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“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford,”

Samuel Johnson, September 1777.

As a Londoner, I’ve found Johnson’s words entering my thoughts quite a bit recently, particularly as the games get underway this week, with the UK capital as the host city for the world’s most important sporting event.

From William and Kate’s royal wedding to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and now the events over the next couple of weeks, I know I haven’t tired of this great city’s ability to meld history, pageantry and athletics onto the world stage.

And now there’s a new way to appreciate London from a bird’s eye view – and in 3D to boot. CNN has created some amazing flyovers of London using Nokia Maps 3D. You can track the Torch’s whereabouts as it’s carried through the city streets.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

You can peer down on Hyde Park, the setting for the triathlon, or take in an aerial of the aquatic arena that plays host to swimming and diving. It’s breathtaking to fly over London in high definition, and the maps give us a new way to experience the games.

Nokia’s 3D experience offers the highest degree of photorealism on the market, collecting data from satellites, airplanes and cars. Including London, we have 3D maps in 25 of the world’s most famous cities, including New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Rome. What’s more, these maps provide interactive visuals – not simply screen shots – that bring the traditional paper map to life.

Nokia and CNN kicked off our partnership in 2011 first with the CNN app for Windows Phone, which gave Nokia Lumia users direct access to iReport, CNN’s participatory news community. Recently CNN and Nokia shared a Cannes Lion Award for the app, with iReport named the overall winner in the “best use of social” category.

So, it’s all the more exciting to now see Nokia Maps 3D being used as a powerful tool for journalism and social engagement. With the mapping tools of Nokia Location Platform, CNN can create broadcast-quality maps on their own, no design or coding experience required. This makes it possible for CNN to build experiences customized for their viewers.

Tell us what you think of the London maps, and if you had a bird’s eye view of the city over the next couple of weeks, what would you like to see up close?

Situations is a Symbian app for making your smartphone a bit more intelligent. At the core of the app is the ability to define situations that change your phone’s settings depending on the context. To give two examples:

• If I am at home (which the phone knows from its GPS co-ordinates) and it’s after 11pm, then switch all the ringtones to silent until 6am.
• When I arrive at the office, switch on the WiFi and start my News Reader app.

The app was originally created as a Nokia Beta Labs experiment, but has now been spun off and continues to be developed as a commercial application by Pastilli Labs, founded by Roope Tassberg and Heikki Haveri.

We spoke to Roope to find out more.

“We’re a very small development company based in Tampere in Finland. At the moment, Situations is a spare time project.

“But it seems very important to us. We call these things smartphones, but why don’t they do things for us? We want to let people get more out of their phones.”

The relaunch of Situations called for a complete rewrite of the app.

“We’ve made it much easier to define Situations, which govern how your phone behaves. The interface is a lot slicker and we’ve been able to introduce some very useful new features. For example, you can now select places from a map: so you don’t have to be physically present at a place in order to create a Situation for it.”

So where next for Situations? What’s the next big step?

“To be honest, we need a lot more innovation before the basic functionality of Situations can take a big step forward. To take an example, it would be nice if we could define a jogging Situation, where it automatically switches on your music when you go for a run.

“But how does the app know you’re not just running for the bus?

“Getting round that sort of problem needs some major breakthroughs in sensor technology and artificial intelligence.

“We think the main improvements in the shorter term will be around making the app easier to use. People like the idea of creating Situations, but doing it in a way they can understand is tricky.

“It’s easy to create a nerdy app: it’s a lot harder to create one that’s usable.”

But the future is looking bright for Pastilli Labs.

“Since relaunching Situations we’ve been astonished by the positivity that’s come from the community, especially through our Twitter account and Facebook page.

“People really like the idea of the app and have offered lots of support and ideas for new features. That’s really energising and makes us want to work hard to deliver what they want.”

Best of luck to Roope and Heikki. If you’d like to get hold of Situations for Symbian smartphones, then head over to the Nokia Store. It costs €0.99.

Any gadget fan will tell you that there is nothing they enjoy more than getting their hands on a shiny new toy and taking it out of the box for the first time.

So you can imagine my delight when I got my hands on a brand new, box-fresh Nokia 808 PureView last week. Right now, it is one of the shiniest new toys around.

Let’s not forget that the 808 PureView isn’t just another camera phone – it features a revolutionary 41-megapixel sensor, state of the art optics and cutting edge algorithms for lossless zoom and super sharp images.

The reviewers have already been falling over themselves to heap lavish praise on the 808 PureView’s stunning camera and now it is going to be my turn to reach for the superlatives.

Naturally, the only way I could contain my excitement was to take the device with me on a trip to the zoo.

First impressions

First, though, let me share my initial thoughts about the look and feel of the Nokia 808 PureView.

Yes, the first thing you notice when taking it out of the box is the ‘bump’ that houses the camera. 

Far from being incongruous, the phone feels very comfortable and natural in your hand. In fact, the ridge of the camera gives the index finger a natural resting place when you’re holding the phone upright with the screen towards you. 

A neat by-product of the camera’s bump occurs when the 808 PureView is put on a flat surface, such as a table or desk. It props the phone up at a slightly raised angle, which tilts the screen towards you and makes it easier to keep an eye on any alerts, messages or just so you can see the time. 

Standing out

So, as far as I’m concerned, the bump is very much a good thing – and that’s before we get to its core purpose of taking photos. Of course, it also makes the 808 PureView stand out from the crowd and that’s definitely where this phone deserves to be.

The 808 PureView is a little heavier than, say, my Nokia Lumia 800 but not outrageously so. If you have a thick protective case on your Lumia smartphone, then it would probably make up the difference.

As ever, the ClearBlack display is a thing of deep beauty and the phone’s body feels sturdy and tactile. Also, the loudspeaker is fantastic for playing your music out loud. Very loud.

Capturing the Zoo

During the summer months of June and July, London Zoo at Regent’s Park opens late on Friday evenings to give visitors a walk on the wild side with a nocturnal twist.

For my visit, there was a brief respite from the unseasonal rain showers and the fading light made it an ideal opportunity for me to put the 808 PureView’s camera through its paces.

At this stage, I should confess that I am not a particularly accomplished photographer. I am strictly of the ‘point, press and pray’ school of taking pictures.

With that in mind, I mainly left the camera’s setting in ‘Automatic’ mode. For most people, most of the time, this will let you take great pictures. 

Looking through glass

In my defence, the zoo was not an easy place to be experimenting with the advanced and creative settings on the 808 PureView.

The animals were often behind glass screens and I had to contend with large crowds to even get a sight of the more popular zoological exhibits. Often, I had to hold the camera above everyone’s head and just hope for the best.

That being said, the 808 PureView was a revelation. Professional photographers must hate the fact that modern cameras have made it so easy to take such good photos.  Now, of course, thanks to this leap forward with Nokia’s PureView technology, you don’t even need an expensive digital SLR camera to do it.

The greatest benefit of using the 808 PureView was the confidence that it gave me. After monitoring my first few pictures, I had total faith that it was not going to let me down.

Turn on the camera, tap the screen to focus on the subject and take the picture. It produced great results every time.

Long distance champion

One feature of the 808 PureView that I found astonishing was how it made a mockery of distance.

You take a picture and then when you are looking at the picture on your phone’s screen, you pinch in to zoom into a particular detail or part of the photo. And pinch, pinch and pinch again to go even closer.

It’s great for spotting things that you hadn’t even realised were, quite literally, right in front of you. 

A decade of progress

The joy of using the 808 PureView was heightened considerably by comparing my photos with those of my companion, who was using her smartphone’s camera. The difference in the sharpness, clarity and detail was satisfyingly massive.

The Nokia 7650, which had a 0.3-megapixel sensor, was Nokia’s first phone with a built-in camera when it came out in 2002.

Ten years on, the Nokia 808 PureView is yet another landmark device. The photos compare favourably with those taken on my very good digital compact camera.

Quite simply, unless you’re a serious photography connoisseur, you won’t need a standalone camera if you have an 808 PureView.

The new deal with Scalado shows that Nokia is not being complacent about its imaging expertise either. Who knows what the next decade could bring?

Seton Hall University, based in South Orange, New Jersey, is completely revamping their computing experience and taking it all-mobile with the Nokia Lumia 900 as the mobile part of the new offering. As we’ve covered before, all incoming freshman coming into Seton Hall this fall semester will receive Nokia Lumia 900 smartphones.

To make sure Seton Hall’s network will offer the best computing experience for all students and faculty at Seton Hall, the University is launching SHUmobile, a multi-pronged approach to advance communications at the Catholic university.

It’s good to be a freshman at Seton Hall
In collaboration with Nokia, AT&T and Microsoft, Seton Hall officials are giving a pre-release version of Windows 8 to incoming freshman, along with Nokia Lumia 900s and Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud Services.

To take advantage of Office 365 while on-the-go, AT&T is upgrading Seton Hall’s cellular network to lighting-fast 4G speeds.

With the new infrastructure, students and faculty can write and collaborate on documents in the cloud, whether on their Lumia phones or on Windows 8 desktops. No matter where the students can get online, they can access their documents without having to use messy email attachments with multiple versions.

Creating an efficient Windows ecosystem
As a part of the SHUmobile program, all Seton Hall freshman and juniors will be upgraded to either a tablet or ultrabook running Windows 8 and all undergrads will be using Office 365. Looking at the entire student population, approximately half will be on Windows 8 PCs and a quarter will be using Windows Phone on the Nokia Lumia 900 on AT&T’s 4G  network.

David Middleton, Seton’s Executive Director at the Center for Mobile Research & Innovation, told Conversations:

“The Nokia Lumia 900 is a critical component of the SHUmobile ecosystem. The native extension of cloud services such as SkyDrive and Microsoft Office, specifically OneNote, allow our students to collaborate on content creation anywhere, at any time.

“Tying together personal and professional uses, the Lumia 900 extends to students mew communication channels and opportunities for engagement with their peers and academic, administrative and social resources and services that otherwise might be limited to more traditional computing environments.”

Making collaboration easy
With SHUmobile and the build-out of this advanced computing environment for Seton Hall, the university is delivering an impressive online collaboration environment for students and faculty. The effort leverages the power of Windows, the cloud-based smart collaboration tools of Office 365, and the ability to do it all at ultra-fast 4G speeds on the Nokia Lumia 900.

Have you used Office 365 on your Lumia? Let us know what you think.

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CYFRA+ W SALONACH SPRZEDAŻY PLAY   W ramach współpracy między Spółką CANAL+ Cyfrowy i P4 już pod koniec sierpnia w punktach sprzedaży PLAY będzie oferowana pełna gama pakietów telewizyjnych CYFRY+.   – Rozpoczęcie sprzedaży CYFRY+ w salonach PLAY znacznie wzbogaci naszą sieć dystrybucji. Zdecydowana większość z ponad 1000 nowoczesnych, atrakcyjnie zlokalizowanych i obrandowanych naszymi logotypami [...]

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Last week, we revealed that SMS is the most common form of phone-based communication in the UK. Its popularity is a worldwide phenomenon, though. (Around 700 billion texts were sent in China in 2007; individual U.S. subscribers send more than 500 a month).

But why? We’ve got email, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype – a myriad of much more sophisticated tools to use. 

Yet it’s plain old text messaging that gets the love.

In part, that’s because it’s the lowest common denominator. Everyone’s phone is capable of text messaging. It’s also very cheap in a lot of countries: it doesn’t need a data provision and is often bolted onto contracts as a ‘free’ extra.

But there’s more science to it than that. According to Internet psychologist Graham Jones, it’s about the way we classify different ways of sending messages.

For many, email is associated with business and more formal communications. Social networks, on the other hand, are associated with broadcasting messages to larger groups of friends or complete strangers.

So that leaves text. It’s uniquely personal and almost always about one-to-one communication with people that we have relationship with. There can’t be many people who haven’t typed “miss u. wish u were here” into their phone at some point.

Jones notes:

“Text messaging remains a functional communication tool, but still with a personal aspect, which could explain its longevity. You can say things in text you wouldn’t necessarily say on another communication tool.”

A second attraction is that you can normally expect a swift response to a text message, whereas it’s OK to leave responding to an email for a few hours (or days…)

It’s also about our instinctive laziness. We want to do everything in the easiest possible way. 

“Running in the back of the human mind,” Jones explained, “is the need to do everything with the least possible effort, and we instinctively search for the easiest way to communicate. This is why we rely on and still love text messaging.”

Nearly all of us still text regularly despite the many alternatives. Do you have any other ideas about why people like it so much?

image credits: sloanpix (sweethearts); Bekathwia (necklaces)

This is a summer of sporting events in Europe. Last month, Spain set new football records in Poland and Ukraine (of course, as an Italian, I was less happy) and as of tomorrow the world’s foremost and oldest sports competition is going to keep London busy for a while, for the third time in history.

To help you follow your favourite sports and athletes, there is a dedicated section on maps.nokia.com with all the information you need about the games, plus public transportation lines and schedules, photorealistic 3D tour of London and tips for accommodation, restaurants, shopping and sights.

Also CNN is using our stunning 3D maps to show what’s happening in London this summer. This is for instance the route of the marathon:

You will really appreciate our city page maps.nokia.com/uk/london, especially if you are a London newbie. The city pages, as you might already know, are available for many locales around the world and actually for all the previous host cities like Athens, Berlin, Paris, Atlanta and Beijing.

What you perhaps don’t know is that the games are not confined to the Olympic Park. Of course the most iconic sports are being hosted in the Olympic Stadium, but football will be played in Wembley and tennis in Wimbledon (where else?). What made us smile is realizing that boxing, judo, weightlifting and more are taking place at ExCel London, which also hosted Nokia World in 2009 and 2010.

It’s also not only about London. The whole UK is hosting the games, as you can see in this map. This is a great opportunity to visit one of the most interesting European countries this summer.

Let us know if you are going to be in London!