Monday, October 18, 2010

10 things you don't know about Nokia

1) The ringtone “Nokia tune” is actually based on a 19th century guitar work named “Gran Vals” by Spanish musician Francisco Tárrega. The Nokia Tune was originally named “Grande Valse” on Nokia phones but was changed to “Nokia Tune” around 1998 when it became so well known that people referred to it as the “Nokia Tune.”

2) The world’s first commercial GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki over a Nokia-supplied network, by Prime Minister of Finland Harri Holkeri, using a Nokia phone.

3) Nokia is currently the world’s largest digital camera manufacturer, as the sales of its camera-equipped mobile phones have exceeded those of any conventional camera manufacturer.

4) The “Special” tone available to users of Nokia phones when receiving SMS (text messages) is actually Morse code for “SMS”. Similarly, the “Ascending” SMS tone is Morse code for “Connecting People,” Nokia’s slogan. The “Standard” SMS tone is Morse code for “M” (Message).

5) The Nokia corporate font (typeface) is the AgfaMonotype Nokia Sans font, originally designed by Eric Spiekermann. Its mobile phone User’s Guides Nokia mostly used the Agfa Rotis Sans

6) In Asia, the digit 4 never appears in any Nokia handset model number, because 4 is considered unlucky in many parts of Southeast/East Asia.

7) Nokia was listed as the 20th most admirable company worldwide in Fortune’s list of 2006 (1st in network communications, 4th non-US company).

8) Unlike other modern day handsets, Nokia phones do not automatically start the call timer when the call is connected, but start it when the call is initiated. (Except for Series 60 based handsets like the Nokia 6600)

9) Nokia is sometimes called aikon (Nokia backwards) by non-Nokia mobile phone users and by mobile software developers, because “aikon” is used in various SDK software packages, including Nokia’s own Symbian S60 SDK.

10) The name of the town of Nokia originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river itself, Nokianvirta, was named after the old Finnish word originally meaning sable, later pine marten. A species of this small, black-furred predatory animal was once found in the region, but it is now extinct.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Google World - cultural differences

I am not a huge Google fan, and I do have my reasons for not to. Since this Yahoo! and Bing join up thing, (check: here) I am more inclined to use Google for complex searches (as if...).

The auto-suggestion feature of search portals is getting interesting day by day. As they have more localised search servers now, such as you can have Google-Kuwait if you in Kuwait, the auto-suggestion comes up with 'suggested searches' based on the number of similar searches carried out from that particular website.

Just out of boredom, and from my previous experience, I tried random searches on Google-Kuwait and Google-Pakistan.

Now this is what I call 'cultural difference' mean in global terms. I found it hilarious, I hope you do the same.

Some very simple search results from Google Kuwait:






Now lets see what people in our lovely Pakistan are searching for ;)