Thursday, Oct 27, 2011
Gulf News
Dubai Eight months ago, tech pundits mused that Finnish phone giant Nokia may never find light at the end of the tunnel amid its declining share price.
After a sweeping reorganisation of the company, Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop answered critics yesterday with the much-anticipated launch of its Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone.
The unveiling of the first all-new Nokia Windows Phone before 3,000 delegates at the Nokia World conference in London, Elop said, represents a new dawn for the company.
“Lumia is light, it is a new dawn for Nokia and yet, these moments will continue,” Elop said on stage where a second smartphone, the Lumia 710, and four other Nokia mobile phones in the Nokia Asha line were also introduced to the world.
Elop was undeniably proud of the new phone that analysts have said may be a turning point for sluggish phone sales for the company amid fierce competition by Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry. Elop said the phone comes in cyan, black and magenta.
The phone builds upon similar features of the Nokia N9 launched in Singapore in June and features a bright 3.7-inch AMOLED screen placed into a single piece of injection-molded polycarbonate.
Elop said the new smartphone is the “result of consumer-led thinking.”
Nokia’s head of programme management Kevin Shields told delegates at the webcast rollout that the new Lumia 800 is a “beauty on the outside, beast on the inside” in reference to a list of new features that indirectly challenge competitors operating systems based heavily on apps.
Repeatedly noting that new innovations bring “the experience to the surface” of the screen, Shields said the new Lumia changes everything by doing away with app icons and replacing them with a handful of screen tiles that are instantly accessible.
“What you don’t see is a large grid of applications that sit there doing nothing,” Shields said. “I can see what’s going on without opening an application.”
Favourite tiles such as news, sports or social applications can be pinned on the screen for instant access.
Tiles
Shields said the tiles help create a “butterfly smooth experience that seems to glide across the screen.”
In addition to an improved faster camera with a 2.2 lens aperture and other features such as as Microsoft Office hub and an Xbox Live hub, Shields said the phone comes with Internet Explorer browser with the latest HTML 5 for easy mobile viewing of full internet pages.
Other next-generation offerings heavily touted by Shields included the new Nokia Drive, a free voice-guided navigation system as well as a Nokia Music feature called MixRadio, “a pre-set of mixes of full-length music” that are streamed free of charge to the phone.
Apparently taking direct aim at Apple’s iTunes, Shields said with a simple tap on a music tile on the Lumia screen, music begins to play and the tiles can be downloaded for listening offline.
“No sign up, no subscription, no log-in, no password,” he said of the mixed music feature.
“I think we’ve finally solved the mobile music problem.”
The Lumia 800 also includes an ESPN Sports hub for quicker access to teams, games, and scores and includes with purchase 25GB of storage on Microsoft Skydrive.
Shields said the Lumia “set a whole new standard for smartphones.”
The Lumia 800 should be offered for about $585 (Dh2,148), the company said.
By Derek Baldwin?Senior Reporter
Gulf News 2011. All rights reserved.
