We dig the idea of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N900’s expandable feature set. And to prove just how tweaking-friendly the Maemo-powered device is, this guy managed to make it run the good ol’ Windows 3.11. Yap, you’ve read that correctly – it’s running Win 3.11 from DOS. But I said enough, just watch the video and enjoy!

[Via: JampBLOG]

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) just posted an entry to their N-Gage blog saying that the N-Gage publishing platform is going to die in less than a year. Games will now be sold through the Ovi Store, which on face value makes sense, giving consumers a single location to purchase applications, whether that be a new alarm clock, or Super Monkey Ball, but all the community features that many of you have come to love will be gone. Stuff like high scores, messaging, and keeping up with your friends in the N-Gage Arena, that stuff is gone.

If you’re an N-Gage addict, make sure you read the complete blog post to get the details on what’s changing and when.

[Hat tip to @stevelitchfield from All About Symbian]

Yesterday Google launched Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 and with it crushed the stock prices of Tom Tom and Garmin, makers of dedicated navigation devices. The question of whether or not we’ll see Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps Navigation come to other platforms has yet to be answered, but knowing Google’s previous moves in the mapping space, it’s pretty much an inevitability.

Why is Google dominating the mapping space with such force? The answer lies with the cost of maps. If anyone with enough entrepreneurial spirit wanted to create a competitor to Google Maps, Bing Maps, or Ovi Maps, they would soon realize that they would have to secure mapping data, at a great cost mind you, from the two largest players on the market: Tom Tom, who purchased Tele Atlas in 2007, or NAVTEQ, who was purchased by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) during the same year. Entering the mapping space is not easy financially and that is why we’ve seen little competition.

Google Maps is fantastic, I use it on a near daily basis, but how much better could it be if anyone could build a mapping service? I’m not talking about using the Google Maps API to overlay your data on top of a Google Map, or the Ovi Maps Player API, which is an exact clone of Google’s, I’m talking about making mapping data open and free and allowing the same city center to be rendered in millions of different ways depending on the context of what a user wants to visualize. There is already an effort taking place on the internet right now to do just that, and it’s called OpenStreetMap (OSM), but they need help.

If I was Nokia I would donate every last bit of mapping data collected by NAVTEQ to OSM and just sit back and watch to see what happens. Anyone in the world would be able to use that data, and with it usher in a long due renaissance in the world of mapping. This isn’t about OpenStreetMap beating Google Maps, this is about allowing the creation of many mapping services.

If you think about it, honestly, how much better has Google Maps become since it was launched in February 2005? Sure, we now have Google Maps on mobile, but that’s because we had to wait for Google to make their maps available on the go. If access to the data of all the buildings, and all the streets on this Earth was available for anyone to build upon, with no licensing fees, and no strict conformity to the aesthetic dictated by one company, a 3rd party could have not only beaten Google to the mobile maps game, but may have created an entirely new user experience.

Think about it Nokia. You’ve been playing the open card a lot lately. First with Maemo, then with Symbian, now do the same thing with NAVTEQ. It’s the only way you’re going to beat Google at maps. They’ve got smarter people, more of them, and they stand the most to lose so they’re going to defend what they’ve got to the death if you try to out innovate them with Ovi Maps.

Google disrupted the mapping space by making navigation free, your turn to disrupt the mapping space by making maps free as in speech.

As expected, the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Surge 6790 has arrived on Rogers (NYSE: RCI) for the rabid texters out there. An unexpected bonus is a cheaper price point than the originally anticipated: a mere $29.99 on three-year contract. This is one of the cheapest new smartphones you’ll find out there, though the form factor might seem awkward to a lot of folks. Still, it’s packing a 2 megapixel camera, GPS, microSD memory card slot, and a 2.4″ QVGA display. It’s not in Rogers’ online store just yet, but it should be up soon.

[via Nokia]

T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) UK will be offering a special, Chrome coloured (not pictured above, but just imagining what it would look like makes me go ewww), edition of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 5800 on Sunday, sources tell Mobile Entertainment. The device will be free on a 2 year contract, 30£/month. Note that the Comes with Music subscription only lasts for 1 year, so if you’re picking this up then you better start downloading the second you turn the device on. If you’d rather have the 5800 without Comes with Music, then you’ll only have to pay £15/month. Do yourself a favor: buy an HTC Hero and a 1 year subscription to Spotify. You’ll be a happier person, with a better phone, better music selection, and a better overall experience. Comes with Music has been out for roughly a year and they’ve barely managed to get 110,000 people to sign up. Old devices, limited selection, higher prices, I’m not surprised Nokia is having a hard time getting customers.

While listening to All About Symbian podcast epsiode 154, one sound bite jumped out at me. At around 21 minutes and 20 seconds in, Rafe Blandford asked Jan Ole Suhr, the one man development shop who is best known for his Twitter client called Gravity, what is the revenue split from the Ovi Store, Handango, and other application stores versus his own website. Bit of back story: on June 2 of this year, Eric John from the Ovi Store team posted a blog entry stating that Gravity was the number one selling application. The statistics haven’t been updated since then, but hypothetically speaking let us pretend that today it is still the number one selling application. Jan said that “around 90%, probably even more than 90% came from my own website”. Is this a sign of how badly Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Ovi Store is doing right now? One would think that with the millions of devices out on the market now with Ovi Store built in that they would launch it, discover Gravity, and buy it, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. There are even commercials running in the UK, a country where Twitter is very popular, showcasing Gravity and the Ovi Store.

The whole point of application stores is to expose people to the applications they can install on their devices, and to give developers an easy way to monetize their applications. If the revenue coming from the number one selling application in the Ovi Store is less than 10% of total sales, then what the hell happened?

The Wall Street Journal takes a stab at reviewing the Nokia Booklet 3G, the first laptop to come from the Finnish handset maker hellbent on becoming an “internet company”. Katherine Boehret loves the battery life, saying “after running it through a harsh test with its screen cranked up to the brightest setting, Wi-Fi on, music playing on a continuous loop and all power-saving features turned off, it ran for almost eight hours straight”. That’s where the praise end however, she urges readers to “beware its tiny keyboard”. Whatever happened to the 12 hours Nokia (NYSE: NOK) promised at Nokia World?

You’ll be able to pick up the Booklet 3G for $300 from AT&T with a 2 year contract, $60/month, that gives you 5 GB of data per month, or you can buy it without contract for $600. Note: The Booklet 3G comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition, which has a whole lot of limitations. Are you doing to pick up this HDMI port packing, underpowered Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) MacBook Pro clone? I’m curious, leave a reply below.

[Hat tip to @samin, Creative Director at Nordkapp]

I posted this video on the @IntoMobile Twitter account, which if you haven’t followed already may be due to head trauma suffered as a child, and I wasn’t going to blog it … that is until I read what Ewan MacLeod had to say about it:

Brilliant, brilliant video from the Phoneage / Tehkseven chaps. Genius. Provided this video doesn’t hit the mainstream and Twitter doesn’t pick this up, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) will be perfectly fine.

To which I have to reply let the spreading begin:

When you’re a company that makes revenues almost exclusively from the sale of mobile handsets, whoring of patents aside, then you take counterfeit hardware pretty seriously. In China it’s really easy to find a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) clone, powered by a MediaTek chipset, running some local operating system that most users in the region have no problem using. That is why today Nokia has announced that they’re teaming up with SAP and Giesecke & Devrient to start a new company called “Original1″ by the end of the year, headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, to deal with the problem.

Full Press Release after the jump. Emphasis added by yours truly.

Read the full article »

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

This software release improves touch screen usability, allowing you to scroll smoothly through content by flicking the screen. Ovi Maps 3.1 brings 3-D maps, more accurate positioning, and improved search. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (NYSE: NOK) e-mail (Nokia Messaging), Ovi Contacts, Ovi Store, and VoIP support have been added. This release also includes improvements in memory and battery performance, and in image and video stability. To get this software through your device, select Applications > SW Updates and choose the software you want to update.

Someone will surely post something today regarding their experiences with the new firmware. This post will be updated throughout the day with those findings.

Updates:

• UK variants appear to not have been updated yet.
• All About Symbian has a really nice changelog on their site.
• “Best ’secret’ enhancement in N97 v20 is the bump in speaker volume – the device just got a whole lot better for listening to podcasts! 8-)” – @stevelitchfield

A video just came out highlighting the kinetic scrolling. Hat tip to @Jussipekka:

I hope that didn’t cost a lot of money.