State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

A while back we took a sneak peak at Nokia’s latest offering, N97. The set was officially launched on 12th June at a grand launch ceremony held at Marriott Karachi. Along with a tilting 3.5″ touch display, QWERTY keyboard and a fully customizable home screen, the Nokia N97 promises to offer instant access to the full range of Ovi services. The N97 is expected to be sold in Pakistan at a retail price of PKR 58,000 only.

The device was announced at a glamorous press event where two European models brought the phone at the venue and the Finnish First Secretary, Deputy Head of Mission H.E Miia Rainne handed over the phone to the GM Nokia Pakistan Imran Khalid Mahmood. Also present at the ceremony was Henri Mattila, Head of Category Marketing, Nseries Middle East and Africa.

Delivering on Nokia’s vision and thought leadership based on mobile convergence, Nokia Nseries has aimed to present the best in class mobile computers to its internet savvy consumers. Today, we take great pride in introducing the newest addition to Nokia Nseries – Nokia N97. We have combined the most-advanced smartphone capabilities in this device to enhance the internet entertainment for our consumers and at the same time ease-of use with one-touch access to their favourite online content.

Imran Khalid Mahmood

GM Nokia Pakistan

The Nokia N97 is Nokia’s first device to feature a personalizable home screen, which can be customized with a range of widgets which bring live information directly to the device. These widgets include key social networking destinations like Facebook and Hi5, news services like the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters, as well as shopping and weather information.

The Nokia N97 is the first device to ship with the Ovi Store, which offers easy access to applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, web and location-based services, and much more. Ovi Store has paid and free content from a range of global and local content providers and developers, including Paramount Pictures, Facebook and Qik, as well as a selection of Twitter applications.

The Nokia N97 is an important step towards our vision of delivering a highly personalized Internet experience. Fuelled by a multitude of music, maps, games, media and applications via Ovi, the Nokia N97 transforms the Internet into an experience that’s completely tailored to the tastes and interests of its owner.

Henri Mattila

Head of Category Marketing

Nseries Middle East and Africa

Entertainment Ensured

The Nokia N97 also has direct access to the huge catalogue of music in the Nokia Music Store. With multiple high-speed connectivity options and 32GB of storage (up to 48GB using a microSD card) it is possible to directly download and store tens of thousands of songs on the handset. And you can listen to your favourite music on the Nokia Bluetooth Stereo Headset BH-905, which Nokia also launched today. This headset brings crystal clear sound, eliminates background noise, and is the ideal accessory for listening to music and making calls on the Nokia N97, as well as being compatible with a diverse range of other mobile and music devices.

High-quality images and video clips at 30 frames per second (fps) can be captured using the 5 megapixel camera with integrated Carl Zeiss optics. Images can also be geo-tagged to specific locations and shared instantly with friends or uploaded online via Ovi Share, Twitter or Flickr.

Like I had mentioned in my previous post, the Nokia Bloggers Meet-up was held on 22nd May at The Sports Bar – Karachi. The event wasn’t just a bloggers meet-up but also a sneak-peak of N97.

N97- The new entrant in the Nokia’s flagship N-series is due to launch in Pakistan in first week of June. This time Nokia came different and thus was this pre-launch meet-up with the bloggers.

Mr. Adeel Hashmi, Communication Manager – Nokia Pakistan, started off the event giving an introduction to the idea of meeting the bloggers for the pre-launch and promised more of such meet-ups. The keynote speakers of the evening were Mr. Khurram Pradhan, Product and Portfolio Manager and Ms. Shabana Shahzad, Program Manager.

Khurram Pradhan gave his presentation on the main theme of N97 – Personal Internet. In his presentation he also focused on what’s driving the transformation of converged devices. He discussed that Nokia has been working on converging mobile phone with internet from last decade to enhance the personal internet experience.

At present out of the 1.3 billion internet users 520 million use it on mobile device and research has indicated this figure will go up to 1.5 billion by the year 2012. Nokia being consumer centric is on the move to make the mobile broadband dream a reality.

Not only this Nokia also plans to attract the market where we have 93 million users using the social network services like facebook, my space and twitter on their mobile devices, 82 million downloading maps on their devices, 22.3 million access the internet on devices daily for news and information and where we also have 184 million blogs among which 77%  are actively read and commented. In efforts of enriching the networking experience, the N97 comes with third party widgets, which are standalone programs on your mobile home screen.

Nokia’s customer care is a two dimensional strategy, one, devices for connecting people and second devices for connecting places which it achieves along with Ovi Maps.

Foreseeing the future in application development Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license.

Khurram’s part ended with a Q and A session and then came the most interesting and most awaited SNEAK PEAK at the N97. Ms. Shabana Shahzad conducted it. Bloggers were also given the feel-it experience of N97.

Some of the N97 features are:

- Easy and fast connections to internet services
- Easy text input with QWERTY keyboard and touch screen
- 3.5 inch sliding tilt display
- Live personalized home screen with widgets
- Up-to-date information via RSS feed
- Fully compatible with Oviservices
- Browse real web pages
- Take pictures and videos and share them immediately
- Watch high-quality video on the large 3.5 inch 16:9 widescreen
- Video playback at 30 fps, for a wide array of formats
- Play videos, music and pictures on TV using TV-out
- Access internet video feeds through Nokia Video Center
- Enjoy great audio through standard 3.5 mm jack headphones, built-in stereo speakers or Bluetooth technology
- Digital music player with support for play list editing, equalizer and categorized access to your music collection
- Search, browse and purchase songs online in Nokia Music Store (for availability, please visit www.music.nokia.com)
- Nokia Maps with integrated compass and A-GPS receiver
- Multimedia city guides and navigation services. Drive: voice guided car navigation, or Walk: pedestrian-optimized turn-by-turn guidance. (Navigation may need to be purchased separately.)
- World-class game titles with N-Gage
- Make you home-screen private any time you want

N97 Tech Profile:

System:        WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface:    S60 5th Edition
Dimensions:    117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm*mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight:        Approx. 150 g
Display:        3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colorsnHD16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Battery:         Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory:        Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via micro SD memory card slot)
Video playback:    MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps, up to VGA resolution Real Video up to QCIF @ 30 fps Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser
Music playback:    MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA
Lens:        Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture:    Up to 5 mega pixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture:    MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture:        F2.8
Focal length:    5.4 mm
Flash:        Dual LED camera flash and video light
Talk time:        Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time:    Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback:    Up to 4,5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback:    Up to 37 hours (offline mode)

The device shall be availabe here in second week of june at an expected retail price of Rs. 60,000.

At the Nokia Blogger Meet-Up yesterday, Mr. Khurram Pradhan, Portfolio and Product Manager (Nokia Pakistan) shared this video in his presentation.

This video shows the transformation from the silver screen to the FOURTH SCREEN as he says is all about the paradigm shift. Soon cell phones will no longer be ‘cell phones’. Personal computing is transforming to mobile computing which will make your internet personal.

The device from Nokia that does it all -the N97- will launch in Pakistan next month. Stay tuned to get its sneak peak before its actual launch.

The story behind the making of the Nokia N97 is a fascinating one that gives a real insight of what goes into to forging a flagship device from scratch.

The team behind the creation of the Nokia N97 is a global one with a shared vision that’s highlighted in this video. The project is based in Tokyo, with the industrial designer in Finland, the mechanics team in Tokyo, and software teams around the globe, straddling Boston, Dallas, India, China, Singapore. Many of the key players at Nokia behind the product step in front of the lens in this rare video to tell their piece of the story puzzle that fits together to make the N97, including Tomi Kuparinen, Product Program Manager and designer Shunjiro Eguchi.

Watch the video below for the making of Nokia N97. The device launch in Pakistan shall be in the 3rd week of June. We shall get more on it to you soon.

[Via Nokia]