Not Another Mobile Phone Blog

If you have 15$ in your pockets then you can buy a mobile phone. This is not a joke because Vodafone unveiled a $15 mobile phone at the on-going Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain. Vodafone V150 will also be available in India at the price point of Rs.700, which makes it the cheapest handset on the block. I guess the moment this device hits the market it will penetrate the rural areas rapidly, which has been a strong playing ground for Nokia. Vodafone V150 has basic features like voice and SMS. Interestingly it also has mobile payment feature. Nokia recently launched its pilot for Nokia Money in Pune along with YES Bank.As you can see the V150 is a dual-band basic candybar shaped handset with 5 way keys for navigation and features like SMS, vibration, ring tones, 110 phone book entries, micro USB connector, torch.

Along with the V150, Vodafone also launched the V250, another cheap handset, which will be priced at $20 or INR 900. The features include,FM radio, stereo headset support, voice and SMS; GSM 900/1800; polyphonic ringtones; vibration; alarm clock; calculator; currency converter; 2 embedded games; memory for up to 100 entries in phonebook and SMS storage; torch; mini USB connector. Both these handsets are bound to change the rules of the game once they enter India. However, few days back Nokia said that, it would soon launch a handset for farmers, which will be priced around INR 500, way cheap than these two guys mentioned above. This handset of Nokia will come under its, Nokia Life Tools program.

Nokia has once again made it clear that, India's mobile users market is of utmost importance for its performance. At the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2010, Nokia introduced a new service called Nokia Money. Kicking off in Pune, India, Nokia Money will work hand-in-hand with one of India's well known private sector banks, YES Bank. YES Bank has named these services as Mobile Money Services and the Pilot is soon going to start in Pune. With Nokia Money, users will just need the person's mobile number to whom they wanna transfer money. People can also pay utility bills, SIM top ups etc. Its just a pilot as of now, but the possibilities are end less like shopping, movie ticketing etc. This partnership is also a good opportunity for YES bank to increase its share of wallet. Also this is the initial partnership of Nokia with respect to its Mobile Money project. Going ahead, they are very much keen to build an open eco-system of mobile operators, banks and goods/services retailers. [Via] Nokia Money will be using Obopay's platform for this service.
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Yesterday, at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2010, Nokia and Intel almost took every one by surprise when they announced the merging of their Linux based platforms into one single platform, MeeGo. Its been a big day for Nokia as a company and also for Symbian platform as the fully open source Symbian^3 was also shown yesterday at the MWC 2010. Recently Nokia has gained back its market share and with the launch of new products and services they are doing the right things to keep up with their competitors like Apple and Android based phones. Apart from its products, Nokia is also known for offering a lot of mobile based services like App store, Ovi mail etc and over the last year they have made a lot of changes to their services to keep up with the competition, which has increased dramatically in 2008-09. Though not the best, but it seems that Nokia's services are doing really well. This was evident when Nokia shared some numbers that define the performance of their services.

• Ovi Maps - 3 million+ downloads till date
• Ovi Store - More than 1 million downloads; App Store localized for 18 countries with support for 30 languages
• Nokia Messaging - Nokia Messaging Push email service has been signed by 70 operators worldwide. Million people/month open Ovi Mail account
• Nokia Money - Commercial pilot has kicked off in Pune, India
• Nokia Life Tools - Currently available only in India and Indonesia since 2009 but there are already a million subscribers
• Nokia Music - Comes With Music is available in 27 markets with an average user downloading 500 songs in the first week. Ovi Music is available in 33 markets with a catalog of NINE million tracks

Today, at the MWC 2010 Nokia and Intel announced the merger of their Maemo and Moblin platforms respectively. The new platform will be called MeeGo. The name might be weird but its surely seems ready to Go!! Jokes apart this platform will not be restricted only to mobile phones but its for everything thats has a processor inside. Check out the video below that throws some light on this new platform from both, Intel as well as Nokia's point of view. You can also check more info and videos on the Official MeeGo Website. Nokia and Intel also announced that the first version of MeeGo will come out in Q2 2010 and MeeGo devices will be fully compatible with Nokia's Ovi store and also for independent developers who want to work on MeeGo, there is Intel's App Center. Also with the launch of MeeGo it does not mean that Maemo will be dead. Nokia has assured that the next Maemo version will be fully compatible with MeeGo. So its like, the next Maemo is MeeGo or you can say MeeGo is next generation Maemo.

Bolt, one the popular mobile Internet browsers has got a version upgrade. BitStream Inc which makes the Bolt Mobile Browser showcased the Version 1.7 of the browser at the Mobile World Congress 2010, which kicked off in Barcelona today. The new version is pretty fast and boasts of features like,direct Twitter integration, Spanish and Russian language support, an enhanced download manager, increased streaming video features and the ability to run widgets. Bitstream made this announcement exactly after one year of its formation. Like Opera, Bolt is a popular mobile Internet browser and has more than 4 million users, streamed over 135 million minutes of video (equivalent to 256 years if played back to back), served more than 512 million pages – as as many as 3 million pages per day, and downloaded more than 132 terabytes of data. Bolt is one of the fastest browser around and I have been using it regularly on my N79 and I must say that its a no non-sense application with fast page load speeds, nice rendering, data compression and its video streaming support is one of the best. [Via]

For the Samsung Wave the Bada App storte is already there with around 100 apps but soon the number of Apps will grow including the country availability.

The Mobile World Congress 2010 is just around the corner and companies are all set to launch thier new devices and applications that will lure customers all around the world. Nokia will also be participating in this year's MWC and  will be launching its C Series range of handsets. Nokia will launch the C5 and C6 handset. There is a rumor that Nokia Mystiq, which leaked a few days back is actually the Nokia C5 but there are no details about the C6. Nokia has already made it pretty clear that, C Series range of handsets would target budget conscious consumers.

The Mobile World Congress, also called as the MWC is back in 2010 and will be held from Feb b15th to Feb 18th in Bracelona, Spain. Last year's Mobile World Congress 2009 was hot and happening where companies right from Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and other small payers showcased their products inlcuding innovative devices, accessories, applications and different technologies that make mobile communications what they are today. This year's Mobile World Congress is also much awaited and as a lot of things have happened in the last year, the expectations are very high. Nokia is showcasing its new C Series range of handsets. It showcased its X Series range at the Nokia World Event 2009. December 2009 was the month when Samsung showcased its upcoming mobile platform by the name Bada. With Bada, Samsung wants to give smart phone like experience on non smart phones and the company confirmed that the first Bada phone will come in the H1 2010. With So many OSs floating around Bada is creating buzz in the mobile community and not to worry it is also making its debut at the Mobile World Congress 2010...that's the news as of now. LG will also be showcasing some Android based handsets at this event.LG is also the Platinum Event Sponsor of the MWC 2010, so don't be surprised if you see LG all over the place and also a lot of LG handsets with Windows Mobile, Android getting launched over the span of three days. Sony Ericsson showed us it Idou, Yari, Satio, Aino handsets last year, let see what they have in store for us this year. You can check out the agenda of this year's Mobile World Congress 2010 here.

If you remember, Nokia was supposed to release the C Series handsets along with the X Series handsets in last year's Nokia World Event. But sadly that thing never happened and though everybody knew that something like the C Series exists, nobody ever saw what the C Series handsets from Nokia would look like. But now, guys over at Daily Mobile Blog got their hands on some of the exclusive pics of Nokia C5, which belongs to the C Series from Nokia. It seems that the C5 is a fairly simple handset that will run on the Symbian S60 3rd Edition. Other features inlcude, 3.2 meg snapper, GPS feature, 50MB internal memory, microSD card support, 3.5 mm standard headphone jack and support for UMTS, HSDPA and HSUPA. There is a high possibility that Nokia will release this handset at the upcoming MWC 2010 lets see if the C5 packs the punch to demolish its competitors at the MWC 2010!!