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Much like the UK’s multi-faceted railway system, there are also plenty of different train applications for your Nokia Lumia in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Many of the apps share the same features. For example, they let you check the timetables, buy tickets and get live departure information.
However, each of the apps have one or two great individual features that make it stand apart from the rest.
Imagine if you could all of the great features combined into one great app?
So, here’s a rundown of some of the train apps for the UK railway system and the killer feature in each of them that I would like in my fantasy ultimate train app.
Apologies for the parochial approach, but trains were invented in Britain, if that’s any excuse… Anyway, here goes.
This is a comprehensive app that covers the entire UK railway network.
It gives you access to the official national rail train timetable, lets you buy tickets up to 10 minutes before you board the train and then sends you a code to collect the ticket from the station of your choice.
A nice touch is a Live Tile that reminds you to collect your ticket and it also lets you save your favourite and recent journeys to book repeat bookings a little easier.
Killer feature: Next train home – uses your Lumia’s location to find the nearest station and then plots a route for you to get back home.
Although Virgin Trains is the rail franchise that runs up and down the west of Britain (technically called the West Coast Main Line), this app allows you to check live timetables and buy tickets for the entire rail network.
Killer feature: You can get your tickets sent straight to your mobile, so there’s no need for collection at the station or for printing out your tickets.
This app is unique among the railway apps in that it also encompasses London Underground, London buses, DLR, Tramlink and river services. It also has Birmingham Tram, Glasgow subway and all domestic flights.
Journey Pro also has interactive maps that calculate the best route from A to B using the different modes of transport.
Killer feature: Particularly for Londoners, this app is a utopian glimpse of a fully integrated transport network.
I’ll just come straight out and say it: This is an expensive app.
It has a slick interface that lets you check live train timetables and to plan your journeys. A major disappointment is that you can’t buy train tickets.
So, why does it cost so much? Two letters: AR. Hold your phone up and it has an augmented reality train and London Underground viewer.
Killer feature: Augmented Reality. Some of you will love it and others will dismiss it as a gimmick that doesn’t justify the cost.
This is the official application of CrossCountry trains – another railway franchise that operates several inter-city routes in the UK.
Trainspotters will inform you that CrossCountry runs that longest direct train journey in the UK, from Penzance in Cornwall to Aberdeen in Scotland, a journey of over 13 hours.
The app does everything you expect: live national rail timetables, plan a journey, find your nearest station and you can also buy tickets. If the ticket is for a CrossCountry journey then that could also be delivered straight to your phone, otherwise you’ll need to collect it from a station.
Killer feature: You can buy tickets without the need for registering or signing in. It’s a simple idea, but something of a rarity.
Well, we were looking for unique features and this one fits the bill.
My Stop uses your Lumia’s GPS to identify when your destination station is approaching and sounds an alarm to inform you. Useful for people who fall asleep on trains, right?
It does not have live departures, timetables, ticket sales or any of that stuff but you can save favourite journeys, see weather information at your destination and it also works underneath the lock screen.
Killer feature: Wake up, you’ve arrived!
What features would you like to see on your train apps? If there any good features in non-UK apps, let us know in the comments box below.
Image credit: eisenbahner
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Launched a couple of weeks ago, the new Camera Extras app for the Nokia Lumia range gives your camera a boost with a host of photo-enhancing settings, including Panorama, Self-Timer, Action Shot and Smart Group.
With the summer months now in full swing, here are some photo opportunities that can be enhanced through the new functionality.
Try Camera Extras on the checklist below and send us your photos. We’ll post the best shots right here on Nokia Conversations in a Creative Showcase.
As far as the eye can see
The human eye is not limited to the peripherals of a camera lens, and neither should your photos be. Whether you’re embarking on a city break, a hiking holiday in the mountains or picking out your spot on the beach, Camera Extras easily allows you to create seamless photos spanning the entire skyline, in only one touch.
Just shift the lens from left-to-right, line-up the on-screen box and the camera will do the rest. Be patient though; the preview shown on screen, while the image collates is not the final image.
As you can see by the picture above (click on it to see a larger version), Camera Extras will straighten out those ragged edges for a great-looking Panorama shot.
The Meat Table
Just because the 4th July is done for another year, it doesn’t mean you have to put the grill away for the rest of the summer. Especially when entire-table views of a banquet of perfectly-charred animal parts can be captured.
Scan the platter with Panorama mode and post online to the envy of social networking friends. It’s what Freedom is all about.
Create an illusion (of well behaved children)
Be honest, as angelic as the young ankle-biters in your family may appear, getting all those siblings and cousins to look in the same direction for a photo, without pulling faces or beating each other up can be a mission.
Smart Group Shot captures five shots in quick succession and will automatically leave out the grimaces and pick out everyone’s best face.
Take me out to the ballgame
Everyone loves a group shot from the ballpark, but it ain’t just the kids who have the propensity to act like idiots in photos, especially after a lengthy pre-game.
The entire posse (including yourself)
If you’re the designated family photographer, you may wistfully gaze back at special moments and feel aggrieved that your grinning mug doesn’t appear alongside the rest of your posse.
The Self-timer functionality in Camera Extras helps you complete the shot, giving you ten seconds to get in on the act. On your marks…
A romantic dip
Capturing a blur-free image of the surf washing across your toes is often a holy grail for a photographer with only a smartphone at his or her disposal.
Give it a try with Action Shots on Camera extras which allows you to fire-off multiple frames in a shorter space of time, just by holding down the shutter.
Immortalising marital bliss
Everyone loves a summer wedding (except the guy/gal who foots the bill) but it’s rare that you’ll fully capture the blur-free essence of that scrimmage for the bouquet as wannabe brides fight to the death. Again, give it a try with action shots.
Forever taking photos
They should really rename that song I’m Forever (Trying To Get Good Pictures of People) Blowing Bubbles. Action Shot with Camera Extras will minimise the time it takes to capture that look of wonderment on the youngster’s face while that mixture of soapy water flies “so high into the sky…”
Getting Camera Extras
Camera Extras can now be downloaded from the Nokia Collection section of the Windows Phone Marketplace on your Lumia handset. Once downloaded, open the app for the first time, and the options will then automatically appear in your regular camera app settings.
Remember, once you’ve made use of Camera Extras to enhance your snaps, you can tweak them further with Creative Studio. Within this suite you can add effects, crop, rotate, boost exposure and more. As you can see below…
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Where do you go after you have mapped over 37 million kilometers of roadways worldwide? Easy. You go inside.
At last year’s spring CTIA show, we launched Destination Maps, our latest product. Destination Maps takes the highly accurate mapping coverage you have come to expect from Nokia, and moves it inside to continue the orientation, routing and guidance beyond the great outdoors.
Indoor venues are continuing to grow larger and more complex, making it difficult for all of us to find our way easily and quickly to our desired need. Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and needing a football. With Destination Maps, you can search for the football, find out the stores that carry it, know exactly where to park or which door to enter, and get the fastest walking route directly to that store. Incorporating Destination Maps into location apps or onto a specific device eliminates the stress and the unnecessary time spent reading floor plans or guessing which store carries the football.
And, it’s not just shopping malls we have mapped. Since the launch of Destination Maps, with 214 shopping malls in the US, we have steadily increased our coverage each month, both in venues and countries around the world. To date, we have mapped 4605 venues – shopping malls, retail stores, airports, and transit hubs – in 38 countries with more being added every month. This is over a 2000% increase in just 16 months. Wait until you see what happens in the next 16 months.
While other providers claim to have powerful indoor map offerings with a large number of venues mapped, Destination Maps are not just the average 2D floor plans that can be viewed on a device. Our indoor map content enables a full end-to-end experience, making the exploration and discovery of indoor places more realistic. Further, Destination Maps include a wealth of interior map attributes, like escalators, floor levels, ATMS and restrooms. Including these important points allows for more advanced and accurate guidance and routing.
Like most of our products, Destination Maps is optimized to work seamlessly with our other Nokia Location Content offerings. Dynamic content such as movie listings, flight times or transit schedules can all be added to these indoor maps, providing even further value to end-users.
As always, Nokia offers Destination Maps across many devices and PNDs. Already, Bing Maps has implemented this location content into their maps with the announcement of Bing Venue Maps last month. Nokia Maps will follow soon.
Given that people worldwide spend 87-90% of their time indoors, helping make routing and indoor discovery faster and easier is a natural next step. Drive navigation is fairly mature – indoor mapping is the next untapped frontier of mapping, and you can expect Nokia to continue to lead the way.
Image credit: The Columned Mall by stuckincustoms on Flickr
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This BBC News Mobile app in the Windows Phone Marketplace for your Nokia Lumia smartphone is as slick, functional and easy to use as you would expect from one of the world’s great news organisations.
Except, it has nothing to do with the BBC.
It is the work of 23 year-old Lawrence Gripper, an economics graduate with no formal computer or IT training.
Launched on the Windows Phone Marketplace in October 2010, Lawrence’s BBC News Mobile app has been downloaded over 200,000 times and last month was awarded the Best News prize at the 2012 Community App Awards.
Not bad for someone who grew up on farms in England’s west country.
Now on the Microsoft graduate training programme and living in Reading, Lawrence talks to Conversations about how he started building apps, what we can expect in the Windows Phone 8 version of BBC News Mobile and what advice he would give to other developers.
How did you get involved in developing apps?
When I left school, I started working for a firm doing IT in schools. While I was there the job got outsourced and I was offered a job working on some SharePoint stuff for them. I had a go and really enjoyed it.
Then I did an economics degree at Exeter University and carried on working part-time as a SharePoint developer. I wrote in C# for that and those skills let me write a couple of mobile apps while I was at university.
What apps did you create in university?
It was a train times application back on Windows Mobile 6.5. The second one was the BBC one and that’s just carried on from there.
Why create an app for BBC News?
It was a combination of things. I liked Windows Phone and I knew that it was going to be a really good platform.
I like reading the news and there wasn’t anything to do it with on the phones, so I thought I would give it a go and make one. Since then, it has been driven by the people who use it.
The good feedback I get from it keeps me going to make it better. Everyone seems to enjoy using it.
The first version took 3-4 days to write. Since then I have spent many more hours just tweaking it and it has gone through a couple of major revisions as well.
Is it easy to develop for Windows Phone?
The development environment is really nice to use and actually very user-friendly compared to some of the other platforms.
So when you sit down to do an app, there are all the resources you need to just get it done.
It’s all in Visual Studio – it’s a really nice interface and the process is very streamlined. Write a bit of code, hit the play button and it will get deployed to an emulator that looks like a phone and you can test it quite easily. You just keep going round that loop until you end up with an application.
What can we expect in the Windows Phone 8 version?
It’s still in the works at the moment. It’ll be a similar flavour but I’m looking to take advantage of the larger tiles. The Windows 8 SDKs are out now so I am working on it in the hope that I can bring it across.
I’m looking to make better use of the ‘In Pictures’ feeds and hopefully adding the ability to leave comments on stories. Loads of stuff but I just need to find the time.
Did you ever think the app was going to be such a success?
Nope. Not a clue. I wanted it to be used and for it be liked but I did expect that somewhere down the line someone was going to come along and make a better job of it.
My only expectation was that I could wake up in the morning and read the news in a nice app. It was quite a selfish motivation, I think.
Now that you are working at Microsoft has that been a help?
Working on apps is completely separate from my work but there are clauses in my contract that allow me to write apps for Windows Phone because obviously they are looking to encourage people to do that on the platform.
They definitely support me however and there’s a lot of enthusiasm from my managers and my colleagues around the app. But they don’t give me time off!
What other apps have you been working on?
I released one with a colleague called Square, which is for sharing pictures or contacts.
You go on your phone, find a contact or a picture that you want to share and it generates a QR code on your phone and then you can scan it with anyone else’s phone and that lets you download the picture.
The bonus is that it works from a Windows Phone to an iPhone or an Android phone so it’s cross-platform.
What advice would you give to budding developers?
Find an app or something that you really want to be able to do on your phone. Then try and make it. Don’t aim too big. Create something with just a small number of features, get it released and then get feedback and build on it.
I think a lot of people try to set the bar too high and say, ‘I’m going to do this and it’s going to have a Swiss-Army knife of features.’
Actually, you end up getting bogged down with a laundry list of features and you don’t actually release anything.
You’ve got to be happy to work on it in your free time and it is something you’ve got to have a real passion for.
Image credit: MonkeyMyshkin
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Das neue Nokia 808 PureView wurde nach eigener Aussage fünf Jahre lang entwickelt. Revolutionär und überraschend: das Smartphone von Nokia hat eine 41-Megapixel-Kamera integriert. Faktisch können im 4:3-Format maximal 38 Megapixel genutzt werden. Wie es um die weitere Ausstattung des … Weiterlesen »
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Category: PLAY | Leave a Comment
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Category: PLAY | Leave a Comment
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High-end design used to hit your wallet where it hurts. Not any more. As prestigious fashion designers team up with retail outlets to bring catwalk style at cost-conscious prices, we’re happy to announce that you can now pick up the Nokia Lumia 900 for just $49.99 on a two-year contract from AT&T in the US.
This announcement comes just in time for the debut of the elegant Pink Lumia 900 and the start of back-to-school shopping for student smartphones
The Nokia Lumia 900 has received overwhelmingly positive reviews on consumer sites, and won awards at shows such as CES and – most recently – Microsoft’s TechEd. The iconic Nokia design, combined with the elegance, speed and utility of the Windows Phone operating system, set this phone apart.
If you’re new to the Lumia 900, the phone comes in four colors including pure white, matte black, stunning cyan and the perky new addition – pink.
The Lumia 900 supports AT&T’s ultra-fast LTE network, has a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED screen and sports an 8-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens.
Exclusive content, brought to you by Nokia
Nokia works hard to bring you valuable extra apps and services that set the Lumia family apart from any other phones on the market.
You’ll get access to a host of free, Nokia-exclusive experiences such as:
- Nokia Drive: Complete voice-guided, turn-by-turn GPS navigation;
- ESPN Sports Hub: an amazing app that keeps you in the know about your favorite sports;
- Nokia Play To: lets you display your photos and videos from your phone onto your TV;
- The Dark Knight Rises: Nokia’s exclusive app for fans of The Dark Knight Rises movie;
- 100th Day of School: Through our partnership with the Sesame Workshop, this app brings a read-aloud experience that any school-aged child would love.
The Nokia Lumia 900, priced at $49.99 on a 2-year agreement with AT&T, is an amazing phone and a stunning value.
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lip
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High-end design used to hit your wallet where it hurts. Not any more. As prestigious fashion designers team up with retail outlets to bring catwalk style at cost-conscious prices, we’re happy to announce that you can now pick up the Nokia Lumia 900 for just $49.99 on a two-year contract from AT&T in the US.
This announcement comes just in time for the debut of the elegant Pink Lumia 900 and the start of back-to-school shopping for student smartphones
The Nokia Lumia 900 has received overwhelmingly positive reviews on consumer sites, and won awards at shows such as CES and – most recently – Microsoft’s TechEd. The iconic Nokia design, combined with the elegance, speed and utility of the Windows Phone operating system, set this phone apart.
If you’re new to the Lumia 900, the phone comes in four colors including pure white, matte black, stunning cyan and the perky new addition – pink.
The Lumia 900 supports AT&T’s ultra-fast LTE network, has a 4.3-inch ClearBlack AMOLED screen and sports an 8-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens.
Exclusive content, brought to you by Nokia
Nokia works hard to bring you valuable extra apps and services that set the Lumia family apart from any other phones on the market.
You’ll get access to a host of free, Nokia-exclusive experiences such as:
- Nokia Drive: Complete voice-guided, turn-by-turn GPS navigation;
- ESPN Sports Hub: an amazing app that keeps you in the know about your favorite sports;
- Nokia Play To: lets you display your photos and videos from your phone onto your TV;
- The Dark Knight Rises: Nokia’s exclusive app for fans of The Dark Knight Rises movie;
- 100th Day of School: Through our partnership with the Sesame Workshop, this app brings a read-aloud experience that any school-aged child would love.
The Nokia Lumia 900, priced at $49.99 on a 2-year agreement with AT&T, is an amazing phone and a stunning value.
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Play jako sponsor festiwalu Woodstock wraz z agencją Grey Group przygotowali kampanię, w którą zaangażowano legendarnego założyciela Wielkiej Orkiestry Świątecznej Pomocy Jurka Owsiaka. Organizator tegorocznego Przystanku Woodstock, zaprasza na festiwal i zapowiada 4 dni rozmów za darmo ze wszystkimi. Ideą filmu jest wzmocnienie siły przekazu pozytywnych emocji oraz wspólnej radości i zabawy, jaka towarzyszy festiwalowi. [...]
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Najbardziej spodobało się nam hasło Adama Dębińskiego i niniejszym zapraszamy Adama na Play Weekend 
Kolejne zadanie: znajdź fajną usługę telekomunikacyjną, której nie ma w Polsce ale gdzieś na świecie istnieje 
