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 …

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 …

Nokia has just started in the first pilot of Nokia Money in Pune, India in collaboration with YES BANK and the name they’ve given the project is Mobile Money Service. Nokia also plans to roll out Nokia Money in all major Indian cities within the next months.
As of now the pilot is limited to allowing people to easily transfer money to another person by using the person’s mobile phone number and also pay utility bills and top up prepaid SIM cards. But you can soon look forward to paying …

What is MeeGo? A new OS? The name of a very important partnership? What happens to Maemo after this? Is Symbian still in the picture for Nokia? Maemo 6?

MeeGo is the result of Intel and Nokia’s broad strategic collaboration announced in June 2009. Today, they have come together to create MeeGo, a Linux-based software platform that will support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segments, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

Maemo …

In a significant development in the convergence of communications and computing, Intel Corporation and Nokia are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms. This will create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences. MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers …

Nokia Conversations has just published a video showing off how Symbian ^3 will look on upcoming Nokia devices. At first glance there seems to be a hint of familiarity with the UI that you may have seen on Nokia’s current touch devices like the N97, but that quickly goes away when you look at the sheer number of optimizations and enhancements that have been done to the UI.
There is multitouch (pinch and zoom), multiple homescreens, support for hardware accelerated graphics, single tap across the entire UI, complete kinetic scrolling, a …