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New Zealand is not for the faint hearted. Just ask the guys and gals who’ve been mule kicking, cannonballing and miller flipping off peaks in the first ever Burton ‘High Fives’ snowboarding competition. With a little tech magic from Nokia, this cool event showcased the Kiwi’s passion for hardcore sports perfectly. But what makes this island country such a magnet for the madly adventurous?

It dares you!

Temperate climate all year round, a third of its glorious land marked for conservation, but less than four million people. Not just filmic in the Frodo Baggins sense – it screams ‘I dare you’ thrills from every sun-buttered stone. Add history – that mighty Maori heritage and the influx of nineteenth century gold-seeking Europeans crafting skis to get around. Then spectacular caves littered with glow worms and sulphurous pools secreted in the woods. Perfect.

Upside down on elastic – really?

It’s fine, as 1980s entrepreneurs Henry Van Asch and AJ Hackett, who developed the bungy/bungee, will tell you. Want to jump 400 metres off Kawarau Bridge in Queenstown? No problem. The whole concept was inspired by a myth from Vanuatu (not in New Zealand) of an abused wife tricking her husband into jumping after her. She had vine and he did not. Some Vanuatu people land-dive still, as a harvest ritual. No fatal trickery in modern bungy though – the ‘vine’ is latex – just great opportunities for bouncy scream-inducing leaps. Both North and South Islands offer it.

You better roll with it

Remember a big white ball called Rover, that followed The Prisoner in sinister fashion? Well you can be inside something similar and zorb your way around – but this one is transparent. OK, so you may not see a complete inventory of landscape clearly – those beaches, mountains, lakes, rivers and forests will be going round and round as you do. Invented in New Zealand, you can also do liquid zorbing, where water is added, or hydro-zorbing, where you roll on a lake. What’s not to like?

Water babies

You can always do white water rafting in New Zealand. Or take a spin in a jet boat. The country is at one with water, with its ‘outdoor-can-do’ sportsy attitude. Last century, farmer Bill Hamilton developed the jet boat to navigate through even 3cm of shallow water, to reach inaccessible land. But if you’ve been there, done that, then black water rafting is the thing. While if you like alliteration and small spaces, then fun and adventure in Hagga Honking Holes in Waitomo is ideal. New Zealand also offers spelunking (deep water diving within caves) and cave abseiling for the claustrophobia-adverse.

The fun never stops

New Zealand has an adept way of not simply showing you their country, but making you use it. Mountain? Cycle up it. Rocky slide called Bealey Slide in Arthur’s Pass National Park? Try scree running. Glacier? You can go by helicopter to the best known – Franz Josef. There, you can see a frozen waterfall and walk on top of ice, staring at the drop below and squeezing your way through crevasses.

Like a savvy cook plundering every bit of the chicken for a meal, New Zealanders use every geographical asset they have. Feast on it all – it’ll make your heart beat faster.

image credits: imprinttours, misterbisson

Well hello there. Welcome to the new and improved Nokia Connects on Nokia Conversations! While we settle in and make ourselves at home at the new residence, why don’t you take a look around?

In case you’ve missed it, what’s actually changed? See here for full details, but in a nutshell, the new look Nokia Connects will focus less on us and more on our community, as we celebrate all the great stuff you guys are up to. Things like amazing videos, photos and Nokia experiences. 

The trial programme is growing (let us know if you’re interested in trialling a phone!) and we are, as ever, available for a chat on Twitter on @Nokia_Connects (say hi!).

We hope you enjoy the new site – if you have any questions, please give us a shout.

Image credit: Suzy Taylor

How do you spell competitive, stimulating fun? W O R D A M E N T, that’s how. It’s different to your usual hack and slash game and it really challenges the mind.

We first wrote about Wordament back in March and since then it’s grown to a hugely popular word spelling game, receiving 4.5 stars from over 15,000 ratings.

The idea of the game is really simple. You’re presented with a square grid of 16 letters from which you need to spell out as many and as long a word as possible. Each letter must be adjacent to the previous one and you spell the word by tracing it on the screen without lifting your finger.

Each letter is assigned a score, so make sure you make the most of those high-ranking letters and use them whenever possible in order to score big.

The length of each game only lasts for two minutes so you need to think fast. While you may not think that’s an issue, it is when you consider that you’re playing the exact same set of tiles with every other player around the world. They’re all trying to beat you and you must return the favour.

After the two minutes is up, you’ll see on the leader board how well you’ve done and you can also compare your efforts with everybody else who was playing.

Wordament is an Xbox LIVE title, which means that there are achievements to be won. Some are easy to achieve, however some are only accessible for the VERY good Wordament players.

One nice feature is the addition of guest mode. You know how it is. Somebody wants to play for a bit but you don’t really want him or her to play, as they’ll mess up your rankings. This lets them play without compromising your hard-earned stats.

With every board guaranteeing over 100 possible words, you’ll find it almost impossible to exhaust the board before your time runs out.

Wordament is free and can be downloaded right no and available for the Nokia Lumia 610, Nokia Lumia 710, Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 900.

Have you played? What’s your best ranking? Let us know, in the comments below.

Image credit: Laineys Repertoire

Today, we’d like to tell you about a great tool that helps SMBs (Small and Medium Business) put their business on the map and attract customers, free of charge, with Nokia Prime Place.

At Nokia we care about our customers and work hard to deliver a great user experience. In line with this, we aim to deliver great experiences and support discovery and adventures. We have been working with small and medium size businesses since 2010 and now offer primeplace.nokia.com in 20 countries and 11 languages.

Prime Place enables business owners to add their business listing free of charge to Nokia Maps on web and mobile, share opening hours, website and contact details, and add lots of images to show what their business or service is all about, and why you can’t miss to visit! This provides Nokia customers with lots of unique businesses that can be discovered, wherever you are, and helps you to be a local anywhere.

We understand SMBs and know that time and budget to promote your business is often limited. This is why Nokia Prime Place was born. We offer an end to end experience from adding your business listing to the map and becoming discoverable, to enriching your business page with content, like images or opening hours. To round up your business page, we’ll automatically pull in reviews from partners like Qype and TripAdvisor. This gives your business additional credibility.

We keep adding and improving Prime Place features that we believe are of essence to SMBs and to date, are proud to offer:

Account Management – We have introduced users roles (owner, admin, manager) in order to address the need of businesses with a larger number of locations to manage access rights.

Facebook publishing – Businesses can now publish posts about their business(s) to their FB wall or existing FB pages, directly from the Prime Place dashboard.

Secure place verification – To ensure that no-one else claims your business listing on your behalf, we offer a versatile and secure verification system. Businesses can choose between postcard, phone verification and credit card verification in most countries.

Bing Adcenter – Should you decide that you want to give your business that extra boost, then we offer a direct link to Adcenter, where you can create ads to promote your business.

You can join Nokia Prime Place with you small or medium business anytime and for free at primeplace.nokia.com

A few years ago I was standing in a queue at a bank when an elderly woman’s mobile phone rang loudly with the crazy frog ringtone. I have never seen someone blush so brightly.

The moral of the story, of course, is to never be caught out with an embarrassing ringtone. You can play it safe by using one of the standard ringtones that comes with your phone, but who wants to use the same ringtone as everyone else?

With the Lumia smartphone you can easily make your own ringtones. There are apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace to help you do this, but we think you’ll get much more satisfaction if you can do it yourself!

So, in the latest of our practical guides, here is how you can create custom ringtones for your Lumia.

The ringtone file

The first thing you will need is a media file – the song, tune or sounds that you want to be your ringtone. This file needs to meet the following criteria:

• It must be in the MP3 or WMA format
• Less than 40 seconds long
• Less than 1MB
• Not protected by digital rights management (DRM)

I have come across several fun homemade ringtones that may inspire you to do something similar. A friend of mine recorded his daughter singing; a Formula 1 fan recorded the sound of the cars speeding past and a cricket fan used the shout of ‘Howzat’ as their custom ringtone.

Let your imagination run wild, but always be mindful that your file meets the requirements above.

Depending on your computer or laptop, you can probably record audio using the built-in microphone, external headset or webcam.Audacity is an excellent audio editing suite for both Windows and Mac.

Alternatively, record with your Lumia using a voice recorder app. I would recommend Pocket Recorder, which is free and also lets you assign your recorded files as a ringtone, but wouldn’t you rather learn how more about the manual process?

Setting your file as a ringtone on your Lumia

Once you have the media file on your computer and you are happy with how it sounds then you need to synchronise it to your phone and assign it as the ringtone on your Lumia.

If the file is already on your Lumia, then you still need to assign it as a ringtone first.

The steps are slightly different on a PC and a Mac, so we’ll them each in turn.

Zune for PC users

1. In Zune, find the media file you want to turn into a ringtone
2. Right-click on the file and select Edit
3. In Genre list, click or type ringtone and press OK

Connect your phone to your PC with a USB cable and transfer your file to your Lumia. Then on your Lumia:

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to Ringtones + Sounds
3. Select Ringtone and then scroll down to the file that you’ve created to make it your ringtone.

Windows Phone Connector for Mac & iTunes

1. In iTunes, find the file you want and right-click and select Get Info
2. On the Info tab, find genre and type ringtone and click OK.

Open Windows Phone Connector for Mac and synchronise the file to your phone and then repeat the three steps above on your Lumia.

Making custom ringtones sounds like a daunting task but hopefully this guide demonstrates that it is relatively straightforward and simple to do.

Let us know if you have been making custom ringtones for your Lumia and if you’ve created something unique.

Image credit: Ernest Vikne and MacKinnon Photography

Zobaczcie galerię zdjęć z dzisiejszej konfernecji Które urządzenie w ofercie najbardziej Wam się podoba?    

Zobaczcie galerię zdjęć z dzisiejszej konfernecji Które urządzenie w ofercie najbardziej Wam się podoba?    

Właśnie rozpoczęła się konferencja prasowa – koniecznie zobaczcie prezentację    

Właśnie rozpoczęła się konferencja prasowa – koniecznie zobaczcie prezentację    

We are now releasing a sensor framework, referred to as DASH (Dynamic Android Sensor HAL), as an open source GitHub project. This actually means that we are the first manufacturer to release such a sensor framework. By making this open source, we hope that custom ROM developers will gain a lot from using it, and we also hope to see the community of developers help us improve the framework by contributing back (which we’ve already seen). In this article, Oskar Anderö, a Sony Mobile software engineer, explains how DASH works, and how developers can contribute.

Oskar Anderö, Software Engineer.

A few months ago, we announced the open sourcing of the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL, internally called DASH for short. The sensor HAL is the software layer giving applications direct access to the sensor components. DASH was invented as a way to use the same sensor HAL implementation across multiple devices and hardware. When doing bring-ups of new Android platforms, we had to reinvent the wheel every time when it came to sensors. Nowadays, it is only a matter of enabling the sensors we need for that specific platform and configuring them according to their mounting and specifications.

As a next step, we are now making DASH available as an open source project on GitHub. Here, custom ROM developers can find the source code files and “make” files for the sensors in Xperia™ smartphones, which is used to enable and disable multiple sets of sensors for each device, including the accelerometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, magnetometer, gyroscope, and pressure sensor. We plan to keep adding more sensor code as we release new phones. Anyone in the Android open community is free to contribute their own sensor implementations and other improvements to the DASH code.

What is DASH?
DASH is an Android sensor HAL implementation that has scalability and configurability in its design. Constructing a generic framework that lets the board configuration define which sensors to enable reduces the code maintenance and the integration costs. The DASH implementation further adds functionality for configuring sensors at run-time. By having DASH released as open source, there will be a robust sensor HAL implementation that the public can use. Anyone can make improvements, such as adding new features and bug fixing. And through GitHub, developers working with sensor libraries can quickly integrate a sensor HAL solution.

Key properties of the DASH
Some of the important features provided by this sensor HAL implementation include:

• Dynamic attachment of sensors using registration calls at run-time – The library framework provides a method for registering sensors at run-time, rather than statically link them at compile-time. This allows for an easier way to configure which sensors are available in the system.
• Scalability and clear modularisation – The aim has been to have a software design that is intuitive and scales well as more sensors and configurations are added.
• Clear static library interface – To calibrate sensor data, different calibration libraries could be needed. Libraries come in all flavors, from open source to binary. Using DASH makes it easier to connect the sensors to fusion libraries.
• Run-time configuration files – DASH provides a unified way for the sensors to define its’ own configuration options. These options are stored on the file system and will be read at run-time.

Getting started
In order to use DASH, first a developer will need to clone the DASH code from our GitHub. Further instructions can be found at GitHub’s Git Reference site. When it comes to integration, the DASH is no different from any other sensor HAL implementation. It should simply be placed in the appropriate directory in the Android tree and the module name (sensors.default) should be added to the PRODUCT_PACKAGES.

There are some compile-time make variables that need to be set before building. For instance, each sensor has its own build flag, so the developer should enable the appropriate sensors. An example of a make configuration file can be found in the source: docs/sensors.mk.example.

Run-time configuration is done using a configuration file that is placed on the target’s file system. Each sensor wrapper defines its own configuration parameters. A configuration file example can be found in the sensors.conf.example of the docs directory for DASH. Details about the structure of the code can be found in the DASH README file on GitHub. Additional information about the project can be found at the DASH wiki page.

Ongoing collaboration with Android community
In collaboration with the developer community, we intend to build up and maintain a generic implementation by adding support for more hardware and features. Independent developers are already making open source contributions, such as the FreeXperia team, who are working with CyanogenMod to provide aftermarket firmware for Android devices. And through our close dialogue with the FreeXperia team, we are aware of the requests to share more code for the sensors. Now that we are able to do share code in a more controlled and collaborative way, the feedback from the team is that this is a very welcome initiative by the developer community.

– “It is great to see Sony open up the sensor framework, it will really help us when working with the CyanogenMod ROMs, and allows us to contribute back.” Alin Jerpelea, FreeXperia developer.

DASH can also help third-party sensor manufacturers and sensor fusion library developers as an Android sensor HAL implementation that they can work with and contribute to. A FAQ and help for GitHub is available, but if developers have a specific DASH question or issue, log it on the DASH issues page, or leave us a comment below.

More information

• Read about the sensor HAL for 2011 Xperia phones.
• Access the open source Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) project on GitHub.
• Learn how to get and create GitHub projects on GitHub’s Git Reference site.
• Check out our other open developer community initiatives.
• Read more about how we are supporting the open developer community.