Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Using a mapping application offline is certainly one of the most requested features, when travelling internationally without a data plan or when travelling underground in the subway. This is something that Nokia Maps has been offering for years already and the benefit of which other players have just recently recognized.

So why do we still believe we are offering the best offline solution in the market? We compared Nokia Maps on a Nokia Lumia 920 with Google Maps on a Samsung Galaxy SIII to explain.

As you can see in the video, offering offline maps is not only about giving the option to cache some data offline for later use, it’s a complete experience: it’s about points of interest (POIs) available offline to enable offline search, it’s about navigation voices (over 70 of them, btw) available on-device and offline rerouting.

How do we do this?

We believe that a digital map can be more than just a digital version of a paper map: this is why our maps are computed on your Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone 8. In other words, part of our engine, the HERE platform, is in the palm of your hand instead of on a remote server.

As a result you can enjoy a powerful and reliable location experience. Nokia, Microsoft or 3^rd party apps that use the HERE platform will feature fast maps you can easily interact with. You are not going to experience any lag when panning or zooming the map, no service interruptions when you are in the subway and of course no additional roaming costs when travelling abroad.

Are you a regular user of offline maps?

Just today Gizmodo called the Nokia Lumia 920 “the best smartphone camera money can buy”. Needless to say, we agree 100%. And it’s not just the PureView technology, Optical Image Stabilization and Carl Zeiss lens that make it such an amazing imaging smartphone. It’s also its versatility in the toughest photography situations. To see just how good it is in one of the most challenging scenarios, a music gig, we gave it to gig photography maestro, Malachi Timothy, and asked him to take it for a test run. Here’s how he fared, in his own words.

Get your priorities right

A photographer’s first priority when shooting a gig is to get sharp, blur free images, with image noise a close second. Using a camera flash is subjective: some people use it, but in most gigs these days it’s not allowed. So to get the best result, I will set my aperture as large as possible (around f2.8 on a DSLR) with my ISO as low as possible. I will then try and get as high a shutter speed as I can, with 1/60th of a second being the absolute lowest.

The biggest challenges

The biggest challenges shooting gig photos with a smartphone camera is that you don’t have the ability to control these settings manually. The camera’s making a different decision for every shot, based upon the light that it is metering for. Happily with the Nokia Lumia 920, there are a couple of ways of getting around this. Basically, you’re tricking the camera’s in built camera modes. There were three different modes built into the camera, which all had their own plus and minus points. The only setting regarding exposure that you can fix is the ISO, so I left that at 800.

How to get the best from Auto Mode

Auto Mode is the one that the phone comes pre-set to. It does a pretty decent job of trying to get a usable image out of the very demanding conditions present at a gig. However, Auto Mode tries to create an evenly lit, bright image. It looks at the entire content of the image, sees the large, dark areas around your subject on stage, and tries to balance the bright subject and the dark background. The result is a compromise between the two, with an over-exposed blurry subject, and a not quite dark but not brightly lit background.

To get around this issue, you need to adjust the exposure value setting. This will allow you to bring down the camera’s exposure by 2 stops, or -2 in the camera settings. This does a pretty good job of removing the overexposed subjects, although the Auto Mode means it still has a tendency to go for a slower shutter speed than would be ideal.

How to get the best from Sports Mode

Sports Mode is designed to capture high-speed action, and tries to remove as much blur as possible from each shot. In doing this, it relies on you being in an area with plenty of light and doesn’t mind sacrificing brightness for a blur free image. This is a step in the right direction, as all we need to do is get the phone to up the brightness and compensate by lowering the shutter speed slightly. To do this, we go back to the camera exposure value setting, and up the exposure this time. It’s best to do it in steps, until you get the desired level of brightness. The main issue with this mode, though, is that while it usually gets the highlights exposed properly, it leaves everything else looking washed out and flat.

How to get the best from Night Mode

The purpose of this mode is to try and give you a nice bright exposure when the lights are dark. It is effectively doing the opposite of the Sports Mode, in that it’s trying to get a decent exposure by sacrificing the levels of blur in the image. We can make this mode work for us though, by using the exposure value to bring down the exposure. Left to its own devices, the camera will bring the shutter speed down way too low, creating a bright but blurry image. Since we have control of the ISO, and have it set to 800 or 400, all we have to do is bring down the exposure value to say -2, depending on the lighting, and the camera will up the shutter speed, reducing the brightness, but also upping the shutter speed.  

As you can see from Malachi’s cool photos, despite the incredibly challenging conditions faced at gigs, with some clever tweaking, the Lumia 920 comes up trumps.

If you’ve got any other top Lumia 920 photography tips, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Social Media Week is happening February 18-22 and Nokia is happy to be a global sponsor of the event that takes place in multiple cities around the world. During the week-long celebration, we’ll be in New York City attending, speaking and taking part in all the Social Media Week festivities.

We know that conferences can be draining and the Nokia social team will be on site helping people stay powered up. Throughout Social Media Week, we’ll be roaming the venues giving out Nokia Universal Portable USB Chargers, so if you see us – don’t be shy to hit us up!  We’ll help juice your phone so you can make sure you have the power to get through the day.

If you haven’t tried it, this charging stick is pretty cool. It fits easily in a pocket and provides a full charge for your ailing phone.

At Social Media Week, we’ll also be showing off the Nokia Lumia line of phones, including the Lumia 920, Lumia 822, Lumia 820 and the Lumia 810.

For those wishing you could get in on the free giveaway action but aren’t at Social Media Week in New York… Don’t fret!

We’re going to be giving away three Nokia PowerUp speakers throughout the week to folks on Twitter who use the hashtag #NokiaPoweredMeUp.  Merely mention #NokiaPoweredMeUp in a tweet to enter.

So start tweeting!  You can enter as many times as you want – we’ll choose the winners throughout the week.

Finally, we’ll be reporting from Social Media Week throughout the, um, week via Twitter.

Ten supersmartfon już wkrótce w PLAY. Często w komentarzach pod moim recenzjami zarzucajcie mi, że to reklama ponieważ nie krytykuję. Naprawdę ciężko mi krytykować nowe BB. Bardzo się cieszę, że producent powraca i to w tak dobry stylu. No może dałbym ciut lepszy procesor za taką cenę, ale to detale. W filmie mówię, że spodziewamy [...]

19 lutego 2013 roku PLAY złożył w Urzędzie Komunikacji Elektronicznej wnioski o rezerwację trzech bloków częstotliwości z pasma 1800 MHz. To efekt rozstrzygniętego przez UKE przetargu, w którym oferta PLAY została oceniona najwyżej spośród wszystkich biorących udział w postępowaniu. – Jako lider rozwoju całej branży telekomunikacyjnej w Polsce, prowadziliśmy przemyślaną strategię przetargową i zaoferowaliśmy konkurencyjną [...]

Ten supersmartfon już wkrótce w PLAY. Często w komentarzach pod moim recenzjami zarzucajcie mi, że to reklama ponieważ nie krytykuję. Naprawdę ciężko mi krytykować nowe BB. Bardzo się cieszę, że producent powraca i to w tak dobry stylu. No może dałbym ciut lepszy procesor za taką cenę, ale to detale. W filmie mówię, że spodziewamy [...]

19 lutego 2013 roku PLAY złożył w Urzędzie Komunikacji Elektronicznej wnioski o rezerwację trzech bloków częstotliwości z pasma 1800 MHz. To efekt rozstrzygniętego przez UKE przetargu, w którym oferta PLAY została oceniona najwyżej spośród wszystkich biorących udział w postępowaniu. – Jako lider rozwoju całej branży telekomunikacyjnej w Polsce, prowadziliśmy przemyślaną strategię przetargową i zaoferowaliśmy konkurencyjną [...]

The work of Microsoft Research is often high level, with work in areas as diverse as making the power consumption of data centres more efficient or advancements towards an HIV vaccine.

In the times between these more serious projects, they’ve also made a number of apps for Windows Phone. The latest of these is Blink, a camera Lens that offers a trouble-free way to take action pictures that capture just the right moment, or photos of friends who have a tendency to close their eyes just as the shutter releases.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Using the app is very simple. Either launch it from its own icon or from the lenses selector inside the camera UI. When you press the shutter release, the screen flashes rapidly for a couple of seconds, to let you know it’s working. Inside, the camera is taking a whole series of pictures – actually starting even before you press the button.

After it’s finished, you can choose the best shot by scrolling through the film strip at the bottom of the screen with your finger. Want to capture someone mid-air? They’ll be relieved that they only have to jump once, and the camera lets you select the right picture. Then you can either save or share the image using all the usual media.

There are some limitations. The pictures are lower resolution than normal – 1280 by 720 pixels – which is fine for online use, but you wouldn’t want to print them out. You also need to do without the flash, or other camera controls. That said, Blink is free and currently has a 4.5 star rating on the basis of 275 reviews.

Here’s a tutorial that takes you through all the features.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Have you used Blink yet?

image credit: Martin Calthrae

Doom & Destiny is a Role Playing Game (RPG) that we reviewed almost a month ago. Today, I’m still playing it, hacking and slashing at enemies, with loot and XP as my reward. We spoke with Matteo Nicolotti, CEO of HeartBit entertainment, to try to understand the efforts that went into making this game.

How many people created Doom & Destiny?

“Just two nerds. While I focused on technical aspects, Francesco Ficarelli worked to create a great game experience in his products.”

HeartBit entertainment is a relatively new company, launching in April 2011. However, Doom & Destiny has roots way before that, back in early 2010 when Matteo and Francesco joined forces to create Doom & Destiny – their first joint project. Even before their days of jointly developing, both Francesco and Matteo created code for games or apps.

Working on a project outside of working hours and in any spare time can mean that it can often take a while to be completed. Matteo tells us that Doom & Destiny took about a year and a half to finish. But once the duo knuckled down and focused on their own business, the development of subsequent apps has been completed considerable quicker.

“One of our quickest games was Miner Warfare which took about a month to complete, and another one, Spyleaks, was finished in about 6 months – both are Xbox indie games.”

As you’ll have noticed by now, Matteo and Francesco aren’t satisfied with focusing on just one gaming platform, they want to deliver their content to both mobile and console gamers.

“Not everybody owns an Xbox and we understand that many new gamers are playing games for the first time on their smartphones. From the beginning, we liked the new Windows Phone platform and saw it as something innovative and we wanted to bet on the success of this new marketplace.”

Are older games used as inspiration when creating new games?

Yes, and no, explains Matteo:

“Well, we initially created Doom & Destiny as an offensive parody of four friends of ours.”

“But they enjoyed it and pushed us to complete the game. The game is also a tribute to old NES and SNES role playing games, from the gameplay to the content. Final Fantasy and Pokemon are probably the most well known similar games.”

And what of new developers, what advice would you give to them?

“Don’t do it!” Matteo jokes. “That’s how to eliminate our competitors from the start.”

Nokia Lumia 620

Our newest Windows Phone 8 smartphone.

The family is growing.

“Joking aside, creating a game is very hard and can be very time consuming, but it is rewarding. Always create something fun and original, and if it’s your first project, keep it simple!”

It’s easy to see Matteo’s personality and sense of humour transferred into Doom & Destiny, which is enjoyable to see. Creating a game isn’t just about typing in code; it’s about investing yourself into something that you enjoy.

Matteo and Francesco are always busy creating something, and we’ve been let into a little secret. They’re about to release two more games over the next few days. That’s as much as they’d tell us, but they’ll reveal all on their Facebook page as well as the HeartBit website, so make sure you keep checking there for more details.

Sayonara, nine-to-five; haloo, flexi-working! It’s quite a while since office life has been confined to office hours, or between cubicle walls: a globalized economy, project-based work patterns, and advances in mobile technology mean that we’re almost always on duty. Whether you’re working from an international airline departure lounge or from your own home, having mobile access to your emails and files is, these days, a prerequisite for success. And when a laptop’s not convenient or possible, smartphones rule the business day.

But they’re not just convenient: they’re game-changers. Here’s five ways that mobile technology is changing the way we work forever:

1. We can edit, access and share work, anytime, anywhere.

If you’re toggling between devices, the last thing you want is a mix-up between file versions. The Nokia Lumia family of smartphones comes loaded with Microsoft Office and Outlook so that you can create PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents on the go, then use Cloud services like SkyDrive, SharePoint or Office 365 save, sync and share them. The upshot is that you don’t need your PC to do your job any more: mobile tech lets you access and edit files across multiple interfaces, so you can work effectively as you travel.

2. We can work securely out of the office

You don’t have to worry about leaving sensitive information in plain view on a restaurant table if you’re working from a smartphone; because security is a primary concern for the office tech developers, your confidential files really will be for your eyes-only. Windows 8 phones like the Nokia Lumia 920 come with hardware accelerated encryption, secured boot, apps that guard against malware and the ability to remotely lock and wipe your phone on the off chance that it gets misplaced. Plus, the Active Directory Rights Management Services make sure only authorised users can access your email.

3. We can keep our business closer

There’s more to apps than Angry Birds: with business and leisure, don’t forget that mobile tech is all about communication. Downloadable services like WhatsApp offer free messaging, and your call package probably includes a number of free messages. What’s more, with Lync 2010 for Windows Phone, you can see which of your work colleagues are available, chat through IM and join Lync conferences easily with a single tap from your calendar entry. Which means that these days, no matter your location, you’ll never drop off the office grapevine again.

4. We can work smarter and more intuitively

Smartphones such as the Nokia Lumia range have been specifically designed to help make working life easier. In handset design and interface look and feel, the range has been optimized for great performance and ease of use. Live Tiles are perfect for faster web browsing and fluid multi-tasking. People Hub brings your business contacts, messages and content together in one place. You can choose the person to contact, then how to contact them, all from one place. While People Hub groups, mean you can connect with your key people with a single touch.

5.  We can learn new skills faster

Bewildered? The Nokia@Work business twitter channel is here to help demystify the world of business smartphones. They’re running real-life master classes at Social Media week in NYC all this week, but if you’re not in the vicinity, look up @NokiaatWork and #SmarterEveryDay to get tips on how mobile tech and social media can help you work more efficiently. They’re tweeting advice on developing business apps for Windows 8, the power of online communities for local businesses, and more: and you can access all this info from your phone—bettering your business on the go!

Any other ways mobile tech is revolutionizing your nine to five? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Image credit: Blumpy + DeclanTM