Nokia Phones

After rather humorous announcement according to about how to hold Nokia devices, now the company released a special announcement about how hard Nokia is trying to get everything through. It talks about the facts that company has been developing the antenna service for a few decades.

And then come the claims about the research programs held by the company. The research has to do with the human behavior toward the devices and more precisely the way they hold it.

But the most attention was paid to the last sentence : ” … we may not have any drool-worthy UI around here, but they, at least our phones can actually make calls”.

This means that the company is getting serious about the competition.

YouGov, which is the leading company for the market research in the UK, has recently published a study called Mobile Internet Experience. It is interesting because it shows how popular is a particular brand among the young people. Well, studies have been rather disappointing for Nokia. New smartphones of the Finnish company enjoy less and less popularity.

YouGov conducted a survey last month (most likely only in the UK) among 2,121 users of smartphones with the question – what brand smartphone you bought? 56% of respondents said that it was Apple iPhone, 34% said that Nokia, 31% – BlackBerry, and 28% – HTC. It is worth noting that a similar survey conducted in December of the last year, and the percentage of people who have chosen Nokia, was 46%. So, 12% for 6 months is not enough a pleasant result.

Experts believe that the impact on the popularity loss is based on Symbian operating system. But it seems, Meego will be able to compete with iPhone OS and Android.

Here we come. The first “real” screenshots of the Symbian ^ 4 operating system are already over the web. In contrast to the conceptual images which appeared earlier, these pictures show the real work of the Symbian ^ 4 on the device.

The interface looks extremely unusual for Symbian from the outside, perhaps, a Symbian ^ 4 and the current generation of the operating system does not have anything in common with each other. Personally, I think that Symbian ^ 4 OS is mostly similar with Android OS: the top panel looks almost the same, especially in terms of colors.

It is known that the first device with Symbian ^ 4 will appear in 2011. Prior to that Nokia plans to release its current project in the form of the Symbian ^ 3.

Those Nokia users who have devices based on Symbian S60 platform must be satisfied with the fact of the release of  Opera Mobile 10.1 beta version. The item brings up the most favorite things which were available for the earlier versions, such as visual tabbed browsing, homescreen having webpage thumbnails.

The list of the newest features include:

• Faster page download speed- just like in case of computers
• Geo-location support- GPS pops up with popular location-aware sites such as Goolge and Bing Maps
• Virtual touchscreen keyboard- this is rather useful when working with the URLs…
• Accelerometer support… for getting to landscape mode and back…
• Kinetic scrolling
• Turbo mode

You just need to go to the official Opera site and get the update there.

If comparing with the rest of the online stores it feels like Nokia is being left far behind. The thing is that according to the recent research the customers of the Ovi Store are not only satisfied with the service but also rate its work to be below the average.

Among one of the disadvantages of the Ovi Stores is that it’ s taking too long for the applications to be available to the customers.  Except that the developers of the company tend to the idea that they’re not being payed well-enough for making the applications. And the last point is that the instructions are not that clear.

The good point is that everything is being done here step-by-step which makes is possible and then the list of Nokia devices is not too large to get confused.

Nokia is trying to push up the market while making its devices more and more useful. This time the modification has to do with one of the popular devices Nokia C6. It’s having a successor in a form of a Nokia C6-01.

Recall the specs of Nokia C6 we should mention that the device was equipped with a 5 megapixel camera supporting LED flash, while the recent modification is equipped with a better camera- 8 megapixel with a support of dual-LED.

As for the overall appearance the device look simply alike. That’s why we can say that Nokia C6-01 is equipped with a 3.2″ touchscreen, slide-out keyboard, Wi-Fi, GPS and much more.

Feels like the model-naming of the devices from Nokia gets even more confusing.

The Nokia plant, located in the economic zone of Chennai (India) is shaken by a strike – the workers are demanding wage increases and the restoration of the previously dismissed employees. By such drastic measures the company’s employees were forced to move after unsuccessful negotiations with the leadership of the factory this Monday.

According to representatives of Nokia, wages of employees of the plant are large and exceed the average for the region in the IT-industry. Therefore, to increase their company is not going to happen. The second request relating to the restoration of the workplace laid-off employees, too, is unlikely to be satisfied – Nokia representative says that the contracts with these people were ripped off for “serious misconduct” and to continue working with them is not inappropriate. A total of 60 employees were dismissed at incident in January of this year.

Now the Indian factory of Nokia employs about 8,000 people. For all 4 years of its activity the plant produced more than 350 copies of mobile phones.

Nokia got a chance to get a permission to have Chinese maps posted for the Ovi Maps. This is due to the new law regulation which took place in June 2010. This announcement is not final yet but most likely it will turn into reality.

As for some of the other companies, then we must say that Microsoft and Google didn’t even have submitted an application for their mapping services, while there are some other twenty-six companies which are also waiting either for the final or the pre-approval.

The fact that Nokia is getting a chance to overcome the problems faced by Google is great. At least at this rather hard moment the company has something to feel confident about.

One of the most reliable sources Wall Street Journal believes that soon Nokia Siemens will get Motorola Arm. They say that this contract is going to take place in near future, more precisely in next few weeks.

The deal could round up for around $1,1-1,3 billion. Some say that this is why Nokia decided to get rid of Metacarta. Now the company can get this awesome arm equipment without unnecessary expanses.

While Motorola representative Tama McWhinney announced that the company will not response to the rumors, while the direct representatives of Nokia Siemens were not available for the response at that time.

This kind of info cannot be kept in secret for too long, thus the hope to get some official response in short terms is rather realistic.

Nokia has released a software update for music phones Nokia X6 and X3. Upgrading from version version v20.0.005 to v21.0.004 brought many changes to the applications for Symbian smartphone X6, while the X3 based on the S40 platform has received only minor improvements in the notification of battery life, call time and audio signals.

Full list of changes for Nokia X6:

Upgrade your browser to version 7.2
Ovi Music
Ovi Sync 2.0
Ovi Store 1.5.6
Ovi Contacts 1.50.8
30-day trial version of Shazam
Improved kinetic scrolling in Appshell
Gimlet Touch 2.2
Flash Video Phase-3 – Flash Lite 3.1.7.x
Ability to use Side Lock Key in Swipe UI
Windows 7 Device Stage Support
Updated video telephony
Mail for Exchange v2.9.210
Improved stability and performance

As you can see from this list, there are no fundamental changes in the software – it is customary to improve the standard set of functions. According to the Nokia Web Developer’s Library, the browser for Symbian OS 7.2 version supports multi-touch and provides a zoom with two fingers. However, reviews of the users who already downloaded this pack, say that this feature is still unavailable, despite the presence of a capacitive screen. A possible reason is the limitation in Symbian S60 5th Edition.