GLOBAL

Yesterday saw the announcement of five new emerging market devices, including the most affordable phone Nokia has ever produced. The €20 Nokia 1280 doesn’t skimp on functionality and comes loaded with useful features for those who live in remote or rural areas, where a speaking clock and flashlight are far more useful than Bluetooth or GPS.

With a further four low-cost mobiles joining the 1280 in the new year, Nokia has drawn attention to the benefit of no-frills practicality like never before.
So we thought we’d ask you to tell us what you think is the single most important feature in these ultra-affordable phones.

Read on to find out more, see photos of folk using the service, and as always, share your comments below.

Nokia Life Tools has been tailored for Indonesian farmers

Whereas in India much of the focus for the agriculture service was aimed at delivering timely crop prices to help ensure farmers were able to get better value for their produce, Life Tools for Indonesia has been tailored to provide precious up-to-date info on livestock, fisheries and horticulture, as well as crops.

In terms of what this actually means, farmers will be able to access market prices (consumer price, wholesale price, mill price and farmer price), and are also able to tap into tips and advice on farming techniques (such as animal health care and alerts on new government schemes), as well as receive all-important weather forecasts.

We’re stoked to see how Life Tools has been tweaked to target the unique needs of the people in this territory – could this approach be suited to other services too? Let us know what you think.

The agriculture service will initially launch in Java and Sumatera, prior to rolling out across the rest of Indonesia.

Help with education through Nokia Life Tools

When you access the education part of Life Tools there are three strands you can pursue – learning English, preparing for school and higher education exams, and improving your general knowledge.

Learning English is broken into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, making it easy for anyone to jump in at the stage they’re most comfortable with. In terms of an outcome, the information and lessons that are delivered through Life Tools have been designed to help students come out the other side with the ability to read, write and understand simple English pieces of text.

The test preparation part of the education tool provides students with valuable access to material in keeping with the national curriculum at junior and high school levels. As for the general knowledge stuff, much of that information is again tailored to the region, supplemented with more info related to global general knowledge.

Nokia Life Tools injects entertainment

The entertainment tool adds a lighter touch to proceedings, enabling folk pluck news, astrology, jokes, movie news and reviews via subscription or on-demand. Whereas downloads such as wallpapers, animations, themes, music and comics are solely available via on-demand.

Nokia Life Tools will launch in Indonesia in early December 2009, and will debut on the Nokia 2323 classic, Nokia 2330 classic and Nokia 2700 classic. It’ll later become available on the five new devices announced today for Indonesia, including the Nokia 1280 (Nokia’s cheapest ever phone), Nokia 1616, Nokia 1800, Nokia 2220 slide and Nokia 2690.

Let us know what you think – share your thoughts on the latest Life Tools developments directly below.

This week’s comment of the week winner responds to the results of our recent business phone reader poll, which saw long-haul battery life come out on top as the most important feature in an enterprise device. Read on to find out who has won a copy of Gravity for Twitter, and to join the discussion and share your thoughts.

Congratulations to Alex Whiteside, a copy of Gravity for Twitter will be fluttering your direction shortly. Here is his comment and thoughts on battery lives and charging:

Alex Whiteside: “Charging a phone’s battery is a complete nonsequeter in comparison to your other interactions with the device. You have a handset which can pull down music, video, documents, email, maps and calls at any time and in any place. It’s as free as you are, most of the time.

When you have to charge it, you’re now pinned down to one spot for two or three hours. If you get called away to do something, you either have to abort the charg and get by with what you’ve got until you can get some peace, or leave the phone behind. So obviously the longer you can go between charges, the less pointless thumb-twiddling you encounter.

If you’re travelling, you might – god forbid – find yourself with a dead and useless phone. The better the battery life, the less likely you are to find yourself carrying around a brick.

There are other, smaller annoyances like digging out the charger and finding a free outlet near something you can sit the phone on, somewhere you can see or hear incoming calls, and with the wire positioned sensibly so it doesn’t get tripped over. You have to take the charger with you, or have multiple chargers in different places.

Battery charging is an annoying, tethering relic in a wireless world. The less of it we have to do, the better.”

What do you think? Join the debate, and keep your comments flooding in.

Of course, most of the folk directly involved with bringing the ethos of innovative sustainability to life at Nokia are indeed of the blushing breed, but as we’re not (remember Conversations is written by an Anglo-Brazilian, a couple of Americans and an Irishman!) we’ll happily shine a light on some of the smart projects and some lesser-read public Nokia documents that go some way to understanding how and why Nokia continues to be so focused on being a company actively in pursuit of employing great sustainability practices.

From a product perspective and reducing environmental impact, we’ve witnessed some brilliant stories over the past 12 months, exploring packaging, energy saving solutions (and landmark collaborations) and recycling.

In December 2008 we ran a piece on Nokia’s approach to packaging and ethical consumption, which highlighted some amazing figures and showed a significant impact of reduced packaging and applying a different approach to traditional methods. Here’s a snippet from that article, highlighting these points: “Kirsi Sormunen heads up environmental affairs at Nokia and she also told us Nokia is looking at shipping products without chargers. The charger is one of the biggest factors when it comes to packaging, particularly in the UK where chargers are naturally big. Since reducing the size of product packaging, Nokia has effectively taken 12,000 trucks off the road, used 100 tonnes less paper and saved €470million. These changes don’t happen fast though. There are still a number of products shipping in the older, larger packs, but the change is happening.” (read the full story)

Around the same time Nokia launched a new site called Green Explorer in collaboration with Lonely Planet and the WWF to help people by sharing sustainable tips and advice on living and traveling in a greener way. It’s available as a widget on your device, and the site also highlights another solution we covered in great detail here on Conversations called we:offset – a mobile tool designed to help you track and offset your CO2 emissions on the move (read our we:offset big round-up). The site is certainly worth a look if you haven’t visited before, as is the widget and the we:offset app.

Energy saving has again been an area of great debate and focus, which saw in November of 2008 the big phone charger question revisited, a new energy star rating system unveiled and multi-manufacurer solidarity forged on the issue. Here’s a snippet: “The new star rating system “indicates how much energy each charger uses when left plugged into the wall socket after charging is completed.  The ratings covers all chargers currently sold by the five companies, and range from five stars for the most efficient chargers down to zero stars for the ones consuming the most energy.” This marks a significant and evolutionary leap forward for accelerating the improvement of eco efficiency in mobile phone chargers, and raising awareness surrounding the subject.” (read the full story).

The topic of crucial minerals and materials has been openly and actively engaged, as explored in a great piece by Charlie in April of this year. It definitely warrants a sit down and serious read – “We have no taste for unethical sources of crucial materials”.

Recycling has equally been an area Nokia has been keenly involved in innovating within. We ran a story earlier this year that touched on a number of the issues, ideas and initiatives in a piece entitled “One man’s trash is another man’s problem”. If you want to find out more about all the things Nokia is doing in this space, stick the kettle on and have a good read, as this piece links off to much of what’s being done in this important area of development.

Alongside all these stories (there are plenty more you can explore in our Environment section here on Conversations, including all the recent Progress Project news), it’s worth taking a closer look at the many pages and interesting documents within the Corporate Responsibility and Environment sections of the Nokia site. Publicly available, yet lesser-read, these valuable and inspiring spaces have been reserved to highlight how Nokia approaches sustainability and the environment.

There’s a lot of stuff in there, but if you’re interested in discovering more, in particular, you might find the following pages and documents of interest:

• Environment strategy – here you can read about what Nokia is aiming to achieve and a number of the projects and initiatives it is currently undertaking.
• Nokia Code of Conduct (available in 34 languages) – this document gives great insight into many areas of the business including sustainability and the environment.
• Product development and sustainable design – short overviews on each with links off to interesting associated projects.

There’s still lots to be done, but what do you think to all this? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

We’re going to take your responses to David Mason, one of the guys responsible for the Progress Project, with an aim to bringing you more on these stories (we’ll keep you posted). Read on to find out what you collectively voted for after the break.

Most wanted, and taking the number one slot with 35% of the vote, was ‘updates on new projects in emerging markets‘. This topic clearly remains an area of interest, and we’ll be hunting out more stories from the Progress Project team to ensure we keep you up to date with all the latest developments.

In second place with 24% was ‘diaries from people using the services‘. We put this one in the poll as we think it would be great to get personal accounts from the folk using these solutions and directly affected by them. Granted, I reckon this may be a tougher one to deliver on as we’re wary not to make those people’s lives any more difficult than they may already be, but we’ll investigate further and see what we can do – even if we can get comments or text updates from them. Let’s see how we do.

Third on the list, with 22% of the vote, is ‘stories from people involved in the projects‘. So those responsible and actively helping to make the initiatives happen. Again, an area we’re passionate to pursue.

In fourth place, with 14%, is ‘showcase similar projects outside Nokia‘. This is one that we could use your help with. If you see any great initiatives in this area please let us know and include them in the ongoing conversation.

As ever, please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below.

However, we’re aware that we’re relaying stories on these fascinating stories and important projects, but not necessarily asking you guys what you’d like us to explore on this topic and related matters. So we thought we’d run a poll to help us find out what’s of most interest and what you’d like to see more of. Let us know, and make suggestions by selecting the ‘other’ option in the poll below. And as ever, keep your comments and opinions flooding in.

GLOBAL

But therein also lays one of the biggest challenge. Whilst the initiatives are popular and successful locally, raising awareness on a global level is much harder. Speaking to the gathered bloggers at Nokia World, David called for them to tell him what he needs to do to help bring this stuff to the fore. We’re really keen to know what kind of information we can share with you that’ll help continue to raise awareness. Let us know in the comments below.

You can check out the first three videos below and find out more about the Progress Project on the official website.

Nokia Life Tools

Nokia Data Gathering

PEIR (Personal Environmental Impact Report)

Over the next two years a major tour of key European cities is planned where a major outdoor exhibition will showcase the best photography. There will also be a multi-language coffee table book and AV shows taking place across Europe.

You can find out more from the project website www.wild-wonders.com. Meanwhile check out a selection of the images in the gallery below.

With the album complete, the group toured Senegal and performed live concerts, helping to get the message of child rights out there beyond those who were already involved. Plenty of challenges were faced along the way, particularly when many of the kids couldn’t actually read or write, and some couldn’t speak the national language. The group overcame those though and now those talented enough to make it through the audition process, not only helped to spread an important message, but also got the chance to help them out of the situation they were in.

If you haven’t already, take a few minutes to watch the video. It’s in equal measure heart warming and distressing.

Walking away with a $25,000 cash prize was our old friends from FrontlineSMS. This time picking up the award for FrontlineSMS:Medic which utilises FrontlineSMS software to empower community health workers in developing countries. It’s a deserving winner as FrontlineSMS has just been going from strength to strength, thanks in part (at least) to its unrelenting creator and Conversations buddy Ken Banks.

Picking up $15,000 for second place was on-demand crowd-sourced Volunteerism via Smartphone – aka, The Extraordinaries. Enabling volunteers from all over the world to dip in and volunteer spare moments in time to help solve tasks around science, medicine and government, amongst others.

$10,000 and third place went to VozMob which enables those who don’t typically have access to digital technology to still take part in open source discussion and sharing, utilising low-cost mobile devices.

We want to wish all the winners and featured projects a hearty congratulations, and also a big well done for all those taking part. Please take some time to check them out. Mobile phones offer an incredible opportunity to change people’s lives for the better, particularly in emerging and developing countries. We’ve written plenty of times in the past of the myriad ways phones can make a difference and these various projects all highlight real impact in very real situations.

Check out the brief intro on the winners below along with links to their profiles on NetSquared, and the list of featured projects.

FrontlineSMS:Medic

FrontlineSMS:Medic is a team committed to empowering community health workers in the developing world using appropriate mobile technology. After almost a year of working with FrontlineSMS in Malawi, we are launching FrontlineSMS:Medic to extend the capabilities of this software and bring it to health centers across several continents.

The Extraordinaries

The Extraordinaries is smartphone software (iPhone, Blackberry, and more) that allows millions of people to perform brief micro-volunteer tasks on their smartphones in a few minutes of spare time. People login to our system from any place on Earth within cell reception, and constructively use small windows of spare time for science, medicine, nonprofits, government, and more. Tasks are accessed on-demand, from anywhere, at any time — while riding the bus, waiting in the doctor’s office, standing in line at the post office, and more.

VozMob

Marginalized populations lack access to digital technology yet aspire to participate meaningfully in the digital public sphere. Mobile Voices offers an open-source multi-media platform optimized for low-cost mobile phones that lets users create, share, and reflect on stories about their lives and communities. An academic-community partnership, the project brings together immigrant day laborers, scholars, software developers, and community organizers for participatory design, curriculum development, evaluation and research around this emerging media tool and its social impact.