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The principles behind wireless charging might have been discovered by British scientist  Michael Faraday way back in 1831, yet it’s only in the last year it’s really taken off. It’s still not yet mainstream, but thanks to Nokia, wireless charging already has a ton of enthusiastic fans. To see for yourself check out these quote from some of the most respected technology blogs on the web. 

ZDNet

On the Nokia Fatboy Wireless Charging Pillow:  “I have been testing this out and love the ease of charging up the 920.”

WP Central

On the Nokia Wireless Charging Stand: “It is pricey but the build quality and cool factor are both high with this accessory… it makes the 920 look like a trophy phone. The white stand against our white phone really looks good together, making it seem more art than technology.”

Engadget

On the Nokia Wireless Charging Stand. “The most interesting peripheral is definitely the wireless charging stand. It’s the least cumbersome of the charging options and it’s got a neat trick up its sleeve. An NFC chip embedded in its base can be used to tell a Lumia to launch an app when you place it in the dock.”

Allaboutwindowsphone.com

On the Nokia Wireless Charging Plate: “The DT-900 is a somewhat pricey, but wonderfully effective accessory and I can highly recommend it. And apologies to your bank balance if you end up buying two or even three!”

My Nokia Blog

On the Nokia Wireless Charging Plate: “It’s just wonderfully convenient. The perfect desk or bedside table accessory.”

WMPoweruser

On the Fatboy Wireless Charging Pillow  “The comfort you get with wireless charging is indescribable! It may sound exaggerated, but once you have the option to charge your phone wirelessly you don’t want to go back to the old way of charging…I really fell in love”

Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows

On the JBL PowerUp Wireless Charging Speaker for Nokia: “If you use a Lumia 920 or other similarly-equipped smart phone, the PowerUp is a no-brainer. This is a beautiful, high-quality speaker, and it’s highly recommended.”

UK Mobile Review

On the Nokia Wireless Charging Plate: “Overall the Nokia DT-900 Wireless Charging plate is definitely a must-have purchase…it is a great accessory to have at work and allows you to charge your Lumia 820 or Lumia 920 in style without having to plug in and be connected.”

Unleash the Phones

On the On the JBL PowerUp Wireless Charging Speaker for Nokia: “ So the convenience of wireless charging, plus the simplicity of NFC, and a decent speaker too, what’s not to love?”

Slashgear

On the Nokia NFC Wireless Charging Car Holder: “… you’ve got wireless charging, NFC-activated car mode, and a fully secure clamped-in setup. This lovely beast also has several features that allow you to use it with whatever smartphone you like.”

If you have a Nokia Lumia 720, 820 or 920 chances are you’ll already know how fantastically and futuristically convenient wireless charging is. If you’re yet to enjoy its cable free benefits, we’d love to hear which of Nokia Gear’s wireless wonders gets you most excited.

Udało się! Nexus 4 wreszcie w sprzedaży w Polsce! W najbliższym czasie smartfon nie będzie dostępny u żadnego innego operatora – tylko w Play! Już teraz w sklepie internetowym Play (www.play.pl/super-smartfony/nexus-4.html) możecie zamówić – w ramach przedsprzedaży Nexusa 4 16GB. Realizacja zamówień będzie miała miejsce po 25 marca. Co wyróżnia ten smartfon? Zdecydowanie czysty [...]

Część z Was już pewnie zauważyła, że kilka dni temu po podłączeniu iPhone do iTunes pojawiła się aktualizacja ustawień operatora. Dzięki tej aktualizacji można aktywować usługę poczty głosowej w telefonie, czyli visual voicemail dla iOS. Jak działa usługa? „Poczta Głosowa w Telefonie” pozwala na wyświetlanie, przeglądanie i odtwarzanie wiadomości poczty głosowej bezpośrednio na telefonie. Po [...]

Udało się! Nexus 4 wreszcie w sprzedaży w Polsce! W najbliższym czasie smartfon nie będzie dostępny u żadnego innego operatora – tylko w Play! Już teraz w sklepie internetowym Play (www.play.pl/super-smartfony/nexus-4.html) możecie zamówić – w ramach przedsprzedaży Nexusa 4 16GB. Realizacja zamówień będzie miała miejsce po 25 marca. Co wyróżnia ten smartfon? Zdecydowanie czysty [...]

Część z Was już pewnie zauważyła, że kilka dni temu po podłączeniu iPhone do iTunes pojawiła się aktualizacja ustawień operatora. Dzięki tej aktualizacji można aktywować usługę poczty głosowej w telefonie, czyli visual voicemail dla iOS. Jak działa usługa? „Poczta Głosowa w Telefonie” pozwala na wyświetlanie, przeglądanie i odtwarzanie wiadomości poczty głosowej bezpośrednio na telefonie. Po [...]

Hello everyone,

A new software update for SmartWatch is now available, bringing cool new features, tweaks and improvements…

Here’s a look at what’s included:

• Six new watch faces, something for everyone – retro, wacky, contemporary…  each with different functionality. Wake the watch face up with a double tap, a ‘my gesture’ movement detection or by moving the watch towards you with a twist of the wrist (Motion Clock face). Check out the screenshots below!
• Notification previews – see snippets of your messages, tweets and wall posts, when notified of new interactions
• Smoother search – with around 200 SmartWatch apps (and growing!), we’ve added Categorised sorting/search to make it easier to find what you want
• More intuitive, aligned interface across SmartWatch and Smart Connect, and we’ve also added a QR Code to make connection even simpler if you have a non-Sony Android phone
• Improved battery level indication       

If you haven’t done so yet, you can download HERE for Windows Phone 8 – HERE Maps, HERE Drive(+), HERE Transit and HERE City Lens – from the Windows Phone Store.

We believe that HERE delivers more than just apps. We like to call them experiences. They are the industry’s most comprehensive set of location services, built to work seamlessly together. As such, it’s easy to transition between walking, driving and transit as you move through your day. This is possible because HERE Maps, HERE Drive(+), HERE Transit and HERE City Lens are making the most of our platform, which is the foundation of the location experiences on Windows Phone 8.

Contrary to competitive solutions, we didn’t want to build a single app that’s all things to all people. Instead, each HERE experience is optimized for specific uses, so you get exactly the information you need whether you’re walking, driving or catching the train. Additionally, the HERE experiences work together so you don’t have to stop and switch apps. Let’s see how, with some easy examples.

When you look for a nice restaurant on HERE Maps you can easily plan your route there. HERE Maps automatically suggest the best way, but you can always decide whether to go on foot, by car or by public transport. If you’re on foot, HERE Maps provides turn-by-turn navigation specifically designed for pedestrians.

If you prefer to take your car, HERE Maps shows you the route and with a tap provides the option to start HERE Drive(+) for voice guided turn-by-turn navigation. Last but not least, HERE Maps shows you the optimal route by train or local public transport (available in over 700 cities in 50 countries). If you need more alternatives or schedules, you can start HERE Transit with a tap, too.

If you are like me and commute via public transportation, you might be a heavy user of HERE Transit and probably have pinned to start your home address to figure out how to get home from anywhere in the city. But sometimes in an unfamiliar area, although HERE Transit is providing you with all the information and schedules, you might feel more comfortable to be guided to the train stop. This is why you can now get HERE Maps turn-by-turn walk navigation from HERE Transit.

And when you are using HERE City Lens to discover places nearby, you can easily open HERE Maps to get more information, see photos and read reviews about what you have found.

Have you been in similar situations and seamlessly switched between any of the HERE experiences? Let us know in the comments section below.

Reminder: Pino will be taking part in a Twitter Q&A about HERE experiences, hosted by the folks from @NokiaUS later today.

Have you ever used LevelUp? It’s a convenient service for making payments with your phone and is great for consumers who want to be rewarded for making routine payments.

Here’s how LevelUp works – first you sign up at thelevelup.com and link a credit or debit card with the service. Then, in cities where businesses have LevelUp payment terminals, you load the app on your phone and the terminal scans a QR code. Your credit card is billed and, over time, you get rewards.

The payment process is handy – and fast as well. LevelUp’s Matt Kiernan told me that the average LevelUp transaction takes a mere 9 seconds, where credit card payments take up to 15 seconds and cash is about a 20-second transaction.

Rewarding consumers, benefiting business

The LevelUp service allows merchants to run loyalty campaigns. For example, for every $30 spent, you get $3 back. Another campaign might be to give $5 off any transaction for a new customer. In addition to rewarding customers, LevelUp offers these benefits to businesses:

• A flat 2 percent payment-processing fee, which is much lower than traditional processing fees for credit cards.
• Campaigns to help grow the business. LevelUp has data on the spend and activity of your customers. Using this data, your business can run campaigns to promote behavior.

At the recent South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Nokia and LevelUp blanketed the Austin Convention Center with LevelUp terminals and Nokia Lumia 920s to demonstrate the service to new and existing LevelUp users.

To prompt new LevelUp activations, new users received $5 to spend in the convention center. The campaign worked – more than 50 percent of folks who made one transaction using LevelUp returned to make another.

New LevelUp app on the way
Rather than a glitzy or gimmicky marketing campaign, LevelUp and Nokia took over the payment process at SXSW.  Each vendor stand and payment location featured banners where the Nokia Lumia 920 was on display with the LevelUp app launched and ready. LevelUp employees had Nokia Lumia 920s to show off the phone and how easy it was to use the LevelUp app to make a quick payment.

Kiernan says SXSW goers loved the Nokia Lumia 920 and found the phone and LevelUp app easy to use. Also, LevelUp users on Lumia can look forward to an upcoming version of the app that will feature a Live Tile that will display businesses around you where you can use LevelUp to pay.

After sitting through the latest three-hour blockbuster, it’s hard to believe that in the early days all films were short. Everything from newsreels and comedies to serialised dramas and adventure stories. In the USA, superstars like Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy rocked the one- and two-reel film world with flicks like Chaplin’s Mabel’s Strange Predicament.

Short changed

As the movie industry expanded, though, and talkies and colour films hit the big-screen, so-called feature-length film became the main event and short films were relegated to the opening act. In Britain, these tended to be educational flicks, like the Green Cross Code campaign—informative, but hardly fun. By the 1980s, the film industry was driven by blockbuster movies and profit margins, and, commercially speaking, short films weren’t anyone’s priority.

 Festive fun

Sound bleak? Not really. With the commercial imperative removed, short films quickly became incubators for film-making talent. Lower costs and shorter schedules meant that directors and producers could use the short format to experiment in ways that the cautious studio bosses discouraged in feature films. And because shorts tend to be shown at film festivals where the audiences are actively seeking out innovation, where better for a film-maker to road-test their skills?

Small films. Big prizes

Some kick-ass short films that have wowed the festival circuit include Peter Capaldi’s Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1994), starring Richard E. Grant, Bobby Peers’ Sniffer (2006), which picked up the Palme D’Or for short films at Cannes, and João Salaviza’s Rafa (2012), winner of the Golden Bear (short film) at the Berlin International Film Festival. Niche festivals like the London Short Film Festival, Tropfest, and the long-running International Short Film Festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France cater exclusively for shorts, and companies like Future Shorts work with film-makers to distribute short on- and off-line. Future Shorts also run a pop-up festival to develop a global screening network for short films.

TV times

On TV, too, short films are on the up: music videos and narrative adverts often have massive budgets, at least compared to the indie movie-makers; the production values for these shorts are high, and the audience reach is immense. Directors and actors often work across feature films, TV adverts and music videos— check out Wes Anderson’s Amex ad, My Life, My Card (2006), David Fincher’s Mechanical Legs (2002) for Adidas, or Ridley Scott’s 1984, advertising the brand new Apple Macintosh was back in, yes, 1984.

The smart option

And there’s more: huge shifts in film distribution options have changed how we make and think about short films. We’re talking about the internet, of course: not only can any budding Spielberg or Kurosawa shoot movies on full-spec HD smartphone video cameras like Nokia’s Lumia 920, but they can upload them to services like Vimeo and YouTube and use the power of social media to reel in an audience bigger than they’d get at any film festival.

 Bite sized art

Social media and mobile viewing are also making short format films and programmes increasingly popular, especially in Japan, where dramas and soaps are serialised in bite-sized chunks designed to be watching on the go, on mobile phones and tablets. All of which means that short films, far from being a dying art, are still the place where film adventure begins.

To see for yourself, why not throw your hat into the ring for the Nokia Music Short Film Competition, launched in association with Sundance London. The aim is to have filmmakers showcase the amazing, unusual and unknown music scenes in their cities.

Filmmakers need to simply upload a short 15 to 60 secs video trailer by March 21^st visualizing the underground music scene in their chosen city. If their idea is picked, they’ll receive Nokia Lumia 920s and a $5,000 budget to shoot their film, plus a guaranteed a special screening at the Sundance London Film & Music Festival (2013) in April.

Think you’ve got what it takes? We look forward to being dazzled.

Image credits: Feral78 + VancouverFilmSchool

We’ve seen some fantastic new feature phones from Nokia during the past month, including the Nokia 301 and Nokia 105.

They come from an illustrious family of handsets, with Nokia having made some of the most influential and best-selling phones of the past decade. We’ve been talking to Marco Mildenberger, Director of Product Management to find out which models have been the most influential, what features they’ve brought to market, and also how the current models extend that heritage.

Rewind to the beginning of the century, and the mobile phone landscape was massively different. Mobile phones had keypads and monochrome displays, and were used for calls and texts rather than surfing the web or satellite navigation.

The year 2001 saw the introduction of the Nokia 6310, and it turned out to be a game-changer for Nokia. Marco explains:

“The Nokia 6310 is a good starting point when we look at the heritage of feature phones. Everybody who ever had a Nokia seemed to have this one, or it was one of the phones they wanted to own.

“When you ask people what they thought about the Nokia 6310, they highlighted robustness, simplicity and battery life. This product was still on the market in 2005. When I started at Nokia in 2006, people were still talking about it.

“I remember a lot of input, people asking: ‘Can’t we extend this product, can’t we bring it back again?’ There were a lot of people on eBay trying to find that exact phone, which is true even today!”

The Nokia 7650 was also launched in 2001. It combined a colour screen and camera into a sliding form factor. “With high-end features including Bluetooth, infrared, an email client and a premium price tag, this product was bought by business customers,” Marco explains.

“Following on from this, the Nokia 3510i was a much more attractive device for consumers, bringing a colour screen to a lower price.

In 2007 the Nokia 6300 hit the shops.

“It was hugely successful, selling in very high volumes,” says Marco. “It highlighted the same three key features as the Nokia 6310: robustness, simplicity and battery life. It also came with a metal housing, which was very difficult to do back then.”

Before the 6300, metal only appeared on high-end devices like the Nokia 8800. The Nokia 6300 was a good development on the simplicity side, too; the software was a good step forward. Battery life was still really high on the agenda. Looking back at consumer feedback, it was a very reliable product as well.

Marco highlights a change in form factor as one of the next big steps for the feature phone:

“Typically, a feature phone was a monoblock. Then QWERTY came on the radar, and the Nokia C3, launched in 2010, was a very important product. Before the Nokia C3, BlackBerry was dominating the QWERTY market.

“We managed to transform that into a consumer market and offered relevant features addressing messaging and social networking at radically lower prices. In many countries like Indonesia, we became number one in a very short space of time.”

“There have also been other important innovations recently, like our Easy Swap Dual SIM. We weren’t the first to produce Dual SIM, but we invented the hot-swapping of the second SIM,” says Marco. “It seems like lots of people in many countries actually have more than two SIMs. So a device like the Nokia C2-00, hitting the stores in mid-2011, was an important step.”

“Later the Dual SIM technology appeared in all sorts of different form factors,” adds Marco. “The Nokia C2-03 ‘Touch and Type’ was important for us, as it combined Dual SIM and touch capabilities. There were lots of people who didn’t want to use a full touch device at the time, so this was a stepping-stone for them towards full-touch devices.

“The line between feature phones and smartphones is blurry today. Meanwhile, there is still a huge market for traditional phones. Many people aspire to a smartphone, but due to affordability aspects, feature phones will play an important part for a long time yet.

“What’s important is that we continue to bring those high-end or high-value innovations to lower-priced devices, focussing on features we know our consumers will enjoy and love.”

The Nokia 105 is a great example of a phone that delivers these features, providing 12.5 hours of talk time, a dust and splash proof keyboard, colour screen and a host of games. The Nokia 301 adds 3G connectivity and a 3.2-Megapixel camera to the mix, proving you really can have everything you need at a low price point.

What’s your favourite Nokia feature phone? Leave a comment below.