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 

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 :/

Widget Widget

A restaurant locater, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a weather monitor, horoscopes, stock quotes and network games are just some of the applications that you can now install on new smart phones like N97 coming from the Nokia stable. Mobile phone applications are the next big thing in the mobile phone industry and there is an increasing demand for third party applications to be developed similar to the development that happened in the PC industry few years back.The availability of high end features such as A-GPS, high resolution cameras, entertainment tools and large disk space and processing power makes mobile phone application development the next challenge for application developers around the world. These applications are aimed at various user requirements with major categories being productivity improvement, business tools, entertainment gadgets and games.
Nokia is entering the market of mobile phone applications for its N-Series platform with the concept of widgets. Widgets shall help Nokia N-series users customize their phone according to their liking and requirement. Widget stores will see shaping up of selling, licensing and downloading of widgets is in the times to come. The widget store could become the only mechanism supported by the operating system for installation and up gradation of applications. This shall ensure the stability of installed applications, verification of software conflicts and the ability to locate applications at a single point of sale. Apple has already taken a big step in this direction with the Application store launched along with iPhone 3G. The initial 3 months of this store saw more than 5000 applications being posted and over 200 million downloads. The advent of these applications is slowing diminishing the gap between smart phones, PDA and Pocket PCs. Seems like beyond a point, hardware improvements shall give way to software innovations in the dynamic mobile phone industry. Its happening.

Want a prelaunch N97?

A lot of visitors have expressed an ardent desire to own the Nokia N97. Well heres your chance... Nokia is running a kickass widget competition here. All you are required to do is to download the design package and get your creative juices working! Winners get to take home a N97 pre-loaded with a working version of the winning widget. Hurry Hurry... Last chance to steal a deal till February 27!

Were already competing ;)