One of Nokia Maps’ biggest strengths is its ability to pre-load maps. Once you know where you’re headed, you can download the maps for that city/country over the air or via your computer for free before you leave and you’ll never be in a situation where you’re lost, just because your phone can’t pull the maps via the internet connection.
Needless to say its also useful even if you have speedy data as you save on data costs and no matter how fast your connection, it’ll never beat local storage. Someone …

While Symbian Belle and the trio of new Nokia devices is the major story today, Nokia has also announced a premium NFC capable noise cancelling, in-ear type Bluetooth headset called the Nokia Essence. The Essence is Nokia’s highest performance in-ear headset to date that featuring a very impressive 99 per cent noise cancellation, all in a very small package.

In Hong Kong today, Nokia has just announced three brand new devices called the Nokia 600, Nokia 700 and Nokia 701. These new smartphones will run Symbian Belle out of the box and start shipping within the present quarter, which translates to about 35 days from today. The Symbian Belle OS will also be be available for existing Symbian^3 devices that were only recently upgraded to Symbian Anna.

All the devices announced today come with NFC, a pentaband radio, WIFi, HSUPA 3G speeds and Gorilla glass protected screens …

The best foursquare app for Symbian and MeeGo Harmattan devices (N9/N950) has just received an update that brings with it the ability to view photos associated with the venue and read and leave tips. You cannot add photos yet, but hopefully that’s coming in the next version.

Apart from that it now also remembers your search history and adds some UI modifications to make the app look even more pretty. If you are using a N950 or a N9, the 4squick experience should be better for you, although UI is …

The much awaited Symbian Anna update has finally started rolling out to all the Symbian^3 devices, which includes the Nokia N8, the E7, C7 and the C6-01. The update is being progressively rolled out across the world with the update already being available in the majority of European and Asian markets.
Symbian Anna is available as a 22+ MB over the air update or via the Ovi Suite application on the computer.  Post the update your firmware should read as 22.014. All the data, settings etc would be preserved on the …

We’ve heard from the major Android manufacturers, we’ve also heard from Nokia on the Google acquiring Motorola Mobility deal, but this time its the turn of Nokia’s CEO to chime in with a warning to Android manufactures to ‘watch out’.

Reuters has been able to track a few comments he made about the deal in a seminar in Helsinki, and here’s what he had to say:
“If I happened to be someone who was an Android manufacturer or an operator, or anyone with a stake in that environment, I would be picking …

In the last two years, Nokia has stayed clear of the Mobile World Congress main event, instead preferring to setup a parallel gathering in Barcelona on the sidelines. But it looks like 2012 will change all that. Not only will Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop keynote at the biggest mobile event of the year, but Nokia will also be exhibiting their latest and greatest work in a huge 2300 square meters space on the App Planet floor.

The huge Mobile World Congress overlay can only mean one thing, new Windows Phone devices. …

We’ve heard from the major Android manufactures on what they feel about Google’s Motorola Mobility acquisition, but it would be interesting to hear what Nokia has to say about this. After all, pre Feb 11 Nokia was contemplating putting its eggs in the Android basket. Lets look at their official statement:
“This further reinforces our belief that opportunities for the growth of Nokia’s smartphone business will be greatest with Windows Phone. This could prove to be a massive catalyst for the Windows Phone ecosystem. Additionally, with our respective intellectual property portfolios, …

In a very interesting development, Google has just announced that it will be acquiring Motorola Mobility, the handset and tablet division of the company for a cool 12.5 billion dollars. As you can probably guess the primary driver for Google was its inherent lack of patents and Motorola’s 17,000 patents with another 7000 in the pipeline were too good to pass. Motorola will be run as a separate business and will remain an android licensee and Google promises that there will be no change on how Android is run.

While this …

Nokia has rolled out a beta of the Ovi Store for the developer only Nokia N950. While the release is still beta, it does give us an idea of what the Ovi Store will look like on the not so widely available Nokia N9. The design of the store is based on the MeeGo Harmattan UI that can be seen on the rest of the device with certain similarities with the Ovi Store on Symbian.

The N950 will find the Ovi Store automatically, but if you don’t see it, you …