Day 3 of SXSW and the brilliant folks at WOM World had something incredibly awesome planned – the Ovi Maps Route Race. The idea was simple – navigate around Austin with Ovi Maps. The fun part was that we were going to be doing it on Segways and on a ‘confrence bike’. The experience was incredible, but that’s not really why I am writing this post. It is to share the navigation experience.

As you are aware, Ovi Maps navigation just went free worldwide for quite a number of devices, including …

I am at the South by Southwest festival here in Austin, Texas and things are just getting started. Here are a few observations and experiences that I had on day 1 of the festival.

Picking up a device – Since I had decided I would not be lugging a laptop to the convention center, the first task at hand was to pick the equipment I was going to take along. I ended up with the E72 and the N900. The E72 decision was simple, I do not have a local SIM …

WOM World Nokia is currently having a series of giveaways, over the last week they gave away two Nokia N900’s and trips to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The giveaway is still on and you should keep your eyes peeled on http://www.womworld.com/nokia/ and to make sure you do not miss out.
Over the weekend, they also had a competition where you had to make a video entitled ‘Dear Nokia, I should go to SXSW because…’ giving reasons why they should take you to #SXSW. Based on these videos, Nokia will pick three …

I have just received an awesome email from the Nokia India Music store with the much awaited news that Nokia Music is finally going DRM free and that it will soon merge into the Ovi brand. The email carries no specific date for the transition to occur, we can only hope it happens soon.
DRM free means that you can use the music you downloaded from the Nokia store on any device, be it your computer, mobile phone or mp3 player. After Ovi Maps going free, Nokia saw a lot of …

Truphone, one of my favorite VOIP providers has added support for four new Eseries devices, the E52, E55, E72, and the E75. The update also brings WIFI calling support for the N86, which was previously restricted to Truphone’s Anywhere plan in which ‘international calls dialled on a Truphone Anywhere enabled handset are connected as local calls to the Truphone network, then routed to their destinations at Truphone’s low rates’.

This new release takes Truphone’s Nokia compatibility list to 30 devices, most with WIFI calling support and some with the …

As I have told you before, I had gone to Helsinki for The Way We Live Next event last year and Nokia had some really interesting demos from the work being done at the Nokia Research Center. There I was fortunate to witness and be able to witness, interview and film a demo of the Explore & Share concept that allows wireless data transfer at very high speeds.
The setup is based on a new radio technology built from a scratch. At Nokia house it was being demoed on a specially …

In an ’speaking from the heart’ interview to Rafe and Ewan at the Mobile World Congress, Anssi Vanjoki bit the bullet and talked about the N97, what went wrong and how it has been a huge nightmare for Nokia.
It is unheard of for a company to acknowledge their faux pas so openly but such an acknowledgement and a promise that they have learnt from their mistakes was heartning to see.
He promises that Nokia will make sure that Symbian^3 will be ‘perfect’. Whether or not they deliever time will tell, but …

After the unparalleled success of the E71 for Nokia, they knew that they had a recipe for success in their hands. Symbian is still the number one OS for non touch devices, its stable, its fast and there is a plethora of applications for users to choose from. So the task for them was cut out – make a device that’s not too different from the E71, but improved enough that people want to jump on it.

When I bought the E71, I despised its camera and the 2.5mm jack for …

We have all cribbed that Nokia’s Symbian devices are underpowered, that they need faster processors, that there is just not enough juice in them. That is about to change, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs in an interview to the Helsingin Sanomat has said that we will see a Nokia Symbian device running on the Snapdragon processor by the end of this year. Awesome.

In case you are wondering what all the fuss about Snapdragon is, have a look at the following quote from the Wikipedia:
The Snapdragon platform is designed for real time …

Skype has finally come out of beta and now not only supports S60 3rd Edition (both FP1 and FP2) devices but also S60 5th Edition smartphones like the N97, N97 Mini, 5800 and so on. This means that the N97 finally has Skype support, something that was promised the day it shipped.

You can download Skype by going to skype.com/m from your phone’s browser. According to Steve over at AAS, the client for S60 5th Edition has been revamped and is a lot more demanding when it comes system resources like …