile Asia Congress.

Nokia India has been nominated for the Green Mobile award for the take back phone recycling campaign. Airtel has been nominated for the best Mobile Game for Airtel GamesClub. Both Aircel and Airtel India have been nominated for the Best Mobile Music Service Award.Hungama Digital Media Entertainment has been nominated for Best Mobile TV  Service. Aircel’s Pocket Internet has been nominated for the best mobile internet service.
The winners of the GSMA’s Asia Mobile Awards will be presented on the evening of Wednesday 18 November, at the Congress Networking Party and Awards Celebration at the famed Happy Valley race course.

Here are he nominees for the Asia Mobile Awards 2009

Best Mobile Game

• Bharti Airtel, India for  ‘Airtel GamesClub’
• Electronic Arts, China for  ‘The SIMS 3′
• Gameloft, Taiwan for  ‘Hero of Sparta’
• Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri, Turkey for  ‘Mobiwar’

Best Mobile Music Service

• Aircel, India for  ‘Aircel Dialer Tunes Eat-All-You-Can service’
• Bharti Airtel and Onmobile Global, India for  ‘Gaana Bolo Hello Tunes Pao’
• China Mobile, China for  ‘New Albums Digital Release’
• Green Tomato and CSL, Hong Kong for  ‘Musicholic’
• Singapore Telecom Mobile, Singapore for  ‘SingTel AMPed’

Best Mobile TV or Video Service

• Hong Kong Telecommunications, Hong Kong for  ‘PCCW Mobile Infotainment Platform’
• Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, India for  ‘Tata Sky Active Mall’
• Mobixell Networks, Israel for  ‘Mobixell Videon and InfoGin IMP’
• Motorola, Hong Kong for  ‘Motorola TuVista’
• Telegent Systems, Singapore for  ‘Telegent Free-to-Air Mobile TV – TLG1120 Mobile TV Receiver’

Best Mobile Advertising or Marketing

• Bharti Airtel, India for ‘Friends Under Attack’
• InMobi, India for  ‘Reebok Indian Premier League Campaign’
• Madhouse, China for  ‘HP’
• Smart Communications, Philippines and Unilever – AXE for  ‘AXE on Phone’
• Zad Mobile, US and Indosat for ‘SC i-klan’

Best Mobile Enterprise Application Product or Service

• Aircel Cellular, US and uReach Technologies for  ‘Aircel mConference Plus’
• Aircel Cellular, US and uReach Technologies for  ‘Aircel mReceptionist’
• Cylande, China and Terranova for  ‘Cylande’s StoreAssistant Corner Manager’
• Orascom Telecom Bangladesh, Bangladesh for  ‘Banglalink Jigyasha’
• tenCube, Singapore and SingTel for  ‘PHONESafe’

Best Mobile Internet Service

• Aircel, India ‘Aircel’s Pocket Internet’
• Eterno Infotech, India for  ‘NewsHunt’
• Geodesic, US for  ‘Mundu IM’
• GyPSii, Netherlands and China Unicom for  ‘UniSpace’
• KT Corporation, Korea for  ‘SHOW HYUNDAI/ KIA-MOTOR’

Best Mobile Money Service

• Bharti Airtel, India for  ‘mChek on Airtel’
• Globe Telecom, Philippines for  ‘GCASH CLICK’
• SK Telecom, Korea for ‘T Cash’
• Smart Communications, Philippines for  ‘Smart Money’s expanded mobile-based security feature for online purchases’
• Sybase 365, Singapore and Celcom for  ‘Celcom AirCash’

Mobile Money for the Unbanked Award

• Bharti Airtel, India and EKO for  ‘EKO’
• MPAY Solutions, Philippines for  ‘m-bux’
• Smart Communications, Philippines for  ‘Smart Islands Activation Program (IAP)’
• WING Cambodia, Cambodia, for  ‘WING’

The Green Mobile Award

• Grameenphone, Bangladesh and Huawei Technologies for  ‘Building a Greener Mobile Network’
• Nokia, India for  ‘Take-back & recycling of unwanted devices and accessories in Asian markets’
• Smart Communications, Philippines for  ‘SMART Post-Marketing Waste Management  Initiative (tarpaulin recycling)’
• StarHub Mobile, Singapore for  ‘Green Network – Singapore’s first Solar-Powered

Mobile Base Station

• ZTE Corporation, China, for  ‘ZTE’s GSM ZXG10 uBSS system’

GSMA Mobile Innovation Grand Prix – Asia Pacific Tournament Nominees

• Altobridge, Ireland
• Impetus Infotech, USA
• Locatrix Communications, Australia
• Sentry Wireless, Ireland
• Xtract, Finland

Best Mobile Broadband Handset/ Device – Judging of the Best Mobile broadband Handset/Device’ category will take place in November, nominees will be announced soon.

None Found

Building on 10 years of successful Symbian events, SEE 2009 will reflect the evolution of mobile computing beyond the realm of the mobile phone, and create an event that has evolved beyond that of a traditional trade show.

Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organisation with a mission to enable a global business ecosystem that collaborates to create the richest, most satisfying mobile user experiences.  In keeping with this mission, SEE 2009 will provide a live, interactive forum to experience, interact and participate with thousands of mobile developers, device creators and industry executives helping to create the software and devices shaping the future mobile computing landscape.

There will also be talks and panel sessions from industry experts, leading minds and visionary speakers, such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Crossing the Chasm author, Geoffrey Moore.

The various events at SEE 2009 will allow all attendees to share and support ideas on the future of mobile, as well as how to work with Symbian to create the richest user experiences for mobile devices.

FoneArena will be covering the event live and I shall try to give you the updates from the ground as much as possible.

• Our Quest to Get to The Good Things in London – Day 1
• Nokia Flagship Store in London – Photos
• Nokia shows off the UK’s Good Things on The world’s largest signpost

Also notice the green card with the Latitude and Longitude on it ?  This is where we were supposed to head to as a part of the activities.

The activities started on the morning of 22nd. Each one of us was paired up with another blogger and so we were 5 teams now.  The team which finished the activities first would get N97 Mini Trials (3 devices per person) for 3 weeks. Since I m a huge fan of the mini since Nokia World, I was pretty much interested in trialling it.

My team mate was Jon Choo a really cool chap. We were provided with Travel Cards , Cash. We had to head to 5 Locations all around London. A mix of walking , riding the tube, riding the black cab was part of the adventurous journey around the city of London.

At each location we had to Twitpic the location / Post a screenshot of the maps and SMS Tom of WomWorld that we had reached , so that we can the co-ordinates and clue for our next location.

We headed to the Gloucester Road station first and took the Tube.

Good Thing #1

Then we landed up in here . Wellington Arch ? This is where we met Katie .

Good Thing #2

Next we saw the Queen head out of Buckingham Palace and landed up in Queen Victoria Memorial

Good thing #3 – Trafalgar Square

Next we headed to Trafalgar Square and our mission was to find Lydia  who was standing below the statue of Cunningham

Good thing #4 – London Eye

This is where we hit a minor roadblock. Tom had deliberately sent us the wrong co-ordinates for our next location. We got a 39 N for an actual 30 N  and Jon and I were scratching our heads for a while before we found that a great tourist attraction was at 30N and it was the London Eye. We lost some time due to this and it was part off the challenge. As we were on our way , Tom messaged us the right location.

Good thing #5  – Tower of London

Our next mission was to get on a cab and head to the Tower of London. We lost most of our time here stuck in traffic. After arriving here Jon filmed the guard here and that was our challenge.

Good Things Arrow

And this is what we saw near the Tower Bridge – The Nokia Good Things Arrow hanging from a crane and it had a gigantic TV display mounted on it to display messages sent in by users ( more details on it in a follow up post)

We settled for the day for dinner on a cruise boat and had great fun !  It was a great day filled with adventure and fun and something we have not seen before !  A Big Thanks to the WomWorld Team of Katie, Tom and Lydia who did a great job !

• Nokia shows off the UK’s Good Things on The world’s largest signpost
• Nokia Flagship Store in London – Photos
• Secret Nokia Event in London and FoneArena will be there
• Thanks WOMWorld for the Cool Barcelona postcard
• Unboxing the Navigator Package from WOMWorld

There’s a secret Nokia event happening in London this week and FoneArena is attending the event, thanks to awesome folks at WOMWorld

While we speculate that the event has something to do with Nokia Maps / GoodThings  and Navigation, you know that Nokia is tight lipped about revealing details as always. We’ll post more details soon.

Any FoneArena users in and around London ?  I would love to catch up with you over a Coffee or a Drink !

Stay tuned for more updates about this event from Oct 22nd to 24th

Read

• Our Quest to Get to The Good Things in London – Day 1
• Thanks WOMWorld for the Cool Barcelona postcard
• Position Art with Nokia N82 GPS by Stavros in Rome
• Received Nokia N95 and N81 8GB from WomWorld Today !!
• Nokia N82 VS N95 The 5 Mega Pixel Camera phone Battle

If you or your company develop SIM-based mobile applications, then you must be interested in SIMagine 2010.

Its an event which is inviting all developers who develop for the tiny chip which sits in you mobile phone a.k.a SIMCard.

Did you know that the SIMCard has inbuilt Memory and a tiny CPU?

Last year India sent in 18 entries.So where are you developers ? You have a chance to win 150000 euros in prizes

Last date for submitting your entry is  October 17, 2009 . So hurry up !

With about 3 billion SIM cards being shipped in 2008 , we are sure that the number will be more big in 2009.

Head over to http://www.simagine.info/ for more info.

None Found

You can count 24 apps running in the pics if you look closely

I am one lucky guy, I know that, I get to attend the premier events around the world when it comes to mobile technology and I get to play with the latest and greatest devices.  Sometimes devices I’m not at liberty to talk about for months.  So when I was at CTIA last week in San Diego I made sure to take a look at the N900.  My short introduction to it really hooked me.  I’m a big fan of HootSuite, a web based Twitter app and I was happily shocked when Chanse Arrington got it running on his N900 without any hitch or tweaking of settings during the GoMo News Blender.  I mean I was really impressed.  Then the next day Joe Gallo had 24 apps running simultaneously on his N900.  That’s not a typo, he really had 24 going.

On top of that I got to check out what seemed like a universal and all in one in box for all incoming messages.  I have written about this in the past and hope what I saw was accurate.

Lastly I was more impressed with the contacts application then anything else.  Presence seems to be built in according to what I’ve been told.  Basically you input all your friends contact info including instant messaging ID’s like for Skype and Google Chat.  Then when you look at that contact it will show if they are on line.  Now this is a huge step in the right direction.  For years I’ve been reading about presence and that it’s coming but this is the first time I’ve truly seen it implemented deep into a phones software.  I’m hoping it will be expanded beyond just contacts but I’m happy about this as a place to start.

My only concern at the moment is the interoperability of 3rd party applications like emoze (a client) and Truphone with Maemo.  Theoretically QT is supposed to solve this but the question is, will developers really migrate their apps over?

As a whole the N900 seems to be a stellar device that if all goes well may be Nokia’s very first mainstream tablet.  I like to see Nokia heavily promote development of 3rd party apps so it has a chance to compete against other devices with extensive app stores.  Great start Nokia!!!

UPDATE: So I just watched Ewan from MobileDeveloper.tv do an unboxing and once over and I’m sold.  I am absolutely ready to get my hands on an N900?  I can’t tell you how much I want one of these now to play with.  It was a pre-release unit Ewan has and it was still smoking fast.  It looked like it was burning up the OS and the web.

• N900 Short Video Walkthrough
• Nokia N900 Unboxing Pictures
• Nokia N900 Fondle Video
• Win a N900 by Hacking it at Push N900
• Video : Maemo Linux 5 on N900

The event started and ended with Advaita putting on a spectacular show by playing some of their songs which are incidentally available on Nokia Music Store for download. I found the songs to be very good and I would strongly suggest you to download ‘em all. Jasmeet asked them what the word ‘Advaita’ meant, well this is what it  means -- non-duality, it is a Sanskrit word. They (the band) stated that they are inspired by music that is transcendental.

Nokia’s Music Store is a new approach towards delivering music content to people. Jasmeet mentioned in his brief presentation that the formats for music have changed, but music by itself has not. It is interesting to note that India has close to 1000 movies being launched every year and if you assume 6 songs on an average per movie, we are talking 6000 songs annually, which is quite a number if you ask me.

Mr. Gandhi went on to add that we are at such a point that want our music at our convenience and in our format, and on a portable device. In face today, many of us choose to not pay for music that we own. This means that an artiste performs and creates the music but doesn’t earn anything because everyone wants it free. This is where Nokia comes in, it has the reach and that’s clearly visible with the number of handsets it sells in India. Nokia Music allows the user to download the content he/she wants and that too from a library of 3 million songs (30 lakh songs) which will be increasing regularly now. And with ‘Free tracks of the Week’ one can be assured of something free  every week. If you want to listen to a track before buying it then you can actually listen to a 30 second clip of it and then download it. Which means that you know what you are buying.

Mr. Gandhi was also quizzed about why one could not use a credit card at the store, he replied by stating that, the majority of the people (target audience) does not have credit cards, a student for example might not have a credit card,  thus making voucher based distribution easier as it allows tapping different forms of distribution, in fact one doesn’t need a PC for it, just a phone. Credit cards were also not expected to give Nokia volumes either. he did however mention that adding that as a payment mode was a minor thing and could be done anytime, if a demand for it arose.

The duration of the music is the tricky part, a song of 7 minutes is considered as one track, increments of 3 minutes thereafter makes the song a 2 track song. Further increment of 3 minutes – 3 track song. What this means is that when you are downloading a song from the store of duration 11 minutes, the store will consider them as 3 tracks and will deduct three tracks from your voucher. This is bit unfair, but I don’t know if many people will object to it or no.

Mr. Gandhi also assured us that by the first quarter of next year we shall see ‘Comes With Music’ branded devices in India. This means the X6 and the X3 will be available from next year.

Overall the event went off great! it was really nice to meet with some old friends. Here are a few photos of the event.The event also saw the launch of a new website to keep people informed of the happening at Nokia Music Store in India, http://millionsongs.co.in.

And if you want to hear and see Advaita, live in concert -- here are the videos!

• Nokia Music India Gets Festive and Offers 100 free tracks. Download Now!
• Nokia Music Store is Live in India
• Nokia To Launch Music Store In India by Year End
• Nokia 3720 -- A phone that survives torture -- Videos included
• Nokia N900 Fondle Video

After the mega launch of Nokia N900 at the Nokia World ‘09, Nokia has come up with an interesting contest for all the developers, hackers and modders called “PUSH N900“.

Nokia describes Push N900 as “An unique design, hacking & modding project from Nokia.  We want to give designers, hackers, modders, creatives and artists the chance to get their hands on, and heads inside, the new Nokia N900 & the Maemo platform – the most powerful pairing we’ve ever created”

Event brief

You will have to tell Nokia how you would hack and mod the N900 & Maemo to connect the N900 to something you love.  An expert judging panel will be selecting winning submissions and the groups behind the winning entries will receive N900 devices, funding and support to develop their PUSH idea. And once they’re complete, we’ll share them with the rest of the world with a series of installations in Nokia Flagship Stores across the globe.

Already a lot of buzz is present around Nokia N900 and this event is just going increase the buzz by many folds. Just imagine the quality of apps which will be created with a lot of hackers, modders and artist getting together to create apps for the Maemo OS.

Few companies like Hyper and Tinker.it have already got together and started working on a sample project for the PUSH N900 launch event. A project which dealt with a mashup of a Speak ‘n’ Spell, a Rolodex, 80’s radio tagger/Last.fm integration and 3D ViewMaster camera.

A Speak and Spell was used to text a message to a member of the audience, a Rolodex then identified a contact’s details after being manually spun and automatically pulled it up on the phone, an FM radio hack then identified any ‘80’s musician texted to the phone and connected to Last.fm to pull up the relevant cover art as you tuned the radio to a station playing the selected artist’s music, and finally a View-Master which used Nokia N900 to create custom 3D photos.

Interested to create a similar mashup or create another unique application for Nokia N900? Then rush with your ideas/proposals here.

Submissions for Nokia PUSH N900 are accepted until October 5th 2009. The proposals can be either a video proposal, or a written proposal or even visual proposal. The winning submissions and the winners will be announced on October 25th 2009.

Submit Ideas for Nokia PUSH N900

• Nokia brings Qt port to Maemo5 , shows it off on N900 on Video
• Nokia N900 can be Customized by Operators
• FoneArena Valentines Day Contest
• Nokia N900 is Official runs Maemo Linux and might be the Best Nokia Phone Ever
• Video : Maemo Linux 5 on N900