London, UK – At Nokia World, the company’s annual event for customers, partners and developers, Nokia demonstrated clear progress on its strategy by unveiling a bold portfolio of innovative phones, services and accessories, including the first smartphones in its Windows Phone-based Nokia Lumia range. The stunningly social Nokia Lumia 800 brings content to life with head-turning design, Nokia’s best social and Internet experience, familiar Nokia elements, such as leading imaging capabilities and new signature experiences. The colorful and affordable Nokia Lumia 710 is a no-nonsense smartphone that brings the Lumia experience to more people around the world.

Nokia also launched four new mobile phones which feature stylish design, a rich social experience and location-aware technology. The Nokia Asha 300, Nokia Asha 303, Nokia Asha 200 and Nokia Asha 201 blur the line between smartphones and feature phones, offering QWERTY and touch screen experiences, combined with fast and easy access to the Internet, integrated social networking, messaging and world-class applications from the Nokia Store.

“Eight months ago, we shared our new strategy and today we are demonstrating clear progress of this strategy in action. We’re driving innovation throughout our entire portfolio, from new smartphone experiences to ever smarter mobile phones,” said Stephen Elop, Nokia President and CEO. “From the Nokia Lumia 800 to the Nokia Asha 201, we are bringing compelling new products to the market faster than ever before. I’m incredibly proud of these new devices – and the people of Nokia who have made this happen.”

“Since Nokia’s major strategic shift only eight months ago, the company has found a new energy. It has provided substantial improvements to Symbian, managed to differentiate on Windows Phone and it continues to build on its strong portfolio in mobile phones,” says Pete Cunningham, Principal Analyst, Canalys. “Nokia is delivering on its pledges, and is clearly demonstrating its path to future success.”

The first Nokia Lumia smartphones
First two smartphones based on Windows Phone introduce a range of new experiences designed to make everyday moments more amazing.

Nokia Lumia 800

The stunningly social Nokia Lumia 800 features head-turning design, vivid colors (cyan, magenta and black) and the best social and Internet performance, with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9. It features a 3.7 inch AMOLED ClearBlack curved display blending seamlessly into the reduced body design, and a 1.4 GHz processor with hardware acceleration and a graphics processor. The Nokia Lumia 800 contains an instant-share camera experience based on leading Carl Zeiss optics, HD video playback, 16GB of internal user memory and 25GB of free SkyDrive storage for storing images and music. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Lumia 800 will be approximately 420 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies.

The purposely built, no-nonsense Nokia Lumia 710 can be personalized with exchangeable back covers and thousands of apps to bring the Lumia experience to more people around the world. The Nokia Lumia 710 is designed for instant social & image sharing, and the best browsing experience with IE9. It is available in black and white with black, white, cyan, fuchsia and yellow back covers. With the same 1.4 GHz processor, hardware acceleration and graphics processor as the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 delivers high performance at an affordable price. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Lumia 710 will be approximately 270 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies.

Both smartphones include signature Nokia experiences optimized for Windows Phone, including Nokia Drive, which delivers a full-fledged personal navigation device (PND) with free, turn-by-turn navigation and dedicated in-car-user-interface; and Nokia Music introducing MixRadio, a free, global, mobile music-streaming application that delivers hundreds of channels of locally-relevant music. In an update delivered later this year, Nokia Lumia users will also gain the ability to create personalized channels from a global catalogue of millions of tracks. Also integrated in Nokia Music is Gigfinder, providing the ability to search for live local music for a complete end-to-end music experience, as well as the ability to share discoveries on social networks and buy concert tickets also coming in the Nokia Music software update delivered later this year.

Completing the ultimate mobile audio offering, Nokia also introduced the on-ear Nokia Purity HD Stereo Headset by Monster and the in-ear Nokia Purity Stereo Headset by Monster, co-designed and co-developed by Monster, a recognized leader in high performance audio. Both products provide a fresh listening experience and are the first output of the exclusive long-term partnership between Nokia and Monster, intended to introduce a range of premium audio accessories to reflect the outstanding quality and bold style of the Lumia range.

The new Nokia Lumia 800 is now available in select countries for pre-order and is scheduled to roll-out across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in November, with 31 leading operators and retailers providing unprecedented marketing support in those first six countries. It is scheduled to be available in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and?Taiwan before the end of the year, and in further markets in early 2012.

The Nokia Lumia 710 is scheduled to be available first in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan toward the end of the year alongside the Nokia Lumia 800, before becoming available in further markets in early 2012.

Nokia also announced its plans to introduce a portfolio of products into the US in early 2012 and into mainland China in the first half of 2012. In addition to the existing products, which include coverage for WCDMA and HSPA, Nokia also plans LTE and CDMA products to address specific local market requirements.

Asha: A new family of smarter mobile phones

Nokia continues its mission to deliver high quality, stylish devices that provide the best access to social networks, the Internet and information, and offer the best overall experience and value proposition for the next billion mobile phone users. These consumers want access to innovations such as easy-to-use dual-SIM, local services and content, and third-party apps, all with a superior user experience for which Nokia mobile phones are known.

These devices comprise the new Asha family of Nokia mobile phones. Derived from Hindi – meaning ‘hope’ – Asha signifies Nokia’s focus on positive user experiences and connecting millions of people to new opportunities that help them reach their aspirations.

The Asha mobile phone family includes:

Nokia Asha 303

The Nokia Asha 303 is a stunning phone designed with sophisticated materials and metallic finishes. It combines a large 2.6″ capacitive touch screen with a high quality QWERTY keypad. The Nokia Asha 303 is built with Internet and social networks ease in mind.

The device harnesses a powerful 1Ghz engine, 3G and WLAN to deliver a fast Internet experience. Social networks, email and IM are at the center of the experience, easily accessible from the homescreen. The Nokia Asha 303 is powered by the cloud-based Nokia Browser, which by compressing the web by up to 90%, provides higher speeds and a more affordable access to the Internet.
Entertainment and applications are also a core part of the Nokia Asha 303 offering. Angry Birds Lite, the popular mobile game, comes preinstalled, together with support for other globally relevant applications such as Facebook Chat, Whatsapp messaging and the latest release of Nokia Maps for Series 40 (in selected markets). The price will vary from market to market and operator to operator. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Asha 303 will be approximately 115 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies. It is expected to start shipping in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The beautifully designed Nokia Asha 300 is a touch device which also offers the convenience of a keypad. The Nokia Asha 300 has a powerful 1GHz processor and 3G to deliver a faster Internet and social networking experience. The Nokia Browser allows for fast, affordable and localized Internet access by compressing? web pages by up to 90%.
Users have fast access to messaging, email and instant messaging from the home screen and can swipe to access apps, music or games from the Nokia Store. The Nokia Asha 300 also arrives preloaded with the popular Angry Birds game.

The Nokia Asha 300 comes with a 5 megapixel camera, a music player, FM radio, Bluetooth connectivity and can handle memory cards up to 32GB.? The price will vary by market and operator. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Asha 300 will be approximately 85 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies. It is expected to start shipping in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Nokia Asha 200

The Nokia Asha 200 is Nokia’s latest dual SIM phone with Easy Swap functionality, allowing consumers to easily change their second SIM without switching the device off.
It is a fun and colorful QWERTY phone designed to meet the needs of young, urban consumers who want to constantly stay in touch. The Nokia Asha 200 features integrated social networking, email and IM, adding RenRen, Orkut and Flickr support. Nokia Asha 200 makes it possible to carry thousands of songs with support for 32 GB memory cards and providing a battery for an amazing 52-hour playback time. The price will vary by market and operator. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Asha 200 will be approximately 60 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies. It is expected to start shipping in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Nokia Asha 201

The single SIM version of the Nokia Asha 200, the Nokia Asha 201 is ideal for young consumers who wish to stay socially connected, are price conscious and like listening to music. The Nokia Asha 201 has great music features including a high performing loudspeaker, enhanced stereo FM radio and ringtone tuning. With the Nokia Browser you get even faster, even better and more affordable access to the Internet. It supports up to 32 GB memory cards and provides a battery for 52 hours of music playback time. The Nokia Asha 201 also supports push email as well as the popular Whatsapp messaging app. The price will vary by market and operator. The estimated retail price for the Nokia Asha 201 will be approximately 60 EUR, excluding taxes and subsidies. It is expected to start shipping in the first quarter of 2012.

Nokia Maps: location services designed to make every day better

With an aim to continuously improve its location-based offering, Nokia showcased the latest versions of Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive for Windows Phone. These and other map-related applications introduced at Nokia World aim to make Nokia Maps relevant for commuters and to find interesting places in the city where people live. In addition to its world-class, free walk-and-drive navigation for more than 100 countries worldwide, the Nokia Public Transport application tracks public transportation directly on a mobile device in more than 430 cities worldwide, including up-to-the-minute updates on bus and train routes for 45 cities. Nokia also introduced Nokia Pulse, which allows location-tagged updates and photos to be sent privately, adding location to conversations with the people that matter most. Nokia also showcased Nokia Live View, which turns the phone’s camera view finder into a reality augmenting tool. With Nokia Live View, a phone can be pointed to a building or street and the names of the places become superimposed over them, offering one click access to detailed information about businesses, restaurant or attractions. All the applications announced today are available at Nokia’s Beta Labs (betalabs.nokia.com).

Nokia also announced:

• Nokia Maps is now powering Yahoo! Maps, starting with the US and Canada
• An agreement with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to develop a NFC-based smartphone ticketing solution to pilot on New York regional commuter trains starting before the end of 2011

After a rather uneventful journey to London via South West Trains it was a 25 minutes dash from Waterloo to London City Airport via the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway. There was a small problem,and anyone who has ever travelled around London City Airport will know it is full of 1-way streets and confusing back roads.

Luckily for me I had my Windows Phone powered HTC Mozart, and after a quick scan via the Maps application and using Local Scout I quickly found a quick (and safe) route to the hotel which will act as my base for the next 36 hours or so.

Opposite the hotel, across the river is the ICC London ExCel centre which is my? destination for tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. I can clearly see ‘Nokia World’ lighting effects being projected onto the front of the building. Although any pictures taken just don’t show up well enough from this distance

Already I am excited about tomorrow and just what Nokia and Microsoft have in store for us. It all kicks off at 9AM with Stephen Elops opening keynote in the main auditorium. Make sure you are following us on Twitter (@hsctechsupport) to keep up to date with all the news from this years event.

Over the course of two days Nokia will be holding a number of keynote sessions, developer talks and hands on demonstrations for members of the mobile industry and press. Ensuring that you, our valued resellers and partners are always kept up to date on the latest developments and news, HSC will also be in attendance and tweeting/blogging live from the event over the entire event. You can keep up to date by following @hsctechsupport on Twitter and checking back here on the blog each morning.

Other sessions HSC will be attending are being hosted by some of biggest names in both Microsoft and Nokia; Joe Belfiore (Corporate Vice President – Windows Phone Program), Achim Berg (Corporate Vice President – Windows Phone Marketing) and Matt Biddulph (Head of Data Strategy and Apps ? Nokia). We will also be settling in to hear from Barry Cottle the Executive Vice President and General Manager of EA Interactive (Electronic Arts) and how he believes Bigger is Better during the Nokia Developer talks on day 2.

We are excited to be in attendance at this years event, and we cannot wait to share some fantastic and exciting news with you as it happens.

The official Nokia World website can be found here.

The Titan is just the type of Windows Phone we have all been waiting for, and we are pretty sure it is just the type of device Microsoft imagined their OS running on. It is big and of course people are going to be asking just how big is too big? But at 4.7inch, the Titan keeps to being big and beautiful without becoming a burden to our trouser pockets. The Titans 4.7inch size is redefining just how big a smartphone screen can get without becoming cumbersome. We have seen the Optimus LTE and Samsung Galaxy SII with a 4.5inch screen but in comparison, they just do not feel big enough anymore.

At 9.9mm thick, the Titan is far from average, but when you take the rest of its dimensions (131.5 x 70.7mm) into account, it actually looks and feels rather slick. The Titans sides and back are composed of one, easily removable, aluminium shell making battery and SIM replacement nice and easy. The devices shell is decorated with a dedicated camera button,?volume rocker, power / lock key, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a MicroUSB port. The overall look and feel of the Titan is as close to standard issue HTC design as you can get. It merits noting that the single-piece aluminium case feels extremely sturdy and rigid, while fit and finish between it and the Titans internal components is simply?flawless. One concern around devices becoming larger and larger is the bezel size left around the screen. The Titan has less than 3mm on either side of the screen and the top and bottom bezel are large enough only to house the HTC and Windows logo along with a front facing camera and 2 buttons; search and back. Nothing short of superb craftsmens ship from HTC throughout when looking at the hardware design on this device.

The 4.7-inch Super-LCD inside the Titan is its biggest strength. Blacks are deep (almost a prerequisite for a good Windows Phone experience), whites are true and uniformly lit across the screen, and colours lose very little of their vibrancy as you start to look at the phone from oblique angles. Watching videos and browsing and composing photos on the Titans display is a delight. Signing into Xbox Live on the Titan and playing some Plants vs. Zombies, well lets just that say that the experience enjoyed is something Sony Ericsson simply dream they could have engineered with their Xperia Play.

The Titan runs Qualcomms MSM8255 Snapdragon system-on-chip at 1.5GHz. It is been a popular chip in a variety of Android phones this year, with Sony Ericssons full 2011 Xperia line relying on it and HTC inserting it into the Incredible S and Desire S, among other devices. ?The reason undoubtedly for this is that the chip performs fantastically in terms of power efficiency. During our testing process the Titan was consistently able to continue performing long after 20 hours of usage were clocked up. I took the phone our for a test drive over a busy weekend. I unplugged it from its charger at 8.30am on the Saturday morning as I was leaving the house and it was still operational Sunday night at 9PM after a weekend of photo taking, occasional browsing, email (with push notifications), video and Xbox Live play time.

HTC goes above and beyond Microsofts chassis specs by endowing the Titan with an 8-megapixel, backside-illuminated camera sensor. Pictures shot with the Windows Phone are of a consistently high quality, offering a good balance between noise reduction and detail retention. Shrunken down for web use, most of the images coming out of the Titan look splendid. Windows Phone 7.5 does not make any major alterations to the way the camera software works ? you can still jump straight into composing a picture by holding down the camera key on the phones side, and captured stills can be pulled into view from the left side of the screen. The seamless transition between image capture and gallery browsing remains unchanged. From the people hub you can seamlessly almost instantly view your galleries, your Facebook friends galleries, SkyDrive and your camera roll. The front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera is predictably mediocre; do not expect it to give you usable images beyond the occasional 400-pixel Twitter profile pic.

Video can be captured at resolutions up to 720p and generally looks attractive and detailed. I am unsure whether HTC has implemented some form of digital image stabilization or if the Titans just easier to hold steady than other phones, but the videos I recorded with it lacked the usual wobbliness of smartphone recordings. The one thing that disappointed me was the presence of motion blur on subjects that were not moving all that quickly across the frame.

Internet sharing, or the ability of your phone to function as a mobile hotspot, has also been added in Mango and works perfectly on the Titan. You can share your data connection with up to five wireless devices and choose whether to secure it with a password or just keep it open.

All you need to know about the Titans software and performance can be boiled down to just one sentence: it runs Windows Phone 7.5. Responsiveness, screen resolution, and the vast majority of preloaded capabilities are identical between the Titan and any other handset running the Mango update. HTC throws its own Hub into the mix, but all the features that it adds (photo enhancer, notes, stocks, and news apps) are also available on all of the companys (HTC) Mango-updated smartphones.

As to the experience of using Windows Phone 7.5 itself, it is highly impressive. From its inception, Windows Phone has been wonderfully responsive and the update has simply improved the already superb OS. Email threads are a major advance for what was already a very attractive email client and the Twitter and LinkedIN integration throughout the OS keeps Windows Phone right up to date with the competition; The foundations of Windows Phone remains as solid as ever.

Conclusion:

The build quality of the Titan is as good as, if not better than any other phone in the companys recent portfolio, while the improvements in Mango have pulled Windows Phone 7 right up alongside the best in the mobile business in a number of important areas.

In terms of the size the 9860 is 120 x 62x 11.5mm and weighs in at just 135g. It feels comfortable to hold and although slightly longer than other BlackBerry devices due out or already in the market, it does not feel too big when carried in your pocket.

The screen is a beautifully responsive TFT capacitive touchscreen with capable of displaying an ultra-crisp 16million colours. It is 3.7inches in size and includes an optical trackpad and is capable of Multi-touch input and has a proximity sensor and accelerometer sensor built in. Granted these are now standard amongst touchscreen smartphones now, but it is refreshing to see RIM at least trying to keep up with the competition.

The internal memory on the 9860 is 4GB with support for 32GB microSD cards and hurrah! The 9860 actually has the microSD card slot in a position that makes hot swapping cards possible. They have not hidden it underneath the battery or beside the SIM card.

Connectivity is something everyone buys a BlackBerry device for and the 9860 comes with HSDPA (14.5Mbps) and HSUPA (5.76Mbls) support as well as Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP. The device is supposed to support NFC upon release but our evaluation unit does not seem to support it. In terms of wired connectivity the device uses microUSB for charging and synchronising with BlackBerry Desktop Manager. The 9860 also supports GPS with A-GPS also supported.

I was desperately holding to the hope that one of the new BlackBerry devices would come running the QNX operating system as found on the BlackBerry Playbook. Unfortunately this is not the case. The 9860 comes with OS7 which although an improvement over OS5, still leaves BlackBerry somewhat behind the market leaders. That being said, the on screen keyboard on the 9860 is rather good. When holding the device upright (portrait) it can be a tad fiddly when responding to longer emails or texts, but once switched sideways (landscape) the keyboard becomes much roomier and easier to manage, in fact it becomes almost easy.

The camera on the 9860 is a low 5MP one with autofocus (and continuous autofocus), Geo-tagging and face detection. There is no secondary camera but the primary does support video and can record up to 720p. Check out the pictures and videos we took by visiting our 9860 Wiki page; here. (Link to be added).

The 9900 battery is not great, it is no big secret, however the battery on the 9860 seems to be an improvement. During testing I was able to get 2 days of life from the Li-Ion 1230 mAh battery. That included some Facebook and Twitter time, Email usage, BBM and of course my new favourite the 3D Rollercoaster 2 game available from BlackBerry App World. And yes, Wi-Fi was on during the full 2 days.

All in all the 9860 is great BlackBerry device. It looks from distance like it should belong with the Storm family but as mentioned it luckily leaves that stigma behind. It now sits in the Torch family and performs as a BlackBerry should. It would have been nice to see QNX on this phone especially with screen size taken into consideration but I guess we will just have to wait a little while longer for that.

Review written by Kristian Wingfield-Bennett

]]> http://support.yourhsc.com/blog/2011/09/19/blackberry-torch-9860-review/feed/ 1