NOKIA's Second Innings Begins With Brilliant Windows Phones - NOKIA LUMIA

Nokia launches its most awaited windows phones during the NOKIA WORLD 2011 event held at London on 26^th October 2011.

The two new windows phones from NOKIA announced with the theme “NOKIA LUMIA EASIER, FASTER, FUNNER” were NOKIA LUMIA 800, and NOKIA LUMIA 710. Both of these phones showcases a brilliant design work, LUMIA 800 looks alike N9 with a mono block and curved glass 3.7” 800*480 AMOLED capacitive display. While LUMIA 710 is being branded as “first affordable windows phone” features 3.7” TFT capacitive display.

Most importantly both of the devices are powered by 1.4 Ghz Single Core Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Processors for smooth and quick response.

NOKIA LUMIA 800

LUMIA 800 takes social networking to its next levels by intuitively integrating Facebook, Twitter, E-Mail, Chat, SMS for instant social and image sharing. And it also features Internet Explorer 9 and HTML 5 applications.

LUMIA 800 has “ NOKIA DRIVE “ as like OVI MAPS  for voice assisted navigation which is a major advantage as most of the existing nokia customers have been accustomed to OVI MAPS and would be happy to have the same maps with lot more features on windows phones.

When it comes to music, LUMIA 800 features “NOKIA MUSIC” enabling users to access over 14 million tracks divided across various catalogues based on locality. And the users have also have access to nearly 100 radio channels.

Hardware Specifications:

Networks : WCDMA 850/900/1900/2100, GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900

Speed : HSDPA cat 10: 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA cat 6: 5.76 Mbps

Display : 3.7” WVGA (800x480) AMOLED capacitive touch ClearBlack display with pinch    zoom, 2.5D curved glass seamlessly integrated to unibody

OS : Windows Phone Release - Mango

Memory : 16GB internal user memory, 512MB program memory

Camera : 8Mpix auto-focus Carl Zeiss, LED flash, Video capturing MPEG-4 720p @ 30 fps

Size/Weight : 116.5 mm x 61.2 mm x 12.1 mm (LxWxT) / 76.08 cc / 142 g

Connectivity : WLAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, micro-USB connector and charging, 3.5mm AHJ connector, Accelerometer, Proximity, Magnetometer, ALS

Processor : 1.4 GHz Single Core MSM8255 (WCDMA)

Audio : MP3 player, Audio jack: 3.5mm, Supported codecs: mp3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, m42, m4b, wma, EVRC, QCELP

Battery : 1450 mAh Music playback: up to 55 hours

NOKIA LUMIA 710

The first affordable windows phone LUMIA 710, allows the user to customize outward looks by exchanging back covers available in 5 different colors.

Like LUMIA 800, LUMIA 710 also enables social networking and instant image sharing by integrating Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Even LUMIA 710 supports “NOKIA DRIVE” for voice navigation and “NOKIA MUSIC” and radio channels for music and entertainment.

Hardware Specifications:

Networks : WCDMA 900/1900/2100, GSM/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900

Speed : HSDPA cat 10: 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA cat 6: 5.76 Mbps

Display : 3.7” WVGA (800x480) TFT capacitive touch ClearBlackTM display with pinch zoom

OS : Windows Phone 7.5 - Mango

Memory : 512MB RAM, 8GB storage

Camera : 5Mpix auto-focus, LED flash, Video capturing MPEG-4 720p @ 30 fps

Size/Weight : 119mm x 62.4mm x 12.5mm (LxWxT) / 81.1cc / 125.5g

Connectivity : WLAN 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, micro-USB connector and charging, 3.5mm  AHJ connector

Processor : 1.4 GHz Single Core MSM8255 (WCDMA)

Audio : MP3 player, Audio jack: 3.5mm, Supported codecs incl.: mp3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, wma

Battery : 1300 mAh

 

What important features NOKIA LUMIA lacks.

NO NFC.

NO HDMI output.

NO MICROSD slot

Pricing and Schedule

LUMIA 710 is priced around 270 Euros and is expected to hit European market by early November and later in India, Hong Kong, Russia, Singapore, and Taiwan by the end of 2011.

LUMIA 800 is priced around 420 Euros and will hit the shelves of UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Germany by early November and US market in the beginning of 2012.

Your first Windows Phone 7 App is just a few keystrokes away.

Hi, just by looking at the title of the article don't think that this isn't for you, in fact this article is intended for all those who is interested in knowing how a mobile app is being developed and deployed. And to understand this you need not be a hard core developer or not even required to be working in telecom domain, but just an urge to know and learn is enough.

Before actually getting into our first app development, let me brief you about the current state of the art of mobile phone application development. Mobile apps are being developed for multiple platforms and the current well known platforms which are buzzing with high app development activities are,
Apple iOS
Android
Symbian
Windows mobile.

All of these platforms have their own well established developer communities well known as "ecosystems", developers from these ecosystems constantly contribute to the community by developing apps which fall into wide range of categories, like Business, Entertainment, Utility, Multimedia, etc..
The well known app stores of today are OVI store by Nokia, iStore by Apple, Market Places by Microsoft and Android Market by Google.

In this article, I'm going to show you how an app can be developed for windows phone 7. I have chosen windows phone not because I'm biased, but simply because of the fact that it's very easy to set up the development environment, straight forward to understand, and very less development efforts.

So, Let's get started.
By the time this article was written Microsoft had just released beta version of Window Phone 7.1 developer tools. But since this is an introductory article to Windows phone app development I'm sticking to Windows Phone 7.0 development environment.

The minimum requirement to have windows phone 7.0 development environment is that your machine should be running at least windows 7 OS, next
1) Download SDK from here
2) Apply patch
By now your dev environment for windows phone 7.0 is up and running, The windows phone applications are Silverlight applications written in "C#" language and will be running on  silverlight framework

As our first application I'll be showing how to create a log in page for Facebook application.

After you've installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools, the easiest way to create your first application is to use Visual Studio.

1. On the Start menu, launch Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone .
2. On the File menu, click New Project .
3. From the project templates select Silverlight for Windows Phone and choose Windows Phone Application .
4. Name the project and click OK.

5.  A new Silverlight app tfor Windows Phone project is created and opened in the designer.

6.  Edit the user interface as required by adding controls from the tool box and editing "XAML"

7. Write event handlers for " Log in " and " Exit " buttons , In this example the user name and password is hard coded as "vdr" and "admin" for successful log in case.

<Code>

namespace FacebookLoginPage
{ public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
  { public MainPage()   {
     InitializeComponent();
   }   private void BTN_Login_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
   {
    if (TB_UserName.Text.Equals("vdr") && TB_Password.Text.Equals("admin"))
    {
     MessageBox.Show("Login Successful");
    }
    else
    {
     MessageBox.Show("Enter Valid Credentials");
    }
   }

   private void BTN_Exit_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
   {
    NavigationService.GoBack();
   }}}

 </Code>

8. That's all your app is ready to launch. Compile the code and run it  in windows phone 7 emulator.

Here are the screen shots of  application functionality.
1. Once the emulator comes up your application can be seen in the list of applications displayed. Here we can see  the app "FacebookLoginPage" which we have just created.

2. Launch the application, and you are directed to Home screen of the application.

3. Log in with valid credentials.

4. Successful log in.

5. Log in failed.

With this we have successfully created our first windows phone 7 app and also have reached the end of this article, but before putting a full stop I would like to highlight on few things.
Mobile phone application development is not a rocket science it's more of a fun filled and challenging activity. Since these days, as the mobile phones are becoming integral part of our lives the phone user base is also rapidly growing and this has exponentially triggered the need for various kinds of mobile apps for people working in diverse domains.
And it's time to put in all your creative ideas and create great applications to serve the human community in a much better way.

Good bye for now.