nokia phone blog

Nokia, Microsoft and AT&T have finally taken the wraps off the Nokia Lumia 900. The smartphone will be exclusively available via AT&T “in the coming months,” in matte black and cyan.

No word on the pricing yet, but Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop mentioned that the company plans to “enter aggressively” on the North American market, which might indicate that the Finnish handset maker is willing to price its products cheaper than before.

The third Nokia handset to run Windows Phone operating system, Nokia Lumia 900 is the first to comes with LTE support. The smartphone allows data downloads up to 50Mbps on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, or HSPA downloads up to 21Mbps.

Nokia Lumia 900 sports a brilliant 4.3-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display with 800 x 480 pixels resolution, which is based on Nokia’s ClearBlack technology.

The phone boasts an impressive 8-megapixel rear camera with exclusive Carl Zeiss optics that features a large aperture (F2.2) and wide angle focal length (28mm). Furthermore, the smartphone packs a 1-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling.

The phone’s high capacity 1830 mAH battery is rated by the manufacturer for up to 300 hours of standby time or up to 7 hours of talk time.

On the inside, the Lumia 900 is equipped with a 1.4 GHz single core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8055 processor, as well as 16GB (14GB user available) of internal memory and 512MB of RAM. Additional storage is available via SkyDrive cloud storage.

The Lumia 900 runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Commercial Release 2 (Mango + LTE) and comes pre-installed with several AT&T and Nokia services and apps, such as U-verse Mobile, Nokia Drive, ESPN sports hub, CNN App, and Univision App.

According to Nokia, the device, along with the rest of Lumia series smartphones, will get around 20 EA popular games in the near future.

The Nokia Maps Suite packs a series of applications that are meant at providing users with location and navigation features on their devices.

It includes Places, enabling users to discover places around them, Public Transport, for easy planning a trip, and Pulse for sharing location, photos, and more.

Most of the enhancements included in the new release of the application are related to Pulse, the changelog shows.

Nokia did not bring changes to the Public Transport and Places, but made the following modifications to Pulse:

Login – fewer Nokia Account login prompts

Notifications – more reliable push notifications

Keyboard – various bug fixes including stuck CAP lock, frozen cursor, delete key stops functioning, and we also added split-screen feature

Interoperability – compatible with latest versions of various Qt components, especially important because the latest Store client available this week uses a new version of a dependency that is not compatible with the previous Pulse v0.91(6)

Nokia Maps Suite for Symbian

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The latest Nokia Maps Suite for Symbian release is available for download from Softpedia as well, via the link below.

Before hitting the download link, users should learn that the application is available in beta at the moment, which means that there are a series of issues that might affect the experience they receive from it.

In addition to announcing these enhancements brought to the Nokia Maps Suite, the team behind the application also mentioned a new Nokia Live View release.

The app is no longer part of the Nokia Maps Suite for Symbian, but users will be able to download and install it as standalone software. The latest version of Nokia Live View is available from Softpedia as well.

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has just announced that a new software update is being pushed out to its Nokia N9 users, the PR1.1 firmware that was made official a few weeks ago.

The company says that the update has started to make an appearance on devices out in the wild, and that the new features and improvements it packs inside will soon be delivered to more users out in the wild.

The update was already sent to some Nokia N9 devices out there (our review unit received it), and should land on other devices as well in the coming days or weeks.

Among the main enhancements that the new software update is bound to deliver to devices, we can count the charging and calendar notifications that are now available on the standby screen, as well as music controls added to the lock screen.

Basically, users will be able to control what they are listening to without having to head over to the music player for that.

The release notes for the new update include:

- Chinese language support.

- More powerful multitasking with improved memory handling.

- Faster Mail for Exchange synch, synchronizing only active folders.

- Noise cancellation, reducing background noise so that callers can hear you better.

- Swipe down to close apps easily; now on by default.

- PLUS multiple improvements to the operating system.

Moreover, the new firmware brings on Nokia N9 a series of filters for making photography better than before, including black & white, sepia, vivid, negative and solarize.

Following the update, the MeeGo-based device will offer users the possibility to read NFC tags, not to mention that it provides them with the Swype keyboard for fast typing, as well as with the ability to share images via the Twitter application.

The update was made available for download via the Nokia Software Updater as well, although not all users will be able to see it right from the start. After all, the new firmware is being pushed out in phases.

It’s the beginning of a new era for Nokia: the company announced a “strategic partnership with Microsoft to build a global mobile ecosystem based on highly complementary assets.” That means that yes, Nokia phone will be adopting Windows Phone for future smartphones. But it’s more than that: the partnership means that Nokia will also integrate its current apps with Microsoft products, while Microsoft will bring its developer tools to the table.
Is it the right move? And what about Symbian and MeeGo? Details inside.

The move wasn’t completely unexpected. Nokia phone could have taken three possible routes for its smartphone line: MeeGo, Android, or Windows Phone. Actually, going full steam ahead with MeeGo probably would have sounded a death knell for the company, considering how ridiculously late to the game it would have been released. So the shift would be either to an Android or Windows Phone platform, and I think most people assumed that it would be the former, despite Stephen Elop’s previous high-level position at Microsoft. (for the record, I certainly did)

But if Nokia’s stock price today was anything to go by, investors were definitely expecting some other news. Shares of Nokia fell 14% on the news.

Meanwhile, the jump from one OS to another leads to some big questions, namely about Symbian and MeeGo.

Symbian’s future is pretty obvious: Nokia’s press release says that the company will turn it into a “franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value.” My translation: they’re going to suck it dry. It makes sense, considering that Symbian is clearly on its last legs (or already on the ground, depending on how you look at it).

As for MeeGo, its role isn’t quite as well defined:
Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.

This of course came on the news that Nokia had already dropped its next MeeGo phone.

Sound decision or not, the real winner here is Microsoft. With millions of Nokia Windows Phone devices slated to release sometime in the future, worldwide, it now has a fighting chance to level the playing field against the likes of Android and iOS.