Nokia Ovi is shaping up for a fight with Google

Nokia’s multimedia supremo Anssi Vanoki showed off the company’s new Ovi service at Nokia World today, demonstrating how it’ll work on PCs, online and on mobile handsets. My takeaway thought is this: everyone bangs on about Nokia taking on Apple and its iPhone, but with Ovi, Nokia seems to be setting its sights at Google.

I mean that in its web form, Ovi is trying to bring together a bunch of different applications, including communication and content, while also rolling it out on mobile phones. Just what Google is doing with its web apps, in other words.

Also interesting is Nokia’s bullishness today – for example, one Vanjoki slide had a bunch of Nokia Nseries phones in, but also an iPhone, a Sony Ericsson Walkman, and a BlackBerry. It might seem like a small point, but last

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Eat right and save the world

In Vegan with a Vengeance, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, host of the NYC community access vegan cooking show The Post Punk Kitchen, brings the do-it-yourself, community-driven ethos of punk rock into the kitchen. Her nutrition and cooking philosophy embraces being kind to animals (all recipes are completely animal-product free) and your wallet — while being creative and having fun in the process. She emphasizes staying clear of corporate brand-name foods, and says that cooking should be an innovative, experimental, and completely real experience. This one-of-a-kind cookbook offers more than 150 healthy recipes for all meals of the day, from stuffed mushrooms to tofu pizza, gingerbread cupcakes to pasta with “alfreda sauce,” and is full of tips and tricks on how to keep your diet vegan, inexpensive, and liberated. A great way to introduce omnivores and vegetarians to veganism!

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GPS navigation on modern cellphones and smartphones

The MobiTrackPRO is a J2ME midlet for GPS navigation on modern cellphones and smartphones. MobiTrack connects a GPS receiver that utilize NMEA output protocol to a cellphone to display GPS data and/or to transmit it to an Internet server. It can be used with any bluetooth GPS receiver such as the HOLUX GR-320 or with GPS receiver connected via cable. MobiTrack is able to display on the cellphone satellite positions, latitude, longitude, altitude, UTC time, HDOP and other information. More features:

• Loading of waypoints from KML files
• Pan map and track
• Loading of Google and Virtual Earth maps with smart caching
• Optimized GUI for hi-res display (208×208px)
• Loading of pixel maps (map,gmi and jpg,gif,png), waypoints (wpt) and NMEA logs (ubx) from MMC card
• Saving of track (plt) and waypoints (wpt) to MMC card
• Fast start with last good-known GPS configuration
• Separate intervals for local saving of points in track and for transfering current position to NetGPS server script via GPRS connection
• Sending last good-known position, speed and course by SMS
• Sending coordinates of waypoints by SMS
• Loading of routes from kml and rte files

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China’s smartphone sales pegged at 52 percent

CCID Consulting has released figures showing how China’s smartphone sales changed from the second quarter to third quarter of 2007. Windows Mobile’s growth rate, pegged at 52 percent, outpaced the overall rate by a factor of 10, the Beijing-based market research firm reports.

CCID says the sales volume of China’s smartphones reached nearly 6.4 million devices in 2007 Q3, up 5.2 percent over 2007 Q2. Sales revenue reached 16.61 billion yuan, increasing 11.3 percent on a month-on-month basis. The firm ascribes this to students buying phones during the summer vacation and to promotions during the Chinese national holiday.

Chinese smartphone operating system market share, Q3 2007
Source: CCID Consulting
According to CCID, Symbian OS retained its large lead over other operating systems, thanks to continuing popularity of Nokia’s phones in China. Symbian held nearly 70 percent market share, with sales volumes reaching 4.416 million handsets.

Though still representing just over 5 percent of the market, Windows Mobile posted a sequential growth rate of 52 percent, CCID noted. This was attributed in part to the popularity of Windows Mobile-based phones from Motorola, Samsung, Lenovo and Dopod (HTC).

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