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While most people would now associate Nokia’s photography prowess with Lumia smartphones and the revolutionary PureView technology, the Nokia 301 offers compelling proof that Nokia is also committed to bringing great imaging experiences to feature phones.

In fact, the 3.2 megapixel camera and its suite of imaging features were two of the things that impressed me the most when I recently summed my thoughts after spending a week with the Nokia 301.

For instance, the Nokia 301 is the first feature phone that can take panoramic pictures. There’s a lot more that its camera can do besides, and it’s worth going through each of its features in a bit more detail.

Going through the settings

First things first, after opening the camera, you need to press the left option key to launch the menu for the complete list of features. And then you use the navigation keys to pick the feature you want.

If you select ‘Settings’ you can bring up the following options. 

• Photo size: From 3.2mp to 0.1mp
• Photo preview: 5, 10 seconds or end manually)
• Photo storage: Internal memory or SD card
• Photo title: automatic or manual
• Photo album: None, or create your own albums
• Camera sounds: on/off
• Self-timer sounds: on/off

Most of this is self-explanatory and will be down to personal preference. However, I think it was really smart to include the option to reduce the photo size because if you’re uploading them to social networks then you don’t want them to be huge files.

One more technical setting to be aware of on the Nokia 301’s camera is that you can adjust the white balance. This is also selected from the main camera menu and you can choose between: Automatic, Daylight, Incandescent and Fluorescent.

Voice-guided ‘selfys’

The Nokia 301 lends itself well for the ‘self-portraits’ phenomenon, or the ‘selfy’. There’s no front facing camera but instead you can take nicely framed photos of yourself with a little help of a voice assistant. 

From the menu, select the ‘self-portrait’ feature and you’ll see this text on the screen: ‘Look at the camera and follow the instructions’.

Spin the camera around so that you’re facing the camera and a voice (female, friendly but firm) will then guide you to hold the phone higher, lower, left or right until you’re framed properly. You don’t even need to press the shutter button – it takes the photo shortly after you’ve heard the ‘OK’.

This is great functionality that is also great fun!

Panorama

Taking panoramas have become fairly commonplace, but as I mentioned earlier this is the first time you can do it on a Nokia feature phone.

It’s easy to do too: Select ‘Panorama’ from the camera menu and you line up your first shot. Notice that the shaded square fits perfectly within the target outline.

After you’ve taken your first image that shaded square will disappear and, as you pan your Nokia 301 across, the next square will appear at the edge of the screen. The trick is to line up that square into the target outline too. Repeat this for four separate photos, which will be stitched together for the final panorama.

Creating a panorama this way, reminded me a little of playing a video game. It is like target practice. Again, a great function that is fun to use.

Sequential shooting

Taking a great picture is sometimes about capturing the perfect split-second. The Nokia 301’s sequential shot mode makes this easier to do, which takes several consecutive images in quick succession. 

You can select between shooting bursts of 3, 4 or 5 and then just press the shutter once as normal. You can then go through the images to see which one you prefer.

A couple of tips: to turn off the sequential shot mode, just select it from the menu again and select ‘off’. Also, if you need to be careful about storage space, then you can delete the remaining sequence images (the ones that didn’t quite catch the moment). 

Self-timer

This lets you select a countdown of 3, 5 or 10 seconds after you’ve pressed the shutter button before it takes the photo.

Importantly, it gives you the visual countdown on the screen but there’s also an audio warning that becomes more urgent as the seconds tick down. Useful for the subjects in the photo so that they know the precise moment to give you their best smile.

The Nokia 301

A feature phone for the image conscious.

Learn more.

Effects, editing and clip art via the 5-in-1 camera app

Selecting ‘effects’ gives you a choice of capturing a photo with the following filters: sepia, negative, grayscale or normal. What’s nice is that you can see the effect on the Nokia 301’s viewfinder before you even take the photo.

You can also edit, change or customise your photos after you’ve taken them. Select any photo from the album and select ‘Options > Edit photo’ from there you can rotate, crop, flip, add clip art, frames, text and make all sorts of other enhancements.

Share this!

When you’ve finished with your self-portrait, panorama or customising your image you can also share it with your friends through Bluetooth, via email or by using Nokia Slam.   

The Nokia 301 has all these imaging features and it records video too!

Just as no man is an island, Nokia has not been able to bring you all the wonderful experiences that you love about your phone entirely on its own.

Many of the games and apps that you enjoy on your Nokia Lumia smartphone or Nokia Asha device are the results of working with developers all over the world and by fostering strong partnerships with other companies.

One person who understands this better than most is Bryan Biniak, who is Vice President, Global Partner and App Development for Nokia. 

Partners = Apps

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where some exciting new apps were launched and plans to cooperate with DreamWorks Animation was announced, Bryan spoke with Conversations about the crucial role that partners have in helping to grow a mobile ecosystem.

“Partners are critical. You can’t sell a phone without apps anymore.”

“When I got here almost three years ago, I don’t think anyone believed that but it’s true today,” said Bryan emphatically. 

“You just can’t have some apps either, you have to have the apps that consumers want the most. That only catches us up to our competitors – we have to do it better. Then we need to have some special things that nobody else has.”

Remember Bryan’s line about special things; we’ll be coming back to it later.

Being a good partner 

Nokia goes to great lengths to look after its developers and partners.

For smaller or independent developers, Nokia has created some business tools to help them build, plan and monetise their business. It also shares technology, such as its music and location APIs, to enable developers to use those services in their apps.

The larger ‘depth’ developers are assigned their own account manager at Nokia, who becomes a direct point of contact. This system is in place to ensure that the partner is not overwhelmed and also so that Nokia can maximise their value in different channels, such as marketing or distribution. Most of all, it is about working closely with the partner to make the best product possible.

Being on Team Nokia

In return, the partner will get all the benefits that Nokia, and perhaps Nokia alone, can offer. Bryan explains:

“We might look at their roadmap and ask ‘what are the things that you’ve been dreaming about and haven’t been able to do?’”

“We can eliminate the risk of innovation for them, especially when it comes to technology that we’ve already created around imaging or location.”

Nokia can also give a partner access to its genuinely global market. Bryan points to WhatsApp, the cross-platform messaging service, who grew their distribution by ‘tens of millions’ in new countries after becoming available on Nokia Asha devices.

Courtships

However, before partnerships can blossom there is the task of finding, or persuading them to come onboard in the first place. 

Bryan tells the story of CNN, who was initially reluctant to have a presence on the nascent Windows Phone platform. He convinced them to let Nokia design a CNN app anyway – just on the off chance that they might like it.

“Two weeks later, not only did we go in with a design but we were able to show them an alpha of the product and they said yes because it was the best product that they had ever seen, and better than anything they had ever done internally or externally,” says Bryan.

Now, more and more partners are enthused about the potential of the Windows Phone platform and, in particular, about partnering with Nokia.

We have already heard the story about DreamWorks and how they are incredibly excited about working with Nokia.

Ironically, it was Bryan who was originally sceptical about working with them:

“I thought they just wanted us to write a big marketing cheque, but I was encouraged to go to the meeting and as it turned out all they wanted was to create products that no one had ever seen before.”

Special things

For the next year, the two watchwords for Nokia’s Developer Experience team are innovation and quality. 

Already, with new and groundbreaking apps from GoPro, Burton, Foursquare and others, Nokia and its partners are offering new experiences unavailable on any other platform and from any other device manufacturer.

There’s more to come too. Remember, those special things that Bryan mentioned earlier? 

“We have some amazing things coming out, and the companies that have had a sneak peak to our portfolio, want to build something amazing and exclusive with us,” Bryan concludes.

When it comes to smartphone names, you’ll be hard pressed to find one more apt than Asha. The Hindi word for hope, the Asha family of phones has been especially created for those people aspiring to enjoy smartphone functionality at an affordable price. The Asha 311 does this in a host of wonderful ways. To see for yourself check out these ten Asha facts and features you probably didn’t know about. 

1. It has a 3-inch scratch resistant capacitive glass screen with polarization filters. This means you’re guaranteed a silky smooth and accurate touch screen experience and you can read it in the sun. Double win!

2. The Asha 311 is powered by a 1GHz processor with  Wi-Fi, 3G and HSPA, for a surprisingly zippy performance.

3. If you love gaming you’re in for a treat. The Asha 311 comes pre loaded with fifteen levels of everyone’s favourite game, Angry Birds.  

4. And if that wasn’t good enough, the Asha 311 comes with an exclusive EA games gift worth €75. It enables you to download 40 EA games titles including classics like Need for Speed The Run and Bejeweled.

5. If you’re anything like us, you like to get the low down on what’s up with your friends and family. The Asha 311 sates our craving for this connection with social apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Chat, GTalk, Yahoo and MSN etc.

Nokia Asha 311

 6. We all love mobile surfing. Happily the Asha 311 has a cloud excelerated Nokia Browser, which is up to five times faster and uses up to 90% less data than other smartphones. Pretty nifty.

7. In some markets, you can also discover, share and get to where you want to go easier with Nokia Maps preloaded.

8. To keep you entertained while out and about, the Asha 311 has a Music Player, FM Radio and Internet Radio. It’s also really simple to plug and play to your PC to transfer  music and other files.

 9.Thanks to Facebook and Twitter being preloaded, it’s super easy to stay super social with the Asha 311. 

10. There’s nothing worse than your smartphone losing power on you. Thankfully, the Asha 311 has an incredible 29 days standby and 14hrs talk time.

Know any other interesting facts or features about the Asha 311? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Kto wie może nawet w kwietniu Kilka godzin temu po ostrej “walce” z Engadetami i innymi super blogerami z całego świata udało mi się dopchać do stołu prezentacyjnego i wziąłem do ręki nowego Samsunga Galaxy S4. Czy jest to trzęsienie ziemi? Nie, ale bardzo dobry smartfona S III ma teraz jeszcze lepszego, szybszego, dającego [...]

Kto wie może nawet w kwietniu Kilka godzin temu po ostrej “walce” z Engadetami i innymi super blogerami z całego świata udało mi się dopchać do stołu prezentacyjnego i wziąłem do ręki nowego Samsunga Galaxy S4. Czy jest to trzęsienie ziemi? Nie, ale bardzo dobry smartfona S III ma teraz jeszcze lepszego, szybszego, dającego [...]

Bejweled is a classic puzzle game where you have to match a number of coloured jewels in order to progress through the levels. Bejeweled Live + is the latest incarnation of this classic game, and it’s exclusively available on Nokia Lumia smartphones.

Download Bejeweled Live +

1. Press the Search button on your Nokia Lumia and then tap Vision
2. Scan the QR code
3. Tap on the link when it appears on the screen
4. Install the application from the Windows Phone Store

The aim of the game is simple; match three or more gems to have them removed from the board, at the same time adding points to your scoreboard. The more jewels you join up, the more points you receive.

You can create useful power-jewels by lining up 4 or more stones, and you receive even more spectacle power-ups should you join cleverly interest jewel combos.

There are five games to choose from, starting from the classic, to more adventurous types. Lightning mode is a fast-paced game when time is against you. You need to collect the time game to host your time. If you run out of time, you lose the game.

Diamond Mine mode is another timed game, but with a twist. At the bottom of the screen is the ground and you need to dig deep into it to progress to the next level.

You dig by creating matches of gems directly next to the ground. In turn, this frees up more space for the gems to fall above. Once you’ve dug beyond the screen, it’s time to play the next level.

The Zen mode is an interesting idea, it’s a game with some self-help type meditation mixed in, as the name of the mode would suggest.

This mode doesn’t have an ending, but instead continues for as long as you need. For Zen mode, the game recommends you plug in a pair of headphones to make use of the unusual properties within.

You can change the ambient sounds to that of beach, with seagulls flying over head. Alternatively, you might like to listen to rain fall as you play. There’s even the option to turn on mantras that can be presented to you through out your game in either normal form, or as a subliminal message.

If you want to crank the chilled-out dial to 11, then switch on the breathing modulation. This helps you breathe at a slow rate by using audio and visual cues to give you a real sense of relaxation.

The last mode is called Butterflies. Hidden within the jewels are coloured butterfly gems which must be matched with gems of the same colour. After every move, the unclaimed butterflies fly up a level until they reach the top of the screen. Eventually, they’ll get caught and eaten by the spider that awaits at the top.

As you progress through the games and earn points, the chances are you’ll unlock Achievements. The same type of achievements you earn when you’re playing a game on your Xbox console. There are 20 to be claimed in this game.

If you’re the competitive type, get for friends to play so you can compare your scores on the Xbox LIVE Leaderboards.

Bejeweled Live + is available exclusively for Windows Phone 8 Nokia Lumia smartphones, including the Nokia Lumia 620, Nokia Lumia 920, Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 900 and costs £2.29.

Is there one single thing that you love about your Nokia Lumia more than anything else?

In an interview with Conversations a couple of months ago, Nokia’s Pekka Horo identified five areas that were helping Lumia smartphones stand out from the crowd.

They were: 

• Design and Colour
• Imaging
• Location and Navigation
• Nokia Music
• Developer experiences and apps

These differentiators lie at the very heart of the Nokia Lumia experience that we have all come to value so much. But do you love one of these above all the others?

Have a vote in our informal poll: Which unique Lumia feature do you value the most? 

Which unique Lumia feature do you value the most?

We’ll announce the results next week and don’t forget, as well as voting, you can also leave a comment below.

The smell of burning rubber and the sound of screeching tyres can only mean one thing: Formula 1 is back!

The new season gets underway this weekend at Albert Park in Melbourne, and doesn’t finish until the final grand prix in Brazil at the end of November.

Throughout the year, you can follow every twist and turn of the travelling F1 circus on your Nokia. We’ve picked three F1 apps for Nokia Lumia devices and another three for Nokia Asha handsets.

F1 on Nokia Lumia

F1 Race Centre (free)

For live race day action, you’ll definitely need to install F1 Race Centre on your Lumia smartphone.

As well as at-a-glance updates to see who is winning and the other race positions, this app also has live text commentary courtesy of ESPNstar.com to keep you informed all of the key incidents.

Another nice touch is that the app integrates tweets from the major teams and F1 drivers.

F1 World Pro (£0.99)

The great strength of F1 World Pro is that it keeps you up-to-date with all the news away from the racing.

You can follow the news from a specific team, individual drivers or even from a particular circuit. These news feeds, from sources such as BBC Sport, Formula1.com and Espnf1.com update automatically in the background without the need for you to manually ‘sync’ the app.

2013 FIA Formula 1 (free)

Real Formula 1 fans can’t get enough of the huge amounts of raw data that is generated by each team. These details show you how a driver managed to gain that crucial one hundredth of a second to win the race.

This app should help to satisfy even the biggest F1 statistics geek. It will show you the race results, lap times, fastest lap and even the pit stop times. If that’s not enough, it also breaks down the qualifying sessions and provides sector-by-sector analysis of each lap.

 Almost as an aside, one of my favourite features of 2013 FIA Formula 1 is the attractive display calendar feature, which gives you a countdown to the next race.

F1 on Nokia Asha

ESPNF1 (free)

For Nokia Asha devices, I would definitely start with this ESPNF1 app. As well as giving you all the information you want, it also provides a great user experience.

This app gives you access to all the latest news, live result, commentary, race summary and stats.

In addition, there are complete driver and team profiles and a season calendar.

F1 Confidential (free) 

The intriguingly named F1 Confidential promises to give you ‘secrets, gossip, insider tips and confidential goings on’ directly from the pit lanes.

I’m afraid the reality is that the news is rather more conventional but this is still worth investigating all the same, as it brings in photos and F1 related video clips.

Formula Race (free)

Let’s face it, we’ve all fantasised about driving in one of the F1 cars. Unfortunately, the closest we will ever get to that is through a game.

There are plenty of racing games available in the Nokia Store but this is one of the best F1 racing simulators.

You can collect power ups to go faster (just imagine you are deploying your KERS…) and there are also different conditions for you to master. Rev those engines!

image credit: Natursports / Shutterstock.com

Nokia Music isn’t just about listening to your favourite tracks. It’s also about finding new ones, too. It’s this joy of discovery, which recently led Nokia Music in association with Sundance London, to launch the Nokia Music Short Film Competition. 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.

One person who’s already been inspired by this idea and run with it is Aaron Rogers, a filmmaker from London. Using the Nokia Lumia 920, Aaron went out to investigate the underground scene in the UK capital.

As you can see from his one-minute short film, the result was spectacular. So we hooked up to find why the Nokia Lumia 920 is so good for shooting short movies. Here’s what Aaron had to say.

Beautifully slick

“The Nokia Lumia 920 is a slick and beautifully manufactured phone. The operating system is a joy to use and its performance is exceptional. As a filmmaker the main things I need in a camera are manual control over aperture, focus and ISO plus a choice of white balance presets relevant to my environment.”

A low light delight

“I’ve taken the phone to all of the shoots that I have been involved in plus more since having the device and have tried to incorporate it into the production as if I was solely using the footage shot on the phone. I have come across some really strong aspects of the camera. The phone deals with light really well – both in low light and in bright environments. However, in the video cameras settings by default, the white balance is set to ‘AUTO’, which does cause a few issues. This is due to the phone trying too hard to adjust to the mixture of colour temperatures in the room, so in hindsight set your white balance before shooting from the selection of presets available.”

Really impressive optics

“The OIS (Optical Image Stabiliser) is really impressive. For those familiar with editing tools such as Adobe Premiere CS6 – It’s like having the ‘Warp Stabiliser’ plugin constantly turned on.  The optics are really impressive for a phone. When comparing it to the iPhone 5 the colour, clarity and general look of the image far exceeds the iPhone.”

Focusing on focus

“The biggest challenge I found with the Lumia 920 is the focus. In the settings you have two options and that is to have ‘Continuous focus’ on or off. When this setting is on it does work very well at focusing on the thing most prominent in the image. However, lets say you were shooting through trees branches and you had your subject walking towards you in frame. The phone would really struggle at deciding what to focus on – the tree or the subject, and they aren’t subtle focus pulls.

So if you turned ‘Continuous focus’ off would you be able to manually focus on what you choose to? Afraid not – you then lose all ability to focus what so ever. You can’t press the shutter button half way down or even touch to focus as that initiates recording.“

A serious bit of kit for filmmakers

“Overall though the phones camera capabilities are really strong and show a big development in portable technology. I think it’s amazing how things have evolved the past 5 years. How you can now get perfectly good Full HD footage on a phone and how DSLR’s have had a massive influence on the film industry. As a whole I think the Lumia 920 is a serious bit of kit for the independent filmmaker due to how convenient it is to have a refined 1080p image in your pocket, that unless you tell someone -wouldn’t necessarily guess it was shot on a phone.”

It’s great to see that serious filmmakers are taking the Nokia Lumia 920 seriously. We’re convinced that smartphones can revolutionize filmmaking. But what about you? Is this the beginning of a whole new genre or just a cinematic flash in the pan? Lets us know your thoughts below.

When Nokia launched its first cameraphone, in 2002, nobody predicted that six years later the company would be world’s biggest manufacturer of cameras. The same could be said of Instagram. In 2010 when it launched, you’d have been a brave person to forecast that in two years Instagram would have 100 million users sharing over a billion photos. But fantastic ideas have the power to set our world alight and mobile photography has done just that.

Instagram love is in the air  

And that’s why we’re helping the Window’s Phone community show their passion for Instagram. Last week, we launched the #2InstaWithLove on the Windows Phone market place. Our aim is simple: To help Windows Phone users speak directly to Instagram and the Instagram community in a way they respect, through beautiful photography.  The response has been incredible. In fact, downloads of #2InstaWithLove are off to the fastest start of any Windows Phone app ever.

Power to the Windows Phone people

But it’s not just Nokia Lumia lovers who want to see Instagram on Windows Phone. The entire Windows Phone community is eager to use this fantastic app. It’s for this reason we’ve made #2InstaWithLove available to every other Windows Phone user, regardless of device. So now more people than ever can profess their love of photography and Instagram. Just download it onto your Windows Phone then snap and share.

Why have we done this?  Marco Argenti, our VP of Developer Experience: “This movement is about the people expressing their opinions, sharing their experiences, and making their voice heard. Many have asked to make the app available for all Windows Phones, and we listened.”

The more photographs you take the louder the shout out to Instagram. So, what are you waiting for? Join the cause and make a difference to mobile photography today!

Image credits: Windows Phone Instagram lovers