Whats your Widget..!!

At a glance what you will notice on the N97’s huge screen is something new to S60,the feeling is more like when you’ve shifted from XP to Vista,you will see Onscreen widgets.Now unlike the old (almost same on each and every s60 3rd Edition device)home(Standby) screen,the new screen is customizable on the N97,you can decide what to see and what to avoid,the new OS will allow the user to customise the home screen widgets as you wish with easy interactive touch movements.

What is a Widget?

A widget is a time-saving element of the device’s user interface, a visual building block that provides an easily accessible single interaction point with an application, which holds and processes data. There are thousands of types of widget.

The team behind the Nokia N97 have launched a competition to find the most creative, innovative and useful widget to stick on the new device’s home screen. The winner will receive a production-mode N97 ahead of public release. The widget will also be fully produced so you can spot your handiwork on N97s world wide! Luring enough?

How to Participate?

Download the design package, design your widget and upload it for others to rate. Keep visiting the site to log your opinions on others' offerings as the ten highest-rated designs will go in front of a panel of judges selected from the Nokia N-series team. The panel will choose the best home screen widget based on creativity, usability and quality of design. And programming skills are not required, even a novice like me can do it!

Prize: The winning designer will receive a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with a working version of the winning widget
Deadline: The closing date for the competition is February 27, 2009. The winner will be announced on this site on March 13, 2009.

Here are some real nice ones submitted by amateurs like you and me, and you can find more at the competition website. Inspiring enough?

Submit yours for a chance to win the Nokia N97 and good luck! Of course, I am making mine right now!

Eye Candy...!!

As demanded by you guys, these are some sample pictures which have been taken from an N95 which also has a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens. The actual size of these pictures is far far bigger than what blogspot can accomodate on the page, thus for your convenience, I have given links on every picture to click and lead you to the actual size.

Pure treat for the eyes, isn't it?

Search Google for more and more images, or lazy souls like me can click here to directly visit this website with many luring pictures clicked by an N95! Can it get better? Yes it just did!

Picture Perfect...!!

Talk about the 416×352 resolution of the N80 and N90, and for such a long time, successive flag ship phones had to endure with 320 x 240. Nokia have understood the importance of fitting a High-end cam into their flagship device while many other touch device competitors forgot to do so.Also this is a perfectly timed decision taken to keep the existing Nokia multimedia fans sticked to the N-series in the future too.

The N97 has 640×360! Not Nokia’s highest, the internet tablets have that point; but it’s a small leap in the right direction. It’s higher than the iPhone’s 480×240 but MORE IMPORTANTLY, the aspect ratio is TRUE 16:9 widescreen. This is absolutely fantastic because which means you have a more effective use of the 3.5 inch display when viewing widescreen videos, i.e. No/less BLACK BARS. The move to true widescreen is also important considering YouTube’s evolution to 16:9 true widescreen, so newer YouTube videos can be seen in their full non-letter-glory that you would get when viewing on a standard 4:3 screen.


Combined with the sizable collection of videos the N97 can carry, (if a 90minute DivX video takes around 700mb, that’s at least 22 movies stored on a 16GB memory card alone! 68 films if you want to fill up the entire memory!)makes the N97 quite practical portable video player . Fingers crossed the N97 meets the 4.5 hours of video playback. This possibly means 270 minutes giving you enough time to finish any single part of the Lord of the Rings and still have juice left for other applications.

Higher pixels means also means richer visual experience for viewing photos and browsing the internet. You’ll see more of your photos not just physically, but more detail, and this is especially useful when browsing the internet as you can read the small font text without necessarily having to zoom in as required on lower resolution devices.

I’m sure it will be a great pleasure to do the Photo/Videography on a 3.5 inch widescreen camera view,I just can’t wait to have that experience.Also the camera controls will be more maneuverable with the touch controls than using the navigational D-pad to scroll along the menus.T camera would produce more realistic and Lively images with the help of Carl Zeiss lens and picture color renditions.

Okay mobile movie lovers,its time to setup your budgets for mid 2009.

Are you game?...

N-gage needs no introduction to any of us. All of us, in our boring lectures when half of the class is asleep, while going to office in the car, sitting idle waiting for someone, workless, have had our Nokia phones and gamed away to winning glory! Nokia N97 is the next big N-Gage device. One gets nothing less than astonished when discovers the possibility of widescreen gaming, touchscreen games, accelerometer support and the possibilities that the N97 brings for N-Gage games.

The Future of N-gage :
With the N97 changing things for N-gage through the introduction of new kinds of games and technologies, next year promises to be pretty exciting. Context is king in that location is going to play a much bigger part in gaming in the future. Music too will have tighter integration and Nokia is already in the process of developing new music based initiatives.

N-gage on the Nokia N97 :
In the next video, we can hear Jaako Kaidesoja, vice president of N-gage, to find out what we might expect when it launches . As he says, it is the first device which gives you the full scale and capabilities to run the most amazing of the games. Widescreen games is the first thing, with current and future games getting the full widescreen treatment. Touch, and tilt based gaming is also on the cards. All sounds pretty exciting.

The future of N-Gage sounds good, but will it be enough to compete with the variety of new iPhone games being released.

I think YES.

What do you think ?

What Nokia N-97 has and 'The Phone' does not!

So here is what 'The Phone' has:

• Touch Screen
• Accelerometer Sensor for Auto Rotate
• Bluetooth - Headset support only
• 2 MP Camera
• Built in GPS Receiver
• Audio/Video Player

And what is missing?

• Push mail: Push Mail's 'always on' capability is the most important feature of any business phone!
• Video Recording: No multimedia phone is complete without video recording!
• Sharing files using bluetooth: Works with only a few wireless headset and does not permit sharing files and pictures!
• No external memory: Well, am sure you will say you just not need it, so do with the 'limited' space you have!
• Non removable battery: After a year or two, battery capacity reduces, but a change is just not possible!
• No cut, copy, paste: And how do you think you will edit documents?

And there is more:

• Cannot be used as a wireless modem
• No speed dialing
• No SMS forwarding
• No MMS sending

And what does Nokia N97 have? All this, and when I say all this, I mean EACH and EVERY feature I just mentioned, and much more:

• Does not just have a video recorder, but the camera is 5MP, carl zeiss optics, autofocus with flash, plus a secondary videocall camera
• Does not just have external memory compatibility upto 16 GB, but has 32 GB of internal memory too
• And did I mention a QWERTY keyboard other than just the touchscreen
• SMS forwarding, MMS sending, Speed Dialing, and yes, can be used as a wireless modem
• Nokia is known for its batteries, and yes, unlike 'The Phone', they are removable
• And bluetooth is not just for its own headset, but you can share all you want

Need I say more? Or is there even a need to justify or argue which one's better, and why? I guess smartphone users are smart enough to make their own choice! As you can see, I have made mine...

PS: People who had difficulties in identifying 'The Phone' can go bite raw apples, as for them, the grapes are sour!