Tag: Nokia

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FLASH FICTION CONTEST: Giving away 3 Nokia X3 Phones

UPDATE: Please see rules. I failed to include the limit of characters.

Hello! New year, new contest! And this January, we are starting with Nokia. Nikka Abes of Nokia Philippines has ordered three Nokia X3 Touch and Type phones. SRP is PHP 8,999. The Xseries is the revamped XpressMusic line of Nokia, perhaps the line which I personally find to be most succesful with its value proposition for entertainment. So we have 3 and we’re giving it away. But here’s how it will work.

RULES

1. There will be three winners of three mini-contests. The first contest will end 11:59PM of Wednesday. The second deadline is 11:59PM of Friday and the third will end 11:59PM of Sunday.

2. The contest is FLASH FICTION. If you don’t know what it is, this is the type of creative fiction which you can do with as little words as possible. The limit is 144 characters (including the space and periods, commas, etc) so if your limit is essentially one Tweet. Leave the entries in my comments section.

Example: Perhaps the most famous is the work by Hemmingway which goes something like: For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.. English / Filipino / Taglish entries are OK. Avoid abbreviations.

3. The themes:

HORROR Monday – Wednesday 11:59PM
ROMANTIC COMEDY Thursday midnight – Friday 11:59PM
MYSTERY Saturday midnight – Sunday 11:59PM

As you can see, themes are pretty generic. Have fun!

Clock is based on the timestamp of the comments.

4. I’m choosing the winner. If there are any discrepancies with the rules whatsoever, I’ll have final say with the rules after considering the comments from readers. Winners wil be announced a couple of hours after each mini contest ends, also announcing the beginning of the new series.

5. This contest is open to everyone from the Philippines. if you live outside the PH, we will have to ship the prize to you courtesy of Nokia. They will take care of it. If you won once, you can’t win again. But you can submit as many entries as you wish (you can even combine them if you want). Entries that are heavily offensive / done in bad taste / pornographic won’t be counted. PG-13 allowed.

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TORQUE DQ500 looks like the E72: PHP 4,999.00

Whoaa nelly!

I’ve always been curious about TORQUE’s roadmap in the Philippines. As a China sourced phone with local branding (TORQUE’s local endorser is Luis Manzano), they’ve made some rather humorous moves in the industry, one of which is this E72 / E71 clone, the DQ500. TORQUE’s PR lent me a few phones to try out (check the F1 feature) but this phone wasn’t included in the catalogue. I begged them to have a demo sent over as it was just too funny to let pass. It’s an E72 clone!

From afar, you won’t be able to tell the two apart. But there’s more to the DQ500 than its jest at Nokia’s most popular enterprise device: for PHP 4,999.00 you get a dual SIM phone with really loud audio. The DQ500 is lighter than the E72 and feels almost exactly like it. If all you’re after is the aesthetic (poser!), you get to save over twenty thousand pesos if you buy this phone. A 1.3MP camera with video, Bluetooth, voice recorder, trans flash expansion, FM Radio and GPRS are the other features. That’s it really.

The DQ500 mimics the call and menu buttons of the E72 by instead making each button act as the “call” for SIM 1 and SIM 2, with one red end call button while the remaining odd key acts as the back button.

What’s next in the pipeline: I hear they’re going for the most affordable Android market. Go TORQUE! Undercut the competition!

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Nokia 2330 Classic Winner and Behind the Scenes Stuff

Using our trusty randomizer web application, we figured out the winner in less than 30 seconds. As agreed in the terms and conditions of the Nokia DiscOVIries competition, the eight previous winners of our two month contest will duke it out in a battle of complete randomness to win a Nokia 2330 Classic phone.

And, our winner, based on the stars, is Lowell Aguirre!

I’d like to thank everyone who joined this series of contests in the past two months. By far this is the biggest mainstream campaign a local company ever invested in with bloggers. Glad to have been a part of it.

But more importantly, a little sincere word on Ovi — from what I’ve seen there has definitely been a big increase in sign ups for the service. Yay, that’s good. But as I’ve said before, this is one of those things that has work successfully in other countries simply because there isn’t much .. ‘conformity’ when it comes to the red tape of public utility (AKA telco services). In the Singapore version of Ovi, the portal gives away unlimited free music for one year every time you buy a new Nokia phone. Difficult here because of licensing issues. In Singapore, software companies have taken advantage of the Maps platform to build really good subscription-based services such as public transportation schedules, routes, locations of diners, etc. Difficult here because too many companies are reinventing the wheel and there isn’t a huge effort to know how important software technology is. Why? Well, the Philippines is “events based.” So many events. So many society pages. So little relevant conversation. And if so, it’s about the same thing (look at the “off topic” or “anything goes” forums in any online group to prove my point). Moving on.

If there’s one thing I’ve observed from the DiscOVIries campaign, it’s this — and this may come as a surprise — as what i observed had nothing to do with Nokia’s campaign per se: when it comes to bringing in the “new” many agencies don’t look at numbers. They look at what their direct and ambient competitors are doing. So when someone executes a really great idea, it waits to get copied. Ironically, there’s a similar article here, but on the gaming industry. Friends have told me that they’ve seen the print ads and videos not just in the movie theaters and papers and television. But as agency pegs from competitor brands. Wow. Interesting.

There are barely any more innovators. And where they exist, they don’t have the financial capacity to drown out the noise of mainstream trends.

Behind the scenes photos after the jump.

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Nokia DiscOVIries Last Week’s Winner: Lowell Aguirre

It’s been a good run, and we’re down to our final winner for Nokia’s DiscOVIries photo competition. For this last contest, the winner is no other than Lowell Aguirre for his most creative wireless hotspot location — the Rotary Centennial Park of Kandaya.

Lowell's Winning Entry

I’d like to thank everyone for joining the series of contests that we’ve been running since October! There’s one more prize up for grabs and that’s going to be between the previous winners of the competition, which will be decided upon randomly through the Randomizer app. I’ll have this up soon!

Again, thank you for participating!

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Hands on with the Nokia N97 mini (PHP 28,900.00)

P1070849

UPDATE: On third day use, I kept the charger plugged in for most of the day. Odd, but battery life improved. It’s been 9 hours and I’m still on full bar. It is apparent therefore that the drain really comes in when you start doing wireless Internet and other such functions apart from calls and text. I checked other websites and they confirm the same thing as well — battery life is significantly less, but if all you do is SMS and call, you’ll get by on a single charge.

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I was able to borrow a Nokia N97 mini for the weekend. I’ve been using it for two and a half days. Despite being a new release, the phone suffers from two things which I think is integral to day to day use — weak battery life and a noticeably weaker signal similar to the E71.

Read on for the full hands on.

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