Introducing the hottest thing in mobile technology in Nigeria in 2011 – mobileRave magazine and Events, launching end of January 2011 with a launch party.

mobileRave magazine is initially a 12-page full-colour publication (bumped to 24 pages by the end of the year), in high quality gloss paper, and presenting consumer-targeted information on mobile devices and services in Nigeria.

The magazine has a quarterly cycle and will be circulated throughout the country via phone retail outlets, snail mail/courier and our mobileRave events planned to hold in major towns and cities across the country from this month. Going by the distribution channels that we have put in place, we have a conservative projection of 10,000 copies per edition. Of course, we expect the magazine to do much better than that in the currently empty mobile magazine market in Nigeria.

For those who prefer it, especially international subscribers, there is the option of subscribing to an electronic copy in PDF format. This will be sent out via email. Payment is via bank deposit and PayPal.

The mobileRave events are high-octane events where we showcase mobile devices and services, provide configuration and troubleshooting services to consumers in an atmosphere of music and entertainment. We have musicians billed to perform at such events. Our goal is public enlightenment in a relaxed environment. On our road map are locations in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Ibadan and others.

Showcasing Mobile; Demonstrating Opportunities

Mobility Nigeria will also be using this new initiative to demonstrate the capabilities of modern smart mobile devices. As such, all pictures and videos recorded at these events will be done 100% with mobile phones. Those media files will, of course, be published here on the site and in subsequent editions of the magazine as part of our reports.

So hot, we are almost burning up with excitement

We are excited about this and can’t wait for the first edition of mobileRave magazine and the launch party. We hope you are as excited as we are.

Let me mention here quickly that subscription to the mobileRave magazine is already open and you can subscribe right now from our site. Let me also mention that there are a couple of goodies that come with subscribing to mobileRave magazine.

One, your subscription now is automatically your entry to a raffle draw to win a mobile phone at our upcoming mobileRave launch event. So, being an early-bird is a good thing here.

Two, subscription also means automatic membership of the mobileRave club, a replacement of our Phone instalment Club, which allows you to be able to buy phones from our phone store on installment. We have scrapped all those tough requirements of the old club.

Are these exciting times or what? Subscribe for your year’s copies of mobileRave magazine now. Subscription to a year’s supply (4 editions) costs N3,000 only. The electronic version costs N2,000 or $15 per annum only.

We’ve bottled it up long enough. Enough! I say……. In fact I don’t know what to say. What do you say?

My Misgivings About Blackberry

For a long time, I stayed away from the Blackberry device because one of my misgivings about the Blackberry device – in my own words – was, “The only strength Blackberry has is Push email“. Every time that I spoke to people who wanted to get one, I told them that there were devices that did Push email and much more.

Another myth that I held about Blackberry is, “It is not user friendly“. This was a device that I hadn’t used and yet I held a very strong opinion about. This is so typical of the average Joe out there.

My next misgiving is an offshoot of the previous. Because I thought it was not user friendly, I naturally concluded that everything about it was going to be complex. Using it wasn’t going to be simple, and tethering with PC was going to be complex. As such, I kept my distance from it all together.

Finally, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get on the Blackberry platform the applications that are so loved by me on Symbian. Apps like the torch light app (allows me to use the camera light as torch light), Bible application with multiple translations, screen shot application that allows me to capture the screen of my phone, etc, are examples of such.

The Mist Clears

Fast forward to my 10th wedding anniversary last year. I wanted to give my wife a special gift, and Mobility Nigeria made a Blackberry offer that I couldn’t pass up. So I got her a Blackberry 9630 Tour.

As it turned out, my wife thought that the phone was rather big and looked masculine – not something that she would love to use. So we swapped phones and I ended up with the Blackberry.

My first day with it, I thought, “If I get this device to tether with my PC with ease and I am able to use it as a modem for my internet access, I just might keep it“. Surprisingly, when I installed the desktop manager on my PC, and connected the device, I was prompted to input the network settings. This I did and presto, I was browsing away on my existing internet bundle plan. It was so easy to do that I instantly fell in love with the Blackberry phone. I must say that at that point I had not subscribed to BIS.

Secondly, I set out to get those must-have apps. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to find those apps and the best part of it was that they were all free.

At this point I was more than sold and loving the Blackberry phone. My first ever experience with the Blackberry platform was turning out to be a very pleasant surprising one. Would there be more surprises as I used the phone?

If you want to know the answer to that question please come back for the concluding part of this article.

In the mean time, for all our Blackberry readers, please use the comment box below to share with us what your first steps with Blackberry were like. We’d really like to know.

The Underground is a musical talent hunt show organized by Inner circle to discover and showcase talented and upcoming musical acts in the Nigerian music Industry. On Sunday the 26th of December 2010, an exclusive Christmas edition of the show went down at the Rehab Bar and Pool, Victoria Island, Lagos.

Mobility Nigeria was a media partner and our team was there. Here is a brief report.

The show which was completely sold-out, with the venue packed to the rafters, was to say the least an electrifying one. The audience had good value for their money as they were treated to some very good music and very good stage perfomances by some of the young, talented and upcoming acts. The show kicked off with performances from 15 of the upcoming acts who had made it through the auditioning and screening process. They were later cut down to the top 4 after votes came in from the audience.

The top 4 performed and were cut down to two, and this time the votes came from celebrity judges from various segments of the entertainment industry who were in attendance. The last two performers contested fiercely, but the day was carried by a very gifted Hushman after winning the free style battle. Folashayo Oke, president of Inner Circle (the organisers) said, “This is our little contribution to the Nigerian music industry”.

The Blackberry Addiction

As it turned out, roughly 90 percent of the audience of over 400 at this event were carrying a Blackberry device. It seems that there is a Blackberry revolution among the youths, especially in the entertainment sector. Everywhere we turned we saw people snapping pictures, recording videos, giving live Twitter reports of the event and uploading pictures to Facebook in realtime.

The Future

At Mobility Nigeria, we are determined to engage the mobile culture nationwide in a greater way. We have already announced our upcoming mPower seminars and mobileRave events. Our media partnership with Underground will bring you free downloadable videos, pictures, reports and surveys.

If you are interested in attending Underground events, follow @mobilityblog on Twitter, and/or subscribe to be notified of our posts, as we will be bringing you more information from time to time.

If you were at the Underground Exclusive, what are your views about the performances? Who would have been your choice of winner between the last two standing? Your comments are welcome!

In the meantime, do watch out for our interview with the organizers of the Underground event.

Here at Mobility Nigeria, we predicted sometime back – and have stood our ground – that mobility is the future of personal computing.

With last week’s announcement by Nokia of the Booklet 3G (Nokia’s own take on mini Laptops), we just might be inching closer and closer to true mobility in the PC world. The Booklet 3G is essentially a netbook – a mini laptop, but a little bit more.

One of the things that the Nokia Booklet 3G brings to the PC world was included in Wikipedia’s list of the seven things that a mobile can do that a PC cannot do – the ability to stay connected all the time. See our article on that, The Modern Mobile Phone is Inherently Superior in Capability than a Laptop or Desktop PC.

The new device from Nokia will have always-on connectivity, thanks to a built-in 3G/HSDPA modem and a SIM card slot. With this inclusion, Wikipedia’s list has been reduced to six and the PC has taken one more step towards becoming truly mobile.

Battery life does not make it to Wikipedia’s list, but I think that one of the advantages that a mobile has over the laptop is the fact that its battery life lasts much longer than that of a laptop – many times going for more than 24 hours before running out. This, my humble opinion, is part of what true mobility entails. The Nokia Booklet 3G, while still not offering battery life that is at par with mobile phones boasts an impressive 12hrs of battery life. More and more, battery life is increasing on laptops, thus making them all the more truly mobile.

As we become more and more mobile, one wonders, “Will the mobile phone replace the laptop PCs or will the PCs become 100% mobile to the point where mobile phones are no longer needed?”

My thinking is that both will compliment each other to give a truly mobile experience.

Due to be available towards the end of quarter three of this year, Nokia on Monday announced the successor to the highly popular E71 – the Nokia E72.

The Nokia E72 continues the design tradition of the E71 with a candy bar QWERTY keyboard. It also has essentially the same software elements albeit enhanced – s60 third edition feature pack 2. The new kid on the block builds on the success of its predecessor, while at the same time bringing a few new things to the table. The upgrade in my opinion is not in any way revolutionary, rather, it is an incremental one.

This latest E-series device comes equipped with a 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash, an upgrade from the 3.2 megapixel camera on the E71.

Nokia has implemented an optical Navi key (track pad) in the centre of the D-pad of the device for a more intuitive and animated scrolling in the menu. While this is new for Nokia E-series, the technology is not new as this has been implemented by Samsung on a few of their devices.

One of the new things that the E72 brings to the table is somewhat of a surprise. There’s now a chat application pre-installed called Ovi Chat that is integrated into the contacts application. What it means is that from the contact menu you can chat on Yahoo and GoogleTalk. This is highly welcome as there will be no need to install a third party application to do chat.

Another surprise that the E72 springs on us is the inclusion of the N-series style image and video gallery. I am truly happy about this as I hope that it marks the end of the old and boring image gallery that E-series owners have been subjected to in the past.

Nokia messaging is on-board out of the box, with support for multiple e-mail accounts. The interesting part is that there is a lifetime license for Nokia messaging on the E72. There is also a life-time license for Ovi Chat.

Other upgrades include a digital compass embedded in the map application, QuickOffice editing suite is now up from the 4.3 version to 5.3 with support for Microsoft office 2007.

Is the E72 a true upgrade from the one year old and very successful E71? While I was hoping for the Symbian foundation OS, I am of the opinion that the E72 has come to take the shine from the E71.

Thanks to Symbian Guru for the heads up, all owners of Nokia E51, E52, E55, E63, E71, E72, E75, and E90 can now upgrade their QuickOffice application to the latest version 6.0. The new version has full support for viewing, editing, and creating Microsoft Office 2007 documents, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The update is available through the QuickOffice application on the phone. Launch the application and go to the Quick Manager area to initiate the upgrade.

I was able to successfully download an upgrade for the E51 with me.

If you own an E-series device, go ahead and download your free update right away.

Here’s the official press release:

Quickoffice® Offers Free Updates for Select Nokia® Eseries Devices

Latest version of Quickoffice, office viewing and editing software suite, now available for download via on-device, e-commerce portal Quickmanager™

Dallas, TX – June 15, 2009 – Quickoffice, Inc., the leading global provider of mobile office productivity software, today announced it will be offering free upgrades to the latest version of Quickoffice for users on certain Nokia Eseries phones. Currently this program includes the Nokia E51, E52, E55, E63, E66, E71 (excluding AT&T E71x model), E72, E75 and E90 devices.

Starting today, users of the above devices can download Quickoffice 6 as a free upgrade via Quickmanager®, Quickoffice’s secure on-device, e-commerce portal. Quickoffice 6 includes more advanced document viewing and editing functionality of Microsoft Office 2007 documents, ZIP file support, password-protected file handling, Excel 2007 chart viewing and multiple usability enhancements. Subsequent software updates released by Quickoffice for these select devices will also be available on a continual basis, including PowerPoint 2007 format support. Quickoffice 6 will initially only be available in English and a fully localized update will follow in the near future.

“Through our long-running partnership with Nokia, most S60 users have already benefited by receiving Quickoffice on their devices as part of their phone’s initial firmware, providing users with essential viewing and editing functionality of Office documents,” Gregg Fiddes, VP of sales and strategic partnerships for Quickoffice. “Recently, we’ve been working with Nokia to provide these S60 users with an easy and reliable way to update their Quickoffice software. Now, through Quickmanager, they can easily access the latest version and begin utilizing these new enhancements and feature improvements we’ve developed.”

To subscribe to an RSS feed of all Quickoffice’s news, please visit http://www.lewiswire.com/us/lewiswire/Quickoffice/c/117 and click subscribe. To sign up for Webinars from Quickoffice to learn about the latest product updates, visit http://www.quickoffice.com/webinars/.

About Quickoffice
Quickoffice is the world leader in providing mobile office productivity software and solutions for mobile devices. The company’s robust product suite includes its flagship smartphone office suite, Quickoffice® Premier, its Content Transformation Solution (CTS) infrastructure and the Bitflash® Rich Media Engine. Quickoffice Premier is an award-winning smartphone application that provides native viewing and editing of Microsoft® Office documents in over 47 languages. The software ships as an on-device solution on tens of millions of smartphone devices annually. The CTS client/server infrastructure offers network optimized, anytime, anywhere access to digital content and high-definition viewing of such content. The Bitflash Rich Media engine is the industry’s highest rated SVG-T engine providing rich user experiences on over 300M mobile devices worldwide. Platforms supported by Quickoffice include Symbian®, Palm ®, Blackberry®, iPhone® and Android. Privately held, Quickoffice Inc. is based in Dallas with offices in London, Ottawa, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

More information is available at www.quickoffice.com, twitter.com/quickoffice, and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Quickoffice/80930822730

Press Contact for Quickoffice:
Katie Eakins / Amy Robinson
LEWIS PR for Quickoffice
619-677-2700
quickoffice@lewispr.com

Quickoffice is a trademark of Quickoffice, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

I was on my way home after office hours two days ago when I ran into a billboard advertising Nokia’s mobile maps for Nigeria.

This is long overdue, in my opinion, given the fact that Nokia has a huge market here in Nigeria. I have always felt that Nokia downplayed the significance of the Nigerian market with their lack of support for the country in Nokia Maps.

However, the billboard claimed that Nokia Maps is “The First Mobile Navigation in Nigeria”. This is certainly untrue. I can rattle off my head at least two mobile navigation applications that made it to Nigeria before Noki Maps: Garmap for Mobile (which was launched a few weeks back), and Ceaser MobyMap.

This reminds me of Zain’s outrageous claim that with the launch of 3.5G on Zain Ghana, they “inaugurated the first 3.5G network on the continent outside South Africa“. Come on, guys!

The people at Nokia should have done a little research before making such a bold claim as this. Or are they just attempting to bully their way through with it?

Fact: Nokia Maps is NOT the first mobile navigaation in Nigeria. It is NOT even the second.

That false claim aside, we will be looking forward to trying out Nokia Maps in real life usage to see how it performs. Until then, if you have more information about Nokia Maps, you are welcome to share in the comments segment.

Members of the MobilityNigeria team were at the Opebi base of JEJ Engineering, the country representatives for Garmap for Mobile, a navigational application with Nigeria street maps. Yomi wrote a a news item on the introduction of Garmap for Mobile in Nigeria.

One of the highlights of our visit was the demonstration of the navigation application on a Symbian-powered smartphone. Our initial impressions of the application based on the little time we spent with it are good.

First up, we noticed how simple it is to get the application up and running on the phone – a great plus for the application.

The next thing we are particularly impressed about is the user interface. The user interface, for the short time we spent with the application seemed intuitive, but we will give our final verdict on that after taking it through its paces in real life use. One thing is for sure, Garmap for Mobile got a lot of eye candy.

The application locked to our position easilly. We also tested Points Of Interests (POIs) on the application, and it delivered with no stress, identifying eateries, hotels all over the Opebi and Maryland areas.

At this point it is worth mentioning that JEJ Engineering has decided to send MobilityNigeria a complimentary copy of their streetmap application for us to review.

I must say that this gesture is commendable, and we look forward to having more mobile application developers and manufacturers borrow a leaf from JEJ Engineering/Garmap.

Our review (with pictures and videos) will be up as soon as we get the review copy promised us and put it through its paces.

China Phones! I wouldn’t have given them a chance some months back, but that is changing as the chinkos are manufacturing better looking and more functional phones. It is looking like we no longer can afford to ignore them.

I remember one of the first China phones to hit the Nigerian market. A friend had brought a unit and asked me to help install useful mobile applications and to configure it for internet. Do I have to say that we were not able to put any application on the phone and also didn’t succeed in configuring it for internet? Simply put, the phone was useless.

Fast forward to 18 months later, a completely different person asked for the same thing- to help install useful mobile apps and configure for internet on his China phone. My initial response was, “There’s no use, it won’t work”. But she begged and I decided to give it a shot. The first thing I did was to manually input internet settings. Once that was done, I launched the browser and to my amazement it loaded well. The browser even loaded a social networking site like Facebook. This was the first surprise. The second was that the phone gladly accepted Java applications and they worked well on it.

It has been an upward trend for China phones since then. They are getting more and more matured as the days go by.

However, what I dislike about these phones and wish will change is the use of brand names of other mobile phone manufacturers by the people behind some of these phones. An example is the “Nokia N99i” (pictured right), which is by no means manufactured by Nokia.

These phones I dare say are now good enough to have their own brand names, and with their current pricing scheme, these phones will continue to do well in emerging markets. Some of them are already doing this, and we have brand names such as i-mobile.

China phone, anyone?

Owners of the 5800 XpressMusic here in Nigeria can now update their device’s firmware to the latest verion, 21.0.025. The the best part is that the update can now be done directly on the phone. Bye-bye, PCs, USB data cables and huge downloads.

Over the air firmware update (update done directly on the phone) is simpler, faster, lighter, and less problematic than doing it from a PC. It took less than three minutes to get the firmware on my 5800 updated and the size of the installation file was less than 4MB. If this same update were to be done from my PC, it would have taken nothing less than 40minutes and the file size somewhere around 100MB.

Please note that in order to be able to carry out over the air firmware update, it is best that you have a bundled mobile internet package from your network operator.

How To Update Over The Air
From the phone’s home screen click the dial pad short cut key, then dial *#0000#. The phone displays your current firmware version.

From that screen, click Options and select Check for updates. The phone will alert you of a new firmware version and then select download.

Once the installation file is downloaded, select Install and the new firmware will be installed on your phone. That is it, simple as ABC.

I have noticed a few changes since I installed the latest firmware version on my 5800. The changes include a considerably faster browsing experience on the built-in browser, applications launching faster, and the white menu button breathing at intervals in standby mode (though you’d have to enable that in the notification light settings).

For those of you who actually update your firmware version, please let us know the changes you notice after updating.

Recently, I had a discussion with someone who was of the opinion that just because a mobile application has a price tag on it, it must be better than any freeware mobile application in its category.

Here is throwing the discussion open. What do you think? Do you agree with this opinion or do you have a different take?

Please note: whichever side you take, kindly provide example(s) to support you argument.

Look forward to hearing from you guys.

Finally, those of us with GPS enabled phones in Nigeria can now at least put them to use, albeit in a limited way.

In the past, most navigation applications that run on GPS enabled devices didn’t come with support for Nigeria and that included the widely popular Google maps. But that has changed now with the release of the latest version (3.0.1.4) of Google maps for s60 devices.
Google maps loaded the map of Lagos when I launched it and it pinpointed my location.

Features like getting direction from your current location to a new location are currently not working, but we can expect that with further updates of the software more and more features will have support for Nigeria.

In case you are itching to see your street on your phone, move over to http://m.google.com on your s60 browser to download the software. And don’t forget to give us feedback of your experiences and impressions.