Early November this year, Samsung revealed that it will be launching its own mobile platform Bada in December 2009. The USP of Bada, according to Samsung, is that it will be bringing smart phone like experience to non smart phones. The launch day is December 8, 2009 and the launch will be happening in London. Everybody is eagerly waiting to see what this Bada is all about. Samsung’s Bada website also talks about major companies being a part of this event apart from journos. As per Bada’s website, “The event will have attendees like major game companies, one of the most popular SNS companies, and a powerful media company. The representative directors and VPs of each company are planning to share their experiences with bada and to showcase their products based on bada.Along with the partner presentations, details of bada platform and highlights of the key features will be introduced by a principal engineer from bada development team. The strategy of devices, application store and partnerships & alliances will also be announced.”

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Sydney checks out the Samsung DoubleTake, a side-slider messaging phone for Alltel.

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When it comes to Apple, something is always in the works. And the next-gen iPhone (or iPhone OS device) is no exception. This little nugget seems to confirm previous reports that something is coming. References to “iPhone3,1″ have surfaced in the usage records for iBART, a San Francisco transportation app created by Pandav.

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Nokia N97 sports a 5 mega pixel snapper with Auto focus and dual LED flash. The are seven scene modes excluding the Automatic mode. Also, you can change the color tones, do white adjustments, change ISO settings. The camera works really good when taking macro photographs, The might mode out put of the camera is ok not that great. I realized that the 5 mega pixel snapper in my N79 was better than that of the Nokia N97. Find below some of the pics clicked by the N97’s 5 mega pixel snapper.

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Here’s a little light reading for your holiday weekend: Last month, CNN Money ran a piece titled “Celebrities’ Favorite iPhone Apps.” It strikes me as bit of a misnomer though — Celebs? I’ve never heard of some of these people. Even so, it’s a fun little list of programs, with special appearances by some familiar faces. So is T-Pain’s top app “I Am T-Pain”? Is that Food Network celeb’s pick a cooking-oriented program? Well, that would be too predictable. But see what they did choose below.

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Nokia Music Store in Nokia’s answer to Apple’s iTunes. If you compare Nokia Music Store with iTunes you will realize that, Nokia Music Store has good number of tracks from different Genres including Bollywood, International and also many regional track listings. To access the Nokia Music Store from your desktop you need to have the Ovi player. The Ovi player, which doubles up as your media player as well as your interface to the Nokia Music Store is pretty easy to use and has the ability to replace your current media player (might not stand true for power users). Ovi player is an easy to use media player with clean interface. The layout of the Nokia Music Store is simple, on the top you have a the latest releases promos running then, in the middle column you will have Best Sellers, New Releases Bollywood and South. This is the looks and feel of the store when you access it from the desktop i.e. your Ovi player. One draw back of this application is that, it is only available for Windows based machines and not for people who have Mac OS or Linux on their machines, which is sad. Nokia needs to make this multi platform application. Also, if you wanna download songs you need to have PIN numbers that come with the vouchers. The vouchers are currently available only with select handsets and the dongs are not DRM free. So you need to buy a handset and then redeem that PIN, unless you figure out a way to get hold of these redeemable PINs and use them in the store. The tracks can be downloaded once you create a Nokia Ovi account and use your PIN that comes with the phone. Only the new Nokia phones (shown in the image) come with the PIN and if you see only the Music oriented handsets and multimedia handsets can download almost 50 to 100 tracks. The store lets you listen to the 30 second clip of the song before you finally want to buy it. After the 30 second clip you can also decide not to go for the song. The store does not let you download full albums, you have to download every single song if you plan to go for a particular album, which is really annoying at times. But, I give the benefit of doubt to Nokia because, majority of us would be interested in downloading particular tracks from an album. The downloaded tracks can be played on your PC (the one which you used to download) and can also be transferred onto your Nokia device. The tracks are not DRM free so whenever you try to play the tracks on any other device (i mean if transferred to any other device), it will connect to the Ovi store and process your log-in information and then only play the tracks. This holds true for every single track you transfer to any other device. The tracks can be transferred between the PC (which has the Ovi Player that was used to download the tracks) any number of times but can be burnt only 10 times into a disc. You also get album art along with the tracks and no points for guessing that, it is optimized for Nokia phones.The Nokia Music Store has a good and impressive database of Hindi, Bollywood, albums and South songs. It also has a good database of old Hindi songs and whatever songs you search for in this genre, you wont be disappointed with the results. The Store, when launched, had 30,00,000 tracks and I am sure that, this number has grown in the last two to three months. The store’s regional music data bas is also really cool. Huge Hindi and regional database of songs is one of the USP of the Nokia Music Store, which lets it score over the iTunes. The search feature in the Music Store is confusing. I am of the belief that you should just have one option for search, just write the song name and hit search, no need to provide space for artist as well as song name. Options like these should be there in advance search menu, which a user might use when needed.

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What Phones Are We Carrying and Why?

Thanksgiving 2009 Edition

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