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Nokia Asha owners probably can’t believe it has been a year already since the phones were launched, and it’s considerably less than that if you have a Nokia Asha Touch.

To celebrate the anniversary, and to fully appreciate these innovative devices, we took the opportunity to reflect back on the concept and ideas that led to Nokia Asha in the first place.

B.A. (Before Asha)

Historically, Nokia has always had many different phones on offer. Many had names that could, to the uninitiated, read like a secret code. Each product had a clear purpose and benefit for the consumer, but the names often made it harder than necessary for people to find the right phone for them. 

With Asha, Nokia sought to make choosing your next phone effortless.

The name was just the start. All the phones in the new family would also share certain characteristics. They would have internet access that didn’t cost the earth, social networking right out of the box, had the ability to download apps from the Nokia Store and, in the high-end of the family, the phones would have Nokia Maps. 

The team were also clear that these phones had to set new benchmarks for Nokia’s already legendary battery life and overall product quality.

The first Asha phones were unveiled at Nokia World 2011 exactly one year ago.

Introducing the family

First out of the blocks were the Nokia Asha 200 and Nokia Asha 201. They were fun and colourful QWERTY messengers that brought a key partnership with WhatsApp – something that would prove immensely popular on Asha phones.

Also launched at Nokia World 2011 were the Nokia Asha 300 and Nokia Asha 303.

The Nokia Asha 303 was the first-ever Java based phone to come pre-loaded with Rovio’s smash hit, Angry Birds. Working with world-class partners to bring exciting apps and games would be a recurring feature throughout the rest of the year.

In late February 2012, new Asha models were also announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Nokia Asha 202 and Asha Nokia 203 introduced our partnership with EA Games, bringing 40 premium games for consumers to download from the Nokia Store for free.

The summer saw the launch of our new Asha Touch smartphones – a range of affordable touchscreen smartphones with a quick and responsive user interface, cloud-accelerated Internet browser, easy access to social networks, thousands of apps, Nokia Maps and much, much more.

A busy and thrilling first year for the Asha family was capped just a few weeks ago with the announcement of the Nokia Asha 308 and Nokia Asha 309, the latest additions to the Asha Touch line-up.

Innovation

“Right from the outset, we worked to create an innovative family of products that really blurred the lines between feature phones and smartphones in the marketplace,” says Neil Broadley, a Director in Nokia’s Mobile Phones Product Marketing team.

“Over the last 12 months we’ve continued to innovate so that our latest Asha Touch family are full smartphones. Asha Touch devices deliver against all the common consumer expectations of what a smartphone should be able to do and have recently been recognised as such by influential industry analysts GfK and IDC.”

Key to the success of Asha though is not just delivering on those experiences, but how they are doing it. The Nokia Xpress Browser, the social client and the way Nokia Maps are already pre-installed reduce data volumes and costs.

Asha’s future

That’s a good first year then, but what does the future hold?

“Nokia will continue to innovate with the Asha family and we will continue to build upon the foundation that we’ve created. We’re not resting on our laurels,” says Neil.

“We are looking to build increasingly rich experiences and to enable cool new applications for our consumers. They are increasingly online and we want to give them a smarter way of making the most of the Internet.”

It’s been a few months since we launched the Nokia Connects: Go! contest and challenged you to get out there and create amazing videos and photos with a Nokia. It’s your chance to get your hands on a Nokia Lumia 900 and Nokia Purity HD Stereo Headset – every single month. We’ve had some simply stunning entries, and what better way to bring them to you than in a mash-up video?

I’ll stop talking and just let you watch:

Think you could do better? You don’t need to be on the trial to participate in this competition, just pick up your Nokia phone and post your photos and videos on Twitter using #NokiaConnectsGo. If you would like to trial a phone to take part in this, feel free to drop us a line on the Trial a Nokia page.

Nokia has been hard at work bringing an amazing array of money-focused apps Nokia Lumia, to help ensure you have full control over your funds.  From finding an ATM to moving your money from one account to another, let’s walk through the apps that are now available to Lumia owners in the U.S.

PayPal is the world’s best-known payment service, powering person-to-person payments along with payments to businesses as well. Now, with PayPal on your Nokia Lumia, you can send money to other PayPal users along with requesting money to those who owe you. With the “Local” feature, you can see merchants around you that take PayPal as payment in your area.

Keeping up on the markets

What if you want to know what’s going on with the markets, foreign and domestic? Bloomberg is not only the most trusted source on your TV and online, it’s the best app for markets data on your Lumia as well. An exclusive Nokia Lumia app, Bloomberg Hub gives the most insightful news and analysis of the markets and is updated constantly throughout the day.

While we’re on the subject of markets and stocks, when you see an actionable development, there’s no time like the present – this is where E*TRADE comes into play. E*TRADE is amongst the leading low-cost broker services online and has a great Lumia app to help you make trades when the time is right.

Your local branch, in your hand

Sometimes you just want to check your account balances and make sure your money is in order at your local bank. For customers of Chase and Bank Of America, the respective apps on your Nokia Lumia will help ease your mind. With these leading bank apps you can check balances, make transfers and even contact customer support should the need arise. Also, if you want to set alerts on your accounts – such as a minimum balance or deposit alert, you can do this too.

Last but not least – two great MasterCard apps

When you need to get cold hard cash and just need to find an ATM, the MasterCard ATM Hunter is your best friend. This application senses your location and instantly suggests an ATM, no matter where in the world you may currently be. 

Also, for enrollees of MasterCard Easy Savings, the incentive program that gives participants special offers at merchants in your local area. To find these special offers, the Easy Savings app for your Nokia Lumia will give you a map-based view of offers around you.

If you’re not a member of Easy Savings, you can sign up directly from the application.

What’s your favorite money app for your Nokia Lumia?

Image credit: fudj

If you’ve recently bought a smartphone, chances are it runs on a multi-core processor. The Nokia Lumia 920, for example, is powered by a dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, a processor that can take on the most sophisticated tasks. However, the activity that matters most to mobile users—running the gamut of Apps—may not necessarily take advantage of all the cores in the processor.  

Thankfully, hardware support for multi-core is already enabled while major mobile operating systems have support for it as well. It’s a different story for apps, though. For applications to truly take advantage of multi-core technology, developers must change their mindset and “multi-thread” their code when creating an app, which requires a lot of skill and work .

One step at a time

The main challenge in programming for multi-core, or parallel processing, is that users and application logics tend to move sequentially.  In other words, they target one core before seeking out the next. And app workloads, unfortunately, hardly scale beyond the need for two cores. Consequently, it can be very hard for applications to truly take advantage of the benefits that multi-core platforms provide.

Apps made for single core

At the moment, almost all applications are programmed without too much attention paid to the number of cores. In fact, most apps are “single-threaded” or developed for single core processors, so multi-cores don’t directly affect their performance. What generally matters is clock speed or how many instructions a single core  can perform in a given amount of time. Another reason for programming single-core is that most of the time applications do not need a tremendous amount of processing power, so putting extra effort into making an application multi-core aware may be waste of time and resources.

Buttery smooth interfaces

There are times where multi-core processors like the Snapdragon S4 make software run smoother and faster. For a start, modern smartphone OSes have a number of background processes that can be run on the second core when the first one is busy running the main application. The Snapdragon S4 also houses other “cores” to better distribute these tasks. For instance, the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) found in a Snapdragon S4 processes audio when listening to your music library. The payoff is more battery life when work is offloaded from the CPU cores.

Now that Windows Phone 8 supports multi-core processing, the Nokia Lumia 920 takes advantage of Snapdragon’s multiple Krait CPU cores to ensure that complex user interfaces run buttery smooth.  

Kick ass gaming

And there are certain applications, which benefit from multi-core, too. If you’re a big gamer, you’ll be happy to hear that multi-core is a big win for high-end gaming. Games generally employ complex 3D rendering techniques and possibly an artificial intelligence for the computer opponent. What’s more, many visually rich and compelling games from the PC and console platforms are now available for mobile devices and some of these have been created with multi-core in mind. Add to that the fact that the Snapdragon is paired with the new Adreno 225 GPU, the new Lumias promise a mindblowing gaming experience.

Super camera shots and editing

If you’ve got an awesome camera smartphone like the Lumia 920, you’re also going to want great still imaging processing. Image post-processing truly benefits from multi-core set-ups. First of all, post-processing requires tons of algorithms and calculations. And secondly, post-processing can easily be divided between different cores by running the algorithms parallel on multiple cores. Luckily, multi-core processors trumps in this department, too.

What’s more, for Window’s 8 Lumia devices, the Snapdragon’s Image Signal Processor (ISP)—yet another “core”—makes doubly certain that you’ll get the very best shots, time after time.  Multicore also hugely benefits those of use who like to edit the photos and videos we shoot.

On top of these exciting features, app developers are starting to create apps specifically for multi-core smartphones. And as multi-core technology is used in lower priced smartphones, there’s an increasing incentive to look into dual-core, with quad-core on the horizon. So in the future expect even more reasons to be happy about multi-core processors. For now, though, which of these advantages most appeals? Let us know in the comments below. 

Image credit: Franck Mahon

Nokia Asha owners probably can’t believe it has been a year already since the phones were launched, and it’s considerably less than that if you have a Nokia Asha Touch.

To celebrate the anniversary, and to fully appreciate these innovative devices, we took the opportunity to reflect back on the concept and ideas that led to Nokia Asha in the first place.

B.A. (Before Asha)

Historically, Nokia has always had many different phones on offer. Many had names that could, to the uninitiated, read like a secret code. Each product had a clear purpose and benefit for the consumer, but the names often made it harder than necessary for people to find the right phone for them. 

With Asha, Nokia sought to make choosing your next phone effortless.

The name was just the start. All the phones in the new family would also share certain characteristics. They would have internet access that didn’t cost the earth, social networking right out of the box, had the ability to download apps from the Nokia Store and, in the high-end of the family, the phones would have Nokia Maps. 

The team were also clear that these phones had to set new benchmarks for Nokia’s already legendary battery life and overall product quality.

The first Asha phones were unveiled at Nokia World 2011 exactly one year ago.

Introducing the family

First out of the blocks were the Nokia Asha 200 and Nokia Asha 201. They were fun and colourful QWERTY messengers that brought a key partnership with WhatsApp – something that would prove immensely popular on Asha phones.

Also launched at Nokia World 2011 were the Nokia Asha 300 and Nokia Asha 303.

The Nokia Asha 303 was the first-ever Java based phone to come pre-loaded with Rovio’s smash hit, Angry Birds. Working with world-class partners to bring exciting apps and games would be a recurring feature throughout the rest of the year.

In late February 2012, new Asha models were also announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Nokia Asha 202 and Asha Nokia 203 introduced our partnership with EA Games, bringing 40 premium games for consumers to download from the Nokia Store for free.

The summer saw the launch of our new Asha Touch smartphones – a range of affordable touchscreen smartphones with a quick and responsive user interface, cloud-accelerated Internet browser, easy access to social networks, thousands of apps, Nokia Maps and much, much more.

A busy and thrilling first year for the Asha family was capped just a few weeks ago with the announcement of the Nokia Asha 308 and Nokia Asha 309, the latest additions to the Asha Touch line-up.

Innovation

“Right from the outset, we worked to create an innovative family of products that really blurred the lines between feature phones and smartphones in the marketplace,” says Neil Broadley, a Director in Nokia’s Mobile Phones Product Marketing team.

“Over the last 12 months we’ve continued to innovate so that our latest Asha Touch family are full smartphones. Asha Touch devices deliver against all the common consumer expectations of what a smartphone should be able to do and have recently been recognised as such by influential industry analysts GfK and IDC.”

Key to the success of Asha though is not just delivering on those experiences, but how they are doing it. The Nokia Xpress Browser, the social client and the way Nokia Maps are already pre-installed reduce data volumes and costs.

Asha’s future

That’s a good first year then, but what does the future hold?

“Nokia will continue to innovate with the Asha family and we will continue to build upon the foundation that we’ve created. We’re not resting on our laurels,” says Neil.

“We are looking to build increasingly rich experiences and to enable cool new applications for our consumers. They are increasingly online and we want to give them a smarter way of making the most of the Internet.”

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