LiveSide - News blog : Nokia

Windows Live For Nokia Now Available In 33 Different Countries

Sunshine — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:14:47 GMT

The Windows Live Services for Nokia has just been made available in 7 new countries. It already was available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Thailand, UAE, UK and Vietnam. The new ones are the USA, Hungary, Iceland, India, Israel, Poland and Romania. This makes a grand total of 33 Countries!

The Windows Live for Nokia service provides Hotmail, Messenger, Live Contacts and Spaces access to customers that use Nokia S60 mobile phones. Once downloaded from your mobile phone, the application enables customers to move seamlessly between contacts, e-mail, messenger, phone calls, text messaging, camera, gallery and browsing, all in an integrated way, by simply signing on with their Windows Live ID.

The following S60 handsets are compatible with Windows Live for Nokia today - the Nokia N73, N80 Internet Edition, N95, N95 8GB, N76, N81, N82, N93i, E90, E65, E61i, E51, 6120*, 5700*, 6110* (* after downloading a software pack at www.nokia.com/windowslive).

More information (and screenshots):
Live with Phil: Windows Live for Nokia now available in 33 different countries
Live with Phil: go Live with Nokia

Previous LiveSide article(s):
Microsoft and Nokia team up to offer Windows Live on S60 devices

Silverlight On Your Nokia?

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:29:46 GMT

Nokia announced today that you will soon be able to see Silverlight content on your Series60 (and earlier Series 40) Nokia mobile phones. The announcement comes just a day before Mix08 starts, and the press release states that:

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keynote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year.

So this now means should Microsoft make any of its Windows Live services using Silverlight, you will get the same experience on your mobile as you will on your desktop, whether you're using a Windows Mobile, or Symbian. Of course this doesn't just apply to Microsoft, it will be interesting to see whether people start building Silverlight applications that are geared specifically to mobile users.

Coming soon: Get a Windows Live ID from your phone

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:37:00 GMT

An announcement coming at CTIA in San Francisco this week will unveil plans to offer the ability to sign up for a Windows Live ID from your phone, simply and securely. Why is this important? This from Phil Holden from Windows Mobile:

We think this is an important step in delivering a great end-to-end solution in the 'mobile first' scenario where we know many customers in countries like China, India, Brazil that their primary computing device is the mobile phone. We already have services like Hotmail broadly available in most countries around the world already so this enables folks to sign-up directly for a new Live ID and get access to email for the first time.

The service is going live as we speak, it can be accessed via your mobile phone from

Go directly to the account creation: https://mid.live.com/reg

Go to http://mobile.live.com, find service like hotmail, and select “Get a Windows Live ID”

Anyway, we think its a nice clean experience that is appropriate for a mobile device. In the past its been way too hard to try and create a Live ID on a phone and in fact was really limited to a couple of operators/countries. Now we have a sign-up experience that is available to a much broader list of potential customers and so much easier - yeah!

(...)The service has been designed to work with the built in mobile browser that comes with your phone and all folks need is a data plan to get started. Its going to be available in 33 languages and about 70 different countries

Accessing Windows Live (and other) services in many parts of the world comes either from a mobile phone or not at all. Om Malik wrote recently about the importance of Symbian (read: Nokia) around the world, with a graph of phone usage around the world:

..so this new service, in conjunction with Windows Live for Nokia and Windows Live for Mobile, continues efforts to broaden Windows Live presence around the world, on a variety of devices, something we will be following closely in the coming months.

Microsoft and Nokia team up to offer Windows Live on S60 devices

Chris — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:01:00 GMT

Microsoft and Nokia are set to announce a new agreement that brings Windows Live services to selected Nokia S60 devices. From today, customers in 11 countries will be able to download the new Windows Live suite, giving access to Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, Contacts and Spaces. This extends the agreement made last year whereby Live Search was to be provided as a free download for Nokia S60 handsets. New S40 devices that will be available next year will most likely have these applications pre-installed, or at the very least be able to download them too.

Windows Live Messenger for S60 has been floating around in a beta form for a few months now, and from what we've seen, users are impressed with the functionality. While the new Hotmail client doesn't feature the push email capabilities of its Windows Mobile 6 counterpart, it does allow photos and videos taken by a camera to be attached to emails. The Messenger client allows the user to set a display pictures and change status at login, as well as sending photos and voiceclips to contacts through file transfer. Check out the screenshots below to see how it looks - Phil Holden has some more pictures.

By making the core Windows Live services available on such a potentially large number of devices, Microsoft is turning Windows Live into something much larger than just Software and Services. This is starting to be about allowing users access to their information from anywhere, at any time, from any device. Windows Live Contacts is a central part of this, and as Outlook users know, contact information synching between your mobile device and PC is a very powerful and useful tool.

Nokia users can get the Windows Live applications via the Download! service on their handsets, or can visit http://www.nokia.com/windowslive for more information. The service will be offered initially as a free trial, but a monthly fee may be introduced. We heard that it could be around €2, which still sounds like a bargain. Think of all those text messages saved, though you should consider getting an unlimited data plan if you don't have one already.

And for those who like nothing better to look for the next release, we hear there may be a small beta coming later this year which advances these Nokia offerings. Time to move to Sweden :)

Press Release | Phil Holden's blog