GLOBAL – Nokia Social is our Symbian app for keeping in touch with your social networks, and it’s recently been updated to make creating and viewing updates simpler than ever.

The main visible improvement is the addition of extra widgets to take full advantage of the extra screen real-estate that comes with Nokia Belle. With Social 1.5, there’s a choice of four different widgets so you can see more or less of your networks right from your homescreen.

A picture paints a thousand words in this case, so this is what you’ll get:

Of course, it’s entirely your choice to use any of these widgets. Starting with the left-hand picture, there’s the Facebook summary widget. This is reasonably compact (4×2), and gives both a field to create an update, with access to the camera, and also notifications of messages, events, updates and invites.

The lower two 4×1 widgets on the left are simpler and give quick access to the main apps, plus notifications.

On the right is the 4×3 mega widget. It’s hard to tell, but this is actually scrollable, so you can see ten recent status updates from your friends. You can also post updates (with an optional picture), which go to both networks simultaneously.

Under the hood, as it were, there are full apps for both Facebook and Twitter.

Nokia Social 1.5 is a free download from Nokia Store. Give it a spin and let us know what you think. [NB: it's called 'Social Networking Client' in the Store listings, if you're trying to search for it].

UPDATE: If you couldn’t get this through the link provided, a new version is rolling out through Software Update on your phone itself or through Nokia Suite.

But many people want to go deeper than that when it comes to personalising their phone. So let’s take a look at the options.

The first modification you might want to play with is to change the colour scheme inside your phone. If you really want dark blue tiles on your magenta phone, then that’s up to you. It’s your eyesight.

Changing the colour scheme is simple. From the app list, choose ‘Settings’, then ‘Theme’. Tap the ‘Accent color’ list and choose from the list available. (For those who aren’t satisfied with the default choices, check out Wiztiles in the Marketplace)

It’s also possible to choose between black and white backgrounds on the same ‘Theme’ screen. Tap ‘Background’ and choose between dark and light. Note that with an AMOLED screen, the dark background uses less battery power, since black pixels are achieved by turning off the light, unlike LCD displays.

Next you’ll want to change the picture on your lock screen. Go to settings, then ‘Lock + wallpaper’ and press ‘Change wallpaper’ and you can choose any image from your phone and pan the selection box to choose the bit you want. There are apps available to do this for you, but I’ve found it as easy to just find and download an image with regular Bing search. I use Pictures Lab for on-phone picture editing.

To change the ringtone, the settings entry is, of course, ‘Ringtones and Sounds’. There’s a bunch available pre-installed, but we know a lot of people will want to assign a custom tune here. There’s two options here:

(1) Use a free music editor such as Audacity to create a 40 second ringtone on your computer – Audacity can load MP3s and other music formats so you shouldn’t have a problem with your existing music collection. Add it to the playlist you use for your mobile in Zune, assigning it the genre ‘ringtone’. Once it’s synchronised onto your phone, it will be available from the list.

(2) There’s a whole bunch of free and paid ringtone apps available on the Marketplace. We found easyRing&Music perhaps the most powerful. It will let you pick tunes from Amazon and other sources, or your SkyDrive, and edit them on your phone.

The Marketplace is also your friend when it comes to customising your tiles. Of especial interest is Quick Tiles, which is enormously useful, allowing you to create completely custom tiles for a whole bunch of new purposes such as reminders, countdowns, city-clocks and now even moon phases.

Quick Tiles (left) and Tile Painter (right)

Also of note is Tile Painter. This does a similar job to Quick Tiles but with a different set of possible actions to perform when your custom tile is created. In particular, if you’re using tiles to create bookmarks to your favourite websites, this will allow you to customise its appearance.

 Are you dressing up your Lumia? What’s the most important piece of customisation for you?

EUROPE – Youth unemployment is a big problem across Europe. In some states, up to 44% of young people don’t have a job, with around 22% youth unemployment across Europe as a whole.

European e-Skills week is a major event to seek how to equip young people with the right IT and Communications skills to make them attractive to employers.

It’s organised by DIGITALEUROPE and European Schoolnet, in conjunction with hundreds of partners, including major IT industry companies such as Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Microsoft, Sony and many more.

And there’s a competition, Project Passion, which is where young, European readers of this blog stand a chance to score big. There are thousands of Euros to be won and a bunch of other prizes, including Nokia Lumia smartphones.

What you have to do is create a communications campaign on the theme of “e-Skills: there’s a job waiting for you”. Underneath that umbrella theme, there are three sub-categories and your campaign should address one of these:

• e-Skills and me
• e-Skills: jobs of the future
• Creative e-Skills

The campaign can be created for any medium, from mobile to music to tablets to posters and social media.

You’ll need to document what you’ve made on a blog or YouTube or even Twitter and tell the organisers about it.

Note that while we’re partnering with the event at Nokia, it’s not our competition; we don’t decide the winners or adjudicate on who’s qualified to enter. We just thought that readers ought to know about it.

Read more about the competition, the full rules and how to enter on the competition website.

The deadline for entries is March 4^th – so it’s time to get busy!

LONDON, United Kingdom – One of the hundreds of free seminars and events during Nokia-sponsored Social Media Week, ‘Teenagers of the species‘ covered the ways in which teenagers are different from adults, how they use social media, and how brands might get in touch with them.

Depending on how old you are, you may sometimes feel teenagers belong to a different race. And it turns out that, in some ways, you might be right. As event chair Maurice Wheeler pointed out, it’s not just raging hormones that make teenagers different.

Science bit

In fact, teenagers’ brains, particularly the frontal lobe, have not fully developed. This part of the brain is responsible for instincts like judgement, insight and emotional restraint, and might not be fully grown until you’re about 25. You may draw your own conclusions about what this might mean about teens!

Nokia UK PR manager Mark Hindle was on hand to give the benefit of his experience handling a range of recent campaigns aimed at young people. He pointed out that most PR and marketing people really don’t know what makes teens tick. Their world moves so fast and is largely secretive to the extent that it’s been really hard to work out what they’re into.

However, social media allows us easily to see the bands and other cultural reference points that are most relevant to younger people. Equipped with this knowledge, Nokia was able to approach the likes of deadmau5 and One Direction to talk about partnerships with confidence that they would resonate with young people.

Youth expert Dr Barbie Clarke revealed some interesting insights into teens’ use of social media. Over the last five years, teens have flitted from service to service, moving from the likes of Piczo as early teens, to MySpace and then to Facebook as they get older.

Now, however, she’s seen strong evidence of younger teens devoting their time to Twitter instead. She believes that many youngsters have become aware of the potentially damaging effects of over-sharing on social networks, and so the relatively anonymous and ephemeral nature of Twitter appeals to them.

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Marketing expert Chris Ward agreed. He said that teens today very much live “in the moment”. He’d seen evidence of many teens deleting swathes of stored information about themselves from social networks. Thinking towards the future, Mark Hindle suggested that lifespan of brands having fan pages might well be limited as both teens and adults lock down their social networks to much smaller and tighter groups.

If you’re interested in the subject, the full video from the event is available on the Social Media Week website.

image credit: orangeacid, Lil Larkie

It’s the day we celebrate 14 martyred saints in Ancient Rome. The original Saint Valentine was a bit of a tough nut, according to early accounts. Having been condemned to death by Claudius II, he was beaten and stoned. And when that failed to put him down, he was beheaded as well.

Our Finnish colleagues at Nokia display a remarkably sane approach to Valentine’s. Instead of all this romance stuff we put up with in the rest of the world, Valentine’s Day in Finland is all about friendship. They actually call it “Ystävänpäivä“, which means Friend’s Day, and it’s all about getting together as a big group and celebrating your friendships.

Not so much here in the UK, though. Here it’s hearts and flowers from beginning to end.

If you haven’t already booked a restaurant, then a combination of Popular Places on Nokia Maps or Local Scout on Windows Phone might get you to safety before you are in serious trouble with your partner.

It’s a great app, but we somehow doubt that the newly-released Domino’s Pizza app for Windows Phone will win you many brownie points with your nearest and dearest.

And you have bought flowers, haven’t you? Haven’t you? Depending on the answer, you may be pleased to know that Interflora has a mobile optimised website. Competitor iFlorist only offers a full-fat website, it seems, but that worked fine on the Nokia Lumia and Nokia N9. If you need to find flowers in a hurry, then once again, Nokia Maps is your friend with location-sensitive search serving up the nearest florist in moments in case you need to make an early morning dash.

A number of e-Card style apps have appeared that let you send Valentine’s Day cards. (This one seems to be the best on Windows Phone Marketplace). To be entirely honest, we can’t really recommend them. Nothing says “Our relationship is on the rocks” better than sending your partner an e-Card on this special day.

On the other hand, there are a few Valentine’s themed games on offer. Try Valentine’s Delivery for free, or buy it for 99p if you think you might play it again after today. It’s a ‘catch things dropping from the sky’ game that might occupy your time on the bus travelling to meet that special person.

Having given all my money to the aforementioned restauranteurs and florists, I shall be consoling myself with the free Cupid’s Arrows. Ideal if Valentine’s brings violent thoughts to your mind, this one allows you to play Cupid, shooting arrows at as many hearts as you can within the allotted time.

You never know, I might even phone or text someone. Will your phone see any romantic Valentine’s Day action today?

GLOBAL – We know that the Nokia N9 has a lot of fans among Conversations readers. Heck, it’s such a lovely phone with some very cool innovations that you can’t find elsewhere.

But is it perfect? Well, that’s a matter of taste. Maybe no phone is ever perfect. Happily, though, people have been busily tweaking their N9 to make it behave even better. These are the hacks I’ve got installed. Maybe you have some of your own favourites. In which case, leave your comments below.

Make your calendar cooler

There are a number of programs designed to better integrate the N9’s calendar into the phone. The one I’m using is Organiser Feed, which does two useful things.

First, it makes the icon on the launcher screen reflect today’s date, rather than the 12^th, which is only correct 1/30^th of the time.

The second part of the program adds your forthcoming events to the notifications screen, which is really useful.

Completionists might also want a real-time clock for their launcher icon. I’m not so sure this is necessary, since you can see a clock any time you look at the standby or lock screen.

Connect your contacts

One very useful thing that you can do with both Windows Phone and Symbian based phones is put your most-used contacts onto your home screen, so you can get in touch with them without having to go through the address book every time.

You can’t do that on a Nokia N9 out of the box, but now you can with ContactLaunch. If a lot of your phone use is contacting the same few people, then it really cuts through the palaver of making a call or sending a text. This is the only paid-for item in this list. It costs £1.

Sorting out Swipe

The no-buttons, three screen interface of the Nokia N9 has been greeted with acclaim. But there’s something a little quirky about it. If you swipe to the left from a running application, it takes you back to the home screens. But which one? Sometimes it seems random, or it’s never the one that you actually wanted, which is another two swipes left. [There is actually a logic to this: it takes you back to the screen you launched the app from, but it’s easy to forget how you arrived at your current app].

Anyway, there’s no need to play Home Screen Lotto if you install Swipe Manager. You can simply decide what direction means what: if you want a left swipe to take you to the launcher, and right to take you to the task manager, then you can have this, or the reverse, and the same with upwards and downwards.

So what are you ‘must-have’ tweaks for the Nokia N9 interface?

GLOBAL – You know what needs an upgrade? Everyday life. And Nokia is rewarding the people who come up with great ideas for giving people’s lives a reboot with some brand new Nokia Lumia 800 smartphones.

Our colleagues on the ideas project website have set their latest challenge in line with the thinking behind our recent campaigns for the Lumia launch.

For the next three weeks, starting today they’re asking readers to come up with their best ideas to inject a little bit of amazing into our day-to-day existence. This week’s question is:

Wouldn’t it be amazing if life was just a little bit more laid back? Live Tiles are the Lumia 800’s solution to making things simpler, letting you discover everything going on in your world at a glance. What would you do to upgrade the everyday by making life easier?

Got an answer? Check that it meets the strict judging criteria:

1. Is the idea rooted in the everyday?
2. Is the idea about upgrading the moment?
3. Is it something everyone can relate to?
4. Is it surprising?
5. Is it social and instantly sharable?
6. Is it creating fun and delight
7. Is it clever?

If the answer’s “yes”, you should head over to the site and submit your suggestion.

If it’s “yes”, but you already own a Lumia, then feel free to give it away for free in the comments below!

image credit: spettacolopuro

GLOBAL  – Illegal trade in natural resources is widely recognized as a reason for instability. In the past months, the illegal extraction and trade of minerals in the conflict-ridden eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has again hit the headlines.  

At Nokia, we want to ensure that all materials used in our products come from socially and environmentally responsible sources. To provide further clarification on our stance regarding the illegal trade in natural resources, we’ve now published a public policy to complement our existing strict supplier requirements and other guidelines. 

The paper includes a part specifically on conflict minerals, spelling our policy out loud and clear:  

• We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals.
• We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain.
• We have no tolerance with regard to corruption, money-laundering and bribery.
• We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles.

Digging deeper than the first tier

The reality is that problems often lie beyond the first tier of our suppliers.

In the case of conflict minerals, there are typically 4-8 supplier layers between Nokia and any mine, and therefore just focusing on our direct suppliers isn’t enough.  So, as well as demanding proper due diligence from our direct suppliers, we ask them to set policies and supplier requirements of their own and pass those on into the supply chain.

We also require our suppliers to map out their supply chains in order to achieve traceability at least to smelter level. Once mechanisms become available, suppliers will be required to ensure that purchased metals originate from smelters validated as being free of conflict minerals. Nokia reserves the right to request further evidence of the chain down to mine level when necessary. Traceability data must also be maintained and recorded for five years and provided to us upon request. 

The principles of the policy have been incorporated into our supplier requirements. Instead of merely handing them out, we believe it’s also vital to create awareness and build capacity within our supplier base through training and regular supplier meetings. In addition, we encourage our suppliers to support the industry efforts to enhance traceability and responsible practices in global mineral supply chains.

Industry-wide standards needed

The illegal trade of minerals is an issue that cannot be solved alone by one company. Therefore, as well as mapping out supply chains, setting supplier requirements and fortifying our own due diligence practices, we’re also active participants in industry-wide initiatives as we explained in our last article on this topic.

Besides our work with industry peers in the GeSI (Global e-Sustainability Initiative)–EICC (Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition) Extractives Work Group and the OECD pilot for testing due diligence guidelines for responsible supply chain management, we have now joined the US State Department’s Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade. The alliance between industry, governmental agencies and civil society was formed to support the development of supply chain solutions for sourcing conflict-free minerals from the DRC and the Great Lakes Region. The aim is to support legitimate trade and avoid an embargo on Central Africa. 

Metal traceability is an issue that concerns the entire electronics industry, and any industry potentially using minerals deriving from conflict areas. However, tracing the minerals used in electronic goods or any other products is complicated and the process has been slow. This is because currently, there are no certificates available, supply chains are long and complex, and minerals are smelted together before being used for components. Furthermore, there are also some reports of smuggling in the conflict area, complicating the tracing even more.

Both increased transparency in the supply chain and industry-wide standards are needed to solve the problem. We’re actively working to help achieve that day by day.

But the whole thing’s scuppered if the sun’s shining right on your screen and reflections mean you can’t see anything. In fact, the problem’s become worse in recent years as we’ve largely switched to full screen, touch-driven displays.

Brighter displays are one part of a solution. And so we’ve pumped up the power and moved to improved display solutions in pursuit of a few extra nits.

But making the screen brighter and brighter has a big drawback. Big, modern screens use up a lot more power than the 1.5-inch mono display on your old Nokia 3310. There comes a point where you’d be prepared for the screen to be a little dimmer if it meant you could get a couple more hours’ use out of your phone.

Check out the new Nokia Lumia 900

All about our biggest, thinnest smartphone.

Exclusive to AT&T in the USA

So a second strand to improving outdoor usability needed to be devised. One that focused on reducing the reflectiveness of your screen. Anti-reflective coatings were introduced. But they don’t go quite far enough.

That’s why Nokia created ClearBlack display.

ClearBlack display uses a sequence of polarising layers to eliminate reflections.

You have probably tried polarising sunglasses before now and so have a rough idea of how that works. If you look at a window or the surface of some water using polarising glasses, then they become more transparent – which is why they’re especially good for fishermen. The polariser cuts out reflected light.

Polariser layers used in display solutions are bit more sophisticated than in sunglasses. Light rays actually get “processed” many times on its way in and out of your phones´s screen.

Download the larger image, under the resources tab on the right column.

There’s both a linear polariser and retardation layers between the surface of your phone and the display. When light hits your screen, this is what happens:

1. It hits the linear polariser, this vertically polarises the light. (Polarising means – roughly – aligning the wave vibration in a particular direction).
2. Then it hits the circular polariser retardation layer. This converts the light again, making it right-circularly polarised.
3. Then it hits the screen and bounces off it, switching the rotation of the light to leftist.
4. It goes back through the retardation layer. When this happens, the light becomes horizontally polarised.
5. Finally, it hits the linear polariser, since the light is horizontally polarised at this point it can be blocked entirely by this optical solution.

So why doesn’t the light from your phone’s display get blocked? Because it only goes through the second half of this journey so the light is unpolarised when it hits the final filter and goes through.

image credit: illustration by Jamie Sneddon
featured image: Kevin Dooley

HELSINKI, Finland – This week sees the launch of the Nokia Lumia 800 in the city where it was conceived. As with other launches across the planet, the occasion called for a light show. This time around it was the windows of Stockmann, Helsinki’s biggest department store, that played host.

Check out the photos below, taken from the statue of the ‘Three Smiths’, which marks the centre of Helsinki.

This morning there was a free breakfast served at the Nokia Flagship store in Helsinki, which opened for sales at 7am on this special day. There will be special events and giveaways throughout the day.

The Nokia Lumia 800 comes to Finland specially equipped with games and apps for the Finnish market. Notably, Finnish people will be able to check out the latest ice hockey results direct from the home screen.

Larger versions of the pictures are available to download and there’s a bunch more photographs on the Nokia Finland Facebook page.

photography: Derek Latham