Lopez worked with a series of “rapid prototypes” for the Nokia Lumia 900, before attaching it to a human-sized dummy in an anechoic (echo-free) chamber, specially designed to exclude outside noise, and stop sound reflections. The results give the most accurate reflection of a phone’s acoustics.

After that he sends the phones out on an epic global journey, to hear how they sound in the real world, in environments as varied as a California freeway, a Lagos market, or an Asian village.   

Customized Design

“Achieving that final level of quality audio depends on several design factors, and they have to be adjusted for each model of handset,” says Lopez. 

The Audio Lab team is responsible for designing the best earpiece and microphone for each phone, as well as working to reduce “Rub n’ buzz” which is distortion caused when the speaker moves and hits against the back cavity.  

“The Lumia 900 was a step forward in several ways,” Lopez says. “It has a bigger earpiece and a different microphone with better noise sensitivity. The speaker handles more power, so it’s also louder.”

Each phone needs a customized acoustic design because size, form and materials can change the sound. Sound will react differently with glass than it does with polycarbonate, for example.   

Microphone

The microphone itself is “really simple,” according to Lopez, but the teams uses an integrated combination of microphones, precisely placed, to build the best sound.  

“Our work has really progressed in this area. Looking back, the microphone for the Nokia N-900 was a big step forward for us, because it was digital and much less noisy.”

With the Lumia 900, Lopez says it was about analyzing “how many holes are in the polycarbonate, where they are placed, and what shape they are in. Having the microphone right in the front, close to the mouth is the best placement.”

“One hole for the microphone is usually the best, but the form factor of the phone has in impact. Sometimes we need to balance the phone, sometimes the holes need to be small so we have to integrate a few together to get the same performance.”

And you can do a lot more if you use more than one microphone:

“With two microphones you can do noise suppression. When you are in a noisy place, like a restaurant or a mall you only want to hear the person’s voice. Nokia has an algorithm that picks up your speech, using the microphone close to your mouth, and another that picks up noise from far away from mouth. They get combined and the strong signal gets let through.” 

Lopez says the Lumia 710 has a secondary microphone on the back, next to the flash, while the Lumia 800 has an additional microphone right above flash. On the Lumia 900 the second microphone is next to the headset jack. Future phones might add additional microphones to improve noise suppression even further. 

Earpiece Design

You can’t get good acoustics without a well-designed earpiece, and the Lumia 900 has the biggest and best. The earpiece is always on the top side of your phone, because that’s what you press to your ear when you use it. The speaker itself needs a certain amount of space as it has to allow the diaphragm of the microphone to move. This translates to voltage and frequency that gets sent to the earpiece, which also has a diaphragm that converts from voltage to sound. 

Speakerphone

The Lumia 900 speakerphone uses the newest technology to increase wattage and get the loudest sound, and it’s great at withholding drops and stress.  The speakerphone’s usually placed at bottom of the phone where there is more space.

Reducing ‘Rub n Buzz’

Good audio quality isn’t just about loudness. Designing the acoustics of a phone’s  “back cavity” means the speaker can move up and down without any distortion, or “rub n buzz” as sound engineers call it.

Distortion happens when the speaker reaches the maximum of how much the diaphragm can move. The speaker moves more when it’s turned up louder and the frequencies are lower. Lopez says, the result is distortion that sounds “like paper crumpling”.

“We control it by giving it enough back volume of air to make sure that the speaker doesn’t overshoot. The speaker diaphragm acts like a spring, and the back volume needs to be vacuum sealed so that the diaphragm doesn’t move more than the air in the space allows.”

When you answer a call on a Nokia Lumia 900 you’ll never notice that its acoustics are the result of being strapped to a dense rubber head in an anechoic chamber, or that it’s been tested in the furthest corners of the earth by a team of sound engineers who’ve precisely integrated two microphones and tuned up the wattage on the speakerphone. Oscar Lopez hopes that you’ll just think that it sounds good. 

Nokia’s Mikko Lintunen admits this was not the first Lumia he’d misplaced, “They are quite smooth and sometimes they slip out of my trouser pocket.”

Realising that black was harder to find Mikko had already taken the precautionary measure of getting his new Lumia in magenta (It’s ok Mikko, we know you just wanted to get a pink phone.)

Last week, however, even that went missing:

“I got out of a taxi and then went for dinner with my friend…when I realised – my phone’s not there. I borrowed my friend’s phone and called my own number but there was no answer.”

After trying a few more tries without answer, Mikko realised there was a way to find out where his missing Lumia was.

He’d already registered the phone, and so went home and logged on to windowsphone.com. After he typed in his number the site searched for GPS coordinates and located the phone in downtown Helsinki.

Mikko tried calling again, and even sent an SMS, but heard nothing – and when he checked the GPS position again he saw that his missing Lumia was on the move.

“I called the police and they agreed to send a police car out to get my phone. I could see now from the GPS on windowsphone.com that my phone was heading towards a main square, and what I knew was a burger bar.”

Within minutes the police had found a group of men in the burger bar, and retrieved Mikko’s phone.

The police returned it to Mikko’s house, and he was reunited with his Lumia at 2am in his pajamas.  

“It was great to get my phone back, watching the remotely locked screen displaying “This is my lost phone, please call me to this number…” and unlock the phone with my security code. Phew!”

Great policing, but an even better tip on how to locate your Nokia Lumia using GPS, and Windowsphone.com 

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

On this occasion though it’s not a vodka-induced hallucination, instead – unwittingly perhaps – you might be sitting in the world’s first remote-controlled café.

Swedish agency Perfect Fools came up with the idea of the internet-controlled Café Kauko for two months during World Design Capital Helsinki 2012:

“We wanted to show people how much design affected their everyday lives,” says Tony Sajdak. “Highlighting good design seemed easier by demonstrating how bad design could be!”  

By logging in to youdesign.fi people could control the atmosphere, music and lighting in the café – as well as the height of the tables and chairs. Then they watched how people react via multiple live-streaming cameras.

But what exactly is the point of seeing surprised customers bobbing up and down, clasping cappuccinos? “It’s entertaining,” Tony Sajdak admits, “but it also shows that having your chairs too high can be bad design and ruin the whole experience.”

And there’s nothing stopping someone logging on with their Nokia Lumia and setting the height of their own table and chairs, or dimming the lights.

The café took six months to design and construct, and took place earlier this year between January and March. 

“The café itself was built in Denmark and shipped over, but we had numerous hurdles to overcome,” Sajdak says, “We had to create a queuing system online in case there were lots of people trying to set the height of the same chair, or change the music at the same time, and we had to build really quiet pneumatic chairs. We had a fair bit of technology to fit into a small space.” 

If you want to order a latte, and then zap your seating arrangements with a smartphone, the Café Kauko is on the move. PerfectFools plan to take the café on the road, first in Finland and then elsewhere.

“I’ve spent a massive amount of time in different conferences over the course of my career, but they didn’t result in anything concrete. We are hosting this summit to drive forward the development of the African eco-system, foster close partnerships between developers and Nokia, and accelerate African leadership capabilities to drive growth of the ICT industry in the region.”

More than 200 government executives, innovators, VC companies, academics and developers  from 26 countries across the continent will engage in three days of intense debate on ‘Leadership for Innovation’ at the OIAS in Nairobi, which is hosted by Nokia, Cap Gemini and infoDev, a technology innovation program in the World Bank.

Speakers from the World Bank, the Boston Consulting Group and others will attend the event on May 28-30^th, along with Dr Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in the Kenyan Ministry for Information and Commerce, and Alan Knott-Craig, CEO of Africa’s largest social network MXit. 

Delegates will then work in streams over the course of three days to develop a series of viable development projects to go forward. Participants themselves are the stars of the event and will take ownership of the developed initiatives at the end of the summit.

Hinkkanen believes the event in uniquely tailored to African needs: “Nokia is establishing a network of Mobile Application Labs and developer programs in Africa. We already have three in South Africa, Kenya and Egypt – and we plan to have several more.” The OAIS will address two key factors which he believes are now key to making African innovation more successful – developing a more “holistic” eco-system with scale that reaches more emerging entrepreneurs across the continent and enabling developers to monetize their products.

“An African eco-system requires broader approach then in developed markets and needs to include government, financial service providers, universities and other players – in addition to the traditional elements such as developers, operating system and store.”

Building locally relevant content is key, but so is helping African entrepreneurs to become successful commercially and to get their innovations to the local, regional and global markets.

“There is a very strong community element here, and the mindset is very flexible and innovative. We’re seeing some really interesting and unique apps that you don’t see anywhere else in the world – but a lot of those are given away for free due to monetization challenges, and what we need to develop are sustainable businesses that are able to grow and prosper.”

Hinkkanen says he is particularly excited about the focus on leadership at the summit and keynotes from TED alumnae Patrick Awuah, a former Microsoft Program Manager who’s set up Ashesi University College in Ghana, and Fred Swaniker, who founded the African Leadership Academy in South Africa after working as COO for Cape Town biotech company Synexa Life Sciences.    

“They are real visionaries about the future generation of African leaders. This continent is bigger than China, India, Europe and the US put together. We’ve made a great start, but the next stage of the African mobile revolution is about scaling up. We need to build the critical mass of innovators across the continent to unleash the potential of their ideas and to start transforming societies”

Follow the OIAS next week @nokiaeastafrica on Twitter. And if you’d like more background on mobile in the developing world, check this recent post on Techcrunch for some more insight.

Can such success be replicated on a mobile platform?  The answer, now that TIME Mobile has launched in the Marketplace for your Nokia Lumia, is largely yes.   

The TIME Mobile app seems to make better use of layout on Windows Phone than on other platforms. Stories look easier to find, and are nicely laid out, with smooth transitions. The app also makes use of the Live Tile for the latest image.   

But what about the content?  

There’s all the news you’d expect, plus a lot of comment and opinion that benefits hugely from TIME’s website. Content has a distinctly American orientation, as you might expect.

Two articles, one a blogger’s insight into China’s problems with executive compensation, and another story about why there hasn’t been an ‘Arab spring’ in Algeria, were just about perfect length and packed with new information. Another story about Kim Kardashian’s product endorsements (green melon liqueur, and $25 lollipops) told me things I possibly didn’t need to know, but enjoyed reading about anyway.      

Of course one of the main attractions of TIME is its unparalleled photo collection. Historic galleries on D-Day in colour, Marilyn Monroe, and 1950s China were fantastic – current offerings on Michelle Obama maybe a bit less so.  On the whole TIME could think about loading times, and even better presentation of what has to be one of its major assets.  Similarly, video and podcasts could do with a step up to reach the same standard.

Overall TIME Mobile is the kind of app that may make you seriously question whether you need to go anywhere else for news and opinion. 

He runs an African telecoms company that he admits is a bigger, and more trusted, brand than the church in his country. 

“How does that make me feel?” he asks, laughing and rolling his eyes, “It makes me feel a bit like a crusty old man actually”. 

Collymore took over the reins as CEO of Kenya’s Safaricom in November 2010 when he was 52. Not really so old, but he does have more than 30 years industry experience under his belt:

“I can honestly say that this is the most exciting time for our business, and it has changed beyond recognition.

“When I started working with BT our main concern was how we could help people make landline calls, and how we could secure telephone boxes. Now we’re looking at how telecoms is transforming health, education, business and agriculture – and I’m working in Kenya which is the heart of the new ‘Silicon Savannah”.

Before joining Safaricom, Collymore worked in South Africa for Vodacom (and before that around the world in the UK, Japan and Europe). Scrolling through the photos on his tablet he shows me a picture taken with Nelson Mandela at a Sunday lunch.

“When you’re working in countries like South Africa you do feel like you’re walking in the shadows of these heroic men and women – these great ‘statesmen’ like Madiba and Desmond Tutu.” 

But you don’t have to be President, or a politician, to transform Africa, he says.  The next photo is of a woman with a group of children outside a neat one-storey building. “That’s Tanzi, she asked me to help her build a school for orphans in Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Now that school has doubled in size.”

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For his 50^th birthday Collymore banned his mother from throwing him a surprise party, and took 84 orphans to the zoo for the day instead. More widely though he sees his role as a builder, rather than a patron, working to grow a community that can do things for themselves.

In particular, Collymore is focused on the role of women and girls, making a presentation to the UN General Assembly last year on the UN Every Woman Every Child Initiative:

“I don’t know if its because I come from a family of strong women,” he says, “but I believe woman are absolutely the future of Africa, and all the UN statistics about the positive effects of girls’ education, reducing maternal mortality and so on, bear that out.

“Talk about heroes – Tanzi with her school in Kwa-Zulu Natal is one of my heroes. All those women doing that kind of service, contributing what they can are my heroes. ”

No woman should die in childbirth, he says, but in Kenya as many as 21 a day still do. No girl should go uneducated, but for many staying in school is a challenge. All women and girls should have access to safe contraception, protecting them not only from pregnancy but also HIV – yet this remains a huge issue. 

Collymore is committed to transforming Kenyan communities by empowering women through mobile technology:

“Traditionally money has been in the hands of men in Kenya, but we know that things work better when women control and have access to money. One of the ways that we’ve been able to do this is through M-Pesa.” 

Money transfer service M-Pesa has become one of Safaricom’s big success stories, with more than 14 million subscribers and 40,000 agents.  Being a trusted brand, with a large market share, accounts for the huge take-up, according to Collymore.

Much of the day-to-day family and business transactions of Kenyan life can now be conducted through M-Pesa and, as we speak, Collymore gets an email about whether M-Pesa can be used to claim court fines.

Some question whether the idea of a ‘mobile magic remedy’ for Africa has been overplayed. Collymore thinks not.  Yes, the issues can be complex, he agrees – but then points to health and education as two other areas where mobile technology can have a crucial role.

Collymore recently met Stephen Elop in Nairobi to discuss working with Nokia on health services, and he enthuses over SMS messaging for health campaigns on illnesses like Malaria, and a dial a doctor service where Kenyans can get medical advice.

“Of course it would be better to see a doctor in person,” he says, impatient of critics of the scheme, “but in Kenya doctors and medical clinics can be many miles, and hours of travelling, away.

“We have one doctor for every 10,000 patients, and only 450 hospitals. But we also we have more than 25 million mobile phones. This is giving medical advice to millions of people who wouldn’t have access to it otherwise.”

A recent visit to a UK branch of McDonalds with his son, only emphasized the yawning opportunities-gap between Africa and other parts of the world.

“When I went into McDonald’s I saw all these kids tapping away on wifi, for free. They could get any information they wanted – and the answers to all their questions. In Kenya I still see our kids heading off to school with all their knowledge held in a backpack. Kenyans are innovative, educated, people – and when we can get tablets and mobile technology in schools so that our children can have access to that same world of education, then we’ll see a bloom in our economy, a true middle-class, and a real ‘Silicon Savannah.” 

Watching him shuttle between UN task forces (Collymore serves on the United Nations Global Compact Board, as well as a Commissioner on a UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children) and hearing him focus on national transformation, it’s almost easy for observers to forget that Collymore has a business to run.   

In that regard, he says he’s pleased with the company’s “prudent” performance that means this year Safaricom have paid Kenya’s biggest ever share-holder dividend.

“There are always going to be tensions,” Collymore says. “There are tensions between what makes commercial sense for shareholders, and what makes sense for customers. We have a Safaricom 2.0 strategy to take us forward over these next years, and we’ve identified how we want to develop. We want to be less arrogant, and we want to be more respectful to all our stakeholders.” 

Maintaining trust, and improving reliability, are key – and to that end Safaricom are now laying their own fibre optic cable to provide better data after they found current cables, owned by other companies “stretched over trees” rather than buried underground.    

Collymore stresses:

“It’s about having a constructive edge, not just a competitive edge. We engaged in a price war for a short while, and then we quickly stepped away from that. Yes, it’s about price, yes it’s about voice – but it’s about what value add through constructively contributing.” And that is what gets him up in the morning.

 Photographs by Ian Dewsbury

“I’m paralyzed from the neck down, but I can still have a meaningful life,” Moses says.

When friends started to get messages from him on social networks they asked, “How are you doing that?”

Moses can’t use his hands, and used to feel frustrated that someone had to hold his old cellphone for him, and type messages and numbers:

“At a deep level, my independence and privacy was compromised.”

Now he uses a prosthetic on his wrist to hold the phone, and controls it himself with a mouthstick. The phone also has a plastic screen, so it doesn’t break if he drops it.   

“Believe me, as soon as I could communicate with the world – all hell broke loose!” he says. 

In May 2011 Nokia South Africa gave Moses, and other people at the Ama-Wheelies rehabilitation centre, mobiles that they could use for themselves, along with training from a Nokia Developer Champion. 

Ama-Wheelies is the only home for quadriplegics in Mpumalanga Province,  and it provides outreach, and job training, for people with spinal cord injuries. 

The charity’s co-founder, Barry Botes, was a 35-year-old builder and entrepreneur, when he was shot in a car jacking six months after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994: 

“I’m a prisoner in my own body, and I can’t use my hands. After I left hospital my wife and I couldn’t cope and our marriage was disaster. I set up Ama-Wheelies to help people like me in all aspects of their lives – not just job training, but also counseling.” 

Providing people with phones that they can use themselves is partly about helping them to reclaim independence, Barry says, but its also vital in working towards establishing an independent income:

“Nokia has helped us pilot our training program, and hopefully we have a long journey ahead of us together. Most of the jobs we are training people for involve work on the phone, but we don’t just train people for menial jobs. We want to train people for meaningful jobs that they can be successful at, and enjoy.”  

The result has been a slow but profound transformation, according to Barry: “There is life, even if you are in a wheelchair you can carry on.”  

Sometimes its great to filter through feeds and social networks to read about everything from mobile tech in Africa to moment by moment reports of WW2, but its also a bit overwhelming. 

There’s no longer some ‘news editor’ telling me that I need to read something important – I’ve got the freedom to judge that for myself. But the downside is that I’ve sometimes got to wade through all the boring and irrelevant stuff too.

My6sense isn’t the first newsreader app, but it does have an interesting ‘digital intuition engine’ that monitors the content – not just the headline – of what you actually open and read, and so should give you a more sophisticated output.

You can import all your feeds and favourite websites as well as Twitter and Facebook – and select the topics that you like.  

It’s easy and straightforward to use and add your social network accounts.

My6sense also filters by date, so you don’t get the same old information, and let’s you split your feeds and tweets into different areas – so you can separate out history, from current affairs, or sports.

If you read something you like, the app makes it easy to share it with everyone else on one of your social networks. 

It’s like flicking through a personalized digital magazine, with a content engine that’s fine-tuned to figuring out what you actually like to read, and if your preferences are changing. That takes a little time – the more you read on my6sense the quicker the ‘digital intuition engine’ gets to know you, and reaches ‘Lord of the Senses’ status.

My6sense says they aim to guide you through the “flood of content” until you reach the “jewels of the land.” Maybe it’s not quite like that, but it is like reading your own curated content, without having to do any of the heavy lifting.

GLOBAL – The multi-award winning Nokia 808 PureView isn’t yet available but it’s certainly attracting a lot of attention. Our PureView technology uses a large sensor to capture greater detail and purer colours than was ever possible before on a camera phone, and allows for a digital zoom that doesn’t lose detail.

A couple of the devices passed – all too briefly – across our desks recently and naturally, the art director scooped them up and sent them off to be photographed before we had a chance to have a proper play with them.

Today, we have the fruits of that shoot to share with you. This is the stunning white Nokia 808 PureView, you can check back next week to see the results in red.

As before, you can click through to see the full-sized image and download a zip file with all the originals.

photographer: Leo Acker

GLOBAL – Thirsting for a Nokia Lumia 900 following the knock-out reviews from actual owners on Amazon? It’s our biggest yet slimmest smartphone with the fastest internet download speeds. And here are eight more reasons to lust after a Lumia in pictorial form.

This is actually our second gallery for the Nokia Lumia 900. We published the first set of pictures last month. Here are the rest from the shoot.

As with other recent photoshoots, you can click through each picture to see the high resolution version and there’s a zip file of the whole set that you can download.

Photographs by Leo Acker