Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

Jak to możliwe? Przecież pożegnaliśmy w sylwestrową noc tak znienawidzoną przez naszych konkurentów ASYMETRIĘ. Jeden Prezes nawet miał zamiar wypić za to szampana. Jednak zamiast pełnego radości pogrzebu godnego jak te w Nowym Orleanie…mamy zombie w jeszcze lepszej niż za życia formie. Przyznam się, że byłem w szoku kiedy przeczytałem dziś na Telepolis.pl szczere do [...]

At the 1959 inaugural Grammys, only twenty-two awards were given out. This year there were an incredible eighty-one categories. As Dylan sang so poetically, “times they are a changing”. One reason for our current obsession with kick ass music is the 21st century mobile lifestyle: a staggering 42% of smartphone users claim to have between 2000 and 5000 songs on their phones.

Movers and booty shakers

It’s this relationship between tunes and tech, which has prompted Nokia Music to co-host the pre Grammys brunch with Jay-Z’s label RocNation. This year it was jam packed with the movers and booty shakers of the music industry. And judging by their big smiles, it looked like it was an occasion to remember. To see for yourself, check out these exclusive photos.

Adrienne Bailon

Kelly Rowland

Ellen Pompeo

Kylie Minogue

Rihanna and Jay-Z

Jill Scott

Christina Milian

MC Lyte

Jordin Sparks

Nothing we like better than seeing people enjoying themselves, especially when they’re singers we groove along to all day long. We’re sure you’ll agree these ladies and gents are looking stunning, but which one would you most like to brunch with? Write your answers, while humming to the tune of your choice, in the comments below.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The new, super-versatile Nokia Asha 310 is a mobile milestone for Nokia: it’s our first smartphone to offer both Dual-SIM and Wi-Fi together.

That means that owners can enjoy the benefits of both Wi-Fi and Dual SIM, such as saving money by choosing a wireless network for accessing the Internet, and the flexibility of being able to use the right SIM card for the right purpose, without having to change handsets.

The Nokia Asha 310 has Dual SIM on steroids. Nokia’s Easy Swap Dual SIM technology is designed to make swapping between different SIM cards as easy as possible, in order to get better tariffs or to switch between SIMs for personal or work use. Your main SIM card sits behind the battery, as normal. But the slot for the second SIM on the side of the phone allows you to switch the second SIM easily, without needing to switch off the phone. With the SIM manager you can assign unique profiles for up to five SIM cards and define which SIM card you want to use for calling, sending text messages or for using Internet data.

The latest version of the Nokia Xpress Browser is available for the Nokia Asha 310 via an over-the-air download. The Nokia Xpress Browser compresses data by up to 90 per cent, meaning that you can download pages quickly even over a slow connection, and save money at the same time, without compromising the browsing experience.

Of course, we all prefer to use Wi-Fi when it’s available, and its inclusion in the Nokia Asha 310 offers the best way to enjoy entertainment online – like streaming videos from YouTube or downloading files or apps from Nokia store, including any of the 40 EA games offered for free with the phone.

Those 40 free EA games are only the beginning when it comes to apps. The Nokia Asha 310 comes with preloaded email, Facebook, Twitter and eBuddy. Push notifications from eBuddy make sure you won’t miss a single chat with your friends.

With the Nokia Asha 310, you won’t get lost either: the pre-loaded Nokia Maps works online and offline, while the Nokia Nearby web app will point out the local sights and places to go. When you’ve finished playing with those, thousands more apps are available from Nokia Store.

A full-touch device with a scratch-proof 3-inch display, the Nokia Asha 310 also offers a 2-megapixel camera. There’s a MicroSD card slot for extra storage, and either a 2GB or 4GB card is included in the box. Of course, if this is not enough and you want to store even more content on your phone, you can extend the storage up to 32 GB. The sleek, polished shell comes in black, white and gold colour choices.

Like all our Asha phones, the Nokia Asha 310 boasts an impressive battery life that puts other smartphones to shame. In this case, that’s 17 hours talk-time or up to 25 days on standby from a single charge.

The Nokia Asha 310 will be available in Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa and Brazil from Q1 2013. Without local taxes or any operator subsidies, it will cost around $102 (USD).

Mobile gaming is a big business. If you do it right you can find fame or fortune, or sometimes both. One such game to receive wide acclaim is Wizard’s Choice, which we reviewed last month. However, this isn’t the type of game you’d normally expect to see on a high-end smartphone, it’s a text-based game, and we wanted to know why the developer – Sam Landstrom – opted for this old-school format.

“Personally, I wrote this because I like to write (I wrote a relatively successful sci-fi novel called MetaGame) and I like to code, so this was a marriage of both.”

Sam then quotes one of the gaming legends:

“As Sid Meier once said: ‘A game is a series of interesting choices’. Text games strip out all the nonsense and focus on this principal. There’s no learning curve, there’s no huge commitment of time—there’s just interesting choices.”

Sam continues:

“The beauty of graphics wears off on me in a few minutes and then it just comes down whether the game is fun or frustrating and a waste of time? There’s often too much to do, too much trying to climb stairs, looking for objects, and otherwise doing tedious things. A lot of RPG games are like this.”

As you can imagine, writing a text-based game means that there are lots of words for Sam to put to (e)paper. Each chapter in the Wizard’s Choice saga consists of around 40-55k words and with five chapters already published, that’s about 200,000 words. Include the fact that Sam’s currently writing the sixth chapter and the word count increases again.

“Writing the whole story and compiling the code takes a lot of time – about four months per volume. I started working on Wizard’s Choice 20 months ago and it’s all created in my spare time. Initially, my wife helped me edit the first few books, but I recently started hiring people to help with the editing and also to create some art for the story. Sites like elance.com and guru.com are great for that sort of thing.”

Although there aren’t any fading screens, high-def explosions or 3D-landscapes, writing a text-based isn’t necessarily any easier to create, as Sam explains:

“Since this is the only game I’ve created, I wouldn’t actually know if it was any easier; but I can speculate. On the one hand, the engineering is much easier for a text game, but on the other hand, you have to write a book. I have 200k + words of storyline in Wizard’s Choice, which is double the size of the novel I wrote several years ago. Writing a novel isn’t a trivial task.”

Writing a book and writing a text-based game, although partly similar, do have their own challenges. In a novel, you can go into great depth, but in a game it’s different; you’re writing for a gamer:

“It’s important to not get too bogged down with detail, like you can in a book. You need to strike a good balance of story versus a fun game with challenges for the gamer to overcome. You’ve got to keep people engaged, both as a reader and a gamer.”

Sam has some tips for budding-app developers:

“Just make it fun and don’t worry so much about cool features.”

“And, get some good artwork for your icon so that you can attract customers. If you’re not an artist, use elance.com or guru.com and hire somebody to do the work.”

And also some wise-words:

“Test the crap out of it and polish it up. Get other people to test it, too, and get some honest feedback. Ask them ‘is it fun?’”

Nokia Lumia 620

Our newest Windows Phone 8 smartphone.

The family is growing.

The past 20 months have been rewarding to Sam. Wizard’s Choice currently has almost 1,000 reviews on Windows Phone Store with an average star rating of 4.5 out of 5, with lots of people describing the game as exciting, challenging and engaging, amongst others.

But what are Sam’s future plans?

“I’m finishing up Volume 6 of Wizard’s Choice. That will probably be the end of that series. After that, I’ll start up another series, perhaps in a different genre.”

Sam concludes:

“I just produced volume 1 of a new series Zombie High Volume 1. Unlike Wizard’s Choice, I didn’t write most of the story, but it runs on my software. Erin Foster Hartley is the author.”

Nokia’s been involved in the world of snowboarding for a while now. From inventing new apps for boarders to sponsoring competitions, and working with Burton on cool smartphone accessories. On the face of it, mobile tech and snowboarding might not have much in common. But snowboarders are some of the most creative people on the planet.

Hard as nails

And it’s not just coming up with amazing new tricks either, many boarders are passionate photographers and filmmakers, too. If you’re recording your moves on the slopes, you want a camera that’s portable, hard-as-nails and incredibly versatile, qualities Nokia smartphones excel in. 

High fives

We’ve recently launched a competition with Burton to showcase this creative spirit. Photographers, filmmakers and artists from across the world submitted hundreds of stunning entries. To see for yourself check out five that are currently riding high in the voting stakes. Every voter has the chance to win a Lumia 920, so why not head on over and vote today before voting closes in just over 24 hours.

“Snowtrip Chile 2011″ By Evandro Rocha

“Army style snowboarding.” By Gor Elchyan

“Flight of the Butterflies” By Anna Surgut

“Burton U.S. Open model” By Dmytro Malyshev

“From summer to winter – Snowboarders desire ” By Alexander Alexandro

Double golden boy

One person who’ll doubtless enjoy these entries is Roope Tonteri, who recently won double gold at the 2013 FIS Snowboarding World Championships. One of the best snowboarders of his generation and a keen filmmaker, Nokia’s now helping him prepare for the 2014 Winter Olympics. 

Roope will also be giving us a unique insight in the world of a top class snowboarder, using Nokia flagship phones, starting with the Lumia 920. 



“I’m stoked about my new sponsor,” said Roope. “Nokia is a Finnish company and I have been using their phones ever since I was a little kid. We have some great plans coming up with Nokia as a part of this contract so I’m really motivated to start a cooperation with them”

It’s great to be able to support such a talented athlete and help him achieve his dreams. It’s also super exciting to get an insiders view of one of the most mind-blowing sports in the world. A sport so popular, that more people watched the Olympic half pipe final, than the American finals of Idols. 

While we won’t be doing any ollies, nosegrabs or triple corks soon, we’ll certainly be rooting for Roope when he works his magic. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the NokiaxBurton entries, Roope and snowboarding in general.

Image credit: ©Eleonora Raggi

A simple notebook might be a peculiar object to wax lyrical about but Moleskine offers compelling evidence that some notebooks are more equal than others.

Literary and artistic giants such as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway all favoured a classic black notebook, with rounded corners, an elastic page holder and an internal pocket.

This simple design and heritage story lives on today through the Moleskine notebook, which can still shower a certain creative sparkle, sophistication and style upon its owner.

In fact, could you say that Moleskine has become to notebooks what Nokia Lumia is to smartphones? 

Moleskine Journal for Lumia

If you think that carrying a notebook and a smartphone around is too onerous then you might very well consider downloading the Moleskine Journal app (free) for your Nokia Lumia in the Windows Phone Store.

As you might expect, this app combines the simplicity of a notebook with all the technological advantages that you would expect from a smartphone app.

It’s easy to customise, notes can be synced with Evernote or SkyDrive, you can switch between different colours, fonts and also insert photos. 

Perhaps another key point is that, while this app is bursting with features, it remains recognisably a Moleskine product.

There are three types of ‘notebooks’ within the app for you to work with. 

• Notes – A blank page that allows free form drawing and sketches with your finger as a paintbrush. There’s also a choice of brush or pen styles, colours and you can add your images too.
• Weekly Notebook – this is a weekly planner and calendar that helps you to keep on top of your schedule and appointments.
• Passions notebook – Keep a list of your favourite things. Add images and jot down your thoughts. 

Within each of these three notebook templates, you can add more notebooks. For example you could have one weekly notebook for work and another weekly notebook for your social life. Likewise, you could keep a passions notebook on food and another on books.

Within each notebook you can also add and delete pages as you go along. Individual pages can also be uploaded to Evernote and SkyDrive.

Notebooks can also be pinned to your Start screen and you can also set up reminders, which is particularly useful for the weekly notebooks.

Moleskine Journal is incredibly simple to use, beautifully designed and retains just enough of the charm from its physical notebooks.

Yes, there are other apps that will have all the features, and perhaps more besides, of the Moleskine Journal but none of them can trace their evolution and inspiration back to so many geniuses of the 20^th century.

Top image credit: Amir Kuckovic

Właśnie przyleciała do mnie testowa fioletowa Sony Experia Zet. Wszyscy mówią “piękna jest…” W najbliższym czasie na rynku pojawi się kilka bardzo fajnych smartfonów z najwyższej półki. Jaki model kusi Was najbardziej? Zebrałem kilka najbardziej gorących modeli z ostatnich kilku miesięcy i tych, które pojawią się lada chwila. W ankiecie celowo nie umieściłem Samsungów, bo [...]

Właśnie przyleciała do mnie testowa fioletowa Sony Experia Zet. Wszyscy mówią “piękna jest…” W najbliższym czasie na rynku pojawi się kilka bardzo fajnych smartfonów z najwyższej półki. Jaki model kusi Was najbardziej? Zebrałem kilka najbardziej gorących modeli z ostatnich kilku miesięcy i tych, które pojawią się lada chwila. W ankiecie celowo nie umieściłem Samsungów, bo [...]

Richard Castle, 35, of London, is a project manager in the aerospace industry, whose thirst for a creative outlet away from his day job coincided with the release of Windows Phone in late 2010. He also wanted to listen to the BBC’s radio shows on his Nokia Lumia.

Richard, who had done some coding many years ago, downloaded the development tools and started learning C#. Before too long, he had created several apps that provided live streams of the BBC’s national radio stations to Windows Phone devices.

Terms of Business

Mid-way through 2012, Richard added the BBC Podcast Lounge to his stable of apps.

This was, and is, a rather wonderful app that lets you browse, search and download from a 20,000-strong library of podcasts directly from your smartphone.

It was then that a letter from the BBC arrived. More letters were exchanged and Richard also had a lengthy face-to-face meeting with senior management within the BBC’s Future Media division.

The basic problem was that, while the broadcaster was supportive of Richard’s work, the apps also breached the BBC’s terms of use. A solution needed to be found.

Richard spoke to Conversations about the ensuing negotiations with the BBC, why it has actually ended up making his apps better and his plans for the future.

Did you get any reaction from the BBC when you published your first apps?

None at all. I always knew I was treading a thin line with them. I was hoping that they would be pleased with what I had done and would leave me to get on with it.

I didn’t hide; they had plenty of opportunities to contact me if they wanted to. I read their business terms of use and I was satisfied that I had them broadly covered.

When did they eventually contact you?

It was in the middle of 2012 and their main objection was that I was using the BBC name and logo in the title, which was fair enough.

Plus, while they are happy for people to use their APIs, the app cannot solely feature BBC content; it needs to be augmented with content of a similar nature from other providers. The BBC cannot be given undue prominence within the app either.

They had every right to tell me to cease and desist and have Microsoft remove the apps. They didn’t do that, which gave me a bit of confidence that they were willing to work with me to make things right.

Did they have an issue with you charging for the apps?

Funnily enough, they didn’t have any issue with that. Their business terms allow it. 

If I had been charging per radio show, for example, then that would have been an issue. But they had no issue with me charging a small amount to cover my development costs.

Has everything been settled now?

I reached an agreement with the BBC in the first week of January 2013, which said they would allow me to retain the apps as long as I made modifications to them. 

I had to put forward a transition plan, which was to move away from solely using BBC content.

What’s the latest on the apps?

The single station apps are being withdrawn. Ultimately there was nothing I could do to make them fit with the BBC’s terms of use.

BBC Radio Player has been renamed to Radio Lounge and while it is still only offering BBC content at the moment, over the next couple of months we’ll be turning it into something that offers a broader range of radio content like TuneIn.

What about Podcast Lounge?

For me the silver lining was that without the dealings with the BBC, then this app would forever be a very small and niche player.

The new release beings a catalogue of over 20,000 podcasts from around the world. It is the largest and most accessible collection on Windows Phone. It uses the same interface that everyone likes and it’s become a better product as a result.

You can also add your own podcast feeds in there and one thing we do that no one else does is that when you plug in your handset to it charge up, Podcast Lounge will wake up in the background, sync your podcasts and then shut down again. 

What else have you been working on?

I have 2-year-old daughter and we used to put Fun Kids on, which is a London digital radio station on the computer.

I contacted them and said I’d love to do your Windows Phone app. We had a couple of meetings and they made their API available. They published it themselves because they wanted control, which didn’t bother us. 

I would love to do a National Trust app and I have contacted them on several occasions but I’ve struggled to get them engaged.

There are many other ideas I have in the labs, however Podcast Lounge is my main focus today. There’s a gap that Microsoft has left for podcasts that I’ve been going hammer and tongs to try and fill. I think it’s a great opportunity to do something big there.

NFC has been around for several years now and has lots of great uses. However, for many people, it’s seemed an inaccessible product; only for geeks and developers, perhaps? However, as more and more companies (including Nokia) embrace the technology, we see the opportunities to use NFC rise significantly. Clear Channel is one such company, planning on introducing more than 10,000 NFC tags and QR codes to the streets of the United Kingdom during 2013.

Although you may not realise it, Clear Channel has products strategically placed all over the UK, situated deep within local communities and also in popular high streets and busy tourist spots. You may have walked past a few of their products a couple of times already today.

When you stand at a bus stop, waiting on a platform at a train station, or crossing a busy intersection of a road, the chances are that the advertising signs positioned there will be from Clear Channel.

Towards the end of last year, Clear Channel made the decision to include a new, digital method of advertising into their products, alongside existing methods, in announcing the UK’s first national permanent high street mobile platform for outdoor media.

Now, as well as seeing traditional media advertising such as posters, you’ll see a large tag positioned next to the advertisement. This tag is an NFC tag, with the inclusion of a QR code for those devices not yet NFC-enabled.

Throughout 2013, more than 10,000 of these tags will be positioned around the UK just waiting to be scanned or activated by your Nokia Lumia or other smartphone.

When people interact with these tags there’s the possibility you’ll be able to download vouchers and promotions, as well keeping up-to-date with brands you may be interested in.

The type of content available to us, the consumer, really depends on Clear Channel’s business partners. But let’s imagine what that could be, shall we? You could be waiting at the bus stop and want to download the timetable of the buses for that particular stop? Or, you could see a poster advertising a new fragrance at the shopping mall and scanning the tag would give you 10% off that fragrance? And all you’ve done is scanned the NFC tag (or QR code) with your smartphone.

Nokia Lumia 620

Our newest Windows Phone 8 smartphone.

The family is growing.

When it comes to understanding how NFC tags work, particularly as an advertising method, advertisers have a real advantage of knowing what works and what doesn’t, using detailed metrics. Each NFC-campaign that’s set up provides real-time content updates to the advertising company. For example, they can see how many times the tags have been scanned; in addition to how many vouchers they’ve given away as a result.

Matthew Dearden, Clear Channel’s Chief Executive said:

“Clear Channel is constantly looking at new ways to enable brands to meet people. We’re very excited about the engagement opportunities mobile technologies offer to both advertisers and consumers. Mobile is the natural companion medium for out-of-home and this innovative platform builds on the outstanding audience and reach already offered by our market-leading roadside portfolio.”

In London, we’ve already seen many of these tags appearing, particularly at bus stops – which seems like an ideal place to put them.

Are you in the UK and have seen these NFC-enabled advertising posters? Have you interacted with one yet? Let us know what you think about them, using the comments section below.