That’s something our poll has shown to be overridingly popular with users. While the sample is small, over half of all who have shared their preference have confirmed that there is merit to both methods by indicating that both is best.

Check out the poll; if you haven’t already, add your voice, we always love to hear from you.

With 47 of the 92 votes cast as of the writing of this blog (51.09%), we think that means a resounding ‘yes please’ for the recently-announced Nokia Asha 303. The key differentiator for this affordable feature phone is…you guessed it…the combination of touch and type.

What do our readers have to say about Asha 303? Quite a lot; Busisiwe gets right to the point, noting “The best of both worlds indeed, at a great value too. I love that Nokia is made from durable materials; they do not get damaged as easily and as quickly as other brands. It’s a good investment for me”. Looks like the Asha was made for people like Busi!

Meanwhile, Thandile appreciates the design and the versatility of the Asha 303, noting, “Nice look, and features, I’d luv to have a qwerty phone like this with a dual sim NOKIA ALL THE WAY!!”

Tapping into something a lot of us are likely thinking, Linda says, “nice phone when can I get one for me?”. The Asha range retail between R999 and R1799 and are available from Vodacom, MTN and Virgin Mobile outlets

Of course, there’s more to the poll than that; some 33 votes (35.87%) indicated a preference for touch input. Great news for these users, too, since the Lumia flagship range is designed with this interface – and it features the Windows Phone operating system, too, winning praise for its performance and ease of use.

Check out Asha and let’s hear your opinion. Don’t forget to cast your vote in the poll. The more responses we get, the more accurately we can understand what cellphone users prefer.

Having access to the latest and greatest features using your business-minded Nokia E7, multimedia powerhouse Nokia N8 or the awesome Nokia Lumia 800 is all good and well, but what about users that simply need an affordable, easy to use mobile phone that will provide them with the modern must-have features including social networking connectivity (Facebook and Twitter), QWERTY keyboard and email?

Enter the stylish and slim Nokia Asha 303 feature phone. It measures in at a pocket-and-grip friendly 116.5 x 55.7 x 13.9 mm and weighs a mere 99 g. This touch and type device enables mobile phone users to experience the best of both worlds. It offers a very responsive 2.6″ (320 x 240, 154 pixels per inch) touchscreen that makes surfing the net and navigating its S40 mobile operating system (OS) a breeze. This is coupled with Nokia’s finger-loving physical QWERTY keyboard, which will assist users in making quick work of replying to that SMS, email or WhatsApp IM (Instant Message).

Powering the Asha 303 is a snappy 1 GHz processor. It keeps the phone running fast and smooth when opening, running as well as closing apps. In terms of connectivity, this phone boasts the latest 3.5G (HSDPA, up to 10.2 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload) and Wi-Fi (WLAN 802.11n) support, along with Bluetooth version 2.1 + EDR.

Although you only have access to around 100 MB of internal storage space, you will be able to expand this through the addition of a microSD memory card slot, which supports cards up to 32 GB in size.  A number of applications and games come preloaded on the Asha 303 such as Angry Birds Lite. Users can download thousands of additional games and apps from the Nokia Store. Music lovers can also download tracks and albums from the Nokia Music Store to add to their collections.

The Asha 303’s large 1300 mAh battery will provide you with a music playback time of up to 47 hours, as well as a standby time of up to 840 hours (whilst connected to a 3G network) and up to seven hours of talktime. Also onboard is a 3.5 mm audio jack, Stereo FM radio with RDS and a 3.2 megapixel fixed-focus camera that can capture detailed photos and record VGA videos.

Browsing the web is made easier using the Nokia Browser, which allows for a faster and richer web surfing experience. This browser compresses webpages by up to 90%, ensuring that you don’t spend all your airtime on data, whilst also speeding up downloads. You’ll be able to buy the Nokia Asha 303 feature phone for a recommended retail price of R1799 from MTN and Vodacom stores.

Don’t let affordability constrain your aspirations – with the Nokia Asha 303, you can have smartphone like features on a cost effective mobile phone. Let’s QWERTY!

With a global market growth forecast of 55% year on year in 2012, it’s easy to understand why.

According to the Industrial Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped roughly 472 million units in 2011, compared to 305 million units the year before. What’s clear is that there is money to be made in mobile, and that major players which fail to keep up to date with rising trends and emerging competitors do so at their own risk.

One of the most prominent growing mobile platforms in the market today is Windows Phone 7. Labeled as Microsoft’s re-emergence into the mobile environment, it has triggered a panicked reaction amongst industry leaders due to its innovative features.

This may have contributed to the IDC’s recent prediction that the Windows Phone OS will hold the second largest portion of smartphone market share globally by 2015.

Currently sitting at roughly 3.8%, analysts expect this number to grow to 20.3% in just a few years. Growth of this nature doesn’t happen by chance. Microsoft has found a ‘secret weapon’ in our newly developed smartphone range.

By partnering with Nokia to release the Lumia range as the flagship platform for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is securing loyal customer support in key growth areas, says the IDC.

“Windows Phone 7 will benefit from Nokia’s support, scope, and breadth within markets where Nokia has historically had a strong presence. Until Nokia begins introducing Windows Phone-powered smartphones in large volumes in 2012, Windows Mobile will only capture a small share of the market. Nevertheless, assuming that Nokia’s transition to Windows Phone goes smoothly, the OS is expected to defend a number 2 rank and more than 20% share in 2015.”

The upside for us is the availability of a cutting edge, user and social media friendly mobile OS which can be paired with its incoming range of Lumia smartphones. It’s a match made in heaven.

Click here to find out more about the Nokia Lumia 800.

According to Gadget.co.za, the “Nokia Lumia 800 brings content to life with familiar Nokia elements such as high end imaging capabilities, and social and Internet performance with one-touch social network access, easy grouping of contacts, integrated communication threads and Internet Explorer 9”.

Gearburn.com was impressed with the usefulness of the Lumia 800’s “live tiles” and hubs. Particularly because tapping on a live tile gives you access to a particular hub which is centered around People, Messaging, Pictures or Music. They went on to say: “Windows Phone Mango is a distinctly different experience and a refreshing departure from the Android, BlackBerry and iOS app grid interfaces.”

Gearburn also said “Overall the OS is bold, fast, simple and beautiful. Frankly, after you’ve used it for a while, iOS and Android feel positively antediluvian. It has the essentials down pat. Great browser, fantastic keyboard, developed voice control, a fast growing app store and a killer app suite in Microsoft Office.”

Software that shines

Techcentral.co.za was equally positive and says it’s “the software, though, where the Lumia 800 really shines.” The phone is powered by the latest version of Windows Phone, known as Mango, and is upgradeable to Windows Phone 8 due out later this year. Techcentral said “the interface provides something quite different to anything else that’s available in the market”. They also found the Lumia “smooth, clean and a pleasure to use”.

They observed that the Internet Explorer Web browser works well and integrates seamlessly with the operating system and that Nokia has added a number of its own applications to the device, which make the Lumia range stand out from competing Windows Phone devices.

The first of these apps is Nokia Drive. It “offers full turn-by-turn voice navigation and an excellent set of free maps. We experimented with extensively with Nokia Drive and found it superior to and far less data intensive than Google Maps because it uses offline maps. The quality of the voices is also top-notch.”

In addition, “The other app that stands out is Nokia Music, which offers full integration to Nokia’s online music store with its digital rights management-free MP3 tracks, including a great selection of local artists. This, coupled with Mix Radio, a music streaming service, make the Lumia 800 a great music lover’s phone. Integration with Zune for Windows is also excellent, unsurprisingly.”

Mydigitallife.co.za commended the, “Slick, easy to use interface; integration of contacts into address book”.

So there you have it, the Nokia Lumia 800 – already a stand out success with the global media – is making a strong impression in the local marketplace as well. But you don’t have to take our word for it, go online and see the reviews for yourself.

Nokia and Microsoft hosted the first of four Lumia Hackathons (#lumiahack) in Port Elizabeth (PE) this past weekend, and what a weekend it was. The event brought together self proclaimed tech geeks for 48 hours to build applications for Windows Phone, the rapidly growing platform that powers the Nokia Lumia range. Nokia and Microsoft are inviting students from nine campuses: UCT, Stellenbosch, UKZN, NMMU, DUT Steve Biko, Wits, University of Johannesburg, University of Pretoria and TUT to build innovative apps. Twitter was buzzing with competitors and on lookers describing the event, with the copious amounts of caffeine, minimal sleep, growing excitement and extreme coding and hacking being the topics of choice.

Forty students registered and participated in the PE event at St Georges Park which boasted a Developer Zone, Chill Out Space and Snoozzze Zone. Snacks and meals were served throughout the day and participants received an address and welcome from Dave Russell, developer evangelist for Microsoft, Nyaladzi Mpofu, academic advisor for Microsoft and Derrick Kotze, Nokia’s developer outreach manager.

Kotze says: “The app ideas started rolling the minute developers entered their new ‘home’ for the next 48 hours and by early Saturday morning many developers were still happily coding away at their apps and games. They generally slept in shifts of three or four hours before jumping back in and coding.”

These new apps are hopefully going to be added to Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace, which currently boasts over 65 000 apps for people to download and experience. The smartphone era has inspired countless possibilities for people looking to build apps, with many overnight successes coming in areas like shopping, music, photo sharing and games to name a few. Kotze continues, “What we aim to do with the LumiaHack is to create a fun and supportive environment where developers can take their app from concept to Marketplace in just 48 hours. It builds their confidence by proving that they have the talent and skill necessary to compete with the best in the world and hopefully inspires them to build more mobile apps and games that could very possibly become the next top app”.

Kotze adds that the ideas don’t always have to be big and complicated, and advises developers to build something they need or enjoy doing. In addition, design is starting to become a major differentiator for successful apps. They should not just work but also look the part.

Having looked at the idea, execution and design of the apps, Kotze said two things hit home. “We have an incredible amount of talent in this country and it sometimes takes just a little spark to set big dreams in motion. The development platform was completely new to many of the students and they took to it naturally.”

If you would like to apply SMS “HACK” to 41611 and join South Africa’s developer elite. There is limited space, and successful applicants will be notified. Bring your laptops (if you don’t have one, special arrangements will me made), a valid student card, sleeping bag and lots of energy and creativity.

Dates:

Cape Town 23- 25 March 2012

Durban 30 March- 1 April

Johannesburg 20-22 April

Non- student developers should also look forward to a Public #LumiaHack. Nokia will be announcing an event very soon.

The saying, “you are what you wear”, has never been truer in today’s image conscious age. Bags must compliment your shoes, which must compliment your belt, which must compliment your accessories, and accessories these days refer to smartphones and gadgets too. Cue this season’s hottest fashion accessory and must-have item – the Nokia Lumia 800.

The Lumia 800 is available in three different colours in South Africa: Black, Cyan and Magenta. While our poll shows that 55% of Ringaz readers prefer the Lumia in Black – Cyan and Magenta account for the rest, fitting into the style colour predictions for 2012.

The good news is that style gurus around the world agree that Magenta has been pegged as one of the top shades for this season.

The more cooling Cyan is also dominating overseas catwalks in Spring/Summer 2012 collections, as the northern hemisphere gets ready for warmer weather.

Black is the new black, and will remain a classic – the stylish choice whether it comes to fashion, cars or technology.

Interested in finding out which colour suits your personality to make your decision easier?

According to Empower Yourself With Color Psychology, if Magenta is your favourite colour:

• You have a vivid imagination and creative ability
• You love to surround yourself with beauty
• You look for harmony and balance in everything you do

If Cyan (close to Blue) is your favourite colour:

• You are conservative, reliable and trustworthy
• You are genuine and sincere, taking your responsibilities seriously
• You don’t like having your feathers ruffled.

And if it’s Black:

• Prestige and power are important to you
• You are independent, strong-willed and like to be in control
• You may be too serious for your own good – bring some colour into your life to lighten you up – life should be fun.

You can get your hands on the Lumia 800 on a Vodacom Business Call contract (with 100MB data per month) at just R279 per month on a two year contract from 07 February.

The Amazing Everyday is the theme of a remarkable new campaign around the Lumia which sets out to brighten up otherwise ordinary days throughout February. While we all know of the tendency to fall victim to the grind and dwell on the negative, with this campaign the intention is as simple as it is clear: put a smile on the face of the South African public.

Being a week into February already, you’d be right to think that we’ve already gotten started. So far we’ve set up a piano in a shopping mall with an invitation for anyone to have a go.

Amazing: Release your inner Mozart

We’ve also hijacked a make-up counter dished out freebies to leave passers-by refreshed, looking and feeling great, with a cool drink and a make-over.

Amazing: Shopping just became even MORE fun…

 And because a cup of coffee on a busy morning is a pleasure a great many of us look forward to on even the most demanding days, the amazing Coffee Bar Takeover saw 300 people get a free ‘cuppa Joe’.

There is plenty more ‘little amazings’ that we’ve got up our sleeves; follow the conversation on Twitter using the hastag #29Amazings.

February is the month of love, so somewhere Cupid is bound to make an appearance. Expect a flash mob or two to well, flash up. And perhaps most exciting, somewhere in South Africa, a treasure hunt will take place: a couple of concealed Nokia Lumias will get participants amazed good and proper. It’s also a leap year; as amazing as an extra day already is, you can bet we have something exciting for then.

But how about you? How can you participate in the Amazing Everyday? Easy, really. Just surf on over to the Nokia Facebook page and give us your Amazing moment. That puts you in line to win one of three brand new Lumia handsets! More than that, you’ll see 29 tiles, one for each day of this leap year (and which by now you should recognize as the familiar Metro UI interface from Windows Phone. Each tile shares content created to reflect the everyday amazing which surrounds us all.

The amazing is out there, every day. Below, tell us what you found today.

For almost as long as we’ve been using mobile handsets, consumers around the world have harnessed this technology to capture their daily lives in photos, videos or with calls and status updates.

Today, smartphones allow us to shoot exceptional content and share it with the world via social networking.

For some of us, this is limited to uploading images to Facebook and Twitter for the enjoyment of friends and family. For others however, modern handsets have opened up new possibilities for video production and photography.

It was this very attitude that recently earned two friends from Port Elizabeth a dream holiday to New York.

Using the Nokia N8, which features an unrivalled 12 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 720p HD video capabilities, graphic designers Brett Gieseke and Barry Lottering created a stop motion video highlighting the best of Nedbank’s ‘savvy’ banking concept.

The duo shot the short film at Humewood Beach in Port Elizabeth using Lottering’s fiancé Amalie Pistorius as the ‘main character’ and entered it into a local competition seeking the most creative depiction of the bank’s new marketing initiative.

“The idea was to show that simply using a cellphone you could still relax, lie on the beach and do all your banking at the same time,”  Gieseke told the Weekend Post.

After a few weeks, Lottering and Gieseke received a call informing them that the concept was a clear winner amongst competition judges. A short while later, the pair jetted off to New York and enjoyed the best of what the ‘Big Apple’ has to offer as their prize.

According to Gieseke, the choice to use Nokia’s N8 smartphone was an easy one.

“I’ve been a fan of Nokia since I got my Nokia N8 on contract a year ago. I’ve been using it ever since for all of my filming and photography. My clients are often amazed that such great quality can come from a mobile phone.”

“Overall we decided to use the Nokia N8 as our camera of choice because of its image quality, but also its portability” he adds.

The Nokia N8 is widely regarded as the best camera phone in the world, for image quality and video clarity, and has been used to film advertisements, music videos as well as near feature length motion pictures.

To get a better idea of just what this handset is capable of without any image enhancement or effects follow this link – the result is astonishing.

The similarities

Let’s start with the similarities. Both the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710 feature a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512MB RAM. Most significantly, they both feature Windows Phone 7.5, otherwise known as Mango. Both handsets offer quadband radio reception, HSPA, WiFi and Bluetooth. The applications that run on the device are identical. Both include advanced services such as Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive voice-navigation and Nokia Music. Each handset active noise cancellation, a 3D accelerometer and proximity and ambient light sensors, providing all the hardware and sensors required for developers to create any manner of innovative apps.

The differences

The most obvious difference is in the look and the size of the phones. The Nokia Lumia 710 is relative lightweight at 125 grams, while the Nokia Lumia 800’s single piece, polycarbonate chassis comes in at 142 grams. Batteries are also different with the Nokia Lumia 710 boasting a 1300mAh with 7.6 hours of 3G talktime, while the Lumia 800 has a 1450mAh unit good for 9.5 hours.

The ‘buttonless’ fascia of the 800 has only ‘soft’ dedicated keys, while the 710 features an ‘rocker’ for the Start, back and search buttons.

As one would expect, there are hardware differences too. The Lumia 710 is equipped with 8GB of memory compared to the 800’s 16GB of storage. However, one of the most substantial differences is the camera. The Nokia Lumia 800 gets a more advanced camera with its 8MP Carl Zeiss unit, with double LED flash, versus the 5MP and single LED flash in the 710.

While both devices have a 3.7-inch 800×480 pixel touchscreen the 710 features an LCD display while the 800 has an AMOLED, Clearblack display increasing contrast, colour, and visibility in bright sunlight.

Probably the most important point to note when looking at both these devices is that with either, you don’t have to compromise on user-experience, as any device featuring the Lumia name will offer a great experience all round. 

Also keep in mind that the Lumia 800, as the best Windows Phone OS-running smartphone available, is capable of interacting with the Xbox 360, which is the best video game console on the market. Upon downloading the Xbox Companion App from the Windows Phone Marketplace, you will have access to cool functionality such as being able to search through the content on your Xbox 360 via your smartphone, as well as employing your Nokia Lumia 800 as a remote controller for your Xbox.