Nokia Announces 3 New Smartphones

Nokia 700

With the announcement of Symbian Belle, Nokia has announced three new smartphones aimed at low to mid-rang audience.

Nokia said that all three new smartphones will boast Symbian Belle – and availability is said to be made by fourth quarter of the current year.

Nokia 700, as Nokia claims, will be world’s smallest smartphone. Nokia specifically states: “the most compact touch monoblock smartphone in the market right now”.

Despite the minimalistic outlook, Nokia 700 will sail with:

• 1GHz processor,
• 3.2-inch ClearBlack AMOLED display with Corning® Gorilla® Glass
• 2GB of user memory plus a MicroSD card slot for up to 32GB of extra storage.
• 5-megapixel full focus camera with an LED flash
• GPS
• a compass,
• Bluetooth
• FM radio
• WiFi and up to HSUPA 3G data transfers
• 7.3 hours talk-time or up to 465 hours on standby

Availability and Price: The Nokia 700 is expected to retail at around PKR 34,000 and is expected to become available in the third quarter of 2011.

Nokia 701

Nokia Introduces Symbian Belle

It seems that Nokia has been playing hard with it’s smartphone OS, that is, Symbian. Just weeks after the Symbian Anna, we have another update in hand for Symbian phones. This time it’s called Symbian Belle – weird naming convention one would say.

We know that Nokia’s long term plan is to shift all high-end smartphones to Windows platform, however, Symbian will be kept alive, till 2015 at least, for relatively lower-end devices.

Announced at an event in Hong Kong, Symbian Belle is said to incorporate significant improvements in it’s previous version, with new apps, more flexibility in customization and added with new widgets.

User interface is altogether revamped, which now more looks like Android. Built-in NFC support in Symbian Belle, that is deeply integrated into operating system, is something that Nokia is using as headlines.

The fruit of Nokia-Microsoft partnership has started surfacing as Symbian Belle will offer seamless integration with Microsoft Linc, Sharepoint, OneNote, Exchange and a new system called PowerPoint Broadcaster.

Nokia says that Symbian Belle will be available on all new/upcoming Symbian smartphones and will be made available as a free update (just like it did for Symbian Anna) for users with phones running Symbian Anna (Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7, Nokia E6, Nokia X7 and Nokia 500), a pleasing announcement for many.

For sure, Symbian is maturing with time – but many believe it’s too late for Symbian to drag back customers from iOS or Android. Nevertheless, it’s a promising update for long time Nokia and Symbian Fans.

Bringing Windows Phone 'Mango' to Nokia developers

Today, Microsoft previewed the next major release of Windows Phone. Code named ‘Mango’, this newest release brings a number of substantial improvements in both the software platform and developer tools.

Jo Harlow, executive vice president for Smart Devices, explains today in Nokia Conversations that Nokia is planning to release its first Windows Phone devices based on Mango.

“We are very excited about our strategic partnership with Microsoft, and Mango is a great milestone for the first Nokia with Windows Phone devices,” said Harlow. “We believe Mango offers developers opportunities to create new mobile experiences leveraging both companies’ complementary assets while providing consumers with a new choice in mobile.”

Featuring over 1,500 new APIs, 16 new languages and hardware-accelerated IE9 and HTML5 support, Mango brings enticing new opportunities to developers. Updates for tools, such as enhanced debugging, emulator support with accelerometer, gesture support and profiling will also improve developer productivity.

Rather than simply create one high-end device, Nokia plans to develop and release a portfolio of products that address as many of our audiences and markets as possible. Knowing that Windows Phone represents Nokia’s primary smartphone strategy, all of Nokia's smartphone engineering resources are being prioritised to make the best hardware for the forthcoming Nokia with Windows Phone devices. Nokia will work closely with Microsoft to differentiate its devices with Mango by featuring its iconic hardware and services, while applying consistent design principles for a unique look and feel.

As Nokia embarks on the next phase of this partnership with Microsoft, we are beginning to put in place a number of activities that will help our developer community quickly prepare for the upcoming Nokia with Windows Phone devices. We recently published a technical article on the Community Wiki; and there will soon be a number of development guides that will help developers make the most of the apps they already have in Nokia’s application store. In the Projects site, members of the Nokia developer community are beginning to contribute some interesting examples that illustrate how to build apps for Windows Phone.

In the coming months, we will deliver regular updates from experts on both sides of this partnership to help Nokia developers make the transition to developing for Windows Phone. There will also be new improvements, new benefits and simplification to our Nokia developer support offerings, so please stay tuned.

To learn more, please watch this video where Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president in Windows Phone, shows off some of the new features coming in the Mango release of Windows Phone:

iPad 2 Official Introduction Commercial [Confirmed Launch March 11th]

Facebook Rolls Out Enhanced Commenting System

Facebook, in a latest development to make websites more social, has deployed commenting system for blogs and websites.

This commenting system will allow website owners to make it possible for their readers to comment on their websites using their Facebook or Yahoo IDs. Yes, Facebook comment system doesn’t allow comments with twitter, Google, name/website or anonymous IDs.

All comments posted on websites will be relayed on users’ Facebook feeds. Not only this, Facebook users will be able to comment on websites from their Facebook home/news feeds as well.

Comments will look like something following:

If you want to get these comments rolled out for your website, then click this link

A great tool to go ahead, However, before you get the plugin you may need to think about following:

• This comments system by Facebook can’t be backed-up, so there’s returning back. Once you integrate Facebook comments with your website then you won’t be able to get rid of it to revert back to your default commenting system. If you do so, you will lose all the comments.
• You may miss comments from those users who have Facebook blocked in their offices/schools.
• Not everyone would want to reveal their real identity while commenting
• Facebook comments accepts only Facebook and Yahoo IDs for commenters, no Twitter or Google IDs so far.
• Very limited number of comments are loaded first up. You will have to load more to see all the comments coming
• Users are reporting slower performance (in terms of load time) of Facebook comments’ system.

China blocks access to LinkedIn

(Fast Company) -- Users in China are reporting that access to LinkedIn has been blocked throughout the country. By all indications, it seems that the popular career networking site has run afoul of the country's infamous Great Firewall.
According to LinkedIn's Hani Durzy, the company is aware of a blockage in China and is "currently in the process of investigating the situation further."
The shutdown follows days of calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China, on the model of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Access to Twitter and Facebook has been blocked throughout China for some time; Chinese internet users seeking to use Twitter have been forced to access the site through difficult-to-use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
However, Chinese dissidents have another way of accessing Twitter... LinkedIn.
Use of LinkedIn, which is fully integrated with Twitter, was by far the easiest way to access Twitter in China. Messages can be easily read and posted through Twitter via LinkedIn.

One Chinese Twitter user who accesses both Twitter and LinkedIn through a proxy posted photos to Twitpic that seem to confirm a Chinese LinkedIn outage.
Adding credence to the LinkedIn-shutdown-to-block-Twitter strategy is the news that the Chinese government has started censoring the name of U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman from search results on the wildly popular homegrown Twitter/Tumblr clones Sina Weibo/QQ Weibo. Weibo means "microblog" in Chinese.
Huntsman faces widespread charges in China of support for the Jasmine Revolution after a citizen journalist spotted him watching a pro-democracy protest from within a crowd this past Sunday. Like any good American abroad, Huntsman was standing outside a McDonald's.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese dissidents have been disseminating calls to protest and organizing events via LinkedIn. Reuters notes that the LinkedIn outagecould hurt the firm's chances at an IPO:
"If the disruption for LinkedIn is permanent in China, it could hurt the company's prospects at an IPO as a ban would exclude the company from the world's largest Internet market--about 450 million users and growing."
"It certainly would be a negative in terms of the company's future growth and profitability," said Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida.
"This is something where investors would take it into account and be willing to pay a little lower price per share." Luckily for LinkedIn, China's Internet censors are notoriously fickle: Sites blip on and off the Great Firewall frequently, with no prior warning. Related: Fast Company's Anya Kamenetz recently interviewed LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman. Read more about the social networking site as part of our Most Innovative Companies of 2011 project.
Related: Fast Company's Anya Kamenetz recently interviewed LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman. Read more about the social networking site as part of our Most Innovative Companies of 2011 project.

Apple releases new MacBook Pro lineup

The new lineup of MacBook Pro notebook computers, Apple Inc features new processors by Intel and graphics chips made by Advanced Micro Devices.

The new MacBook Pros will be powered by Intel Corp s latest dual-core and quad-core chips which includes integrated graphics processing. More expensive versions of the MacBook Pro also include graphics chips from Advanced Micro Devices for added performance unlike the previous versions of MacBook Pro which used graphics processors made by Nvidia.

Apple s trend-setting personal computers are a high-profile battleground for chipmakers Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Intel supplied the MacBook Pro with a faster, compact input/output technology called Thunderbolt, which supports high-resolution displays and devices through a single port.

The price of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, with a full-size keyboard, seven-hour battery life and an aluminum casing, will start at US$1,199. Whereas the 15-inch MacBook starts at US$1,799 and the 17-inch is priced at US$2,499.

News of AMD s presence in the new MacBook Pros helped boost its stock 5.5 percent to $9.02. Intel s stock rose 0.14 percent to $21.17 and Nvidia s shares were up 1.13 percent at $22.36 following a 13 percent sell-off over the past two days.