Nokia to launch NFC-enabled Windows phone

Lumia 610 going on sale today with Orange France.
TechCrunch has sniffed this one out, noticing that Nokia unveiled the phone accidentally on YouTube, before confirming with sources that the launch is taking place at 1pm UK time.
The 610 is the first WinPho device to embed an NFC chip, but not the first Nokia device to do so.
Nokia has been a pretty vocal supporter of the contactless tech in the past via a small number of Symbian phones such as the C7-00, C7 Astound, 600, 603, 700, and 701.
In the past it's revealed plans for an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds and a smart poster service that seeks to evangelise the use of NFC in advertising.
With the 610, the firm seems keen to maintain a focus on the utility of NFC rather than the payments function, revealing that the tech can be used to sync music with speakers and do Foursquare check-ins.
That said the phone has been certified for the two main contactless payments systems – MasterCard PayPass and Visa payWave.
It's unsurprising that Orange would be among the first backers of Nokia's new adventure. The operators has already sold 500,000 NFC-enabled Samsung, Acer and BlackBerry devices in France, and has been a big supporter of fact finding projects like CityZi in Nice.

LG steps back from Windows Phone, blames the OS for poor sales

After suffering through  half a year of net losses, LG finally managed to scrape together some encouraging financial news last quarter. Thanks to strong sales of their LTE smartphones, the company returned to profitability. Despite this success, LG is tempering expectations for the future, saying that they don’t expect rapid growth when it comes to smartphone sales.
There are several contributing factors at work. The smartphone market is extremely competitive, and LG is finding it tough against competitors like Samsung and HTC when it comes to Android and Windows Phone. Beyond that, LG’s placing some of the blame for their struggles on Microsoft’s mobile OS.
An LG spokesman told the Korea Herald that “the total unit of Windows Phone sold in the global market is not a meaningful figure,” and that the company would focus instead on Android. That’s not an entirely new revelation. At MWC 2012, LG said that their Windows Phone device sales were “slower than hoped for.”
To be fair, LG shoulders plenty of blame for that. The company only built two Windows Phone devices — the LG Quantum and the E906 Jil Sander Mobile — and they did very little to promote either one. Neither was particularly interesting, save for the slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the Quantum. In fact, despite being released nearly a year after the Quantum, the E906 sported nearly identical specs. It did at least drop the keyboard for a shiny, blue back plate, but that’s not exactly a move that will get consumers buzzing about your Windows Phones.
As many as three LG Windows Phone prototypes have been spotted in the wild in recent months, though none looked particularly interesting. Two were saddled with 1GHz processors and all three sported 5MP cameras. Granted, megapixels aren’t everything, but surely LG couldn’t have expected to have consumers ooing and ahhing over last-generation specs when devices like the Lumia 900 HTC and HTC Titan II are available.
When you point one finger at someone, three point back. So when LG says they’re going to continue research and development efforts around Windows Phone, let’s hope that their come-back attempt is something that has a bit more sizzle than what we’ve seen in the past. And not just more sizzle than their new LG Cloud service.
More from Korea Herald and Electronista

Mobile Technology

Jawbone is looking to please more of the crowd with a new, larger version of the JAMBOX portable Bluetooth speaker it brought to market in late 2010. The aptly named BIG JAMBOX weighs 2.7 lbs (1.23 kg) compared to its smaller sibling's 0.8 lbs and promises longer battery life as well as bigger sound - its rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides up to 15 hours of continuous playback, and 500 hours of standby time on a single charge.

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Apart from making it bigger at 10" x 3.1" x 3.6" (256 mm x 80 mm x 93 mm), the BIG JAMBOX retains the smaller unit's textured grill design. One key difference with the BIG version is that there are more controls built into the speaker. While the original model has a power button as well as volume controls, BIG JAMBOX has power, play, skip back, skip forward and volume controls at the top of the speaker.
Connectivity is via a Bluetooth connection, headphone jack or audio line out. BIG can also connect to multiple devices at once, and users can control volume and play sequences from their device in addition to the speaker.
Inside the airtight enclosure are proprietary neodymium drivers and two opposing passive bass radiators along with a newly designed omnidirectional microphone, which is capable of 360-degree sound input with improved echo-cancellation and full duplex communication.
The speaker also has LiveAudio "three-dimensional sound" technology built-in and updates to the speaker's driver system are handled through Jawbone's MyTalk online interface.