Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.17 billion

Nokia today announced that Microsoft will be acquiring substantially all of Nokia’s devices and services business for $5 billion. Microsoft will also license Nokia’s patents and mapping assets for another $2.17 billion making the complete deal worth $7.17 billion in cash.

Building on the partnership with Nokia announced in February 2011 and the increasing success of Nokia’s Lumia smartphones, Microsoft aims to accelerate the growth of its share and profit in mobile devices through faster innovation, increased synergies, and unified branding and marketing. For Nokia, this transaction is expected to be significantly accretive to earnings, strengthen its financial position, and provide a solid basis for future investment in its continuing businesses. “It’s a bold step into the future – a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies.

Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft’s share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive officer. “In addition to their innovation and strength in phones at all price points, Nokia brings proven capability and talent in critical areas such as hardware design and engineering, supply chain and manufacturing management, and hardware sales, marketing and distribution.”

The deal will see 32,000 Nokia employees transfer to Microsoft, with Microsoft also acquiring the Lumia and Asha brands while licensing the Nokia brand for continuity with current Nokia-branded hardware. Microsoft will also acquire Nokia's long-term license with Qualcomm for chip technology. 

Microsoft and Nokia have seen some success with Lumia phones running Windows Phone, but the platform remains well short of becoming a third major player in the smartphone market alongside Google's Android and Apple's iOS. 
By uniting the hardware and software, Microsoft seems intent upon offering a more complete and end-to-end user experience, similar in some ways to Apple's work integration of iOS and iPhone. 

Nokia 500 goes up for pre-order

Announced in August, the Nokia 500 is now available for pre-order with online retailer Flipkart for Rs 10,200. The 500 runs on Symbian Anna and features a 1GHz processor, a 5.0 MP camera, 3.2-inch 640×360 pixel display, Wi-Fi and GPS. It has 2GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot that supports cards up to 32GB. It comes with two additional exchangeable back covers. Nokia is expected to release the latest Symbian Belle update for the 500 towards the end of this year. It is We expect Nokia to officially launch the 500 in India soon. Read on for the complete specifications of the Nokia 500.Nokia 500 Specification

    Weight (with battery): 93 g     Volume: 73 cc     Internal memory: 2GB     Support for up to 32GB with an external microSD memory card     Talk time (maximum):         GSM up to 7 h         WCDMA (3G) up to 5 h     Standby time (maximum):         GSM up to 500 h         WCDMA (3G) up to 455 h     Video playback time (maximum): 5 h 15 min     Video recording time (VGA,15 fps, maximum): 1.5 h     Music playback time (maximum): 35 h     Screen size: 3.2″     Resolution: 16:9 nHD (640 x 360 pixels) TFT display, 16 million colours     Orientation sensor (accelerometer)     Compass (Magnetometer)     Proximity sensor     Ambient light detector     5 megapixel camera, Full Focus, Zoom up to 4x (digital)     Video capture in 640 x 480 (VGA), 640 x 352 (nHD), 176 x 144 (QCIF) at 15 fps     Stereo FM radio (87.5-108 MHz/76-90 MHz)

Nokia 500 goes up for pre-order for Rs 10,200 Price of Nokia 500 in India will be around Rs 10,200 

Nokia Announces N9 MeeGo Phone with Swipe Interface

Nokia’s future lies with Windows Phone 7 and Symbian, but the Finnish phone maker has decided to give MeeGo one last hurrah before abandoning it to the cold darkness of forgotten operating systems. The Linux-based mobile OS gets a final day in the sun later this year when it launches on the Nokia N9, an all-touch smartphone with a 3.9 inch curved AMOLED display and unibody polycarbonate frame.

Nokia’s hyping a new “swipe” interface that eschews buttons for nothin' but finger controls. A swipe inwards from the edge of the screen will return to the home screen PlayBook style. Despite its imminent shift to Windows Phone 7, Nokia’s putting some decent hardware into this final MeeGo phone and claiming it delivers the best multitasking experience on a smartphone.

The 3.9 inch curved glass AMOLED runs at a resolution of 854x480 with power coming from a 1GHz OMAP chip from 2010. The OMAP 3630 has been kicking around for awhile now in phones like the Droid X, Droid 2, and LG Optimus Black. The SoC’s PowerVR SGX530 graphics won’t blow you away, but the N9 won’t be a complete slouch and should handle day-to-day tasks just fine. The phone will go on sale in 16GB and 64GB configurations sometime in 2011.

Other hardware includes an HD video-capable 8MP camera with dual LED flash, 28mm lens and auto focus support. The phone supports Dolby Headphone and Dolby Digital Plus for giving stereo audio the surround sound treatment, and Bluetooth and NFC support are in for short-range data transfer. A 1450 mAh battery keeps the WCDMA phone running.

Nokia’s big on the N9’s touch interface: it uses a double tap to unlock the screen and has a trio of home screens that focus on different phone elements. One shows your installed apps, another lists social feeds and notifications and the third houses the applications currently running on the phone. The Webkit 2 browser is HTML 5 ready and Nokia Maps comes with a Drive application for in-car navigation.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has said that the company will likely launch its first Windows Phone 7 device before the end of 2011. Production won’t seriously ramp up until 2012, and that may well be for a Europe-only launch. Nokia plans to launch up to 10 more Symbian devices by this time next year and will continue to support the platform until 2016. MeeGo won’t be so lucky--the N9 may well be the last Nokia MeeGo phone to hit the market when it launches sometime between late summer and winter 2011.

Nokia Shows Off Futuristic Phone UIs with Morph Concept

Most of the exciting news in the mobile sector these days comes from companies working on iOS or Android--we don’t hear much from Nokia, but the cell phone giant is still out there making phones. In fact, they’re doing some pretty incredible research on futuristic phone technology, primarily with nanotech. It may be decades until we see consumer products taking advantage of Nokia’s research, but the elastic, wearable phone concept looks awesome to us. Alas, by the time something like this is actually possible, it probably won't even seem cool or cutting-edge anymore.

 Read on to watch two videos that show how Nokia hopes to use nanotechnology to make future phones solar-powered and self-cleaning--and even give them a sense of smell.

Nokia Morph

The Morph is Nokia’s big future-concept project, aimed at showing off most of its research projects in one super device. It’s sort of a phone--more like a flexible touchscreen display that can be molded into a variety of forms, like a flat touchscreen or a wristband. Even if the vague scientific backing of “using nanotechnology” makes this feel more like fiction than reality, we hope devices like this are possible in the future.

Closer to Reality

Surprisingly, quite a few of the concepts demonstrated in the Nokia Morph video already exist in working forms. Obviously none of them are quite so sophisticated, but they’re real. Researchers in Cambridge have been playing around with flexible silicone rubber, evaporated gold to serve as a conductor, and an extremely malleable elastic touchpad. Even stretched 20% beyond its original size, the touchpad works as designed.Our future flexible phones may even be able to smell their surroundings, once again using nanotechnology. By placing nanowires on a chip, Nokia’s researchers have been able to mock up an extremely rudimentary sense of smell. Objects in close proximity with the chip influence the flow of current through the nanowire, which allows it to detect and accurately identify some substances.The rest of Nokia’s research involves touch gestures and camera projection--in other words, stuff that’s not as futuristic or cool as Morph’s bigger ideas.

All New Nokia E7: The First of Its Kind

Nokia E7 Price in india

Recently Nokia announced E7, the first touchscreen mobile phone in the Nokia E-series. Nokia E7 sports a magnificent 4” display with CBD (Clear Black Technology) along with a sliding QWERTY keypad. It is fully loaded with features and is called by Nokia as the “Mobile Office” . Seeing the design and build of E7 we can say it is like the big brother of N8. Here is the quick overview of the phone. Nokia E7 Specs

• 16 GB (Internal memory) storage capacity with  256 MB RAM and  1 GB ROM.
• Large 4-inch Full touchscreen display With Nokia CBD technology.
• Supports GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900.
• 4-row QWERTY tilt-slider keypad smartphone along with Multi-touch input.
• Proximity sensor, Accelerometer and UI auto rotate.
• Bluetooth version 3.0 along with USB on the Go.
• Standard battery, Li-Ion 1200 mAh (BL-4D) which gives stand by time Up to 432 h (2G) / Up to 480 h (3G) and talk time upto Up to 9 h (2G) / Up to 5 h (3G).

 

• Heavily loaded with 8 mega-pixel camera with dual LED flash and 720p HD video recording.
• The secondary camera is VGA based.
• Geo-tagging, face detection, video stabilization are are also included to cut short your after shot work load.
• Dolby Digital Plus surround sound speaker with standard 3.5 mm audio jack connectivity.

Price and Release Date of E7

The expected launch price of Nokia E7 in India is around Rs. 26,000 and it will be hitting stores in Q4, 2010.