Click here to view the video on YouTube.

GLOBAL – Over the last six months we’ve been on a bit of a journey behind the scenes here at Conversations. We wanted to do more with the site. Deliver bigger, better content. Make our readers think. And attract new readers who don’t necessarily even use our phones.

Inspiration has come from the best of the modern Web, but also from some very traditional sources. We all really love magazines, for example: the best ones constantly strive to surprise their readers and present them with features that delight and challenge. We miss that feeling of finding something you didn’t expect but is really great. The Web hasn’t been especially good at that historically. It’s good at finding exactly what you want, but not at stretching or surprising you.

For that reason, we wanted to create a site that encouraged play and exploration so we’ve completely redesigned the navigation on the site and the way that stories are presented. We want to keep our best content easy to find, at the same time as leading people to content they might not otherwise find.

We also wanted the space to create longer, broader, more in-depth stories. And to talk about topics that go a lot further than we’ve done before. So we’ve beefed up the team – you’ll have seen some new faces around the place over the past couple of weeks, with Trevor and Karen joining the editorial crew. We also want to make sure our stories shine visually, so we’ve also brought on a full time art director, Jamie. He’ll be creating a brand new home page every day for the site to present you with the best and boldest content.

If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the video above. It goes a bit deeper into the new features. Or maybe it’s time to just start exploring.

Update: Comments are being resynchronized with Disqus. Don’t worry – we have them all backed up and they’ll be in place as soon as possible.

Our thoughts are with Steve Jobs’ family and friends.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said:

“The world lost a true visionary today. Steve’s passion for simplicity and elegance leaves us all a legacy that will endure for generations. Today, my thoughts, and those of everyone at Nokia are with the friends and family that he leaves behind.”

HONG KONG

Another Bluetooth headset?  What’s so special about the Essense?

It has never-been-done-before 99.8% peak total noise cancelation, more than in any other wireless headset out there. But it’s not just the performance; it’s how we did it that makes the Essence special.

Because Nokia is all about being on the move, we took pains to understand how to make music sound better in noisy places. It turns out that the biggest problem with listening to music in noisy places is the low frequency rumble from cars, trains, buses – regular in-ear headphones isolate midrange and high frequency noise, but bass frequencies pass through and destroy the experience. You end up turning the volume up in order to hear enough bass, and the sound is then often piercing and painful in the midrange, and muddled and overpowering in the bass range. Pretty far from an audiophile experience.

So what we did was use the in-ear headphone design to eliminate noise in the mid and high frequency range, and then focused all the active noise cancellation power to the low frequency range. So when you’re on the bus or in traffic, you can hear that crisp, clear, strong bass, rather than having to crank up the volume.  You don’t have to t turn the volume up, you just turn the world down.

That’s awesome.  Tell me more awesome things.

One very cool side effect that audiophiles would value is that we use feed-back active noise cancellation. It means that the microphone that listens to noise is inside your ear, not on the outside like in more traditional active noise cancelling headphones. This means that it eliminates some other types of noise that can be unexpectedly annoying. For instance, with regular in-ears, if you’re in a quiet room, you can hear your own bloodflow inside your head. Our noise cancellation eliminates some of that. Also, when you play a powerful bass note, that note will resonate inside your ear canal and make the bass a bit lazy and booming. We eliminate that resonance as well, resulting in a very tight and accurate bass.

When you bring it all together, it’s nothing short of amazing how good music sounds in the worst of places – like on the subway or walking in traffic.

How does the Nokia Essence compare with other Bluetooth headsets on the market?

We’ve tested our product and competitor products extensively and have been very happy to pull away from the competition.  We haven’t seen any that are nearly as good when it’s Bluetooth – so this is the only Bluetooth product that is this good.

In-ear headsets can be uncomfortable when making a phone call. Why is that?

Yeah, that’s true. Because regular in-ear headphones isolate noise in typical speech frequencies, when you’re on the phone, you can hear your own voice as it echoes inside your head. It’s called occlusion, and it’s very annoying. With the Essence, we use the speech microphone to feed sound from the outside world back into the headphones – but only a very specific frequency band, that’s within your speaking range, 400hz to 3400hz.  So you have a more natural sound – and that’s what we call “natural speech” in the product. Obviously, the frequencies outside this range are still eliminated, so it’s easier to talk in noisy places, too.

How about the battery life?

Standby time is 240 hours, play and music is about eight hours.

What are these little ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ buttons on the headset?

That was a special tuning project for our audio PhDs. They’re very specific about how our products sound, but we wanted to offer alternatives. So when both are off, the reference is like an opera house, it’s professionally tuned to be very faithful to the original recording.  When the bass booster is on, you get the power and definition of a very high end hi-fi speaker system, it’s crisp rather than booming. Very helpful in noisy places and it takes advantage of our great active noise cancellation performance.  If you put just treble boost on, you get sound like an electrostatic speaker, it’s a highly detailed sound that brings out the nuances in mids and highs – great for classical music and jazz.

What else is cool about the Nokia Essence?

It’s supports apt-X and AAC direct streaming along side regular Bluetooth.

Huh?

Bluetooth is the pipe through which you’re sending data, but the way you package it differs by phone and manufacturer.  SBC coding is what normal Bluetooth uses.  SBC sounds better the higher the  bitpool value, and Nokia phones support a very high bitpool value, so you get very high audio quality. For other manufacturers’ phones, laptops, or tablets, we support apt-X and AAC direct streaming, which are alternative ways to stream high quality music. So no matter what you listen to your music with, the audio quality is top notch.

How does the noise cancellation compare to the Nokia BH-905i?

We went from 99.0% in the BH-905i  to 99.8%, which means we quadrupled the total isolation.  The BH-905i was the world’s best active noise cancelling Bluetooth headset, and the Essence is even better.  It blows everyone else out of the water.

This is my dream Bluetooth headset!  Seriously!  Can I have one?  Seriously?

Sure, take mine.

GLOBAL

1. Don’t tell us what to do with our phones

Most phones nowadays have very adaptable hardware and software. You can do whatever you like with it. Perhaps you use your Eseries business smartphone mainly for games or IM-ing friends? Maybe you’re crunching numbers on a spreadsheet using an entertainment-focused Nokia X7? That’s up to you – the classifications were indicators, but often, they didn’t match-up to what people were actually doing with their phones.

2. Hard to compare

How is the Nokia C7 different than a Nokia X7? It all depends what you want to do with it and what your budget is. What about comparing a Nokia C3 and a Nokia C3-01? It turns out they’re actually very different devices. Also, it made it hard to tell how much something should cost. To the average person, a Nokia C7 should cost the same as a Nokia E7. They have a point.

3. People are fine with numbers

People understand the logic behind ‘the bigger the number, the more you get’ philosophy. Theoretically speaking, if we were announce a Nokia 890 (which, to be very clear, does not exist), but it’s a bit out of your price range, you’ll know that the Nokia 790 (again, this model doesn’t exist. Yet. ;-) ) might be a more affordable option. Also, used consistently over time, people learn to know roughly what to expect from a model using its number as a reference.

So the new system is like this:

The first number is the relative price/feature point. So a Nokia 900* would be top dog and a Nokia 100* is the most accessible option. The second two numbers gives each device a unique identifier within that point. So we can release 99 phones at the 500 point before we have to recycle any names, for example.

All the details: Nokia Lumia 800

All about our stunning new smartphone.

The specs; the price; the facts

Frankly, we like numbers. Because we aren’t afraid of experimenting, we tried something different. But at the end of the day, we learned that ‘numbers work’.

* Just to ensure we aren’t feeding the rumour mill, I want to make it clear the numbers used above are for illustrative purposes. Aside from the Nokia 500, we haven’t announced any new products today. But for a sneak peek at something really exciting – click here.

Foursquare on Nokia is now an international and nearly-universal app, thanks to the latest upgrade. It allows users to check-in from almost anywhere from less expensive phones than has ever been possible before.

The Series 40 app has been improved to give it more functionality than previously. For starters, it now uses Nokia Maps to show you your location, allowing for tighter integration. It also now features the useful ‘Explore’ section, showing you nearby venues visited by your friends. It also shows nearby ‘specials’ – offers from brands to foursquare users. It also allows users to add new locations to the service.

Perhaps most importantly, the new version of the app is available in more countries than ever. With over 600 million Series 40 devices in market, foursquare can be used by people in more countries on a Nokia device than any other mobile device, illustrating the global appeal of checking-in, and Nokia’s ability to offer a rich internet experience in feature phones as well as smartphones.

Foursquare has become a social media phenomenon over the last year or so. The service allows users to record their location and publish it to social media channels. It currently boasts over 10mn users, with over 3mn check-ins performed every day. In total, there have been over 600,000,000 check-ins worldwide.

Here’s foursquare co-founder, Naveen Selvadurai, to explain what it’s all about:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Got a Series 40? Download it here. And let us know what you think of the new version below.

Image credit: jimmothy05

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

SINGAPORE – Just like David Hasselhoff is loved in Germany, Nokia Conversations appears to be loved in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and The Philippines. These countries make up the 20th, 34th, and 6th most visited countries to Conversations, respectively. Thanks for reading! During Nokia Connection last week, we had the pleasure of spending time with some of these country’s hottest tech bloggers, to ask them about the Nokia N9, Dual-SIM, and more. Check out our chats with Abe Olandres (www.yugatech.com), Hiep Tran (www.tinhte.vn), Faisal Alsaif, and Mark Macanas (www.techpinas.com) in the video above.

Image credit: whatleydude

How did the Nokia N9 begin?

I headed up a team in Copenhagen during the summer of 2009, and that’s where it began. The brief was to evolve the story from the previous Nokia Nseries/Eseries devices, and define it moving forward. We chose to work with an Nseries product as it was interesting times at Nokia – things were bumpy in the high-end market. Extreme numbers on a spec sheet was not the way to win. We knew we needed innovation at every level.

I’ve had the option to do this before, but those occasions didn’t feel so very exciting: here we had a blank canvas. I wanted to define what high-end means today and take a more software-driven approach, and show people it’s not just the hardware that makes a great phone: it’s the UI and platform and how it all works together.

Did you know you’d be creating for something other than Symbian?

The MeeGo stuff had started bubbling, but we hadn’t seen it. We tried to simplify and distil the existing story, because there was a lot of good in the work that was done. That was the starting point - no compromises. We tried different styles; we did a range of devices like slide-and-tilt; we did a couple different sizes, but they were all based on the same design family. But the one that made it to the market was the Nokia N9.

What makes the Nokia N9 unique?

Above all, it’s the continuity that you feel from the shape of the glass continuing to the side profile. It just feels right. The basic concept is that seamless continuity of the form, and I think it was something we refined with the UI. It’s just something nice about interacting with a device that has a gentle curvature. Once you have something that’s more continuous in your hand, it’s just more pleasant to interact with it, all the way to the edges. Try to swipe stuff on other phones, and you’ll soon see that the edges will bother you.

When you see it in three dimensions, there’s not a single straight surface on the product. It’s actually really difficult to model in CAD. It’s almost like a pillow. In concept, a pillow is a simple form. It’s not hard to understand. But if you have to build those surfaces on a computer, you’ll realize how complicated they are. So the concept is simple, but as a piece of geometry, it’s quite elaborate.

No buttons! Just swipe!

Once you’ve got a flavour of life without buttons, it’s hard to go back. I find myself with other devices trying to swipe, but I can’t. Phones with keys feel old now, in some respects.

What’s so cool about a uni-body design?

No designer likes split lines. Split lines mean imperfection, parts and colours that may not match perfectly. It feels bad. It’s noise. You don’t want that. At the same time, most designers like metals. The Nokia N9 has many antennas, and that meant we knew we could never do a metal device. If you use plastic, the antennas would work better. But that leads to other challenges. Consumers may perceive plastic as of lower value than metal. But plastic is transparent to radio waves, metal is not.

The one piece polycarbonate plastic allows for really great antennas but it also feels expensive in the hand. You need great performance from your antennas, of course, for fast download speeds and quick connections with satellites. So it’s all about a good user experience from that point of view. The challenge was that when creating something that feels like high-end quality design with plastic, the material alone won’t carry that story.

It’s great to see another smartphone with colour, not just a “black rectangle”.

We started off looking at a plastic bar without paint, it gives us a chance to almost think in any colour we would like – eventually, it came back to essentially the basic colours. Cyan, magenta, black.

Plastic is all about offering colours. So we really wanted colours where people could express themselves. Brown and grey is almost an excuse for a colour with plastic. If you’re going to offer a colour, offer a real colour.

Last question, how would you like consumers to feel when they first pick up a Nokia N9?

That’s a good question. What’s important for us is that if this becomes a hardware story, we’ve failed. It needs to be in context with the UI. I hope the first point of delight will be about the interface, the button-less navigation. I hope it’s not only about the hardware design. The idea was to create a canvas for the UI and the user to shine. When you watch TV, you don’t want a frame, you just want the content.

Here’s Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari, SVP Design and User Experience, announcing the Nokia N9 and talking about the design.

GLOBAL –

Get a full run down of the Nokia E6, Nokia X7 and Symbian Anna features from our previous posts, or check out some highlights below…

In brief

• A better web experience
• Faster navigation
• E6 and X7 both have eight-megapixel cameras and record in high definition

Symbian Anna

- Faster and better web experience with an all new browser.
– The long-awaited portrait QWERTY plus split screen text input.
– All new Ovi Maps with public transport routes and other enhancements.

Nokia E6

- QWERTY and touch experience offers faster navigation and operation than either a pure touch or keyboard-only system.
– Direct access to Microsoft business solutions (Mail for Exchange, Microsoft Communicator Mobile and Microsoft SharePoint).
– An 8-megapixel full focus camera with dual-LED flash 720p video recording and 8GB of internal memory.

Nokia X7

- Huge 4” inch screen with preloaded games for entertainment enthusiasts.
– 8-megapixel full focus camera with 720p video recording, dual-LED flash and 8GB memory card preinstalled.
– Beautiful, unique design. Toughened glass and seamless stainless steel.

And fear not Nokia N8, E7, C7 and C6 fans – Symbian Ann will be available for you in the coming months.

So which are you more excited about? The Nokia E6 or X7?

All the details: Nokia Lumia 800

All about our stunning new smartphone.

The specs; the price; the facts

What’s important when choosing foods for Nokians?

Torsti: We have to look after the healthy aspects, as well as foods people will enjoy. Local people want traditional foods, but we have lots of global people who want familiar foods from their locale. There’s approximately 76 different nationalities at Nokia House!

Do Finnish people eat differently than the foreigners?

Torsti: Lunch is often a Finn’s main meal of the day so they eat more, but foreigners often eat their large meals in the evening and eat less at lunch, it’s more “grab and go” for them. Finns like to eat early, as early as 10:30am. Foreigners tend to eat later, so our kitchens need to be open for a long time.

What’s it like serving Nokians?

Katrin: I love it. Nokians are very polite and aren’t too demanding. I’m very interested my customers, I want to know how their day has been. If they look sad or angry, I like to help make them feel better. I’ve noticed a difference in Nokians during the company’s transformation, but everyone still has a very positive attitude.

Katrin keeps everyone smiling with her smiles

How does it feel to work at Nokia every day when you’re from a different company?

Torsti: We have a great relationship with the Workplace Resources team here. They make sure we are kept up to date with what’s happening in the company, and what that means for employees, and for us: we work really well together and we feel very closely connected to Nokia, even though we work for Sodexo.

The cafeteria has a suggestion box, what kind of feedback do you receive?

Torsti: Very positive, we read it daily. People often give food suggestions; like a Nokian suggested we serve Peking Duck, and today was the day we first served Peking Duck. I was very proud of that. We are constantly thinking about new foods to serve, our imaginations are the limits.

Create-your-own pasta on Mondays in ‘Lagoon’

What are the most popular foods?

Torsti: Steaks from the grill. Thai foods cooked by our Thai chef, they’re very good. Scandinavian home cooking is very popular of course. Healthy meals are becoming more popular; we’ll soon have “No Carb Days”.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever served?

Torsti: We have a Colombian chef who served a Colombian specialty: smoked giant ants served in a bowl. They look like just ants, 2cm long. Almost everyone bought it that day.

Many tasty, healthy options available. Like giant ants.

Your staff seems very international, is this important to you?

Torsti: Yes, we have customers from our around the world, so it’s important to have chefs from around the world to make authentic food.

Katrin: My colleagues come from Ethiopia, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Australia, Thailand, Columbia…all over.

How important is buying local foods?

Torsti: It’s becoming more and more important, also organic foods, but organic foods are so limited at the moment in Finland, it’s difficult to get them, but we will be serving more of these in the future. Also, minimizing waste is important to us, so we make the food in smaller parts and when the lunch stops at 2pm there’s few leftovers.

With all those bananas, has anyone ever slipped on a banana peel?

Torsti: Heh, no. But we renewed our grill with a restaurant pager system, so customers can be notified when their steaks are ready. On the first day we stopped lunch at 1:30, and at 1:45 a man came and asked if his steak is ready yet, and we had already closed the grill.

A look into the ‘Village’ cafeteria later in the day when lunch is coming to an end.

Coffee in ‘Lagoon’ during the day. Finns drink more coffee than anyone in the world.

One area of innovation that’s continually evolving is the ways in which a phone’s interface might be innovative. To offer new value, we can’t just be talking about a new set of icons or even more home screens. That’s not innovation, it’s just an increment. An innovation in interface design will make our interactions quicker, more natural or simpler – and so offer users value through the time and effort they save.

Technology futurologists have been talking about ‘pervasive computing’ for a while, to give one example. The idea that we stop thinking about technology as being something separate from the rest of our lives. That it just blends in and becomes natural.

At the moment, of course, our technology is far from natural. There’s nothing natural about icons and drop-down lists and tickboxes. It would probably be better if you could just swipe through your apps, wouldn’t it?

So one of the things that our engineers are up to is making technology disappear. How we then control our devices is the tricky part: with possibilities like gestural control, contextual choices and – who knows? – thought projection – all up for possible consideration. If you’ve had a play with Beta projects like Nokia Situations and Nokia Bots, it shows one direction that might take.

But the possibilities are endless… and very exciting. We can’t wait to show you more – maybe a sneak peek at “Jessie’s Girl” – in the weeks to come.

Image credit: Wootang01