Total chat site for users of phone services

Nokia unveiled two new 3G slider phones, the Nokia 6700 slide and Nokia 7230, made for the design-conscious consumer and optimized for socializing and sharing with those closest to you. 

The ‘all-you-can-eat’ music powerhouse, Nokia X6, now shipping.

The Nokia Comes With Music Flagship phone, the Nokia X6, is now available in selected markets. Through the ‘all-you-can-eat’ music offering the Nokia X6 pioneers new ways for the world to experience music. The Nokia X6 is expected to retail for approximately EUR 450, before taxes and subsidies.

Free Rihanna App available on Ovi Store and offers unique content and latest news.

Nokia launches the exclusive Rihanna App. Bringing fans closer to Rihanna, the new App will deliver news, music, photos and exclusive video content direct to Nokia’s entertainment-rich handsets including the Nokia N97, Nokia X6 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Video content available through the App will include live performance videos from Rihanna’s album launch event. Additionally, fans can access music samples, a Rihanna biography and photo library, and, when available, information on Rihanna’s forthcoming 2010 tour. The App content will be unavailable elsewhere and will be regularly updated for fans.

The App also provides a direct link to the Nokia Music Store where fans can download exclusive album content including a Nokia bonus track, Hole In My Head, written and produced by Justin Timberlake.

In addition, an exclusive Donni Hotwheels remix of Rihanna’s smash single, Russian Roulette, is also available to those who download her album, Rated R, exclusively via the Nokia Music Store.

On November 16, Rihanna performed tracks from her new album exclusively with Nokia. With a set list including former number ones Umbrella and Disturbia, Rihanna’s performance was streamed live and globally to her fans on every continent. The show included live Twitter commentary from music fans across the world. The Rihanna App and exclusive video content from the show is now live at www.nokia.com/rihanna.

To download the Nokia version of Rated R, complete with bonus track and exclusive remix, go to www.musicstore.nokia.com

Nokia makes walk and drive navigation free on its smartphones, doubling size of mobile navigation market.

Nokia has today announced plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps for its smartphones that includes high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost, available for download at www.nokia.com/maps. This move has the potential to nearly double the size of the current mobile navigation market. The new version of Ovi Maps includes high-end car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

“Why have multiple devices that work that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market ,” explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. “Nokia is the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world. Unlike the legacy car navigation manufacturers, we don’t make you buy maps for different countries or regions even if you’re only visiting for a few days. We offer both navigation and maps free of charge, with all the high-end functionality and features that people now expect.”

“The large-scale availability of free-of-charge mobile phone navigation offerings using high-quality map data will be a game changer for the navigation industry,” said Thilo Koslowski, Vice President Automotive and Vehicle ICT at Gartner. “Such offerings will accelerate mass market adoption for navigation solutions and shift innovation focus to location-based services that go beyond traditional routing benefits.”

For Nokia, removing the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians allows the company to quickly activate a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services. This is part of Nokia’s strategy to lead the market in mobile maps, navigation and location-based services. The move is also in line with Nokia’s vision that the next wave of growth will be centered on the location-aware, social internet — as the ‘where’ people are doing things becomes as important as the ‘what’ they are doing.

According to research firm Canalys, the number of people worldwide using GPS navigation on their mobile phones was approximately 27 million at the end of 2009. With this announcement Nokia potentially grows the size of this installed user base to about 50 million by enabling smartphone owners, with compatible devices and devices that will be made compatible shortly to activate free drive and walk navigation through a simple download of the new Ovi Maps. Nokia will further grow this base as it quickly adds more smartphones to the compatible devices list. Canalys also estimated in 2009 that the installed base of smartphones with integrated GPS was 163 million units worldwide, of which Nokia accounted for more than half (51%) having shipped cumulatively 83 million GPS devices.

“This is a game changing move. By leveraging our NAVTEQ acquisition, and our context sensitive service offering, we can now put a complete navigation system in the palm of your hand, wherever in the world you are, whenever you need it – and at no extra cost,” continued Anssi Vanjoki. “By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones we quickly became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. The aim of the new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation.”

By removing the added costs for consumers Nokia expects to fuel the take-up of mobile maps and navigation providing its ecosystem of partners with clear business opportunities:

- For operators:

Nokia believes it will enable them to offer their customers a complete car and personal navigation package as well as encourage the take-up of data plans. An additional benefit for operators is that Ovi Maps uses a unique hybrid technology that is optimized for use on a mobile network. By using advanced vector graphics, plus an intelligent combination of pre-loaded and online maps, the new version of Ovi Maps uses a fraction of the bandwidth of the bulky bitmap technology used by most mobile map providers.

- For 3rd party application developers:

Making navigation on a mobile as familiar as sending a text or taking a picture presents a huge opportunity as the customer base for additional location-based applications expands. Via the Ovi for Developers Beta Program, Nokia has given selected developers and publishers a preview of the Ovi APIs and SDK – Beta (software development kit) which will allow them to build such applications. These will then be made available through Ovi Store by Nokia.

Ovi Maps is immediately available for download for 10 Nokia handsets, including the popular Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia E72, with more Nokia smartphones expected to be added in the coming weeks. In the meantime, current owners of Nokia smartphones that are compatible with the new Ovi Maps can download it free of charge from www.nokia.com/maps.

From March 2010, new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with high-end walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost.

Ovi Maps covers more than 180 countries with car and pedestrian navigation for 74 countries in 46 languages and 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world. Lonely Planet and Michelin guides have information on more than 1,000 destinations globally.

Current list of compatible Nokia devices: Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia E52, Nokia E55, Nokia E72, Nokia 5230, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6730 classic and Nokia X6. For the latest device list, please go to http://www.nokia.com/maps

Nokia has today announced that since the 21 January 2010 launch of the new version of Ovi Maps with free walk and drive navigation, there have been over 1.4 million downloads. The one million mark was reached just one week after the launch.

“We’re averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day,” said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. “When we announced free walk & drive navigation we knew it would be a game-changer. The number of people now using their Nokia for navigation, and as a result looking for more location-aware software, is growing faster than even we predicted.”

The success of the new version Ovi Maps is a key part of Nokia’s strategy to lead the market in mobile maps, navigation and location-based services.  By leveraging its investment in NAVTEQ, Nokia has been able to remove the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians and is quickly activating a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services.

“This is great news for our 3rd party application developers.  Within a matter of days there is an installed base of more than 1 million active users all potentially hungry for new and innovative location-aware apps,” continued Anssi Vanjoki.  “For the operators too there is a growing opportunity to sell more data-plans and a complete navigation package to existing and new customers.”

As of 31 January 2010 the top five countries downloading the new version of Ovi Maps were: China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the download were: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97, Nokia 5230 and Nokia E72.

“There is a huge appetite for GPS navigation on mobile phones. We estimate there were already 25.9 million people actively using GPS navigation on their mobile phones at the end of 2009,” said Chris Jones, VP & Principal Analyst at research firm Canalys. 

From next month, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with high-end walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost. 

Ovi Maps covers more than 180 countries with car and pedestrian navigation for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries. There are more than 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world.  Lonely Planet and Michelin guides have information on more than 1,000 destinations globally.

MeeGo* enables an open ecosystem for rapid development of exciting new user experiences.

Global leaders Intel Corporation and Nokia merge Moblin and Maemo to create MeeGo*, a Linux-based software platform that will support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segments, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

- MeeGo offers the Qt application development environment, and builds on the capabilities of the Moblin core operating system and reference user experiences. Using Qt, developers can write once to create applications for a variety of devices and platforms, and market them through Nokia’s Ovi Store and Intel AppUpSM Center.

- MeeGo will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and governed using the best practices of the open source development model. The first release of MeeGo is expected in the second quarter of 2010 with devices launching later in the year.

- Nokia and Intel expect MeeGo to be adopted widely by global device manufacturers, network operators, semiconductor companies, software vendors and developers.

Gladinet Launches Cloud Desktop 2.0 to Enhance Security, Usability and Performance.

In the rough-and-tumble world of cloud storage, Gladinet http://www.gladinet.com is on a mission to turn the Internet into a virtual PC by integrating cloud services directly onto users’ desktops. With today’s release of Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0, the company moved one step closer to its goal.

Cloud Desktop is the world’s first ubiquitous cloud storage client, using Windows Explorer to access the cloud directly
from a PC desktop and move or store files to multiple cloud storage services at once with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. So it seems only fitting that Cloud Desktop 2.0 strengthens its industry-leading position by addressing the security concerns users cite as the deal-breaker when considering migrating to cloud storage.

“One of the major concerns of cloud storage users is security,” explained Gladinet SVP Business Development
Franklyn Peart. “How can users be sure hackers, service provider employees or anyone else can’t look at their files
when they’re online? Until now, that was a nagging question with no good answer.”

With the introduction of AES 128-bit encryption for files stored in the cloud, Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 is tackling
that concern head-on: The system simply encrypts users files on the storage client before saving them on the
servers in their encrypted form.

Gladinet didn’t stop at enhancing security with its first major version update, however. Cloud Desktop 2.0 includes a
variety of new features designed to provide better usability, performance, stability and scalability. The new
Gladinet Management Console completely reworks and consolidates all the management interfaces for the Cloud
Desktop virtual directory manager, task manager, settings manager, backup manager and audit tracing, and the new Cache Manager offers smart caching and granular cache controls.

Cloud Desktop 2.0 is considerably more robust than the system’s earlier iterations, transferring terabytes of data
with dozens of upload and download threads, maintaining transfer rates of up to four megabytes per second. To do so,
the system uses mirrored folders to pre-cache files and utilizes Smart Bandwidth Control to allocate more bandwidth
to the browser when it is in use; once the browser is idle, Cloud Desktop resumes normal transfer speeds.

Although Gladinet Cloud Desktop has always been fully integrated with the major cloud storage providers –
including Google Docs, Google Picasa, Google Docs for Google Apps, Windows Azure Blob Storage, EMC Atmos Storage, Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Box.net and AT&T Synaptic Storage — with Cloud Desktop 2.0, Gladinet has provided enhancements for Google Picasa, Docs and Apps. The system now supports any file type in Google Storage, while the new Cloud Explorer allows the user to set access controls and share files with Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage.

“We are excited to introduce Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 as the industry-leading, ubiquitous cloud storage access
solution,” stated Peart. “Gladinet developers will continue to operate at the forefront of the cloud industry and set
the standard in cloud storage clients.”

About Gladinet

Founded in 2008, Gladinet launched its cloud services in spring 2009 with the release of its flagship product, Gladinet Cloud Desktop, which leverages the power of the Internet as a virtual PC, providing users the convenience of a virtual disk drive. An enabler of Web 3.0 technology, Gladinet is changing the way small and medium-sized businesses access and use cloud storage through its widely accepted, open-platform cloud storage services. Learn more at http://www.gladinet.com.