"As the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music players, millions of consumers from around the world can enjoy our music experiences," said Mr Alan O’Hara, General Manager of Nokia Ireland. "We’re dedicated to delivering the best music experience, based on products and services that offer consumers choice, relevance, and ease of use. We also want to be more locally relevant than any other digital music store in Ireland. "

Nokia is celebrating the launch by giving away 24,000 free music vouchers for the store at NokiaFreeMusic.ie - each worth from EUR 1 to EUR 10.  Everyone who claims a voucher at NokiaFreeMusic.ie is also entered to win a Nokia N95 8GB device, Bluetooth speakers, plus one year of unlimited streaming music from the Nokia Music Store. Nokia Music Store will also offer a free track of the week every week.

Source: Nokia

ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw comments, "Smart operating systems are continually being optimized to run on processors with lower performance. There is a strategic move to support smart OSes in single chip midrange devices in order to unlock more data revenues." Carlaw adds that, "The market is currently dominated by Nokia (52%) and Symbian (65%). However, the coalescence of the framework wars in the Linux environment and the growing stature of Windows Mobile will enable new competitors to put pressure on this established axis."

In the future, we can expect Google Android and Apple Mac OS X for the iPhone to turn the figures in their favour, bringing mobile experiences close to computer replacement.

Picture: 3G.co.uk, Casario
Source: Slashphone

Mass Email Delete

I don’t know how long I’ve been wanting a mass delete feature for the iPhone’s mail client, but it seems that my nightly prayers have not fallen on deaf ears. The Apple gods will be allowing mass email deletion with the iPhone v2.0. I don’t really get spam in my business email accounts, so mass deletion is not really a problem there. My personal email accounts are an entirely different story. My Gmail inbox is full of ads for mortgages and Viagra - and with push email with Yahoo! Mail for iPhone, I get solicitations to enlarge my penis pushed directly to my iPhone. Talk about annoying.

It’s not clear how this will work, but rest assured, in a matter of months, batch deleting all those spammy emails will be no harder than selecting them and hitting the delete button.

Bonjour

Mac users will understand the awesomeness of Bonjour and what it means for the iPhone. Sure, connecting to a WiFi network is a trivial exercise, but what about connecting to other computers or iPhones on any network (networking in Windows is "fun" to say the least)? Well, Bonjour makes it easy to network devices on a given network. It’s as simple as viewing connected devices and then connecting to them.

Bonjour has been lying dormant in previous iPhone firmwares, and it seems that Bonjour support is coming in June. The iPhone SDK includes Bonjour in the foundation, core foundation and base system components.

Full-Screen Mode on Safari

With the new iPhone SDK, iPhone developers will be able to use a full-screen mode to display webpages/web-apps. In full-screen mode, the web-page/web-app will be displayed without the Safari address bar at the top of the screen or the navigation/bookmark bar at the bottom of the screen. All it will take, apparently, is the addition of a meta tag in the web-app/web-page code. Web-apps with the meta tag will be launched directly in full-screen mode.

Every pixel is a precious piece of real-estate on a mobile phone’s display. And even with the huge screen on the iPhone, it doesn’t hurt to have an extra few lines of usable browser-space.

Scalable Vector Graphics and New CSS Effects

Support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) means that images can be highly-compressed, reducing an image file’s size. SVG is an image format that can be compressed to tiny proportions while maintaining the original file’s resolution. That means iPhones will be able to download SVG images more quickly without sacrificing the image’s quality.

The iPhone v2.0 will also support new CSS effects. CSS transforms, transitions, and animations will help take the sting out of the lack of Flash-support. And, some CSS effects will be hardware accelerated to boot!

PowerPoint Support

While making a new PowerPoint presentation might not be in the immediate future for native iPhone features, we’re all going to be able to view those PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint can be viewed through the iPhone’s mail client, and should add to the iPhone’s enterprise appeal. Microsoft Word and Excel files are already viewable through iPhone Mail, but so the addition of PowerPoint compatibility will truly round out the iPhone’s MS Office compatibility.

Locally Stored Web-Apps

Wait, so what’s the hub-ub with all these natively installable third-party iPhone applications? With locally stored web-apps, any web-developer can code web-applications for the iPhone! No web connection? No problem, just store your web-apps locally and they’re as good as native applications (although slightly limited by AJAX, CSS, HTML, etc.)

The iPhone SDK allows for the creation of web-apps, so it makes sense for the iPhone to include support for offline web-apps. Apple says that the iPhone v2.0 will support client-side database API which will allow “totally functional even with the network disconnected.” Score!

Search

And, last but not least - the iPhone may be getting "Search" functionality. If you search for, uh, "Search on iPhone" you may find that searching for anything on the iPhone just isn’t possible. Sure, with auto-completion, you can just start typing a contact to bring up all matching phone numbers or email addresses, but that’s only a half-hearted workaround. A search function is needed. Without a true search function on the iPhone, it’s hard to find a contact whose name you’ve forgotten, but happen to remember noting the contact entry as, say, "blonde hottie" or something like that.

Picture: Ubergizmo
Source: IntoMobile