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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s the summer of great sports in London, with so many unforgettable milestones from Michael Phelps, Andy Murray, Usain Bolt, Jessica Ennis and other star athletes who have made their countries proud. I met up with my friend Katie in London to check out the excitement and lend support to her on-going quest to meet Prince William.

To get around the city, we turned to Nokia’s outstanding location-based apps to navigate London’s streets and transport networks while the city was at its busiest for the games. Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps, Nokia Transport, Nokia City Lens and Nokia Pulse, along with our trusty Nokia Lumia smartphones, served as our travel guides. In our Day in London video diary, we show how these apps work together to solve, effortlessly and intuitively, many of the where questions we all encounter each day. In this way, Nokia is redefining the where category, providing consumers with the best resources to navigate and anticipate the world around them.

Our video diary also demonstrates a new direction for Nokia’s Location and Commerce offerings and some of the ways we’re adding tremendous value for Windows Phone consumers. We’re focused on building apps that solve everyday problems, meet basic to complex needs and delight consumers.

Let’s say you need directions for your drive home. To get accurate directions, you should not have to endure a laundry list of tasks: opening the map application, selecting the destination, choosing the way of transportation, activating the traffic layer, tapping the start button, etc. How many taps are you willing to perform for such a simple need? One or two taps should be enough, and the Windows Phone platform is an elegant way to achieve this goal. As Katie demonstrates in the video, you can simply pin an address to your Lumia start screen for an easy way to reach your destination (no matter where you’re starting your journey).

In the video, Katie and I take to the streets of London in the midst of the games to show how all Nokia location-based apps can help in different situations. It’s also a demonstration of what all these apps can do when used together:

1. Nokia Drive helped me save money and quickly reach my hotel upon arrival in London, thanks to its offline experience that includes (unlike the competition) offline search and offline routing.
2. Nokia City Lens helped me explore a new city and discover places to shop, eat and visit around me.
3. Nokia Transport helped Katie get to Hyde Park on time, navigating London’s busy public transport network during the games. It told her the best route, the time of travel and when to leave.
4. Nokia Pulse made it easy for us to meet up with friends, with text, photos and, most importantly place details.
5. Nokia Maps, as we experienced, also goes beyond route planning from A to B to embrace rich content such as reviews and photos from travel guides and individual users.

We’ve been talking extensively about Nokia location-based apps on this blog, and we thank you for the many positive reviews and constructive feedback. You’ve helped us improve our offerings. With all the frequent updates taking place these last few months, we’ve been collecting a number of feature requests, most of which are going to be implemented in future releases. As a rule of thumb, consider that the most meaningful features you have previously seen on Symbian are currently being ported over to Windows Phone.

 
Some of you have been expecting to see a huge, monolithic app that consolidates Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport, Nokia City Lens and Nokia Pulse. We are moving away from this approach to concentrate our development on apps that solve everyday questions, everyday needs, everyday use cases, such as you see in the Day in London video.
 
What we are working right now to bring these experiences to the next level, allowing these apps to communicate more with one another, to make it possible for you to change your mind about your travel route and to use the strengths of each app as input for another. You’ll see more and more integration and cooperation between our five location-based apps, even as they maintain their own personalities. In this way, like the games in London, our apps work together as a team with standout individual players.

In the last decade or so, TripAdvisor has grown from scratch to being the world’s largest travel website with over 75 million reviews to help plan your holiday.

It makes you wonder, how we managed to plan holidays before the advent of the Internet. Is this a good hotel? Where is the best seafood restaurant? What else is worth seeing around here?

TripAdvisor, if you are not familiar with it, uses reviews and opinions from ordinary travellers to rate places of interest, such as hotels and restaurants. More than 50 reviews are posted on the site every minute. 

It has become an extremely useful, and powerful tool, that can make or break an establishment.

That power is now at your fingertips, with the Windows Phone app now in the Nokia Collection, so you can discover the best recommendations on your Nokia Lumia even when you’re on the move. 

The App

The app opens up with an ‘explore’ screen that features four tiles: Hotels, Attractions, Restaurants and My Saves. 

The app is really simple and straightforward to use. If you want to search for a hotel, tap that tile and then type in the city or destination that you are visiting. 

The ‘My Saves’ function lets you save any places that you want to keep for easy access. You do this by tapping the ‘+star’ icon that appears at the bottom of every review. You could also pin the review to your start screen. 

The app has a ‘near me’ screen so that, if you allow it to use your location, you can see all the places of interest in your immediate area.

Similarly, if you press the search button, you can type in any global destination and choose to see the results as a category list (hotel, restaurants and attractions) or in a map view.

You can pin the results, as a tile to your start screen, which is particularly useful if you’re staying in a city for several days and you might be consulting the recommendations and reviews on a regular basis. 

Within the settings there are some simple options to customise your app experience, such as selecting a default currency and units of measurement.

It can be daunting task when you are trying to pick a hotel or restaurant. The TripAdvisor app is a welcome tool to help make those choices just a little easier.

image credit: Bert Kaufmann

The Nokia 808 PureView is not just a game-changing camera phone that lets you take great photos, but it also offers an array of options that lets you easily share those images as well.

Sharing photos is just the start. Using the different outputs you can also use your 808 PureView to share videos, music and other files.

At the risk of bombarding you with lots of acronyms, the device features DLNA, WiFi, HDMI, NFC, Micro-USB and let’s not forget the humble 3.5 stereo cable jack.

In short, the 808 PureView’s supreme connectivity options might be just as impressive as its camera.

Let’s go through some of the inputs and outputs of the Nokia 808 PureView in more detail.

WiFi and DLNA

Together with your data connection, the WiFi connection, whether at home or a public network, is the gateway through which your 808 PureView will be able to surf the Internet, check emails, download apps and keep an eye on your social networks.

WiFi also enables DLNA connectivity – this allows your phone to connect to other DLNA-enabled devices that are using the same WiFi network, such as a TV.

Nokia’s Play To is a free app (also known as DLNA Play) that is available to download on the Nokia Store. This will let you wirelessly show the photos and play your videos and music from your phone to the connected TV.

A previous Conversations post looked in more detail at Play To on the Nokia Lumia smartphones, but the operation and the principles are exactly the same.

HDMI 

The HDMI output sits right on the top of your phone and is protected by a small cover.

Using a micro HDMI cable, such as the Nokia CA-198, you can connect your 808 PureView to a TV, DVD or Blu-Ray player to display your photos and videos in glorious high definition.

If you’ve shot any HD videos on the 808 PureView this is how they will look the best on a large screen.

Micro USB

Right next to the HDMI output on the top of the phone is the micro-USB, which is most commonly used for charging the phone up or connecting it to a computer, so that keep it synced up.

You can also use a USB adaptor, such as the Nokia CA-157, this will let you attach your phone directly to an external memory source and let you transfer files and back up those precious photos without the need for a computer at all. 

Talking of which, you can also put a memory card, up to 32GB, in the 808 PureView to boost its memory. You can find the memory card slot next to the SIM cradle, underneath the battery.

NFC & Bluetooth

The Nokia 808 PureView has both NFC and Bluetooth connectivity. While on the surface, these two technologies may appear similar, as they both allow wireless connections between two devices, in practice they will be used differently.

NFC is more secure than Bluetooth and has a much shorter range, approximately 20cm or less. These properties mean that potential applications for NFC include making payments at shops.

You could also use NFC to scan with non-electronic objects, such as a poster – so long as it has been embedded with an NFC chip, to get information such as a website link.

Bluetooth has a greater range than NFC, around 5-10m, and acts as more of a ‘bridge’ between devices. So where NFC is a controlled ‘transaction’ between devices, Bluetooth can be more of an ‘open’ connection.

The important thing however is that the 808 PureView has both. The Nokia MD-310 Music Receiver uses both Bluetooth and NFC to play music from your phone on a home stereo system.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

‘NFC tutorials’ is a preloaded app on the 808 PureView and is a useful starting point to learn more about NFC.

Right connections

Funnily enough, the connection you probably use the most is also the least technically advanced. It is, of course, the headphone socket.

From the latest wireless technologies to the humble 3.5mm cable jack, the Nokia 808 PureView will make sure that you are always connected.

In the last decade or so, TripAdvisor has grown from scratch to being the world’s largest travel website with over 75 million reviews to help plan your holiday.

It makes you wonder, how we managed to plan holidays before the advent of the Internet. Is this a good hotel? Where is the best seafood restaurant? What else is worth seeing around here?

TripAdvisor, if you are not familiar with it, uses reviews and opinions from ordinary travellers to rate places of interest, such as hotels and restaurants. More than 50 reviews are posted on the site every minute. 

It has become an extremely useful, and powerful tool, that can make or break an establishment.

That power is now at your fingertips, with the Windows Phone app now in the Nokia Collection, so you can discover the best recommendations on your Nokia Lumia even when you’re on the move. 

The App

The app opens up with an ‘explore’ screen that features four tiles: Hotels, Attractions, Restaurants and My Saves. 

The app is really simple and straightforward to use. If you want to search for a hotel, tap that tile and then type in the city or destination that you are visiting. 

The ‘My Saves’ function lets you save any places that you want to keep for easy access. You do this by tapping the ‘+star’ icon that appears at the bottom of every review. You could also pin the review to your start screen. 

The app has a ‘near me’ screen so that, if you allow it to use your location, you can see all the places of interest in your immediate area.

Similarly, if you press the search button, you can type in any global destination and choose to see the results as a category list (hotel, restaurants and attractions) or in a map view.

You can pin the results, as a tile to your start screen, which is particularly useful if you’re staying in a city for several days and you might be consulting the recommendations and reviews on a regular basis. 

Within the settings there are some simple options to customise your app experience, such as selecting a default currency and units of measurement.

It can be daunting task when you are trying to pick a hotel or restaurant. The TripAdvisor app is a welcome tool to help make those choices just a little easier.

image credit: Bert Kaufmann

Są wakacje, słońce świeci a woda w Zatoce Puckiej jest bardzo ciepła, czas więc poszaleć! Jeśli lubicie sporty wodne albo chcielibyście po prostu spróbować zapraszamy Was do nowej promocji Red Bull MOBILE! Wystarczy doładować konto odpowiednią kwotą aby odebrać wspaniałe nagrody. Z niektórych atrakcji skorzystali w tym roku uczestnicy Play Weekend! Nagroda Suma [...]

Są wakacje, słońce świeci a woda w Zatoce Puckiej jest bardzo ciepła, czas więc poszaleć! Jeśli lubicie sporty wodne albo chcielibyście po prostu spróbować zapraszamy Was do nowej promocji Red Bull MOBILE! Wystarczy doładować konto odpowiednią kwotą aby odebrać wspaniałe nagrody. Z niektórych atrakcji skorzystali w tym roku uczestnicy Play Weekend! Nagroda Suma [...]

Nokia was at the ESPY Awards, which honors the top performances in the world of sports, rubbing elbows with the world’s top athletes and celebrities. Of course, the Nokia Lumia 900 was front and center, turning heads and attracting attention.

To celebrate some of the amazing people who make sure Lumia customers are happy, Nokia selected two ambassadors to travel to Los Angeles and take part in all the ESPY activity.

Nathan Richards and Micah Jakoblich were selected in part because of their contributions to Nokia Inner Circle, Nokia’s ambassador program for retail service professionals. To get a feeling of what the experience was like for them, we interviewed Nathan and Micah, who are sales professionals for AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively.

How did you feel when you were selected to come to the ESPYs?

Micah: I’ve been in ExpertZone for a few years and through my involvement, I’ve reached Advisor status (there are only about 200 Advisers in the US and UK). Nokia held an essay contest and when Lindsay from Nokia contacted me with the news I was selected, I was so thrilled. I’m a huge sports fan and going to the ESPYs was a dream come true.

Nathan: I won the trip on microsoft.com/expertzone as a member of the Nokia Inner circle. When I got the email saying that I had won I was so excited! I’ve never had the VIP treatment for anything so when I found out I won the trip I couldn’t believe it.

What were your top memories from the event?

Micah: The Nokia Pre-Party which happened before the ESPY event was amazing – it was in a beautiful club and I got to meet so many athletes including Donald Driver, Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews of the Green Bay Packers, Ronda Rowsey from Strike Force and John Jones from UFC. I met so many celebrities and stars over the three days I can’t even mention them all without going on and on.

It was amazing to hang out on the red carpet and watch the paparazzi action as the stars showed up for the ESPYs. It was great fun!

Nathan: It was awesome to show up to the ESPY Pre-party at the Balasco Club with tons of celebs and paparazzi. We walk up to the security guards to show them our tickets just as they are turning away NFL star Warren Sapp!! Being “on the list” when Warren Sapp couldn’t get in the club was the moment when I knew I was a Nokia VIP.

Also, we ended the night at the post party in the diamond room of the Marriott hotel where we saw live performances from DJ Biz Markie and Lauren Hill. We just sat around and mingled with athletes, movie stars and ESPN commentators and executives. It was the best way to end the trip by hanging out at the after party (again, we had to be on the list) eating delicious food, enjoying great music, and rubbing shoulders with some of my athletic idols!

What’s it like as a sales professional with the Lumia – what are your customers telling you?

Micah: The customers in my store love the Nokia Lumia 710. They come back and tell me the size is perfect, the screen is fantastic and they love Windows Phone. It’s an amazing smartphone for first time smartphone owners. Unlike Android phones, they don’t get slow over time and with live tiles and Facebook built into the phone, my customers are very happy.

Nathan: Customers love Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone.  I have customers coming back all the time with their friends and family telling them to upgrade to the Nokia because they love it so much.  They love the fact that you can easily manage and backup all your music, photos, videos, and contacts.  They also love the size and durability of the phone, not to mention the fact that it outlasts all their friends’ phone in battery life.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @NokiaUS and check us out on Facebook.com/NokiaUS as well!

Storing people’s phone numbers, addresses and email details in our mobiles is something we now all take for granted, but sharing or adding new contacts can still be a convoluted process.

Nokia’s Contact Share app, which is now available worldwide for your Nokia Lumia, makes the task of sharing and receiving contacts incredibly quick, straightforward and simple.

Contact Share is not just more convenient but it also eliminates human error. For example, there is always the risk of inputting the wrong number into your phone or losing the all-important business card.

Sharing a contact

Upon opening Contact Share, the first screen you will see is a list of all the contacts stored on your phone.

Select the contact you wish to share and the next screen will give you a choice of which of their details that you wish to pass on. Perhaps you might want to share their phone number and work email, but not their home address.

Confirm your choices by pressing the ‘Tick’ at the bottom of the screen and then you are given the choice of sharing those details either by Email or SMS. Make your choice and then type either the number or email address that you are sending it to.

Of course, if you are sharing the contact with someone else that is already in your People hub then you can just select them by pressing + in the ‘To’ field.

They will then receive a vCard file (or electronic business card) that they can then easily store on their own phone.

Receiving a contact

Receiving a contact via Contact Share is even easier than sending one.

Imagine the scenario, where I need call my mum to ask for the phone number of a distant relative. Then I would have to write the number down on a piece of paper while my mum read it out loud, a few digits at a time, over a crackly phone line. I’m sure we’ve all had those conversations and they are never as easy as they should be!

Now, I’ll just ask my mum to send it to me via Contact Share.

Then I only need to open Contact Share and swipe across to ‘Received’ screen, tap on the contact that has just been sent to me and save it on my phone. The contact will then be in my People hub. 

Looking after your contacts in a mobile phone is similar to maintaining the engine in your car. You don’t always notice it, but it makes your life easier in the long run if you keep it in good condition.

Consider Contact Share a great app for keeping your phone in great shape.

Contact Share will be available to download in the Nokia Collection, alternatively get it directly from this link (only works from your Lumia).

If you’ve carried around a Nokia phone over the last few years, the chances are that an app or game from Offscreen Technologies has been part of your toolkit.

Well known for their polished and sublimely useful apps such as Grid Touch and Converter Touch, Offscreen are the latest developer to reach the milestone of 100 million downloads from the Nokia Store.

We caught up with Offscreen’s CEO, Harri Myllynen, to find out how they did it.

First of all, who is Offscreen?

Offscreen is based in Helsinki, Finland, and was founded by the core team in 2005, when we saw great opportunities in developing software for the early Nokia smartphones at the time.

We’re still a pretty small company, employing 20 people, most of whom are programmers.

While we make money from our apps, our main line of business has been developing bespoke apps for clients.  Our success in Nokia store has proven to be a great way to promote our company and market our skills to potential clients.

We’ve noticed that Offscreen apps have a very distinctive look. What are the ingredients of this?

We believe in simplicity, polish and common non-textual widgets.

By simplicity, I mean reducing the number of menus and screens to an absolute minimum, preferably to just one. Polish comes out through professional design and putting real life materials and elements into our apps. Non-textual widgets in turn are common symbols used for similar tasks (info, close box etc.) which minimize the need for localization.

So which of your apps have been the biggest hits in the Nokia Store?

In terms of downloads the most successful apps have been the simplest – in our opinion, what comes to app design, less is absolutely more!

Just think “Bright Lite” torch app which is basically a realistic light switch turning the camera led on and off, or “Candle Touch” which is a candle simulation with simple and realistic interaction.

Basically, the easier it is to understand an app, the more likely it is to be downloaded.

And what would you say were the golden rules for up-and-coming developers?

To be successful in the apps space, you should always aim to be the first with a given concept in any ecosystem.

Novelty, in turn, gets noticed by the bloggers who spread the word and drive downloads – much more efficiently than any paid marketing would do.

You’re well-known for your Symbian apps, but you’re also moving into both Series 40 and Windows Phone territory. How have you found that transition?

It’s been relatively easy. Perhaps because we do full canvas touch apps with our custom widgets only.

Different screen resolutions sometimes call for changes in the layout, but usually we just rescale graphics for the new platform.

And because of our Origo cross compiling tools we have been able to port apps between platforms in a factory setting, by which I mean deploying several apps simultaneously.

Thank you, Harri, for your time and congratulations on a great achievement!

Nokia was at the ESPY Awards, which honors the top performances in the world of sports, rubbing elbows with the world’s top athletes and celebrities. Of course, the Nokia Lumia 900 was front and center, turning heads and attracting attention.

To celebrate some of the amazing people who make sure Lumia customers are happy, Nokia selected two ambassadors to travel to Los Angeles and take part in all the ESPY activity.

Nathan Richards and Micah Jakoblich were selected in part because of their contributions to Nokia Inner Circle, Nokia’s ambassador program for retail service professionals. To get a feeling of what the experience was like for them, we interviewed Nathan and Micah, who are sales professionals for AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively.

How did you feel when you were selected to come to the ESPYs?

Micah: I’ve been in ExpertZone for a few years and through my involvement, I’ve reached Advisor status (there are only about 200 Advisers in the US and UK). Nokia held an essay contest and when Lindsay from Nokia contacted me with the news I was selected, I was so thrilled. I’m a huge sports fan and going to the ESPYs was a dream come true.

Nathan: I won the trip on microsoft.com/expertzone as a member of the Nokia Inner circle. When I got the email saying that I had won I was so excited! I’ve never had the VIP treatment for anything so when I found out I won the trip I couldn’t believe it.

What were your top memories from the event?

Micah: The Nokia Pre-Party which happened before the ESPY event was amazing – it was in a beautiful club and I got to meet so many athletes including Donald Driver, Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews of the Green Bay Packers, Ronda Rowsey from Strike Force and John Jones from UFC. I met so many celebrities and stars over the three days I can’t even mention them all without going on and on.

It was amazing to hang out on the red carpet and watch the paparazzi action as the stars showed up for the ESPYs. It was great fun!

Nathan: It was awesome to show up to the ESPY Pre-party at the Balasco Club with tons of celebs and paparazzi. We walk up to the security guards to show them our tickets just as they are turning away NFL star Warren Sapp!! Being “on the list” when Warren Sapp couldn’t get in the club was the moment when I knew I was a Nokia VIP.

Also, we ended the night at the post party in the diamond room of the Marriott hotel where we saw live performances from DJ Biz Markie and Lauren Hill. We just sat around and mingled with athletes, movie stars and ESPN commentators and executives. It was the best way to end the trip by hanging out at the after party (again, we had to be on the list) eating delicious food, enjoying great music, and rubbing shoulders with some of my athletic idols!

What’s it like as a sales professional with the Lumia – what are your customers telling you?

Micah: The customers in my store love the Nokia Lumia 710. They come back and tell me the size is perfect, the screen is fantastic and they love Windows Phone. It’s an amazing smartphone for first time smartphone owners. Unlike Android phones, they don’t get slow over time and with live tiles and Facebook built into the phone, my customers are very happy.

Nathan: Customers love Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone.  I have customers coming back all the time with their friends and family telling them to upgrade to the Nokia because they love it so much.  They love the fact that you can easily manage and backup all your music, photos, videos, and contacts.  They also love the size and durability of the phone, not to mention the fact that it outlasts all their friends’ phone in battery life.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @NokiaUS and check us out on Facebook.com/NokiaUS as well!