To differentiate itself in a mobile market full of handset makers, Nokia is attempting to form stronger connections with local application developers so that it may have a full arsenal of local apps.

Nokia has also clarified many Windows Phone 7 apps, which will not be exclusive to Nokia, and anyone with a handset running on Windows Phone 7 operating system will be able to access them.

Marco Argenti, senior vice president of developer and marketplace, Nokia, said to the Financial Times, “We are going to create opportunities for local developers, so there are more apps in general, and more local apps.”

This means that Nokia may create a cricket App for India; soccer app for Italy and so on. These apps will be promoted by the company at relevant places, both through offline and through online activities.

Indian users, hence, can now expect more localised apps such as health, education, travel and tourism. Usually, apps available in app marketplaces are more generalised and lack the regional touch.

For example, in India, though people have health apps these do not connect to doctors who can help in an emergency.

A revamped Foursquare version for Windows Phone 7 has been launched, which has been specially optimised to take advantage of the new user interface of WP7 platform. It comes armed with live tile and a map which shows friends’ check ins while users check in themselves.

The new Foursquare App version 2.0 is now available for users in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

The earlier version of Foursquare lacked several features and user experience was rated below the Android and iOS versions. Lack of features also resulted in Mayors (frequent users in a shop) not getting their well deserved discounts at their favourite retail outlets.

The Foursquare creators worked in tandem with Microsoft to ensure it worked well and used all the features offered by Windows Phone 7 while retaining all the essential features of Foursquare. Users just have to tap and hold on places when they are in panorama view to check in to their favourite locations. Foursquare has right now more than 10 million users across the world.

A Foursquare blog post says, “We collaborated with Microsoft to develop the app entirely on our open API v2. The new version really speaks to the distinctive capabilities (and slick design!) of Windows Phone, while maintaining the foursquare features you know and love. Playing around with it, what’s cool is that it feels both familiar and new, with a personalised experience through the lens of Windows Phone 7′s panoramic UI.”

In a related news, the Windows Phone Marketplace has reached the 25,000 mark of number of apps available for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

We are constantly connected because we have to get our emails on a real time basis, tweet often, and because Facebook is where our social life is. While phones have become smart enough to handle all this, more often than not their batteries are unable to cope.

There is substantial congestion in networks these days. Congestion works like a traffic jam, wherein vehicles waste fuel without moving an inch. In vehicles there is the ‘start stop system’, also called Micro Hybrid by Mahindra, which switches off the car when it is not moving and switches it on when you are ready to go, without your having to touch a thing. This saves a lot of fuel.

Scientific American has reported that a Duke University researcher, Justin Manweiler, a computer science graduate student at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, has developed software he calls SleepWell, which works on similar principles.

Mobile devices today waste a lot of energy searching for the WiFi signal, and then staying connected while overtaxed wireless networks ferry data to and from them. SleepWell allows a mobile device to slip into power-saving mode while it is awaiting its turn to connect.

This is specially useful when people flock to coffee shops lured by free WiFi networks. Manweiler likens the competition for WiFi to big-city traffic. When workers leave their offices en masse at the end of the day, they clog up the roads and rail lines. If these workers staggered the times they left, the transit systems would be less crowded, and it would take less time to get home. Similarly, if mobile devices took their turn accessing WiFi access points, data would move faster and these devices would use less energy.

Sleepwell is designed to double the battery life of internet-connected devices increasingly called on to upload and download music, images and video via WiFi.

SleepWell is installed on devices that create a WiFi network infrastructure, including WiFi routers and access points (hotspot feature in Android 2.2). As such, it is designed so that any mobile device&#151whether it uses Apple OS X, Google Android, Windows or some other platform&#151can take advantage of it.

SleepWell software differs from the “sleep” mode already available in many devices. An operating system’s version of sleep is designed to work over long time scales&#151minutes, hours or days. “SleepWell is enabling short ‘sleep’ periods multiple times per second. These sleep periods are so short, the user remains unaware and unaffected.”

During testing, Manweiler found that SleepWell could double the battery life of mobile phones. “We ran lots of live experiments using real off-the-shelf smartphones, mostly Google Android phones,” he says. “We tested with a variety of use cases, including the user watching a movie trailer on YouTube, playing music on Pandora and Last.FM internet radio, and downloading a large file from the web.”

The extent to which battery life would be prolonged of course varies depending on the situation. Still, Manweiler hopes the brief naps that SleepWell affords mobile devices will add up to significant energy conservation when WiFi networks are in high demand.

Source: ScientificAmerican

Merriam-Webster has released its dictionary application for Android platform with a slew of features including voice search. As a reputed American dictionary, the latest update for Meriam-Webster dictionary App for Android brings some user interface improvements. Available for mobile phones running Android 1.6 or above, the app is free for use but will contain advertisements.

Merriam-Webster App for Android offers a most important feature &#151 offline access. One can simply refer to the dictionary offline, without any need to connect to the internet or WiFi. Complete access to the dictionary will require some initial download.

If you want to push out all the buttons and read just the text, make use of the Reader View. Keep your vocabulary updated with the Word of the Day. Along with that, the app also offers synonyms, antonyms, example sentences and audio pronunciations.

Voice search enables the user to search for a word without having to spell it. Here’s a tip for Android smartphone owners in India who would like to use Voice Search.

On your Android device, go to Settings>Voice input & output>Voice Recognizer Settings> Language Search. Then scroll and choose the language as English (India) from the pop-up list. That may help the Merriam-Webster app recognise and offer search results for an Indian audience as well.

You could download the Merriam-Webster app from Android Market or visit this link to check it out on your desktop browser.

Bloomberg has launched a news App for Android operating system based tablets. With this, users can get the latest news, portfolio information of companies and market data on their Android tablets.

The application is available for free and comes with advertisements. Users can create personalised news category, by industry, region, popularity or on any other basis. To top it all, users can also read stories while they are offline.

The app developers have optimised the application for both smartphones and tablets.

Apart from Android, Bloomberg app is also available for BlackBerry, Nokia, Apple devices.

With the launch of Google+ Android has perhaps received its biggest boost since inception. This, of course, assumes that Google+ will gain traction among users as a social networking site.

Currently, Google+ is available on Android and will soon be released for iOS devices as well. The Google+ service on Android may give users a reason to pick up their phone more often because there would always be something new to look at.

Google might be hoping this service would work similar to how Microsoft Office did for Windows and how BlackBerry Messenger worked for BlackBerry phones.

The biggest benefit of Google+ is that it allows the user to access varied applications like a calendar and documentfrom within it. Hence, people can use such apps while interacting with friends and need not get a different App altogether. Also, its group video chat service is quite unique.

Google has already announced a version for iOS devices, but there is a strong possibility that the full range of Google+ activities, for example group video chatting, can be performed only on Android devices.

Google may also bring the Photo Stream feature of iOS to Google+, which will allow users to upload a picture in the Google+ photo gallery as soon as they click it with their phone camera. Via Google+ these photos can be sent to certain circles of friends within the social network.

The functionality gap between mobile and desktop web browsers is getting thinner by the day, and Opera has played a significant role in making mobile web browsing an interesting experience.

In the last few months Opera has rolled out updated versions of Opera Mini and Opera Mobile web browsers for a majority of mobile platforms such as Android, iOS and Java.

These updated versions are available for download from Apple Store, Android Market, Ovi Store and other distribution platforms.

Sunil Kamath, sales director for India and SAARC at Opera Software, said, “We are seeing growing interest among smartphone users to download Opera Mini due to its easy to use interface and high speed browsing capabilities.”

In the past few years, a wide range of handset providers have been entering the market with attractive features at affordable prices, which has propelled the growth in the handset market and also in the number of mobile internet users.

To add to that, Indian telecom operators have consistently incentivised users to log on to the mobile web. This they have done by reducing data tariffs, which has resulted in the number of data users growing month on month.

“Statistics indicate that 100 million people have internet access, which equals 8.5 per cent penetration in India and through Opera Mini and Opera Mobile it is our endeavour that those people who are now without internet access can get there with their mobile phones,” said Kamath.

On the usage pattern, he said, “Our research shows that social networking and search continue to dominate the charts. We are observing significant data traffic and application downloads on our Opera Mobile Store available as a speed dial on Opera Mini.”

Mobile browsers are indeed a competitive market and Opera wants to stay ahead of its competitors. The company has provided solutions that operators are looking for: the same Browser UI across different platforms and mobile devices and the compression technology that allows more people getting online to enjoy fast internet browsing, without consuming too much bandwidth.