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 Some of you at home may have already recognised the face of our social innovator of the week: Robert Greene. If not then I recommend you check out this video I filmed with Robert in his home town of Amsterdam recently (just to help set the scene a little):

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Newsflash. Robert isn’t just a member of the #SwitchToLumia club, he is also a social entrepreneur! So I thought it would be great to catch up with him about what he does on a day-to-day basis in the world of social. 

Hey Robert, welcome to Nokia Connects! Can you start by briefly describing to us what you do for a job?

I am a Professional Networker and a Concept Developer. I help others to strategically expand their network and I develop social and business concepts. All the concepts I develop incorporate three pillars: social, unconventional and exciting.

Here are a number of social/business concepts I’ve developed:

HungerNdThirst

D Unknown 

meetSue 

Can you briefly expand on your networking business (meetSue) for us?

meetSue is all about bringing people together. It’s a place where diversity in background, culture, market segment and/or education is used to achieve the highest possible return from networking. meetSue locations in the past have included music concerts, art exhibition and cafes. We make networking easy and efficient for everyone by taking out the ‘work’ out of networking. Our guests feel at ease and are able to interact with any and every one. We achieve this by having meetSue Ambassadors at every meetSue event.

Our meetSue Picture Book gives a clear picture of what one may expect at a meetSue event. 

How does your Lumia 900 help you to stay connected to people in the meetSue networking community?

As a Nokia Lumia 900 user I am able to stay in touch with my entire network using applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and of course Whatsapp. The Nokia City Lens has proven, on several occasions, to be very helpful when conducting last minute searches for suitable places to have business lunches and dinners. This phone is not just a phone, my Nokia is a phone I can depend on…like a good friend!

Other than City Lens what is your favourite application on the Lumia 900? 

At times, when on the go, I need to post news articles on my websites. So, I cannot always wait until I am seated in front of my laptop. This is where the WordPress application usually saves the day and I can update everything on the go, wherever I am!

Finally, can you please recommend a great place to visit on a business trip to Amsterdam and why?

If you’re visiting Amsterdam for business or pleasure, you must visit my favourite spot – Café Restaurant Walem. It is situated on one of Amsterdam’s famous canals, the Keizersgracht and also features in the video above!

Thanks Robert!

Have you thought about switching to the Lumia recently? Let us know on Twitter using #SwitchToLumia. See you all next week.

Imagine if you were an inexperienced user of the mobile Internet, or perhaps even using the Internet for the first time, wouldn’t you find it a little overwhelming?

How would you be able to find useful information that was relevant to you, and that you could use to improve your life in areas such as work, family, money and health?

Nokia Life, a service for people who don’t have access to, or cannot afford to use cellular data, has provided such valuable information to over 76 million people in India, China, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Now, a new web application called Nokia Life+ builds on that success to provide millions more people with easy access to life improvement information.

Nokia Life+

Nokia Life+ is supported across a range of basic Nokia handsets, Series 40 phones and the Asha smartphones, including the recently launched Nokia Asha 308 and Nokia Asha 309. 

The free Nokia Life+ web application can be downloaded from the Nokia Store, or it can be accessed directly through the new and improved Nokia Xpress Browser, which compresses data by up to 90%, resulting in faster and more affordable mobile Internet access.

“What we noticed is that there is vast amounts of information which is available on the Internet but this itself does not provide much useful information for people to consume on their mobile phone. It is still difficult for them to get relevant services,” says the Vice President and Global Head of Nokia Life, Jawahar Kanjilal, in an interview with Conversations. 

“With Nokia Life+ we provide a suite of life improvement information services and allow people easy access to valuable information, which can enable them to experience a better quality of life.”

A richer Internet experience

Nokia Life will continue to exist and to grow side by side with Nokia Life+. It is a natural progression that people will graduate from SMS services to wanting richer content and a more web-based experience – this is where Nokia Life+ comes in.

The service, which is completely free to use (minus the data charges), is available in English in over 18 countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, South Africa, Malaysia and Kenya.

This global version of Nokia Life+ has two key services at launch – Life Skills and Live Healthy, with more to come in the future.

• Life Skills helps young people in particular to develop their inter-personal skills, manage their personal finances and how to start running their own businesses.

• Live Healthy offers assistance on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle, preventing and treating common illnesses and information on a wide-range of health topics. 

There are also local versions of Nokia Life+ coming later in Nigeria, China and India, while Indonesia already has one. They will have local language support and also localised services that is tailored for each country.

The ecosystem 

An ecosystem of global and local content partners provides Nokia Life+ with reliable and accurate information. For example, the Foundation for Social Change helps with the personal finance service in ‘Life Skills’.

Nokia Life and Nokia Life+ works closely with content partners, and also with NGOs and UN agencies because of the convergence of social development interests.

However, the original aim, and it remains the case, is to add value to Nokia’s handsets and to accelerate people into the digital information era – the connecting of the next billion.

“The topics that we have chosen sync up very closely with health, education, youth, women and life skills – all those Millennium Development Goals and orientated topics,” says Jawahar.

“People find them relevant in their daily lives. They are utilitarian – it’s not entertainment or social networking but people still find relevance in those topics.”

Nokia Life and now Nokia Life+ are nice examples where you can do good business, and do some good at the same time.

 Some of you at home may have already recognised the face of our social innovator of the week: Robert Greene. If not then I recommend you check out this video I filmed with Robert in his home town of Amsterdam recently (just to help set the scene a little):

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Newsflash. Robert isn’t just a member of the #SwitchToLumia club, he is also a social entrepreneur! So I thought it would be great to catch up with him about what he does on a day-to-day basis in the world of social. 

Hey Robert, welcome to Nokia Connects! Can you start by briefly describing to us what you do for a job?

I am a Professional Networker and a Concept Developer. I help others to strategically expand their network and I develop social and business concepts. All the concepts I develop incorporate three pillars: social, unconventional and exciting.

Here are a number of social/business concepts I’ve developed:

HungerNdThirst

D Unknown 

meetSue 

Can you briefly expand on your networking business (meetSue) for us?

meetSue is all about bringing people together. It’s a place where diversity in background, culture, market segment and/or education is used to achieve the highest possible return from networking. meetSue locations in the past have included music concerts, art exhibition and cafes. We make networking easy and efficient for everyone by taking out the ‘work’ out of networking. Our guests feel at ease and are able to interact with any and every one. We achieve this by having meetSue Ambassadors at every meetSue event.

Our meetSue Picture Book gives a clear picture of what one may expect at a meetSue event. 

How does your Lumia 900 help you to stay connected to people in the meetSue networking community?

As a Nokia Lumia 900 user I am able to stay in touch with my entire network using applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and of course Whatsapp. The Nokia City Lens has proven, on several occasions, to be very helpful when conducting last minute searches for suitable places to have business lunches and dinners. This phone is not just a phone, my Nokia is a phone I can depend on…like a good friend!

Other than City Lens what is your favourite application on the Lumia 900? 

At times, when on the go, I need to post news articles on my websites. So, I cannot always wait until I am seated in front of my laptop. This is where the WordPress application usually saves the day and I can update everything on the go, wherever I am!

Finally, can you please recommend a great place to visit on a business trip to Amsterdam and why?

If you’re visiting Amsterdam for business or pleasure, you must visit my favourite spot – Café Restaurant Walem. It is situated on one of Amsterdam’s famous canals, the Keizersgracht and also features in the video above!

Thanks Robert!

Have you thought about switching to the Lumia recently? Let us know on Twitter using #SwitchToLumia. See you all next week.

The Nokia Store is filled with apps and games that make your Nokia smartphone even more fun or productive. One such app is Access Apps, and it makes it easier for you to access important functions from anywhere on your phone, with a simple finger swipe on the screen.

Available on Nokia Belle smartphones, such as the Nokia 701 we’ve tested it on, Access Apps creates another screen that you’re able to swipe into view whenever you want, much like the notifications bar from the top you’re already used to – except this one is delivered from the left side of the screen.

When installed and loaded, all the apps will be included in this new screen. However you can select a few choice apps that you’d like to use the most by picking them from the Set my icons screen.

All of the main phone functions are available, such as the Camera, Clock, Telephone, and Messaging, for example. Additionally, all of the other apps or games you’ve downloaded from Nokia Store can also be selected and included your choice selection, such as Angry Birds, Twitter or MOLOME.

When you’ve activated the new screen (by swiping your thumb or finger from the left of the screen), you’ll see a bunch of icons in view in a grid format, starting with the apps you selected from the Set my icons screen earlier. Beyond those, the rest of the apps installed on your phone are listed in alphabetical order and scrolling down will reveal them to you. Pressing on the app or game will launch it, as you’d expect.

While listing all the apps might be useful to some people, if you’ve got lots of apps, finding the right one can be time consuming. Hitting the My icons button situated at the front of that list is a better way of finding what’s really important to you – the apps you included in the Set my icons screen – this lets you toggle between just your preferred icons and the all-inclusive, larger app list.

If you’d like to launch the app without swiping – although, swiping seems a natural way to do it – you can include a button in the toolbar at the bottom. You do this by enabling the Launch button in the main menu of the app.

If you see yourself using this every time you use the phone, it’s probably worth making use of the Enable autostart option in the menu. This means that every time you switch on the phone, the app will already be loaded, saving you even more time.

Access Apps is one of those apps that makes it feel like a you’ve had a big software update, without actually having one. It fundamentally changes the way you browse for your apps or phone functions.

Available from Nokia Store for £1.50 for Nokia Belle smartphones, download it today and let us know what you think of it, in the comments section below.

If you’ve ever wondered what the score is with multi-core processors inside smartphones, you’re not alone. You hear the term mentioned all the time, but how, exactly, are CPU cores utilized in a multi-core processor? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer.

Processors like the Snapdragon S4, which power the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820, are astonishingly complex pieces of silicon, packed with advanced technologies that affect every aspect of smartphone use. Nonetheless, it helps to know the myths and truth about multi-core processing when you’re out buying your next mobile device.

What exactly is the core?

Simply put, a CPU core is one of a number of functional elements that make up processors, such as the Snapdragon S4. In addition to running your favorite apps, it’s called upon for practically every smartphone task you can think of. Sure, 3D games rely heavily on the graphics processing unit (GPU), while high-fidelity audio and HD video rely on the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and the video engine, respectively. But every one of these scenarios route through the CPU cores at some point. In other words, cores are to a processor like a general is to its commanding army.

As you’d expect, a multi-core processor contains more than one core, typically two or four, but there is no technical limit to the number. Within certain limitations, each core can run any given task irrespective of other cores.

 Let’s bust some myths

It makes sense to assume that a dual core, such as the Snapdragon S4 MSM8960, is twice as powerful as a single core, and quad core is four times as fast. Unfortunately, this convenient formula is hardly ever correct. While going from single to dual and dual to quad does increase performance, it’s rarely the case that performance is doubled or quadrupled.

One reason is that most applications are single-threaded and thus are only utilizing one or two cores at a time. Only a few high-end games and multimedia editing applications are multi-threaded and can fully reap the benefits of multi-core. The other reason is that many of these processes are distributed throughout the processor, so you have to take into account the power of the GPU, memory bandwidth and speed, and software optimizations. 

So how do they work?

Timo Joutsenvirta, Nokia’s Marketing Manager for Smart Devices, has come up with a great analogy to explain the difference of single, dual and quad core. Imagine a coffee shop as the processor and  the customers are apps that want coffee. The baristas, meanwhile, are the cores who serve it to them. A single barista pours coffee from one coffee pot to each customer at a time. If more customers demand coffee, the barista might not be able to serve coffee fast enough. In this case, the customer would need to wait.

Adding more cores

One way to solve the waiting problem is to double or quadruple the number of baristas. More baristas can serve many more customers at a time so that none of them need to push themselves beyond their physical limitations. However, increasing the number of baristas also has its drawbacks. A single coffee pot can only pour one cup of coffee at a time, leaving the other baristas pot-less until the first cup is poured. Adding more baristas (or cores) can have an incremental improvement, but it’s not exponential.

Why bother, then?

The easiest way for technology companies like Qualcomm to improve processor performance is to increase the clock speed (or how many instructions a processor can perform in a given amount of time). Unfortunately, increasing clock speed (MHz, GHz) can also increase power consumption and heat generation, which are big no-nos for smartphone users. So, one way of increasing performance without your smartphone sizzling in your pocket is to use multi-core technology.

This enhances performance by allowing applications, if they are advanced enough, to run on more than one core at a time. It also saves power as each core can be run on at a lower clock speed than on single core, thanks to a technology called Asymmetric Multi-Processing, found only on the Snapdragon S4.

The bottom line

Smartphone processors are definitely not created equal. You only need to look at the incredible ways the Snapdragon S4 helps makes the Nokia Lumia 920 an amazing smartphone to see that. However, when comparing devices, it’s clear we should take into account more than just the CPU core.

Hopefully, this has helped you get to grips with the ins and outs of multi-core. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, drop us a line below and we’ll do our best to answer.

Image credits: Marion Doss + Just Winchester

Watching television has always been a social event. In the old days, that meant the family gathering to watch the latest instalment of a favourite sitcom or soap, and then talking about it the next day with your office colleagues.

Now, laptops, smartphones, cultural shifts and changes to the nature of TV itself have transformed the way we watch. It’s become common for people to multitask, with television being only one of a number of screens we’re paying attention to during leisure hours.

Google has recently published research saying that 77 per cent of the time, people watching television are also watching another screen, 49 per cent on a laptop or desktop PC, and 39 per cent on a smartphone. Presumably, a reasonable proportion are flicking their eyes between three different screens. (Link: PDF)

Generally speaking, apps use alongside television falls into three different categories:

Communication

People have always wanted to chat about what they’re watching. With your smartphone, you can join in a conversation with complete strangers from across the world, a group of friends or one chosen co-viewer.

Internet forums devoted to TV programmes have existed since the dawn of the Internet. What’s changed is the amount of chatter during the shows themselves. Twitter is the most conspicuous place for this. Current affairs programmes like BBC Question Time (#bbcqt) and reality shows like The Apprentice (#apprentice) seem to attract the most attention: I guess people aren’t as likely to want to chat during a tense drama or an epic film.

Your Lumia is, of course, the ideal tool for such chat. With a whole host of great Twitter apps, live debates about what’s going on on-screen are instantly accessible (Twabbit is my current favourite, though I know Rowi has a lot of fans).

Companion

But the Lumia is a great TV companion in more ways than one. I currently use the app TvPyx to find out what’s on the other channels – the app also has a built in Twitter client if you want all your telly needs in one place.

The other ideal use for your phone is as a reference tool. Gone are the days of pondering (and arguing about) what the name of the actor who plays Rory in Dr Who is, and where you’ve seen him before. The excellent IMDB app and, of course, Bing Search will have the question answered in moments. (Arthur Darvill – he was in the TV adaptation of He Kills Coppers). 

And, of course, sometimes television isn’t quite engrossing enough. Having some similarly low-stress entertainment on your second screen (Angry Birds, of course) can easily alleviate having to watch your loved one’s dreadful soaps or plainly insane choice of sports events. Pro tip: only plug in the earphone on the side opposite your partner, and nod in agreement from time to time, or you’re bound to get complaints.

It’s possible to do a certain amount of compensating for not being able to watch the show you want, too. For the footy fanatic, ESPN goals provides live scores, and clips of the goals taking place within minutes of them happening at the match. Meanwhile, Soapbox might fill your need for small-town tittle-tattle if the football fan has seized control of the remote.

Control and stream

Speaking of remotes, one feature of Windows Phone that a number of app developers have seized upon is the ability to control your computer from a client that sits on your phone. Apps such as RemoteDesktop bring a 4-inch replica of your desktop PC onto your Lumia. If you’re looking for access to your media library on your phone, then apps such as HD EPG, in conjunction with desktop software like Remote Potato, make it easy to set up a discreet second channel on your smartphone.

And finally, it would be a crime to ignore Nokia’s own PlayTo app for the Lumia, for when it’s time to put your content onto the TV. This allows you to stream photos, music and videos straight from your device onto any DLNA device – these include TVs, Blu-Ray players and games consoles.

How else are you using apps as a TV companion?

image credits: dailyinvention, marcleh

Imagine if you were an inexperienced user of the mobile Internet, or perhaps even using the Internet for the first time, wouldn’t you find it a little overwhelming?

How would you be able to find useful information that was relevant to you, and that you could use to improve your life in areas such as work, family, money and health?

Nokia Life, a service for people who don’t have access to, or cannot afford to use cellular data, has provided such valuable information to over 76 million people in India, China, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Now, a new web application called Nokia Life+ builds on that success to provide millions more people with easy access to life improvement information.

Nokia Life+

Nokia Life+ is supported across a range of basic Nokia handsets, Series 40 phones and the Asha smartphones, including the recently launched Nokia Asha 308 and Nokia Asha 309. 

The free Nokia Life+ web application can be downloaded from the Nokia Store, or it can be accessed directly through the new and improved Nokia Xpress Browser, which compresses data by up to 90%, resulting in faster and more affordable mobile Internet access.

“What we noticed is that there is vast amounts of information which is available on the Internet but this itself does not provide much useful information for people to consume on their mobile phone. It is still difficult for them to get relevant services,” says the Vice President and Global Head of Nokia Life, Jawahar Kanjilal, in an interview with Conversations. 

“With Nokia Life+ we provide a suite of life improvement information services and allow people easy access to valuable information, which can enable them to experience a better quality of life.”

A richer Internet experience

Nokia Life will continue to exist and to grow side by side with Nokia Life+. It is a natural progression that people will graduate from SMS services to wanting richer content and a more web-based experience – this is where Nokia Life+ comes in.

The service, which is completely free to use (minus the data charges), is available in English in over 18 countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, South Africa, Malaysia and Kenya.

This global version of Nokia Life+ has two key services at launch – Life Skills and Live Healthy, with more to come in the future.

• Life Skills helps young people in particular to develop their inter-personal skills, manage their personal finances and how to start running their own businesses.

• Live Healthy offers assistance on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle, preventing and treating common illnesses and information on a wide-range of health topics. 

There are also local versions of Nokia Life+ coming later in Nigeria, China and India, while Indonesia already has one. They will have local language support and also localised services that is tailored for each country.

The ecosystem 

An ecosystem of global and local content partners provides Nokia Life+ with reliable and accurate information. For example, the Foundation for Social Change helps with the personal finance service in ‘Life Skills’.

Nokia Life and Nokia Life+ works closely with content partners, and also with NGOs and UN agencies because of the convergence of social development interests.

However, the original aim, and it remains the case, is to add value to Nokia’s handsets and to accelerate people into the digital information era – the connecting of the next billion.

“The topics that we have chosen sync up very closely with health, education, youth, women and life skills – all those Millennium Development Goals and orientated topics,” says Jawahar.

“People find them relevant in their daily lives. They are utilitarian – it’s not entertainment or social networking but people still find relevance in those topics.”

Nokia Life and now Nokia Life+ are nice examples where you can do good business, and do some good at the same time.

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Od juta zmienia się cena telefonu Nokia Lumia 800 w ofercie Biznes Cennik

Od juta zmienia się cena telefonu Nokia Lumia 800 w ofercie Biznes Cennik