Lumia 900 Finland Launch Party + Nokia TV Launch
As we previously suspected, the Launch of the Lumia 900 in Finland was at hand; Nokia Finland just announced the Lumia 900 Finland variant a few moments ago, as expected this is the ROW (rest-of-the-world) variant meaning it lacks the LTE support- which of course is not an issue considering Finland doesn’t support LTE as of yet.
Alongside the Lumia 900 also debuted the Official launch of Nokia TV as a Beta for FINLAND ONLY- Nokia has not yet confirmed whether or not this service will spread to other regions (I assume it will take some time considering the amount of licencing agreements required to carry out something like this), the Launch of Nokia TV adds it to the other great Entertainment services from the awesome Entertainment team which Currently Include Mix Radio as well as Nokia Reading.
Nokia TV is a rich hub experience where all local broadcasters stream their content to Lumia 900 (and Lumia 800, who will have to DL the app from the marketplace). Nokia TV app focuses on local catchup TV, i.e. what was played last night or the night before. Content is normally hosted for about 2 weeks but could be up to 30 days, really depending on the content provider. Nokia TV app complements the already existing distribution channels that the content provider has in the market- Nokia TV app hosts the meta data the actual content is streamed direct from the provider; enabling the provider to show relevant adverting before a show.
Update (Jay, cheers Janne for the tip!): Here’s some more info from NokConv Finland:
The new Nokia TV application brings Internet content Finnish TV-Snow-Nokia smartphones.
Nokia TV-application through Snow-smartphone Nokia entertainment of Finland, Nokia is expanding music service, television services. Application deployment is easy and does not require a login or registration.
Users can watch YLE, MTV3, Channel Four, URHOtv’s Voice, and programs. Capacity will grow in the future in other domestic and foreign program suppliers.
http://aani.nokia.fi/2012/05/24/televisiota-voi-katsella-paikasta-riippumatta/
Janne confirms and says:
I’ve now seen multiple reports of people getting their phones, so it is definitely out in Finland in all the three colors and sporting “Tango” with the Wi-Fi sharing and better MMS settings and so on. Also Nokia TV is installed standard, as is Tango Video Calls (unrelated WP “Tango”). The silicone cover is not in the standard package it seems, so that is extra (it is on sale and stock too, both the back covering and bumper style). The USB cable is white like the charger.
Category: Applications, Nokia, Windows Phone
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Heyyo, names Ali- Currently a fourth year Dental Student from Chicago; studying in Jordan. I love all sorts of gadgets almost as much as I love my cookies! (Have: Green Nokia N8, Cyan Lumia 800, Black N9, Stormtrooper White Lumia 900, Black 808 PureView, Red Lumia 920). Follow my twitter handle '@AliQudsi' - no pressure. Thanks.Subscribe
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“Nokia Finland just announced the Lumia 900 Finland variant a few moments ago, as expected this is the ROW (rest-of-the-world) variant meaning it lacks the LTE support- which of course is not an issue considering Finland doesn’t support LTE as of yet.”
BTW: It is of course the ROW variant without LTE; but as a clarification Finland DOES support LTE, but it is limited still and apparently uses different frequencies than then U.S. Lumia would. LTE is not yet a big deal in Finland I think, so the ROW variant is just fine for the current market conditions here.
Yes, in Finland the 3G network is usually pretty fast. It does support HSPA+ Dual Carrier (max. 42 Mbps).
Nokia TV is not supported on the Lumia 610.
That’s really freaking lame, it plays videos just fine, playback is all hardware accelerated, how much memory do they need to show a list.
It is `very unfortunate, yes. Especially since the Lumia 610 just got released. I’m still hoping a Lumia 610 version will come later. Home much of an issue is the .NET overhead in the non-native applications?
I don’t really understand some of the limitations of the 610.
Background applications have a larger effect than with higher CPU / memory devices, but they run at most every 30 minutes, some only want to run once a day, and have an execution and memory cap, so the OS should have no issue running at most 1 at a time in the background.
The result now is that an app like a daily countdown app can not update its live tile, even when it only wants to run once a day to recalculate the number of days to go.
Everything built in absolutely flies, the email client is the best mobile client I’ve ever used, the people hub, messaging, everything is so fast, how can a tv app which is just a run of the mill ‘showing lists in panomaric view’ like say the imdb app but with video added not run on it, especially since the claim is about memory usage rather than CPU usage.
Third party apps are hit and miss, people can still do things synchronously (badly) and create a crappy experience, but from Nokia itself I expect better of course. 610 is such a beautiful phone. They really should set a good example here, it’s perfectly fine for content to load or display slower on a lower end device, but there is no excuse for not keeping the UI completely responsive, MS has plenty of documentation on how to do that.
Now, for the “optimistic”/”pathetically naive” part (pick your poison), WP8 will fix a lot of these, it’s much clearer now for what kinds of things people use live tiles, and it’s ridiculous that an app would not even be able to update 1 counter once a day, I expect much more powerful APIs as well as performance improvements.
I think one reason may be the native vs. .NET apps question. Most 3rd party apps are .NET managed code, whereas Microsoft’s own apps (and perhaps some priority 3rd party apps like Nokia Drive and the like) can be native C++ apps, that might be more frugal. Windows Phone 8 is expected to fix this of course, allowing native 3rd party apps too, but who knows…
It would agree it has an advantage, but you can certainly achieve perfectly fluid third party apps by paying attention to what you’re doing.
I know that sounds a bit like giving ammunition to the ‘I thought WP was soooo efficient’ crowd, but it’s about the tools WP gives you to create a fluid UI despite lots of background work, versus still being able to block the UI if you’re careless.
A lot of apps for example load data from a website, say a listview with thumbnails/images. If you’re not delegating this to the background, and substituting dummy data or gray squares or whatever to the UI thread for when the user is flicking through a list, while you download the correct images, it doesn’t matter if you do this in native C++ or in managed C#, it all comes down to the speed of the network in that case, and it’s going to be a choppy experience regardless. If I flick really fast I can “outrun” the image drawing in large photo albums, but the UI never ever hesitates and images catch up really quickly, and this is what creates a *very* nice user experience, much much nicer than one where the images load a bit faster but the UI stutters.
WP makes it very easy to do the right thing, but you still need to do it, and I expect Nokia to lead the way.
W8/WinRT flatly removes most of the synchronous APIs and forces you to do things asynchronously, including introducing language constructs to make this easier to do (without “callback hell”), and I expect WP8 to follow suit, with a thin silverlight shim on top for existing WP7 apps).
tl;dr; we have such powerful hardware these days, just learn to love asynchronous and buttery smooth UIs on relatively low end devices, instead of building ever more powerful hardware because you’re doing image decoding in the ui thread.
Pet peeve of mine
Indeed LTE is supported in Finland by all the major telecom operators (Sonera, DNA and Elisa). They use the 2600 MHz LTE range, also 1800 MHz can be used.
This is different compared to the 700 MHz and 2100 MHz in the US.
Finland definitely has 4G! http://www.sonera.fi/nettiyhteydet/laajakaistat/4g+langaton+laajakaista/
One notable fact about NokiaTV is that it doesn’t “stream” TV onto your phone, it is only a collection of videos of shows that have recently played on the channels.
In essence its a “Hulu” of Finland of these specific channels, so everything’s pre-recorded, there’s no possibility of a live stream.
The Hulu of Finland is ruutu.fi
It was said in yesterday’s evening news, by a Nokia representative, that they are looking to expand this to support live streams as well. They have clear plans for that, but as this is a “beta test in Finland” they are not launching everything at the same time. But I’m confident that it will happen in the near(ish) future.
Still, Finnish women talking with that Finnish accent is hot.