Nokia launched their Asha series of phones in Dubai yesterday. With the Asha set of handsets, Nokia plans on making data services available to the lower end of spectrum. With four models released that range in prices between AED 288 to AED 539, the Asha is certainly very affordable and with different form factors such as keypads, keyboards and touch screens, it should appeal to a wide range of consumers.

Present at the launch was Mr. Vithesh Reddy, General Manager, Nokia Lower Gulf. I would like to thank him for taking some time off to talk to me and explain what the Asha range means to Nokia and where they’re headed with it. Following the interview is the press release for the new series.

Press Release

Dubai, UAE: Nokia today announced the launch of the Asha range devices in the UAE which includes four new affordable smartphones that feature a stylish design and a rich social experience for people who want to work, play and connect. ‘Asha’ – derived from the Hindi word for ‘hope’ – will allow consumers to have access to a smartphone experience by being able to download apps, surf the web, check email, play games and chat at an affordable price point starting from AED 288.

“Nokia continues its mission to deliver high quality, stylish devices that provide the best access to social networks, the Internet and information, and also offer a great overall experience and value proposition for the next billion mobile phone users. These consumers want access to innovations such as easy-to-use dual-SIM, variety of engaging local apps, attractive and colorful designs and the superior user experience for which Nokia phones are known for,” said Vithesh Reddy, General Manager, Nokia Lower Gulf.

The Asha range, comprising of Nokia Asha 200, 300, 302 and 303, offers features such as QWERTY keyboard and ‘touch and type’ experiences, combined with fast and easy access to the Internet, integrated social networking, messaging and many relevant applications from the Nokia Store.

The Asha range includes:

Nokia Asha 200:
The Nokia Asha 200 is Nokia’s latest dual SIM phone with Easy Swap functionality, allowing consumers to easily change their second SIM without switching the device off. It is a fun and colorful QWERTY phone designed to meet the needs of young, urban consumers who want to constantly stay in touch. The Nokia Asha 200 features integrated social networking, email and IM, adding Orkut and Flickr support. Nokia Asha 200 makes it possible to carry thousands of songs with support for 32 GB memory cards and providing a battery for an amazing 52-hour playback time.

The retail price for the Nokia Asha 200 will be AED 288/- and is currently available at all leading electronic retail outlets including Nokia branded stores in the region.

Full specs: http://www.nokia.com/ae-en/products/phone/200/specifications/

Nokia Asha 300:
The beautifully designed Nokia Asha 300 is a touch device which also offers the convenience of a keypad. The Nokia Asha 300 has a powerful 1GHz processor and 3G to deliver a faster Internet and social networking experience. The Nokia Browser allows for fast, affordable and localized Internet access by compressing web pages by up to 90%.
Users will have fast access to messaging, email and instant messaging from the home screen and can swipe to access apps, music or games from the Nokia Store. The Nokia Asha 300 also arrives preloaded with the popular Angry Birds Lite game.

The Nokia Asha 300 comes with a 5 megapixel camera, a music player, FM radio, Bluetooth connectivity and can handle memory cards up to 32GB. The retail price for the Nokia Asha 300 will be AED 397/- and is currently available at all leading electronic retail outlets including Nokia branded stores in the region.

Full specs: http://www.nokia.com/ae-en/products/phone/300/specifications/

Nokia Asha 302:
The Nokia Asha 302 is Nokia’s first Series 40 phone to support Mail for Exchange, giving people access to their emails, contacts and calendar on an exchange server, delivering a true mobile office experience. That and a stylish QWERTY keyboard make it ideal for young entrepreneurs and professionals seeking a beautifully designed phone. Additionally, the Nokia Asha connects to popular social networks and enables chatting through Whatsapp and other IM services. The Nokia Asha 302 is powered by a 1-GHz processor and supports 3.5G data speeds. It is available now at all leading electronic retail outlets including Nokia branded stores in the region for AED 425/-.

Full specs: http://www.nokia.com/ae-en/products/phone/302/specifications/

Nokia Asha 303:
The Nokia Asha 303 is a stunning phone designed with sophisticated materials and metallic finishes. It combines a large 2.6” capacitive touch screen with a high quality QWERTY keypad. The Nokia Asha 303 is built with Internet and social networks ease in mind. The device harnesses a powerful 1Ghz engine, 3G and WLAN to deliver a fast Internet experience. Social networks, email and IM are at the center of the experience, easily accessible from the home screen. The Nokia Asha 303 is powered by the cloud-based Nokia Browser, which by compressing the web by up to 90%, provides higher speeds and a more affordable access to the Internet.

Entertainment and applications are also a core part of the Nokia Asha 303 offering. Angry Birds Lite, the popular mobile game, comes preinstalled, together with support for other globally relevant applications such as Facebook Chat, Whatsapp messaging and the latest release of Nokia Maps for Series 40 . The retail price for the Nokia Asha 303 will be AED 539/-, and is currently available at all leading electronic retail outlets including Nokia branded stores in the region.

Full specs: http://www.nokia.com/ae-en/products/phone/303/specifications/

It’s always fascinating talking to someone who has created something massive but had no idea on how big their product would become when creating it. At The Mobile Show 2012, one of the keynote speaker was Igor Pušenjak from LimaSky, creators of the massively popular Doodle Jump game.

After his session, Igor was kind enough to spend a few minutes with me where we talked about how his company expanded and is coping up with the success that Doodle Jump brought them as well as advice for someone looking into developing apps. Igor makes no excuses for repeatedly stating his fondness for Apple and the platform they have developed. It’s certainly a very interesting conversation.

I would like to thank Igor for taking the time to speak to us and wish him continued success.

It is always a pleasure sitting down with Mike Al Mefleh, Director Carrier Product Marketing at RIM Middle East. RIM we present at The Mobile Show 2012 in Dubai where, among other things, they were upgrading devices to their latest OS7.1 release.

I managed to get a few minutes with Mike after his keynote session and we talked about RIM’s phenomenal and growing market share in the Middle East, the flagship store they are planning on opening in Dubai as well as their upcoming BB10 operating system.

I would like to thank Mike for his time as well as the entire team at RIM for being extremely helpful.

I didn’t know anything about SoundCloud until today and the only reason I came to know of it is because Caroline Drucker, the Partnerships Marketing Manager was in town for The Mobile Show and was on stage talking about what her organization does. I guess you can call SoundCloud a YouTube for audio where people can upload sounds from all facets of life that can either be professionally consumed or just listened to for enjoyment.

I managed to steal a few minutes of Caroline’s time after her stage appearance and find out more about SoundCloud in the interview posted below. It certainly is a pretty interesting space to be in and for anyone that is into audio, SoundCloud sounds like a pretty impressive platform.

I want to thank Caroline for taking the time to talk to us and wish her the best of luck with SoundCloud. I’ll definitely be checking it out.

Last week at the VMware Forum in Dubai, I managed to catch up with Elie Kanaan, VP Marketing EMEA, for VMware Inc. VMware has been at the forefront of virtualization technology for a number of years, and I was interested to find out from Elie what the company had planned for the rest of the year as well as what was in store for the Middle East Region.

Firstly Elie, thank you very much for your time – I know how busy you must be here at the VMware Forum.
Not at all, you have all of my time!

What is your typical day like for you at VMware?
My job is really to make sure that VMware as a brand is well-know by all of our customers and known for providing relevant value to their business. Each day my team and I across the various EMEA regions make sure that this message is being driven across to customers and partners, influencers, and analysts.

Elie Kanaan, VP Marketing EMEA, VMware

Why are businesses only now realizing the benefits of turning some of their servers virtual? What’s really been stopping them from adopting this sooner?
Adoption of virtualization is picking up quite significantly. I joined VMware two and a half years ago when we were talking about 25% of companies adopting virtualization, but now we’re talking about 50-55%. VMware specifically virtualizes x86 architecture, so if a business runs mainframes or other critical architecture, then of course virtualization won’t apply to them. Secondly, I think it’s as simple as companies not knowing about the real benefits of virtualization or that it’s not affordable or secure. Lastly, some companies might not have the IT infrastructure that would benefit from virtualization, so we’re talking about really small businesses that run maybe one or two non-critical servers.

So what would you say is the ‘checklist’ that a business should look at before deciding to approach virtualization?
Size is an important factor here – if you’re at three or four servers, then it’s questionable. As soon as you start having ten or more servers, then it’s something to seriously consider, because then you can cut it down to a few physical servers running VMs. You then allows you to cut down on operating expenses, maintenance, and other associated costs and divert that money elsewhere in IT.

The theme of the VMware Forum is on the cloud, and how it’s going to change how we consume IT resources. How will the cloud integrate into VMware’s current technologies – will we see VMs running off the cloud or being backed up to the cloud for example?
That’s a good question – we see two views on the cloud first and foremost. There’s the public cloud such as Amazon which allows you to sync and share information that it’s mission-critical. Then there’s the private cloud where you would take your enterprise datacenter, and integrate it with cloud-like services that you can offer to your end users. What we’re building is the technology to enable that private cloud and to ensure we have the right catalog of services and policies on hand for businesses.

Do you see introduction of other virtualization products such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V having any effect on your stance in the market?
It’s good to always have a choice in the market, and I understand that companies would like to have alternative options available to them. We enjoy such a massive market share that it’s healthy to have a bit of competition in the market, so that we’re constantly innovating new technologies that proves our market worth and stay a few steps ahead of everyone else.

Are you able to share any figures or research on how many companies in the region are moving towards virtualization with VMware?
There hasn’t been any formal study yet on the statistics for our region, but it could be anywhere between 10-20% of companies moving to virtualization. Of course, we are nowhere close to the figures in western markets, but we’re getting there.

Staying with the region, what do you think are some of the challenges you will face with having companies move to virtualization?
That’s another good question – my personal view is that there are really two main drivers for adopting virtualization. One is the cost, and the other is being able to have a much quicker and more reactive IT system which can recover from a disaster in two minutes instead of two days. The obstacle is that there might not be a lot of cost pressure on IT in this region – it’s less about cost-cutting and more about reapplying costs to provide a bigger competitive advantage for the company. If we our job well about educating companies, I think things are going to take off really well in the region.

Now obviously the bulk of your business comes from the enterprise, but do you ever see in the distant future any focus on the consumer side or any benefits that a consumer might get from some degree of virtualization?
Let me give you an example of where consumer virtualization could come in. We looked at mobile phones – so many people carry multiple phones; one for personal, one for business, and we thought that maybe there would be a way to combine the different profiles into just one phone. So we’re looking at a mobile virtualization platform that lets you have two virtual environments on the same physical device. So one profile would be for your personal email, Facebook, and contacts – the other profile with have your company email and company contacts. If you lose your phone, and IT administrator can send a remote command to the phone to wipe the profile from the device so that no data is compromised.  That I think will be really interesting to people – you can now have one device with several different virtual environments to cater to your needs, all separated and protected from each other. We’ve worked with a few telecoms at the moment to pilot the technology, and I think for the moment that’s about the closest you’ll get to consumer-level virtualization beyond products such as VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation.

Lastly, this is the first time you’ve held the VMware Forum in the Middle East – what kind of feedback have you received from the delegates and what are your plans for the next show?
The one feedback that I’ve got consistently from partners and customers is “finally” and to do it again in the future. It’s important for us to meet people from the community and those who use our products, so it’s a good learning experience for everyone. It’s certainly the beginning of a long journey ahead!

YouTube’s official page for the UAE is now live giving video content creators from the region a good opportunity to not only be able to display their talents more visibly but also to make some money from it further down the road.

By pulling content specific to the region, film makers now have a leveled playing field as their content does not drown on a global level. Although some of the sections of the local website appear a bit empty right now, this is basically just the Google algorithm at work realizing what needs to be shown and it will only be a matter of time before videos are populated across the website. YouTube now also allows local advertisers to display ads on the YouTube page while pre-roll for content developers is coming soon as well.

Google’s Matthew Glotzbach, Managing Director, EMEA at YouTube was in Dubai to introduce the new regional website and the amount of statistics he was pointing out were plain incredible- over sixty hours of videos are uploaded every second YouTube. From the region alone, you have over an hour uploaded every minute. This, among other things is what Matthew spoke about in our brief interview with him.

We would like to thank Matthew for taking some time from his very packed schedule and talk to us.

The Mobile Show and The Internet Show 2012 is happening this week at Madinat Arena, Madinat Jumeirah on the 17th and 18th April. The show brings together some of the big names from the industry and this year we will have the opportunity to hear the CEO of Wikitude- Mr. Martin Herdina as well as Mr.Evert Jaap Lugt, CEO of Nibuzz. If we are lucky, we might event get to meet Peter Vesterbacka, the creator of Angry Birds.

We had a chance to sit down with Matt Wallhead, the General Manager of terrapinn, the company responsible for organizing the event. Matt told us what the event is about and why we should be attending it in this brief interview.

We would like to thank Matt Wallhead for his time and wish him the best of luck with the show. We will be covering the show live so watch our for our exclusive interviews and coverage of the show beginning on the 17th.

Nokia held a media roundtable in Dubai recently to introduce their PureView 808 Smartphone featuring a 41 mega-pixel camera. Yep- it’s the phone that was the talk of the Mobile World Congress show this year.

Mr. Vesa Julita, Nokia’s Global Head of Smart Devices introduced us to the PureView 808 by mentioning that Nokia was getting tired of the Mega Pixel race in the Smartphone market and decided to take care of it for once and all by releasing a camera with technology that is miles ahead and will competitors years to catch up. He mentioned that Nokia has been working on this technology for over five years now and has based it on the following three factors:

1) High performance sensors
2) Image processing algorithms
3) Precession optics

On top you see the massive PureView 808 Sensor with competing ones below it.

The Pureview 808 is the first product to feature this new technology and as Tuula Rytila, Senior VP, Portfolio and Business Management hinted, we should expect to see this in more upcoming Nokia phones- so don’t be surprised to see it on a Windows Phone 8 based Lumia phone in the near future as well.

While I was allowed to take pictures from the Nokia PureView 808, I was asked not to share these pictures as the device is still work in progress and the image quality will be further tweaked. Thus, the best I can show is the screen of the PureView with the picture I took from it as well as my iPhone 4S. You can immediately tell that the PureView has a wider-angle lens than the iPhone 4S but for anything above and beyond that, you will have to wait.

Following the roundtable, Mr. Vesa was kind enough to sit down with me and talk a little bit more about this exciting new device from Nokia and technology behind it.

One of my sesions at BlackBerry DevCon Europe was with Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart who is a Senior Technical Director, Open Software at Research In Motion. In his session, Eduardo gave us an overview of Open Source activities at Research In Motion. Eduardo is certainly a man of great experience in the Open Source copmmunity having worked at Oracle where he was Architect for Open Source and Community in the Application Platform Group for Oracle. Before Oracle Eduardo was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he participated and led projects in multiple areas including IDEs, OS, Java, many JSRs and in Open Source. Hiring him shows you that RIM is quite serious about developer relations in the Open Source Space.

It’s a known fact that the current BlackBerry platform isn’t as big as the iOS or Android platforms when it comes to applications. One of the reasons is that the BlackBerry platform has traditionally not been the easiest one to write applications for. However, with the release of BlackBerry OS6, RIM started supporting HTML5 as an added platform to their devices. With the release of PlayBook and moving forward with BB10 devices coming up later this year, RIM has gone all out by adding support for the Adobe AIR framework, a QNX native SDK based on C/C++ and an Android Player to port Android apps over. Tim Neil was present at BlackBerry DevCon Europe and talks about all these platforms and where, which one makes more sense.