Nokia hit 3m Ovi Store downloads a day milestone

Nokia has announced that Ovi Store downloads have reached 3m per day, while more than 400,000 new developers have signed up in the past year. Among the downloads, 92 developers have each seen their apps downloaded more than 1m times; altogether, Nokia is seeing more than 1 billion downloads per year.

Meanwhile, Qt adoption – the runtime system which has been adopted for cross-platform use on both Symbian and MeeGo devices – is also strong, with Nokia seeing 1.5m downloads of the Qt SDK. According to BLStream CEO Anton Gauffin, the coders responsible for gaming title Crazy Hamster, “without any promotion or marketing dollars, in a few weeks we’ve hit 200,000 downloads in Ovi Store faster than we did with App Store.”

More than 250,000 users sign up to Ovi every day, Nokia reckons, which makes for a considerable audience. The real worth of Qt won’t be seen until high-end MeeGo devices arrive in 2011, however, where it will debut to an established ecosystem of titles rather than having to build a software base from scratch.

More @ slashgear

Nokia C7 Review

The Nokia C7 could well be described as the less outlandish sibling of the N8: a more sober design, more mainstream camera and more affordable price tag, for what’s the second Symbian^3 smartphone from the company. Alternatively, it could be a business bargain. First impressions at Nokia World 2010 were solid, but does the day to day experience live up to the sturdy chassis? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

More @ slashgear

3 million downloads served by Nokia Ovi Store daily

Available in more than 190 countries across the globe, Nokia’s Ovi Store is constantly growing in popularity.

The Finnish company has just announced that its application store is now serving 3 million downloads each day. That’s still not comparable with the 10 million daily downloads served by Apple’s App Store, but it’s an important milestone nevertheless.

More than 165 million people are now Ovi users, and Nokia says 250,000 new users are registering every day.

The most popular applications in Ovi Store at the moment are Q Torch, Angry Birds, and EA’s Need for Speed Shift HD.

Via : unwiredview

Android Handsets to Double Up as Credit Cards

We'd dreamt of a day when our cell phones will become our credit cards. That day doesn't seem like some far-fetched futuristic concept now, with Google's Eric Schmidt working towards the same. At the Web 2.0 Summit, he said that the upcoming Android 2.3 (or Gingerbread) mobile operating system will support a technology called Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is a short-range, high frequency wireless technology that can swap data from two devices kept at most 4-inches apart. It works in a similar 'contactless' way that our office access cards or the smart-cards used by many public transport systems do.

Now the idea is to embed these NFC chips into cell-phones. There are only a few handful phones as of today that have this chip. But Android 2.3's compatibility with them gives hardware manufacturers a good reason to put one of these in their next Android phones. They could replace your credit cards while making payments at shops or restaurants. But Google has no plans to get their hands dirty into making specialized mobile payment software themselves. Eric said they'd rather partner with traditional credit card players (like a VISA or Mastercard).

More @ techtree

Qualcomm talking to AT&T

Seems Qualcomm wasn't kidding when it said selling off MediaFLO's spectrum was a possibility now that it's cutting off direct-to-consumer mobile TV services. BusinessWeek is reporting that the company has sat down recently with "several carriers" -- though only AT&T is being called out by name -- presumably with the goal of fleshing out just how much dinero it could land for offing the spectrum MediaFLO uses to deliver programming. Qualcomm paid close to $700 million for the spectrum over the course of the last decade, and it lies in the 700MHz block -- a block both AT&T and Verizon will be using extensively as they build out their next-gen networks -- so it stands to reason they'd both love to buy in, likely at a healthy premium over what Qualcomm originally paid. There was a time that we loved the idea of multicast mobile TV programming, but at this point, doesn't it seem like everything should be going to beef up wireless broadband?

More @ engadget

LaCie serves up SSD-based USB 3.0 FastKey

Get it straight, vaquero -- this ain't your mum's flash drive. LaCie's newest diminutive slab of aluminum is a solid state drive for your keyring, boasting transfer rates as high as 260MB/sec, 30/60/120GB capacities, a rugged metal casing and a USB 3.0 interface. You'll also get AES 256-bit encryption and 4GB of online-accessible Wuala storage, but you best not lose it. LaCie will be dinging your credit card for $149.99, $249.99 or $479.99 from least capacious to most, so you may want to take out an insurance policy on this guy before taking it out into the wild. Safety first and all.

Via : engadget, LaCie

HTC Merge emerges on Verizon site a little early

Far be it from us to tell Verizon how to do a product launch, but showing off a 360-degree view of the HTC Merge before the phone's even been announced doesn't seem like the soundest strategy to us. Of course, we doubt anyone intended for this Flash module to have become public knowledge like it has, but sure enough, a forum member over at Android Central spotted it among VZW's web properties and now we can all take a multidimensional look at this upcoming Android handset. Yes, that includes seeing it with its sliding QWERTY keyboard open -- you can find more imagery of that after the break -- though the pivotal questions of when, for how much, and "can you disable Bing?" remain unanswered for the time being. Ah well, let's just enjoy the eye candy.

More @ engadget

SteelSeries Shift MMO Keyset comes optimized for online

Outside of Word documents and IM clients, one of the most intensive uses of keyboards nowadays is in massively multiplayer online games. But, gaze upon the button array before you and you'll notice that there's nary a single concession to your ten-hours-a-day WoW habit. SteelSeries is today looking to rectify that situation with its all-new MMO Keyset, which you can see above, attached to the company's already available Shift gaming keyboard. This assortment of oddly titled keys comes with an exhaustive set of customization and macro options, so even the most hardcore of online raiders should be able to extract some added value from it. We're not sure that utility will ever add up to the $25 (€25 in Europe) asking price, but then we've never managed to get our Night Elf Mohawk to Level 80, either.


More @ SteelSeries

Rugged POV.HD video system captures 1080p

The POV.HD video system is a new offering from V.I.O positioned as a more professional-grade alternative to other film-through-hell helmet cameras such as the GoPro HD or Drift Innovations HD170. Its two-ounce IP67 certified camera sports a six-element glass lens and a native 1080p CMOS sensor that can capture a 142 degree field-of-view -- claimed to be the widest on the market -- in full HD at 30fps. The head unit can also be adjusted to record 720p at 60fps with a 92 degree FOV for faster shots. A separate recording unit features Texas Instruments' latest Da Vinci DM368 processor and supports a real-time video pipeline while storing up to 4.3 hours of 1080p H.264 video footage on a 32GB of SDHC. It's also equipped with a two-inch LCD viewing screen with exposure and footage tagging controls. Priced at $600, V.I.O is currently accepting pre-orders, which if made between November 15th through December 17th, are guaranteed to arrive by December 22nd -- just in time for your family's' homebrew holiday response to Jackass.

More @ PR Newswire, VIO-POV, engadget

Motorola Droid 2 Global hands-on

At this point we're completely amused that the Droid 2 Global has managed to leak out, get advertised, go on sale, and even arrive in customers' hands without so much as a PR peep from Verizon, so we leapt at the chance to get a quick hands-on with it last night here in NYC. Nothing here you wouldn't really expect, and we weren't able to run any performance tests on the speedbumped 1.2GHz processor, but we were able to solve the mystery of that camera bulge: turns out the Droid 2 Global is a hair thinner than the standard Droid 2, and the bulge pops out just enough to make up the difference. It's not dramatic, by any means -- if we hadn't been looking, we probably wouldn't have noticed. Oh, and it's definitely running Blur on top of Android 2.2, so you know, that's "awesome." Anyway, at the rate we're going we'll have a full review up and this thing will be discontinued before Verizon ever formally acknowledges it, so hit the gallery for a quick hands-on with The Droid That Doesn't... Exist.

More @ engadget

Panasonic Lumix GF2 reviewed

Panasonic's DMC-GF1 proved itself as a tasty go-between, filling the gap between high-end compact and DSLR. The GF2 will soon arrive and, according to Photography Blog, if anything it slots in a little closer to the compact side of things thanks to a new user interface that ditches many buttons and dials in favor of touchscreen menus. This will drive some users mad, but ultimately the up-rated features here still make this a worthy choice over the GF1, including video recording at 1080i60 and a new body that's a fifth smaller and seven percent lighter than before despite still containing a pop-up flash, 12.1 megapixel sensor, and image quality that's about as good as you're going to get out of a shooter this size.

Via : Photography Blog, engadget