The new Nokia Lumia 610 is Nokia’s fourth and most affordable Lumia smartphone, designed as the perfect introduction to Windows Phone for a younger audience.  The Nokia Lumia 610 makes it easy to keep in touch with friends, providing instant access to social networks and bringing all mobile, email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn contacts into one place.  It also makes it easier to browse the Web with Internet Explorer and to access games through Xbox Live. Available with Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Transport and Nokia Music, people can also choose from thousands of apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace to further personalize the experience.

With a distinctive profile and finely beveled metallic edges, the Nokia Lumia 610 is built to convey both quality and aspiration.  It comes in white, cyan, magenta and black, is priced at EUR189 and is expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2012.

Image: Nokia Lumia 610

The Nokia Lumia 610 was made possible thanks to a new software release from Microsoft delivering enhanced capabilities to the Windows Phone 7.5 platform.  The software release, available from April optimizes Windows Phone to support lower memory and processor requirements, while still delivering the same great experience for more affordable products.  In addition, Windows Phone will now include the network and language requirements for China. As a result, Nokia announced plans to make a range of Lumia smartphones available in China, covering both CDMA and WCDMA technologies, in the coming months.

Image: Nokia Lumia 900

After launching the Nokia Lumia 900 as its first LTE smartphone, Nokia is also making the phone available around the world in a DC-HSPA variant, for high speed data connection (42Mbits download) in countries where LTE is not available.  The Nokia Lumia 900 features a 4.3 inch ClearBlack AMOLED display for a superior touch and viewing experience.  It also features Nokia’s highest capacity battery making it the perfect Lumia phone for enjoying media and entertainment on the move.  The primary camera on the Nokia Lumia 900 has exclusive Carl Zeiss optics, a large aperture for improved performance in low light conditions and wide angle focal length for capturing full 16:9 images.  It is also the first Lumia phone to feature a front-facing camera, with large aperture and wide-angle lens for sharp, bright images and video calling out of the box. The Nokia Lumia 900 will be available in white, cyan and black, is priced at EUR 480 and also expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2012.

The Lumia range will also benefit from the launch of new signature Nokia experiences on the Windows Phone platform:

- Nokia Reading is the next milestone in Nokia’s strategy to offer a comprehensive entertainment experience on Lumia. Nokia Reading provides a single, integrated hub experience, leveraging a panorama design to make it easier and faster to enjoy news, ebooks and audio books, including the ability to access content offline and pin dynamic content to the start screen as a Live Tile.  With an emphasis on local language materials wherever it becomes available, Nokia Reading delivers a highly personalized and locally relevant service. Future updates will include the ability to build dynamic magazines from feeds for a single integrated view of favourite online content. With no sign-in or subscriptions, Nokia Reading will be available from April.

- Nokia Transport, coming to Lumia for the first time, provides convenient door-to-door, underground, tram, suburban train, and bus directions for over 500 cities across 46 countries.  With step-by-step directions to the nearest station as well as timetable information on when the next bus or train is arriving for more than 80 cities, Nokia Transport will be available to download from the Windows Phone Marketplace in March.

- A new update to Nokia Drive, the free voice-guided, turn by turn navigation app that turns any Lumia smartphone into a personal navigation device will provide full offline use and features speed limit alerts. The update will also be available to download from the Windows Phone Marketplace in March.

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Pretty amazing news out earlier today, no?? But must be honest the real cherry on the cake was the announcement by Nokia of their new revolutionary pro imaging technology – PureView. Just a couple of days ago we saw a video released by Nokia hinting about this with some spectacular images that left people speechless to say the least, what we never expected was this

So what is Nokia PureView?? 

Nokia PureView Pro imaging technology is the combination of a large, super high resolution 41Mpix with high performance Carl Zeiss optics. The large sensor enables pixel oversampling, which  is explained in detail in the white paper below but in a nutshell it means the combination of many pixels into one perfect pixel. PureView imaging technology is the result of many years of research and  development and the tangible fruits of this work are amazing image quality, lossless zoom, and superior low light performance.

A revolution in imaging

PureView Pro imaging technology doesn’t represent a step change for camera smartphones performance, so much as a quantum leap forward. The first device to feature Nokia PureView Pro camera technology is the Nokia 808 PureView, which gives people the means to take better images and video footage than ever before. Nokia PureView Pro turns conventional thinking on its head. It dispenses with the usual scaling/interpolation model of digital zoom used in virtually all smartphones, as well as optical zoom used in most digital cameras, where a series of lens elements moves back and forth to vary the magnification and field of view. Instead, Nokia’s taken a completely new road.

The result?

Unprecedented camera control and versatility, combined with truly spectacular-quality images and video. Nokia 808 PureView sets new industry standards — it will give you around 3x lossless zoom for stills, and 4x zoom in full HD 1080p. For 720p HD video, you’re looking at 6x lossless zoom. And for nHD (640×360) video, an amazing 12x zoom!

Awesome, isn’t it?? This is just the tip of the iceberg – here is the white paper released by Nokia for your reading, so for full specs etc on this great new technology, just follow the link below:

Nokia PureView imaging technology explained

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Apart from the three fantastic new S40 devices announced this morning by Nokia at MWC12, they have also ushered in a new era in high-end smartphone imaging with the Nokia 808 PureView This is the first smartphone to feature Nokia PureView imaging technologies, which has been in the works for the past 5 years, bringing together high resolution sensors, exclusive Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia developed algorithms, which will support new high-end imaging experiences for future Nokia products.  

The Nokia 808 PureView features a large, high-resolution 41 megapixel sensor with high-performance Carl Zeiss optics and new pixel oversampling technology.  At standard resolutions (2/3, 5 and 8 megapixels) this means the ability to zoom without loss of clarity and capture seven pixels of information, condensing into one pixel for the sharpest images imaginable.  At high-resolution (38 megapixel maximum) it means the ability to capture an image, then zoom, reframe, crop and resize afterwards to expose previously unseen levels of details. With superior low-light performance and the ability to save in compact file sizes for sharing in email, MMS, and on social networks, the Nokia 808 PureView makes it possible for anyone to capture professional looking images in any conditions.

In addition to superior still imaging technology, the Nokia 808 PureView, also includes full HD 1080p video recording and playback with 4X lossless zoom and the world’s first use of Nokia Rich Recording.  Rich Recording enables audio recording at CD-like levels of quality, previously only possible with external microphones. The Nokia 808 PureView also features exclusive Dolby Headphone technology, transforming stereo content into a personal surround sound experience over any headphones and Dolby Digital Plus for 5.1 channel surround sound playback.

“Nokia PureView imaging technology sets a new industry standard by whatever measure you use,” said Jo Harlow, executive vice president of Nokia Smart Devices.  “People will inevitably focus on the 41 megapixel sensor, but the real quantum leap is how the pixels are used to deliver breath-taking image quality at any resolution and the freedom it provides to choose the story you want to tell.”

Here we have three official pictures taken with the Nokia 808 PureView and released today – as you can see – AWESOME

Nokia is back and here to stay.

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Designed to deliver a variety of affordable mobile experiences, the new offerings target three dimensions: Work, with Mail for Exchange support for the Nokia Asha 302; Learn, bringing new information services for young, urban consumers, and a fast, cloud-based browser that reduces internet access costs; and Play, with free EA games available on the Nokia Asha 202 and Asha 203.

“Since outlining a new strategy a year ago, we’ve taken significant actions to deliver against it,” said Mary T. McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president for Mobile Phones.  “We’ve been connecting the next billion people to the mobile world and its benefits through contemporary feature phones and internet services. Today, we are taking another step in that direction, with a compelling combination of smarter mobile devices packed with innovative services.”

Nokia Life benefits 50 million users

Nokia also announced an evolution of Nokia Life Tools, Nokia Life, which provides life-enhancing information across the range of Nokia Series 30 and Series 40 products. Now with additional relevant services, social elements and fresher look, it’s available first on the Nokia Asha 202 and 203 phones. Since its 2009 launch in India, the SMS-based service has expanded to China, Indonesia and Nigeria. To date, more than 50 million people have experienced its benefits.

Nokia Life delivers content in the areas of parenting, life skills, education, health, entertainment and agriculture. For example, Nokia Life can help parents focus on children’s physical, emotional and social growth needs, from birth to adolescence. People can also learn English using basic SMS communications, and enjoy ringtones, sport news and trivia.

“Nokia Life services provide an entry to the world of digital content and an internet-like experience for many people who don’t yet have access to data plans” said Dieter May, Nokia’s senior vice president of Mobile Phone Services. “With today’s news, we’re enhancing our services to bring consumers an even more enjoyable experience on the new Asha phones, with content that matters to them in their daily lives, is fun and helps them progress.”

Nokia Asha family expands

The Nokia Asha family has expanded rapidly since its debut, just four months ago, with four devices presented at Nokia World 2011. It’s now available in more than 100 markets globally and will be complemented by three devices announced today.

Nokia’s Asha 202 and 203 phones stand out with the combination of a traditional keypad with a 2.4- inch touch screen, ideal for browsing, scrolling and opening applications. The Asha 202 features Dual SIM Easy Swap technology with dedicated SIM manager to personalize the phone and save up to five SIM cards with unique information. Both devices come with a 2-megapixel camera, music player, FM radio, Nokia Browser, and Bluetooth connectivity, and can handle memory cards up to 32GB. Estimated retail price for each is about EUR 60, excluding taxes and subsidies, and both are expected to start shipping in the second quarter of 2012.

Image: Nokia Asha 202

Nokia and EA have teamed on innovative ways to bring games to the next billion. The Nokia Asha 202 and 203 will be the first Series 40 devices to offer EA games. As a 60-day promotion at Nokia Store, the EUR 75 separate cost of an EA 40-game pack – including popular titles such as Tetris, Need for Speed, The Run and Bejeweled – will be automatically waived for buyers of either new model.

Image: Nokia Asha 302

The Nokia Asha 302 is Nokia’s first Series 40 phone to support Mail for Exchange, giving people access to their emails, contacts and calendar on an exchange server. That and a stylish QWERTY keyboard make it ideal for young entrepreneurs and professionals seeking a beautifully designed phone. Additionally, the Nokia Asha connects to popular social networks and enables chatting through Whatsapp and other IM services. The Nokia Asha 302 is powered by a 1-GHz processor and supports3.5G data speeds. It is available now for about EUR 95.
“With today’s announcement, Nokia has accelerated the truly global opportunity for enterprise mobility,” according to Nicholas McQuire, research director enterprise mobility strategies EMEA for IDC.
“By making Mail For Exchange available for the sub 100 euros mobile device market, Nokia has taken a significant step in helping businesses across the globe, including those from high growth economies, achieve the productivity and employee satisfaction benefits that greater mobility affords them.”

Nokia Browser helps consumers and operators to significantly cut costs

All three new devices provide a fast and affordable internet experience via Nokia’s cloud-accelerated Nokia Browser, which makes internet content easy to discover with its localized and personalized home page design and portal to thousands of web apps.  In addition to its speed, the browser compresses data traffic up to 90 percent, meaning cost reductions for consumers and operators, who can have better network utilization. Nokia Browser has been rapidly adopted, with almost four new users around the world activating it every second. It is available today in more than 200 markets.

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Nokia today introduced a range of new devices, services and partnerships at Mobile World Congress, setting the pace for 2012 and demonstrating rapid execution of its new strategic direction. The new strategy already has resulted in the adoption ofWindows Phone as Nokia’s primary smartphone platform, major changes to its feature phones, and additional emphasis on location-based services with the launch of its Location & Commerce business.

“One year ago, we shared that Nokia was embarking on a new journey to build great mobile devices,” said Stephen Elop, president and CEO of Nokia. “Today, with our fourth Lumia device, smarter mobile phones and an array of new services, we are demonstrating that we can change the clock speed of Nokia.”

Lumia portfolio extends, availability expands
Nokia has extended the range of products with Windows Phone by introducing the Nokia Lumia 610, the most affordable Lumia yet, as well as targeting availability of the widely acclaimed Lumia 900 to additional markets beyond the U.S.

Aimed at young people who want an affordable introduction to Lumia and Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 610 provides easy access to social networks, web browsing, music, games, navigation and tens of thousands of apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. It comes in four vibrant colors and will cost just €189, before taxes or subsidies, and is expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2012.

The Nokia Lumia 900, which launched in January as Nokia’s first LTE-enabled smartphone, will now be available in Dual Carrier HSPA for up 42.2 Mbps. The superior content experience of the phone’s 4.3 inch ClearBlack AMOLED display and large capacity battery will be available to more countries around the world.

Nokia announced Nokia Reading providing a single, integrated reading hub experience. Nokia Reading makes it easier and faster to enjoy news, books, and audio books including an extensive catalogue of local language reading material and the ability to access content offline.

The announcements cap a year in which Nokia introduced the Lumia 710, Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 to critical acclaim and ahead of schedule.

New era in smartphone imaging starts with Nokia 808 PureView
Nokia also today ushered in a new era in high end smartphone imaging. The Nokia 808 PureView is the first smartphone to feature exclusive Nokia PureView imaging technologies that will enable a range of high-end imaging experiences into Nokia products over the coming years. The Nokia 808 PureView combines a large, high-resolution 41-megapixel sensor, Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia-developed pixel over-sampling technology. This means incredibly sharp, detailed images, superior low light performance and the capability to save images in compact file sizes for sharing in email, MMS and on social networks.

The Nokia 808 PureView also includes Nokia Rich Recording for CD-like quality audio recording, full HD 1080p video recording and playback, and exclusive Dolby Headphone technology to transform any stereo content into a personal surround sound experience over any headphones.

Asha ignites smarter feature phones
Nokia is further blurring the line between feature phones and smartphones, launching three new Asha devices for people who want to work, learn and play. Developed for urban consumers and entrepreneurs, the Nokia Asha 302 is a premium QWERTY device. It delivers a mobile office experience with push email and calendar, and contacts synchronization under the Mail for Exchange support – a first for Nokia Series 40 devices.

Designed for easy access to social networks, the Nokia Asha 202 and 203 bring touchscreens to volume-priced products and a pack of 40 free Electronic Arts games. The Asha 202 also features Nokia’s Easy Swap Dual SIM technology, allowing people to simply swap between tariffs and get the best value from carriers.

Nokia is also differentiating itself by updating its popular Life Tools service, now called Nokia Life, that provides life-enhancing information across the range of Nokia Series 30 and Series 40 products, including the new Asha 202 and Asha 203. People in India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria will benefit from life skills, parenting, education, agriculture and entertainment services, delivered via SMS.

The new Asha devices complement the Nokia Asha range that is available now in more than 100 markets globally.

Going further, faster
In location-based services, Nokia and Groupon plan to offer market-leading location-sensitive discounts and deals. Nokia is also announcing a new version of Nokia Drive for Windows Phone that will come with full offline support for turn-by-turn navigation. Moving forward, Nokia Drive will also remember a personal commute, give advance traffic notice and automatically re-route to avoid jams.

Additionally, Nokia plans to release the Windows Phone version of Nokia Transport for door-to-door, underground, tram, suburban train, and bus directions in more than 500 cities and 45 countries.

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That’s right folks, what probably is going to be one of the most exciting weeks in the Mobile Industry, this years Mobile World Congress being held in the Mobile World Capital of the world – Barcelona promises to bring us many exciting things and with Nokia taking the centre stage we here at Nokia News will be bringing you all the latest and developing news as it happens on the ground.

More than 60,000 people are expected to attend #MWC12, representing more than 200 different countries. Nokia will be holding conferences, talks and presentations by some of their leading developers, as well as a keynote speech by the company’s CEO  Stephen Elop.  But before all this kicks off tomorrow morning Nokia will be holding a press conference at 08H30 (local time), Stephen Elop is expected to make a few announcements which will change the industry as we know it, according to sources this week.

There is a lot of speculation as to what will be announced and as you all know – we do not speculate or spread rumours or leaks – we deal in hard facts, and tomorrow we will all know what Nokia has for us. So stay tuned and join us right here for any and all updates on Nokia related topics during this years MWC, starting with the press conference tomorrow morning at 08H30 (GMT +1). We will also be tweeting during the press conference on our twitter account @NokiaNewscom and posting on our Facebook and Google+ pages, see you all back here tomorrow morning.

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We have decided to take this site to the next level and are currently working on giving it a complete overhaul and new look including a Forum, that I am sure all of you will come to like when we launch in aprox two weeks from today.

So stay tuned, we will continue to update our Facebook, Google+ and Twitter channels during this stage with any and all Nokia related news, so feel free to join us there.

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One of the latest handsets I have had the honor to test, thanks to Nokia Connects, was the Nokia X7 and I must say that’s a great phone but its characteristics tend to place it into an specific type of user and that’s what I’m going to be analyzing here, but before that, here are a few unboxing pictures of the X7, I’m not one for videos, sorry guys

Ok let’s talk about the ‘X’ in the name, as you should know this phone follows a design line that was preceded by some very popular handsets amongst users who love music, videos, games and any entertainment related topics like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and that’s exactly what Nokia did by releasing this phone, taking the user to a whole new experience level starting with its hardware and physical design.

For me this is the most confortable design Nokia has ever made for gamers, its shape fits perfectly into ones hands when playing games in landscape mode – which is the standard display mode in most mobile games. The diagonal corners feature a non surface perfect for handling the phone on the move where most of the game playing usually happens. Two of these corners embed speakers and incredibly the design was made to avoid the hand obscuring the beautiful audio that only lacks some software enhancement to become Dolby Mobile.

The only problem that I observed about the design was the SIM and microSD slots. The rounded back obligated Nokia to include slot trays that in my humble opinion didn’t solve the problem of how hard it’s to add or change cards.

One thing gamers care about is resolution, so Nokia answered this necessity with a very responsive AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors but I still think the size of 360 x 640 pixels, 4.0 inches (~184 ppi pixel density) could’ve been improved at least a bit but it still shows beautiful picture and video quality images, sometimes exaggerating those numbers just increase the price. The huge mistake was releasing this phone without ClearBlack display, gamers normally play on the streets with the sun making hard to watch what there are doing on the scream.

Another big fail was not including a TV out port via HDMI, gamers love to extrapolate their mobile experience onto a big screen (something Nokia is improving greatly with their Microsoft partnership about the Xbox interoperability). I loved how Nokia placed the rest of the ports, the charger and headphones never got a better position on a Nokia device and this is something Nokia learned and its getting replicated on its newer phones, it doesn’t matter OS they are running.

Talking about the OS, the Nokia X7 comes directly from the fabric using Symbian Anna and this is a big plus for the new user. Lots of things have been improved on this release and there are more expected in a very near future with the future release of Symbian Belle. Responsiveness, smoothness and almost crash-less are characteristics of this version (but I think that Nokia could do it better than 680 MHz ARM 11 processor, Broadcom BCM2727 GPU). Compatibility and built-in apps have improved but there are still problems with Nokia Store, Chat, Live View, etc. but those are minimal compared to the goodness of Adobe Reader, Quickoffice, Nokia Button, Tap to write feature, how fast the firmware updates, how easy and fast is to configure emails, the improved sync with Mail for Exchange, Intranet and Communicator support and F-Secure free (although I still recommend Track and Protect app and they can work together).

However, some things are still there after Anna upgrade and I hope they get fixed on with the Belle release, like the limitation if the built in dictionary for only 3 languages, notes API closed and not sync enabled, the hard setup of new Intranet and Communicator features, paused multitasking preview, USB issues when connecting to PC and charging (thank you Nokia for including a led to show if the phone is correctly connected.. oh wait this phone doesn’t have it!), slow image previewing, contacts navigation and mailbox configuration getting cancelled when multitasking.

I’m not going to talk much about the camera of this phone because it’s not a strong feature on this device. Color management is not good and the focus is really bad on very close pictures but the cameras general behavior is good enough for a phone that was not designed to replace the likes of the Nokia N8.

So, if you are one of those people that depend and love Nokia hardware – enjoy playing mobile games on the go (with the vast repository of Symbian games that Nokia offers on Nokia Store) this is the mobile device is for you and from what have been seeing, comes at a very attractive price too.

If you have any questions that you would like to ask me, about this device, don’t be shy and leave them here in the comments section below or ping me on twitter @warmth.

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