Fansite of Nokia professional training

This week’s Report of the Week for the N-Gage campaign comes to us from nikhilchawla. In this report I learned that card-playing is a traditional activity on Diwali. Who knew? I have to say I didn’t — my knowledge of Indian culture is woefully shallow. Luckily, our Ambassadors from India, especially nikhilchawla, are never short on interesting details — whether it is about the latest S60 campaign or the culture/history/food/scenery of their country. Read all about it here:

N-Gage ‘Reset Generation’ The long lost love by nikhilchawla

N-Gage has change manifolds from where it started as a hardware device in 2003 and now to the World’s most exciting mobile gaming platform’s.A week back when the N-Gage ‘Rest Generation’ campaign was launched it got me back on my toes as it came after a long break from the previous campaign atleast for the Indian S60 Ambassadors and to top it all it proved to be one of most thrilling and n-gaging one.
Report:
It was at my place last Tuesday,We were having Diwali celebrations so I had kept a re-union for my schoolmates and the very same day the campaign was launched.After greeting and meeting all of them we started playing cards the traditional game on a Diwali night.While,playing cards we all started chatting and catching up with each other as all of us were meeting after a long time.That’s when I told my friends about the S60 Ambassador program and the campaigns I had been a part of previously.My friends who already knew about it asked me,so whats up with you these days?What are your reports all about this month?I asked a gaming freak friend of mine,Do you remember the Nokia gaming phone I used to have way back in school days?He replied “oh yes! N-gage your beloved phone for 3years how can we forget about it and we all laughed about it.Now,I had got the platform to inform them about the new generation of N-Gage(the transformation of N-Gage from console to ‘N-Gage’ the online community/platform).I asked each of then who had an N-Gage compatible phone if they had played any games on it and to my surprise most of them said yes! Now the next question was what all and which one of them did you like the most,their replies proved that I wasn’t wrong in thinking that most of the people live in a technological oblivion.All of them had played just three games that came pre-installed with the likes of their N95’s,N81’s,N82’s etc as nobody had ever updated it for the obvious reason that they weren’t aware of it.
Then,me being an s60 ambassador led from the front and gave them a demo of the actual N-Gage that is currently available and how it works as an online community + a game parlor.At present there are 21 games available and installed on my phone,so that was 7 times more than what they had in their respective phones.Rather,than asking all of them to try it on my phone I updated N-Gage in their phones for all of them using WiFi at my place.
Now came the time for the big thing ‘Reset Generation’ and the reason I asked them all to play it and not the other games was not just because of the campaign but also because its got so much to offer.To start with a charming princess to save;10 heroes to choose from;23 items to take care of;multiple playing options like - single player,quick match,online and numerous levels.After playing it anybody would agree that it is aptly titled ‘Reset Generation’ as for us it reset our lost love for gaming and kept us ‘N-Gaged’ till 6 in the morning.

Thanks to Raj,Dan,Stefan and everybody else I am missing out on from the S60 team for making our festive celebration so special.Keep up the good work and your hard work always shines in your results.

And thanks to you nikhilchawla for a great report! Your Stars Wars AC will be coming to you from Mike Macias.

A reminder to our N-Gage Ambassadors — the N-Gage campaign is inclusive of *all* N-Gage titles. We happen to be excited about “Reset Generation”, but that doesn’t mean you have to WoM about that one. Whatever game you like, tell your friends. And then (whenever possible) tell us what you said, where you said it, and what the reaction was to what you said.

If you haven’t already signed up for the campaign, you can sign up here.

A recent post by Jill at SquareTrade got me thinking about something I usually don’t: cell phone protection plans. I’ve never considered these plans and I’m pretty sure I never will. But I tend to baby my cell phone. And most people don’t…

Each of the Big Four phone carriers has some sort of cell phone insurance plan. Basically, you pay a set fee each month, and a deductible when the unthinkable happens. You then get a new/refurb phone, and everyone’s happy, right? Not necessarily, if you look at your actual cost for the replacement.

So let’s say you were six months into your contract and you lose your phone. Factoring in monthly costs and the deductible, it would end up costing you:

Verizon: $4.99 per month * 6 months + $50 deductible = $79.94
“Asurion may fulfill claims with new or refurbished equipment. In general, claims are fulfilled with the same make and model you claim. If this is not possible, a like-kind make and model will be substituted. Color, feature and accessory compatibility are not guaranteed.”

T-mobile: $4.79 per month * 6 months + ($40 or $90 or $130 deductible) = $68.74 or $118.74 or $158.74
“Receiving a replacement phone? Your replacement device may be new or remanufactured.”
Basically the highest-end smartphones such as the G1 have a deductible of $130, middle-tier and up is $90, and the bottom of the barrel phones (RAZR v3) are $40. Seems like most phones (naturally) fall into the middle-tier category.

AT&T: $4.99 per month * 6 months + ($50 or $125 deductible) = $79.94 or $154.94
“Claims may be fulfilled with new or refurbished replacement equipment. Phone color, brand, model and features may be different and accessory compatibility is not guaranteed.”
Highest tier smartphones (newer Blackberries, AT&T Tilt, etc) are $125 while everything else (even smartphones like the Blackjack II) are $50.

Sprint: $4 per month * 6 months + $50 deductible = $74.
“Replacement equipment may be the same or comparable equipment—like kind or quality—with similar features as your original equipment.”
Cheapest of the bunch, and you can also submit 3 claims a year vs the 2 for everyone else.

So the bottom line is that the protection plans ain’t cheap.

In the midst of my digging, I discovered that the same company, Asurion, handles all the phone claims for these four companies. It’s pretty interesting how the prices can vary pretty widely - who would’ve expected that Sprint would have the absolute cheapest cell phone protection plan, anyway? (at least out of the phone carriers)

There are always other options, however. As Jill mentioned, you could go with a third-party protection plan (SquareTrade), which would run you $4 a month + $50 deductible for accidental damage = $24 or $74 in six months, depending on whether you lost your phone or dropped it down the toilet. Although one nice benefit is that you won’t get a refurb back. (side note: I haven’t used SquareTrade’s service, nor am I endorsing it or any other carrier’s insurance plans)

And of course there’s always Best Buy (depends on the price of the phone, a rough estimate would be around $40-50 bucks for 2 years coverage), Circuit City, and the other fun retailers. Actually, on second thought, maybe not Circuit City.

It’s my favorite report to date. This week’s “Report of the Week” comes from a relatively new Ambassador named “oddsocks” who is tearing up the Amby team with good writing and funny anecdotes. Check it out:

Nokia Maps Out a Date
By oddsocks

It started off as a usual Monday evening. I picked up my picture-show pal and headed off to watch a movie as we did every week. I borrowed a friends Jeep since mine was back home in my garage awaiting to be welded back together.

I picked her up and she questioned why I got rid of my Jeep to only get an older, dirtier and more importantly taller one that made it even harder for her to climbing in to. I smacked the pedal of the 304 stuffed in the front end and shot back “it’s got a V8, nuff said”.

On our way, the dummy light on the gauge blinked up and advised me that she was thirsty. I looked at Nokia Maps, saw the gas station POI and drove to it. Topped up the tank and started back on the way to the movie theater. This is when she piped up and said she was thirsty (and hungry) too. I raised my arm to show her the restaurants we were passing by, she didn’t want any of that stuff but she didn’t know what she wanted.

Frustrated, I took out my E71, pulled up Maps and ran a search for local eateries. I spouted off the local ones and read the ’style’ from the category listings; “Thai? Italian? Greek?” Her eyes widened. I hit ‘Call’ in hopes to get reservations, she motioned to me to hang up and then motioned what seemed to be her milking a cow. I hung up and asked what in the world she was doing; apparently that was her impression of controlling a steering wheel. I told her that’s why I was driving. Hit “Drive To” and took “her majesty” to eat.

While she was busy filling herself with souvlaki, I pulled up movie listings and times using UCWEB6, read some reviews of the movies to watch and then picked a movie and time. Body of Lies. 8:15. I calculated a route and checked the ETA in order to get a better estimate of when we should be leaving. I polished off a Budweiser as she scraped the plate clean. We dropped coin and then headed out. I followed the directions to the local movie theater I had previously scoped out. Flashed my movie watcher card and headed in.

After 2 hours of pure excitement and thrill we sauntered out of the theater. “Ice cream” she whispered to me as if to make it seem I could read her mind. “Wanna get some ice cream?” I instinctually asked her. She winked. I searched Nokia Maps yet again for a local Baskin Robbins and directions. She commented “stop playing with your stupid phone and let’s go!”. “Oh I’m sorry, did you want me to magically know all the locations of the gelato joints around here?” I turned my phone to her and showed her the search results for Baskin Robbins”. She hit my arm. We headed to flavor country and devoured a chocolate banana sundae large enough to feed a small village.

I dropped her off and as she was leaving she said to me that next time I had to leave my phone at home. I responded that “an S60 Ambassador would never do such a thing. Besides, without it we would probably have run out of gas, not eaten, been late for the movie and sat in a cold Jeep while it rained…unless of course she wanted to walk”. I winked at and hugged my E71. She slammed the door and blew me a kiss.

Another successful (?) evening thanks to Nokia Maps.

Thanks oddsocks! As a reward for being selected “Report of the Week” we’re sending out an N82 (oddsocks already has an E71 and we have a few pre-loaned N82s from the “Share” campaign way back, so why not?) Tune in Monday for the N-gage Report of the Week…oddsocks has now set the bar very high!

S60 Blogs will be down due to scheduled maintenance work next weekend, November 8 - 9. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused!

• Saturday 8th Nov: approximately 8 hours between 4am and 4pm (GMT)
• Sunday 9th Nov: approximately 9 hours between 4am and 10 pm (GMT)

During the recent SmartPhone Show 2008 in London we were showing off the S60 5th Edition software on new Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic.  I expected a lot of folks to be interested in the touch enabled User Interface and I was certainly not disappointed in the reaction from the crowd.  However, what did surprise me was the interest in some of the other things we talked about. 

It seems that a lot of folks tends to equate S60 with Nokia products and assume that the only option for getting content like music and videos for playback on the device is through a Nokia channel like OVI and the Nokia Music Store. 

That is certainly a great option, but when they saw how easy it is to use any of a number of commercial sites for acquiring music in addition to the Nokia Music Store, that’s when the eyes opened wider and the questions started to fly.  MP3 was an expected format, along with M4A and eAAC+, but not so many knew that WMA playback is now part of the S60 Music Player’s capability (originally announced in Cannes in Feb. of 2005). 

For example, the Rhapsody music store was dealing up Britney, Coldplay, Jason Mraz, M.I.A, Ne-Yo, Nickelback and Pink in .wma files that included Windows DRM, and they played like a dream on the S60 5th Edition product as well as the S60 3rd Edition FP2 devices we were displaying.   

Another thing that was interesting to showgoers was the use of Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) for quickly and easily moving music or video content using either Windows Media Player or the stand-alone clients provided by the content shops themselves.

Amazon’s Video on Demand service was the source for some TV episodes of The Office, Heroes, My Name is Earl, and Eureka and the combination of the easy transfer of video  and the beautiful playback experience on the 3.2″ nHD (640 x 360) 16mil color display of the Nokia 5800 really got some attention.  The .wmv files with Windows DRM were handled perfectly by the S60 Media Player.

The rankings for the “Files on Ovi” campaign in SouthEast Asia show a woman on top of the heap for the first time in the history of Ambassador-land. SheWhoWearsRed is numero uno. Here’s the full Top 10 for Nov 6th:

10. maswilbilili
9. mikeyfocus
8. pelosh
7. strikeeagle
6. silentkvght
5. silverwind2712
4. fredrico
3. s60fanboy
2. bbongman1001
1. shewhowearsred

The Top 50 at the end of the campaign (Jan 2nd 2009) will earn rewards…

A couple of days ago I was very happy to have a chat with Aron Kozak from Qt to talk about what they do at Qt Software. Like many of you already know Nokia announced the porting of Qt to S60 a couple of weeks ago.

If you are interested in learning more about Qt, an early technical preview of Qt for S60 is available for download from Qt Software website. The first production release of Qt for S60 will be available in the second quarter of 2009.

We did the podcast using Skype, so at times the sound quality might not be optimal. Apologies for that!

Download in MP3 64kbps Format | (7:30 - 3.44 MB)

Download in AAC+ 32kbps Format | (7:30 - 1.72 MB)

Aron Kozak works in comms for the Qt Software unit of Nokia, which was previously known as Trolltech (before being acquired). Aron has been doing high tech marketing and communications for almost 10 years, and is still loving it. He is a Canadian living in Oslo, Norway and passes his time with his family, friends, and getting out to the curling rink whenever he can.

The Nokia 7100 and 5130 battle it out for budget phone supremacy.

Geez. Six new Nokia models in one day, with one common theme: they’re all budget phones. The two best of the worst include new phones from the XpressMusic (fondly called the XpressPlastic series on this blog until this year) and Supernova series (a strictly middle-of-the-road collection of handsets). Inside: a look at the Nokia 5130 and 7100.

Nokia’s cheapo phones have really come a long way. While the company still makes tons of phones that come loaded with the bare minimum of features and look like they were produced in the ’70s, handsets like the new 7100 Supernova demonstrate why Nokia is still king of the emerging markets. I have to admit, the 7100 actually looks like a decent phone. Stylish, even.

For 75 euros ($97.50 USD, unsubsidized price), you get a slider that has that 5800 XpressMusic/Tube look, a 1.3 megapixel camera, an FM radio, MP3/AAC ringtones, QVGA screen (65k colors supported), and even Bluetooth. It’s pretty darn good for entry level.

The only real flaw I can see with the 7100 is the decided lack of a good battery: Nokia stuck a BL-4S, which is only good for up to 3.5 hours of talk time.

Release date for the Nokia 7100 Supernova: Q4 2008.

At 90 euros, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is the most expensive of the bunch. Like several other phones in the XpressMusic series, the 5130 comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD support, 2 megapixel camera, and an MP3 player. But at this price point, you also get a couple bonus features: quad-band GSM connectivity, and 6 hours of battery life. Oh, and the retail package also includes a free* 1 gig microSD card.

According to the press release, there’s a dedicated music key. And while those dots on the sides look like some onboard stereo speakers, it isn’t mentioned anywhere so we’ll have to call a negative on that one.

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is expected to be released in Q1 2009.

A new day has dawned in North America. New hope spreads across the land. And 9 new Ambassadors have launched themselves into the Maps “Top 25″ list. Here’s the latest tally:

25. Artdeguzman

24. radical24

23. rachaelsmom

22. baslanides

21. thenokiablog

20. Blaxx

19. MrRious

18. xtechx

17. obsidial

16. oddsocks

15. flyinace2000

14. baddogg79

13. rcadden

12. scion9

11. ming387

10. peterk

9. chalot

8. TennCC01

7. pnksniper

6. bugaboo

5. gianboy21

4. anotheran

3. ILikeMyNok

2. rnbrulz

1. LENNYBONS

If you haven’t already signed up to become an Ambassador, or if you have and you want to check out some of the reports and/or write your own, click here.  The Top 25 Maps Ambassadors as of Jan 2nd 2008 will earn themselves a year long trial of Maps Voice Guided navigation plus a City Guide of their choice.

It’s almost two weeks, since the S60 Blogs got revamped and now it’s the Chinese S60 Blog’s turn to be launched with a new layout and structure.

Originally the Chinese blogs site had considerably smaller number of blogs on the front door with a bit different design compared to the English S60 Blogs. Me and the Chinese team (special thanks to Daniel!) figured that we could combine all the four blogs into one to make it easier for our readers to follow us. In addition we wanted to let our bloggers have the possibility to write on a wider range of topics and not stick with what their blog was originally set up for.

If you master the Chinese language, go ahead and check out the new Chinese site and let the team in China know what you think!