With last week’s announcement by Nokia of the Booklet 3G (Nokia’s own take on mini Laptops), we just might be inching closer and closer to true mobility in the PC world. The Booklet 3G is essentially a netbook – a mini laptop, but a little bit more.

One of the things that the Nokia Booklet 3G brings to the PC world was included in Wikipedia’s list of the seven things that a mobile can do that a PC cannot do – the ability to stay connected all the time. See our article on that, The Modern Mobile Phone is Inherently Superior in Capability than a Laptop or Desktop PC.

The new device from Nokia will have always-on connectivity, thanks to a built-in 3G/HSDPA modem and a SIM card slot. With this inclusion, Wikipedia’s list has been reduced to six and the PC has taken one more step towards becoming truly mobile.

Battery life does not make it to Wikipedia’s list, but I think that one of the advantages that a mobile has over the laptop is the fact that its battery life lasts much longer than that of a laptop – many times going for more than 24 hours before running out. This, my humble opinion, is part of what true mobility entails. The Nokia Booklet 3G, while still not offering battery life that is at par with mobile phones boasts an impressive 12hrs of battery life. More and more, battery life is increasing on laptops, thus making them all the more truly mobile.

As we become more and more mobile, one wonders, “Will the mobile phone replace the laptop PCs or will the PCs become 100% mobile to the point where mobile phones are no longer needed?”

My thinking is that both will compliment each other to give a truly mobile experience.

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The Nokia E72 continues the design tradition of the E71 with a candy bar QWERTY keyboard. It also has essentially the same software elements albeit enhanced – s60 third edition feature pack 2. The new kid on the block builds on the success of its predecessor, while at the same time bringing a few new things to the table. The upgrade in my opinion is not in any way revolutionary, rather, it is an incremental one.

This latest E-series device comes equipped with a 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash, an upgrade from the 3.2 megapixel camera on the E71.

Nokia has implemented an optical Navi key (track pad) in the centre of the D-pad of the device for a more intuitive and animated scrolling in the menu. While this is new for Nokia E-series, the technology is not new as this has been implemented by Samsung on a few of their devices.

One of the new things that the E72 brings to the table is somewhat of a surprise. There’s now a chat application pre-installed called Ovi Chat that is integrated into the contacts application. What it means is that from the contact menu you can chat on Yahoo and GoogleTalk. This is highly welcome as there will be no need to install a third party application to do chat.

Another surprise that the E72 springs on us is the inclusion of the N-series style image and video gallery. I am truly happy about this as I hope that it marks the end of the old and boring image gallery that E-series owners have been subjected to in the past.

Nokia messaging is on-board out of the box, with support for multiple e-mail accounts. The interesting part is that there is a lifetime license for Nokia messaging on the E72. There is also a life-time license for Ovi Chat.

Other upgrades include a digital compass embedded in the map application, QuickOffice editing suite is now up from the 4.3 version to 5.3 with support for Microsoft office 2007.

Is the E72 a true upgrade from the one year old and very successful E71? While I was hoping for the Symbian foundation OS, I am of the opinion that the E72 has come to take the shine from the E71.

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The update is available through the QuickOffice application on the phone. Launch the application and go to the Quick Manager area to initiate the upgrade.

I was able to successfully download an upgrade for the E51 with me.

If you own an E-series device, go ahead and download your free update right away.

Here’s the official press release:

Quickoffice® Offers Free Updates for Select Nokia® Eseries Devices

Latest version of Quickoffice, office viewing and editing software suite, now available for download via on-device, e-commerce portal Quickmanager™

Dallas, TX – June 15, 2009 – Quickoffice, Inc., the leading global provider of mobile office productivity software, today announced it will be offering free upgrades to the latest version of Quickoffice for users on certain Nokia Eseries phones. Currently this program includes the Nokia E51, E52, E55, E63, E66, E71 (excluding AT&T E71x model), E72, E75 and E90 devices.

Starting today, users of the above devices can download Quickoffice 6 as a free upgrade via Quickmanager®, Quickoffice’s secure on-device, e-commerce portal. Quickoffice 6 includes more advanced document viewing and editing functionality of Microsoft Office 2007 documents, ZIP file support, password-protected file handling, Excel 2007 chart viewing and multiple usability enhancements. Subsequent software updates released by Quickoffice for these select devices will also be available on a continual basis, including PowerPoint 2007 format support. Quickoffice 6 will initially only be available in English and a fully localized update will follow in the near future.

“Through our long-running partnership with Nokia, most S60 users have already benefited by receiving Quickoffice on their devices as part of their phone’s initial firmware, providing users with essential viewing and editing functionality of Office documents,” Gregg Fiddes, VP of sales and strategic partnerships for Quickoffice. “Recently, we’ve been working with Nokia to provide these S60 users with an easy and reliable way to update their Quickoffice software. Now, through Quickmanager, they can easily access the latest version and begin utilizing these new enhancements and feature improvements we’ve developed.”

To subscribe to an RSS feed of all Quickoffice’s news, please visit http://www.lewiswire.com/us/lewiswire/Quickoffice/c/117 and click subscribe. To sign up for Webinars from Quickoffice to learn about the latest product updates, visit http://www.quickoffice.com/webinars/.

About Quickoffice
Quickoffice is the world leader in providing mobile office productivity software and solutions for mobile devices. The company’s robust product suite includes its flagship smartphone office suite, Quickoffice® Premier, its Content Transformation Solution (CTS) infrastructure and the Bitflash® Rich Media Engine. Quickoffice Premier is an award-winning smartphone application that provides native viewing and editing of Microsoft® Office documents in over 47 languages. The software ships as an on-device solution on tens of millions of smartphone devices annually. The CTS client/server infrastructure offers network optimized, anytime, anywhere access to digital content and high-definition viewing of such content. The Bitflash Rich Media engine is the industry’s highest rated SVG-T engine providing rich user experiences on over 300M mobile devices worldwide. Platforms supported by Quickoffice include Symbian®, Palm ®, Blackberry®, iPhone® and Android. Privately held, Quickoffice Inc. is based in Dallas with offices in London, Ottawa, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

More information is available at www.quickoffice.com, twitter.com/quickoffice, and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Quickoffice/80930822730

Press Contact for Quickoffice:
Katie Eakins / Amy Robinson
LEWIS PR for Quickoffice
619-677-2700
quickoffice@lewispr.com

Quickoffice is a trademark of Quickoffice, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

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This is long overdue, in my opinion, given the fact that Nokia has a huge market here in Nigeria. I have always felt that Nokia downplayed the significance of the Nigerian market with their lack of support for the country in Nokia Maps.

However, the billboard claimed that Nokia Maps is “The First Mobile Navigation in Nigeria”. This is certainly untrue. I can rattle off my head at least two mobile navigation applications that made it to Nigeria before Noki Maps: Garmap for Mobile (which was launched a few weeks back), and Ceaser MobyMap.

This reminds me of Zain’s outrageous claim that with the launch of 3.5G on Zain Ghana, they “inaugurated the first 3.5G network on the continent outside South Africa“. Come on, guys!

The people at Nokia should have done a little research before making such a bold claim as this. Or are they just attempting to bully their way through with it?

Fact: Nokia Maps is NOT the first mobile navigaation in Nigeria. It is NOT even the second.

That false claim aside, we will be looking forward to trying out Nokia Maps in real life usage to see how it performs. Until then, if you have more information about Nokia Maps, you are welcome to share in the comments segment.

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One of the highlights of our visit was the demonstration of the navigation application on a Symbian-powered smartphone. Our initial impressions of the application based on the little time we spent with it are good.

First up, we noticed how simple it is to get the application up and running on the phone – a great plus for the application.

The next thing we are particularly impressed about is the user interface. The user interface, for the short time we spent with the application seemed intuitive, but we will give our final verdict on that after taking it through its paces in real life use. One thing is for sure, Garmap for Mobile got a lot of eye candy.

The application locked to our position easilly. We also tested Points Of Interests (POIs) on the application, and it delivered with no stress, identifying eateries, hotels all over the Opebi and Maryland areas.

At this point it is worth mentioning that JEJ Engineering has decided to send MobilityNigeria a complimentary copy of their streetmap application for us to review.

I must say that this gesture is commendable, and we look forward to having more mobile application developers and manufacturers borrow a leaf from JEJ Engineering/Garmap.

Our review (with pictures and videos) will be up as soon as we get the review copy promised us and put it through its paces.

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I remember one of the first China phones to hit the Nigerian market. A friend had brought a unit and asked me to help install useful mobile applications and to configure it for internet. Do I have to say that we were not able to put any application on the phone and also didn’t succeed in configuring it for internet? Simply put, the phone was useless.

Fast forward to 18 months later, a completely different person asked for the same thing- to help install useful mobile apps and configure for internet on his China phone. My initial response was, “There’s no use, it won’t work”. But she begged and I decided to give it a shot. The first thing I did was to manually input internet settings. Once that was done, I launched the browser and to my amazement it loaded well. The browser even loaded a social networking site like Facebook. This was the first surprise. The second was that the phone gladly accepted Java applications and they worked well on it.

It has been an upward trend for China phones since then. They are getting more and more matured as the days go by.

However, what I dislike about these phones and wish will change is the use of brand names of other mobile phone manufacturers by the people behind some of these phones. An example is the “Nokia N99i” (pictured right), which is by no means manufactured by Nokia.

These phones I dare say are now good enough to have their own brand names, and with their current pricing scheme, these phones will continue to do well in emerging markets. Some of them are already doing this, and we have brand names such as i-mobile.

China phone, anyone?

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Over the air firmware update (update done directly on the phone) is simpler, faster, lighter, and less problematic than doing it from a PC. It took less than three minutes to get the firmware on my 5800 updated and the size of the installation file was less than 4MB. If this same update were to be done from my PC, it would have taken nothing less than 40minutes and the file size somewhere around 100MB.

Please note that in order to be able to carry out over the air firmware update, it is best that you have a bundled mobile internet package from your network operator.

How To Update Over The Air
From the phone’s home screen click the dial pad short cut key, then dial *#0000#. The phone displays your current firmware version.

From that screen, click Options and select Check for updates. The phone will alert you of a new firmware version and then select download.

Once the installation file is downloaded, select Install and the new firmware will be installed on your phone. That is it, simple as ABC.

I have noticed a few changes since I installed the latest firmware version on my 5800. The changes include a considerably faster browsing experience on the built-in browser, applications launching faster, and the white menu button breathing at intervals in standby mode (though you’d have to enable that in the notification light settings).

For those of you who actually update your firmware version, please let us know the changes you notice after updating.

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Here is throwing the discussion open. What do you think? Do you agree with this opinion or do you have a different take?

Please note: whichever side you take, kindly provide example(s) to support you argument.

Look forward to hearing from you guys.

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In the past, most navigation applications that run on GPS enabled devices didn’t come with support for Nigeria and that included the widely popular Google maps. But that has changed now with the release of the latest version (3.0.1.4) of Google maps for s60 devices.
Google maps loaded the map of Lagos when I launched it and it pinpointed my location.

Features like getting direction from your current location to a new location are currently not working, but we can expect that with further updates of the software more and more features will have support for Nigeria.

In case you are itching to see your street on your phone, move over to http://m.google.com on your s60 browser to download the software. And don’t forget to give us feedback of your experiences and impressions.

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While deploying a data service is well appreciated, the networks should go a step further to make it convenient for subscribers to have access to these services.

For example, there’s no valid reason why the networks cannot provide their SIMs already provisioned for internet. It is a fact that at least MTN and Etisalat are doing it right in this regard. Etisalat especially is to be commended, for though being a new player in the Nigerian telecoms ecosystem, they are more forward looking in terms of user-friendly data provisioning than the older boys like Zain and GloMobile.

Surely, it cannot be so difficult for network operators to deploy over-the-air (OTA) configuration such that soon after inserting your SIM into a GPRS or 3G-enabled phone, the data settings are pushed automatically to the phone and the subscriber can simply launch his phone browser and start surfing the web away.

Both MTN and Etisalat are again the leaders in this department. And once again, Etisalat are getting two thumbs up from me for implementing this from the word go.

My experience with Etisalat is one I remember with fondness. I popped in my SIM into a phone, the settings were pushed to me via SMS, and within minutes I was browsing without having to go to their office, call for my line to be provisioned, or manually input any settings. I said to myself, “This is the way it should be“.

Network operators need to remember that the average phone user is not a geek, does not care to go beyond the basic menu of his phone, and would rather not be bothered with the extra hassles of getting value added services setup.

The average subscriber wants these services to work out-fo-the-box, and the networks that respond appropriately to this fact will have subscribers eating out of their hands. Mobile Data will become more mainstream when the hassles of data configuration are eliminated.

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