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Hola! Do you like it when the worlds of Lumia and music collide? If so then you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve got two Lumia 900 switch videos hot-off-the-record-press for you to watch today…both of which have a musical twist!

I recently paid a visit to recording artist IreneB and Platinum/Grammy award winning record producer Frankie Biggz – in the beautiful city of Barcelona – to find out why they both switched from their iPhones to the Lumia 900.

I’ll give you guys a little time to familiarise yourselves with their work in the music industry and why they like the Lumia 900 so much before telling you more about how Irene’s record launch in the USA is going.

IreneB – Spanish R&B singer

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

IreneB has been busy promoting her new record ‘Welcome Back‘ in the USA for the past few weeks now and is currently playing gig dates all over Florida..weather permitting! She has a tonne of Lumia 900 photos on her Facebook fan page for you guys to check out and has been busy tweeting about her journey from Barcelona to the USA.

Frankie Biggz – American record producer/singer-songwriter/DJ

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Frankie has also had a hectic schedule since we last met. When he is not supporting IreneB on her tour in the USA he is working with other talented artists like Romantic (make sure you add him on Twitter - he’s going to be big one day!), Djing at large events in Florida and making music videos with artists at his record label.

We originally got in touch with IreneB through our Trial a Nokia programme and she was really keen to test out the product. After the trial she not only decided to trade in her iPhone for the Lumia 900 but she also managed to convince Frankie to part with his!

If you are a musician looking to use a Lumia to capture your work then why not get in touch with us @Nokia_Connects? Alternatively feel free to leave a comment below. If you missed our last Lumia 900 ‘switcher’ trip to Amsterdam then you might like to check it out here.

Everybody loves a good game. So why is it, that after decades of gaming, there are still bad ones? When I’ve taught game design, one of my approaches with students has been to force them to play bad games in order to learn what not to do with their own projects. Thanks to challenges like this we’ve unearthed seven sins pretty much guaranteed to make gamers rip their hair out in frustration.

1. Inaccessible controls

There is a thin line between the satisfaction a player gets from being able to manoeuvre a character, effortlessly around, and the frustration a player feels when the video game controller does not yield to his command.

Inaccessible controls remains a key reason why many people do not get into video games as a hobby. In a soccer game, a chipped shot might be explained as ‘L1 + B’, a form of gamerspeak that implies finger-twisting to the extreme. Enough said.

2. Lack of or bad tutorial

The first video game ever, Pong, managed to encapsulate it’s core idea into one lucid instruction: ‘avoid missing ball for high score”. Few games are as simple nowadays, which means that game developers cannot trust the player to immediately grasp the basics.

Enter the tutorial, a sequence where the game holds the player’s hand through the core gameplay concepts. Tutorial design demands the game developers to take a step back from what they eat for breakfast, and step into the shoes of a player who has not touched the game the developer has been working on for months or even years. Thus, a tutorial that fails to suck the player in, persists as a design challenge.

3. Too steep difficulty curve

A good game is supposed to grow it’s challenges as the player becomes better at tackling them – this keeps the game interesting. However, it is easy for a game developer to lose sight of how an average player will cope with its challenges. This often leads to the difficulty of the game ramping up too fast. Subsequently, the game ends up frustrating or intimidating the player to the point of quitting. Sound familiar?

4. Lack of feedback to the player

The gist of interactivity is in the simple loop of input and output; one makes a move and sees what comes out of it. Therefore giving feedback to the player for his actions is of utmost importance to keep them engaged – if the game fails to do that, it’s probably not much fun.

Video games are – or at least should be – great at this, because they are essentially systems built to provide visceral, immediate feedback. That’s why they are called video games, something to engage our perception. Imagine a game of Bejeweled where matching diamonds into rows of three would not involve any kind of gratifying visuals to indicate your success. Lesser game, no?

5. Optimal strategy for winning

Part of the magic of Angry Birds is how it simulates physics: how the birds and the pigs and the building blocks behave together in predictable yet unpredictable manner. Let’s imagine for a while that the bird physics would work like this: Each time one maximises the slingshot power, the optimal result – level instantly cleared – would be reached. That would be called an optimal strategy, and it does not a fun game make.

6. Lack of meaningful choices

Famous game designer Sid Meier, of Civilization fame, once defined a game as ‘a series of interesting choices’. His games definitely reflect that.

Yet, if one finds a game where the choices presented to the player produce only superficially different outcomes, you are most probably looking at a bad game. Let’s imagine playing Tetris without being able to rotate the blocks – lesser choices to improve the outcome; lesser fun factor.

7. Unrewarding, unclear goals

When I focus fully on kicking my buddy’s ass, or completing a level in a video game, I engage in a fundamentally goal-driven activity. Part of its pleasure derives from struggling towards well-defined goals, such as ‘avoid missing ball for high score’ or ‘save the princess’.

Furthermore, good game goals are clearly isolated wholes that are pleasurable to strive for. This is not always the case with our everyday life: It’s hard to find romance in taking out the trash. When a game fails in setting it’s goals with clarity and imagination, they appear more like chores.

Each of these can be a real pain, but which gets you riled up the most? Let us know in the comments below.

Image credits: Morberg + Lord Jim + Mbieusch + Johnny Jet

Nokia Lumia 820 colour range

There are some tough choices lying ahead for Nokia smartphone fans. Will you be getting the Nokia Lumia 920 or the Nokia Lumia 820? Perhaps, just as difficult, is choosing what colour you want as well.

Colour is something that has always been taken seriously at Nokia. It was the first mobile phone manufacturer to introduce colour into its range and also the first to introduce changeable covers in different colours.

To this day, and especially with the choice on offer with its Lumia range, colour remains an integral part of Nokia’s design approach and brand identity.

Colour schemes

The Nokia Lumia 920 will be launched in yellow, red, white, grey, black and, for AT&T in the USA, cyan. If you’re thinking of getting the Nokia Lumia 820, then you can choose from all those, plus purple.

The choice of these colours is a lot more methodical and thought-out than you might think. Nicola Ralston, head of Nokia’s Colours and Materials Design team, gives some context to this colour scheme:

“Nokia’s portfolio in the past grew to be very broad. If you had sat down all the Nokia devices on the table, you would think, ‘where is the brand identity? What’s the key message? Why does silver and black mean business?’ It was all quite mind-boggling driven by a complex consumer segmentation model.”

Focusing on one clear ‘Colour and Material’ palette across the portfolio was an important milestone. Driving plastic polycarbonate as a premium material has also allowed designers to create and develop a colour palette with character and intensity.

Nokia Lumia 920 colour range

CMYK

“It felt right to strip our palette back considering our design principles of reduction and simplicity. We wanted to reduce colour back to its purest form and for us that is CMYK,” says Nicola, referring to the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key (Black) colour-printing model.

“Why CMYK and not RGB? That has a lot to do with Nokia as a brand and the character of the brand. We wanted to project confidence and make an impact and this is best shown through the CMYK route.“

Over the last 18 months, we have seen the fruits of this CMYK approach. First with the Nokia N9 in cyan, then later with the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 900. Yellow on the new Nokia Lumia 920 completes the CMYK line-up.

“Not three different tones of yellow and four different tones of blue. Let’s keep it simple, be super confident, fun and characterful, while also providing choice,” says Nicola.

If there is a downside to offering people a choice of colours is that you’ll never be able to cater to the whim of every individual. This is something that Nicola is well aware of.

“Nokia offers colour; it’s not about one colour. The intent was never to have cyan be recognised as our brand colour, as a new Nokia blue, or anything like that,” she says.

Lumia 920 cyan

Bold blends

Nicola also says ‘the most beautiful thing’ about CMYK is that you can mix the core colours together to get other ones.

A ‘balance of neutrals’ is also important to Nokia. Hence, on the new Nokia Lumia devices, there is the choice of grey and white.

“We’ve expanded the palette a little from CMYK and we call that our bold blends. Another one of them is red and one is the purple that you see in the Nokia Lumia 820. Will we continue to add more colours? Not at this stage.

“The colours we have at the moment have a beautiful relationship between the form and the material. The success of this strategy is based on that approach, only developing what works best and sticking to it.”

Finishes

If you read the first part of our interview with Nicola, you will know that colour and material are inseparable from one another. In these devices, the colour is not painted on after the polycarbonate body has been moulded, but it is made in a specific colour from the very beginning of the manufacturing process.

A further dimension to this seamless marriage between colour and material is the topcoat finish that is applied.

“Some colours have got the gloss and some the matt finish,” says Nicola.

“It’s about attention to detail. It really depends upon the character of the colour, the form and the message we are trying to give. Some colours you’ll get the choice of both – and it can portray a completely different character.”

Nokia Lumia 920 in yellow

Nokia applies some of its topcoat finishes using a specialist supplier and with methods that are ‘very different to the standard manufacturing techniques’ to achieve the perfect results.

In fact, the quality controls throughout the entire sourcing and manufacturing process are rigorous, detailed and highly specialised. Just making a phone that is yellow – really, really yellow – is a challenging and complicated process.

“It takes a real mastery and understanding of this entire process to work better with it, and produce colour and material at the end that is truly inherent and in no need of paint to make the appearance flawless,” says Nicola.

“As a designer you need to understand the colour process and it starts when that substrate is in its purest form, powder.”

Nokia Lumia 820

Digital Colours

Nicola’s team also works closely with Microsoft to get the right colours on the Windows Phone tiles. So, the yellow Windows Phone tiles will be a different shade of yellow from that of the smartphone.

“We work in terms of colour harmonisation but it is still a really intense crafting process. You are working in a different medium but you still want it be a holistic offering… Digital colour is just as powerful as the physical,” she says.

Nicola’s designers work closely with the screen engineers to ensure that there is consistency between different devices and different screens.

As a final word on colours and materials, Nicola says:

“This is a really important stage in Nokia’s history and we wanted to make our approach to colour the purest that we could. We also wanted to build on our heritage and to make these devices last for a long time – no matter how many times you drop it; we want it to still look true to how you bought it.”

image credit: flickr

Nokia at the Windows Phone 8 launch

Windows Phone 8 is finally here! Microsoft did the final reveal of the long-awaited mobile platform at an exclusive event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, and Nokia joined the party with our family of Lumia phones with Windows Phone 8: Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 on AT&T, Nokia Lumia 810 on T-Mobile USA, and the just-announced Nokia Lumia 822 on Verizon Wireless.

The event was spearheaded by Joe Belfiore, Manager of the Windows Phone program at Microsoft, who started out by looking at where smartphones are today and where they’ve been.

“If you think about the predominant user experience on most of the smartphones that people are using today, it was standardized by Apple and the iPhone, and essentially that same interface was copied by Android on Android phones,” Belfiore said.

“And it really hasn’t evolved all that much. The static grid of icons has been sort of the standard on smartphones.”

The most personal smartphone

Nokia at the Windows Phone 8 launch

Windows Phone, on the other hand, is drastically different. The operating system has been designed to focus on the user and to prove the most personal experience.

“Windows Phone is unlike any other mobile operating system. The idea is you can find the things and people you care about and put them front and center in your experience… It’s a unique reflection of who you are,” he said.

But the operating system is just one part of overall experience, and Microsoft put its CEO, Steve Ballmer, on stage to drive home exactly that point.

“There’s one more thing that really sets Windows Phones apart, and I think it’s important to emphasize because it is just perhaps so unexpected and so amazing, and that is new killer hardware – I would argue some of the best hardware you will find, if not the best hardware you will find in any smartphone form factors,” Ballmer said.

He then proceeded to show off the brand new Nokia Lumia 920 in attention-grabbing yellow color.

“Nokia’s new Lumia 920 is fantastic. Seeing is really believing with this phone,” he said.

The Microsoft CEO went on to praise the super sensitive PureMotion HD+ screen and our award-winning PureView technology.

“This is the only smartphone in the world that includes optical image stabilization that captures great photos and videos even in low light or with a shaky hand,” he said.

“Nokia is also doing pioneering work on wireless charging. Just set your phone down on a charger in your kitchen or on your bedside table to power up.”

Nokia Corner at the WP8 launch

Great new features

Nokia’s contribution to the Windows Phone ecosystem isn’t limited to marvelous engineering and cutting-edge hardware, we’re also providing the entire mapping infrastructure through Nokia Maps, and improving the user experience by creating apps and services such as Nokia Drive, Nokia City Lens, Nokia Transport and Nokia Music.

An exciting new feature in Windows Phone 8 is Data Sense, which helps you better manage your data. A Live Tile provides exact info about your phones usage of data, and Microsoft expects up to 45 per cent more web browsing on the same data plan as a result of consumers being more confident about not exceeding the limits of their data plan.

Nokia Lumia 920 in yellow

The first mobile operator to support Data Sense is Verizon Wireless, so users of the brand new Nokia Lumia 822 will be among the first to enjoy this new feature.

Other exciting features of Windows Phone 8 include Kids Corner – a worry-free way to let your kids play with your phone without accidently deleting your important information or texting your boss – and Rooms, which makes it easy to share and connect with a select group of friends, colleagues or family members

Microsoft also announced a bunch of new exciting apps, such as Angry Birds Star Wars, Pandora, Urbanspoon and Living Social. Coming soon is the new Skype app, which enables you make and receive Skype calls – including video – just like a regular phone call. It’s going to be a hit with the crisp front cameras on the new Nokia Lumia devices.

Microsoft announced that all 65 Microsoft retail stories in the United States will carry the entire Nokia Lumia family, and every color option will be available through Microsoft’s online store.

Nokia also announced the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 are now shipping and will appear in stores in select markets in the coming weeks.

Nokia Lumia 900 unboxing

If you’re familiar with our Trial A Nokia program, you’ll know that we send Nokias out to members of our community and give them a couple of weeks to get to know it.

Brilliant experience out the box, sad thing is just as it was integrating with my lifestyle, had to give it back!

Some of those who get their hands on a trial Nokia let us know how they found the phone, sharing unboxing photos and videos, blog posts or tell us via our Twitter channel. One of these is Jassen who sent us the message above about the Nokia Lumia 900 he tried out for two weeks.

The photo at the start of the post is the beginning of the journey, a journey being taken by David Estrada. His unpacking/unboxing photos show every stage of opening the package. Once he had unpacked and set up his phone, he shared some more photos like this:

First impressions Nokia Lumia 900

Along with the photos are his first thoughts on getting his hands on the Nokia Lumia 900 and spending some time with it. Among these thoughts:

‘looks so modern, [and] feels so good in the hand’

‘the size is just perfect’

‘[the Windows Phone platform is] beautiful, bright, colorful and simple’

There’s more to read, so go check out his full thoughts and ask him any questions you might have about the Nokia Lumia 900.

What would you do to share your thoughts on a trial Nokia with your friends/family/followers? Let us know in the comments, on Twitter or on the Trial A Nokia page.