A post on the Go!

There is much talk about using smartphones to do day to day online activities on the go. Akhil told me to get into road warrior mode with my 5800 XpressMusic. I am not at the benefit of a full blown QWERTY like the Nokia N97 but am still enjoying thumbing away on my touch screen right in the middle of a lecture discussing ways to conduct a detailed NPV analysis of a firm. Ah. . . The beauty in letting ones mind wander ;)

I plan to walk the complete path on this one.... From writing the complete post to using my campus wifi to login into blogger and post publishing, to try and edit the post and insert a picture of my bench mate taken with it right here in class!

Here goes step 1......!

...Well as it turned out, Step 1 failed as I couldn’t post the article in class. Failed to connect to WLAN :( Now I am sitting in the mess and Akhil & Sonali are huddled close to me trying to get me to post my article ASAP. If this step turns out successful, Ill edit my post again and insert a picture. Here goes ;)

Hmmmm... step 1 failed again. It seems mailing go@blogger.com doesn’t work with my carrier which happens to be Airtel. Sonali is giving me the look and Akhil is playing Bounce on his 5800. Last tactic.. Am gonna log in directly into blogger via my web browser and post. This should work.

IT DID!!! We have a post up. Now we are trying to get a pic loaded - Successful!

Buddy... I told you that you are gonna get famous for sitting with the busiest man on campus!

Its simple. Send a mail using your gmail id from your mobile phone and claim the token at the mobile blogger website. That registers your mobile device. Any subsequent email to blogger automatically posts to the blog. Im loving it!!

Disclaimer: This post is in no way representative of the attitude of students studying at the prestigious IIMs. We attend all classes regularly and work our best to catch all thats thrown at us - be it cash flow analysis, queing theory, or target market segmentation :p

Ringtone for N97 fans

We've composed a ringtone for N97 lovers. All credits to SPSS for helping us on this one. He is a N95 8GB user and cant wait to get his hands on the N97. We cant wait either :). To get an exclusive preview of the ringtone just press Play. (You need to have a QuickTime plugin installed)

You can also download the ringtone here.

Talking about ringtones... the N97 supports video ringtones. So you can have a video or a unique track associated with each each contact. You can see your loved one light up your screen when they call! And did you know that when you get an incoming call on your N97 and you want to silence the tone, you can just turn the phone. Little treasures that show how well Nokia has thought out the N97.

Music on the Go

So how capable is the Nokia N97 with music?
For starters, it has 32 Gb + an optional 16GB of memory to store your music. If you want, you can carry extra memory cards with your music loaded on to it. This means that technically you can carry any amount of music with you. I dont know of any suceesful portable music player including the iPod where you can do this. 48 GB of memory translates to about 12500 full tracks of about 4 MB at 160 Kbps. Averaging track length to about 3-5 minutes you get about 1 month 4 days, 17 hours and 20 minutes of continous different music :) Think of it this way - You can listen to one hour of totally new music every day for 2 years and 3 months just by loading up the N97 once.
Dont forget that the N97 comes with a standard 3.5 mm jack so you an use your favorite pair of Sennheisers/ Bose headphones or plug it into your Yamaha ampifier ;) I wonder what makers of music systems are going to come up with next? The Nokia N97 has effectvely made music systems redundant. One only needs to buy an external ampifier to have the latest top of the line music system ready! Combined with the Tv-Out port you can watch album art and song information on your TV. Possibilities anyone??
Lets dig deeper into the design of the music player

Music Menu - You can play tracks by choosing Artists, Albums, Playlists, Podcasts, Genres or Composers. If your music is well tagged, finding the right track should be just a few taps away. It features search for tracks, so you can actually type in the track you want and it will find it for you.
One salient feature of the Nokia N97 is that you can just copy paste your music folder structure onto the memory card/phone and ask the music player to refresh the library. The N97 will automatically find tracks and put them in the music menu. So you dont have to be at a particular software's mercy every time you want to load tracks.
Support for file formats - The following file formats are supported in the Nokia N97: AAC, AAC+, eAAC, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, M4A, WMA, Mobile XMF, SP-MIDI, AMR (NB-AMR), MIDI Tones (poly 64), RealAudio 7, 8, 10, True tones (WB-AMR), WAV. MP3-files with various bit rates, including VBR! You can even take play protected DRM-files (Janus DRM) by synchronizing with Windows Media Player 11 or higher.And dont forget, it has full support for album art!
Equalizer - It comes with 6 presets which except for the default setting are all fully customizable - Bass Booster, Classical, Jazz, Pop, Rock. You can adjust sound balance, Stereo Widening and Loudness in the settings section.
Music Store - You can buy and download the latest tracks and albums on the road by visiting the Nokia Music Store. I personally have been able to download tracks on my 5800 XpressMusic over the web without even using the music store. Just ensure that the tracks you download are legal to be downloaded free ;)
FM Radio - Features a full blown FM radio with support for visual enhancements and auto tuning.
Internet Radio - Dont like picking tracks and making playlists? Still want to be able to control which genre you are listening to? Try the internet radio. You can choose from a multitude of options and tune in to the perfect channel for your tastes.
Podcasts - The N97 has full support for podcasts. You can access Nokia's podcast catalogue or search and subscribe to podcasts over the internet.
Playback time - The Nokia N97 features an amazing playback time of almost 35-37 hours. You wont run out of battery power on this one.
All in all the nokia N97 has delivered the fatal blow to all music player wannabes in the market. There are other phones with music capabilities in the market but the N97 has raised the bar in terms of the complete solution it offers.

Nokia N97 - My Phone, My Desktop

Customization is the order of the day..be it your coffee, your suit, your automobile… its  high time we had customizable desktops. The N97 with its large 3.5 inch screen and Symbian S60 gives users the freedom to customize their desktop the way they want. So if you are hooked on to facebook or just want the latest stock tips, just put the respective widget on your phone desktop and everything is now just a finger tap away.  You can also switch your desktop with your profile. So now when you move out of office, just switch your profile and you have your latest music and orkut application on instead of your email and meeting reminders. Pretty cool, eh?

Earlier Nokia N-Series phones also did provide the feature of customizing and switching desktop shortcuts, but with N97 you can now place widgets onto your desktop so that you don’t need to go anywhere to see your favourite application. Imagine the fun of a cricket scorecard updating right on your desktop while you are in a boring meeting. Well, we didn’t find this widget suggested in the contest so we posted it ourselves. Look for our Cricket Widget in the Nokia Widget gallery.

To get users to design and suggest widget, the N-Series website is holding an innovation contest as indicated in one of our previous posts. Here is the list of top 5 suggested widgets that we found would be a great addition to your Nokia N97

MyFavorite – A simple yet  very popular widget these days jazzes up the favorites section on the desktop and also gives an option of Google search.

MiniFacebook – Be always online and always connected to your friends on Facebook.

Mp3 Player / Radio Widget – This one is for the music lovers. Have your music and FM play in a small and sleek looking player on the desktop. 

GeoSpot – Find out the nearest restaurant, fuel station or ATM using the GeoSpot application.

Quick Note – Just thought of something cool or you just remembered someone’s birthday. Scribble it down before you forget.

Some of the other cool widgets like Favorite Contacts, Manager of files, Today's Comics, Chat Notifier, N-gage Widget, Web browser, quick open: office, Nokia StockX Widget are also worth a view. So go ahead and play around with your own cool Phone Desktop. Make your desktop reflect your persona 

Whats your "So-Lo"?

Ask the N97! The A-GPS and Electronic compass on board tell the Nokia N97 where it is and it uses this data to dynamically update social networks with real time information. So your Orkut/Facebook status could have the location of the coffee bar you are sitting at and you could share pics and videos relating to the same with your friends. Chatting and staying online all the time would be like second nature to its owners.

The concept of "So-Lo" or Social Location is another first from Nokia and can only come from a company with years of insight into how people use their mobile phones and expect from them.

Another major insight...? Well the Nokia N97 automatically geo-tags the pictures you take in the EXIF data. So you can almost always know the exact spot where you took a particular photo :-| |

The Official Nokia N97 launch presentation

An amazing video where top management from Nokia tell us what they think about the N97 and what they want to show off about it!

Nokia to launch App store?

There is a lot of buzz that Nokia might just launch its very own app store at the Mobile World Congress to be held in Barcelona from 16 to 19 February. The man behind the buzz is Eldar Murtazin, a Russian editor of the Mobile-Review. If Nokia does launch the app store rumored to be up and running behind the scenes, its defintely going to have all its bases covered in terms of taking on competitors like the Apple iPhone, Sony Ericsson Xperia, Blackberry Storm, Toshiba TG 01, T-Mobile G1, Samsung Omnia or the LG Cookie phone! The N97 is going to shred the competition if app developers start building actively for the Nokia platform.

My question to Nokia is, what happens to this and why cant we have the app store directly integrated into Ovi? Take on any comparison of the Nokia N97 done with any other phone and the only thing that the reviewer would conclude by is saying that Nokia still lacks a functional app store. I wonder what theyre going to say now? Keep your your fingers crossed until MWC 2009 :/

Battle of the Smart Phones - Nokia N97 V/s Apple IPhone

We love to hear what our avid readers and subscribers have to say and this article is entirely dedicated to them! Many of you asked for a detailed comparisons...this one goes out to you! We have picked up THE major competitor of the Nokia N97...you guessed it right, the Apple IPhone 3G. Now you will say what about the Sony Ericsson Xperia, Blackberry Storm and Samsung Omnia etc? Well, lets look at the real competition. The competition which is making friends turn into foes, the animosity between the Nokia users and iPhone users! Both these phones are top-of-the-line products from their respective companies and are in a similar price range. In this comparison what we have tried to do is to interpret the specs from a user's angle and look at the practical aspects of using some of these features. Our team has narrowed down the comparison to top 10 features which we feel make the most difference to users. Sure smart phones are primarily used to make phone calls, but they are more than just that. We envision this comparison to become a real life competition of sorts. Some thing like a new Olympic Decathlon! (Imagine if Olympics really has something like that...Phone users competing against each other for supremacy..there'll be bloodshed!).Here's starting off this debate with an in-depth analysis on using these 10 features given by the team from the point of view of comfort, convenience and usability.

Let the Battle begin!

Feature	Nokia N97	Apple IPhone 3G
Touch Screen	A large 3.5 inch resistive touch screen display of this phone is first one from Nokia that works without a stylus. The power of this screen shall be visible only after launch	A 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen gives IPhone the key edge over its competition. The multi-touch display makes moving around menus quite easy
Messaging	A 30 degree slide out full QWERTY keyboard should make it the fastest SMS device among all smart phones	No QWERTY is surely a disadvantage. Also, some of the basic symbols are not available in the direct keyboard
Imaging and Video	A 5 Mega Pixel Carl Zeiss camera is sure to put old digicams to shame. Twin LED flash adds that extra punch. DVD video recording make this the perfect all in one device	A 2 Mega Pixel camera is good to take pictures in daylight. Compact camera but it’s without any flash light. No Video recording support is surely a major drawback
Music	An audio out port and a high quality built-in speaker is the right ingredient in this phone for the music lover. Album art support and preloaded music albums give it the edge	The IPod legacy continues and all the interactivity and convenience of the IPod are part of the IPhone. The speaker phone is not that powerful and you need to relay on your headphone which are also quite great.
Storage	Inbuilt 32GB memory and support for an additional 16GB make this the largest phone storage on the planet	32 GB IPhone has just been announced but the ones available on the Apple store are only 8GB and 16GB versions.
Internet, Maps and GPS	Nokia’s Symbian platform comes with an in built browser that supports almost all sites. Assisted GPS in the N97 and pre loaded Nokia maps provide it the extra edge	The OS platform supports a mobile Safari version that has a much better browsing experience. Integration of the GPS with Google Maps also gives route info in certain countries
Applications	Nokia doesn’t have an application store for the N-Series yet. As most applications are free or third party, there is a lot of scope for improvement here.	The Apple store is one of the biggest selling points for IPhone. With almost 10k applications to choose from this is one place where IPhone has a clear edge
Gaming	The N-Gage gaming platform has been evolving with the N-Series hardware upgrades. Now touch screen games with accelerometer support such as Asphalt Racing are expected soon	Apple has a number of games running in the IPhone but no tie up with any major gaming labels
Connectivity	The phone has 3G support, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. Support for the OVI platform adds a zing to the connectivity support of the N97	With 3G and Wi-Fi, the phone fulfils the requirements of a smart phone. However absence of any online or Bluetooth sync capabilities is a hindrance in some cases
Vital Stats	150 gms in weight and 6.5 hours of talktime on GSM,this baby can surly survive for long	133 gms in weight and a talktime of over 7 hrs on a GSM network make the IPhone a part of your survival kit
Software	The latest Symbian S60 version 5 operating system has widget support and is faster and better than ever before	No one can write software like Apple does. A mini version of the Mac make the software fast and responsive
Overall Verdict	Nokia N97 is power packed, innovative and a dream device for some one on the move with this music,movies and games. An application store would compliment the abilities of this phone to large extend	Apple IPhone has tested the market for a while but has still devoid its users with the features of video recording and Bluetooth. However, the fun of applications does come out with the IPhone