Shopping centre in your pocket

Nokia Research Center is having a trial in Kamppi Shopping Centre in Helsinki where they are offering the content of info board to mobile channel. In addition to this there are also coupongs (Etusetelit) with different discounts, special offers (Erikoistarjoukset), shop listing (Liikkeet), maps (Kartta), seach possibility (Sivuston haku) and changing ads (picture below search) like shown below in figures 1-3.

Figures 1-3. Kamppi Shopping Centre's mobile home page

The service consists of list of shops and when you choose a shop, you'll see its opening hours, homepage and phone number. You can also rate the shop and see where it is located.

Figures 4-8. Shop listing and information about the shop.

You can get different discounts using coupongs like illustrated in figure 9. By showing this code in a restaurant, you would get an euro discount from a beer.

Figure 9. Discount coupong.

It is much easier to find shops using mobile channel's search functionality than searching them from traditional info board.

Figure 10. Search -functionality.

When you are going next time to Kamppi you don't need to stand in front of info board anymore if you are looking something. You might also find some interesting discounts from the mobile channel. You can access the service by entering kamppi.nokia.mobi to your mobile phone's browser.

You might wonder how users will find this service? There are posters around the shopping centre the address as well as video ad in the screens. Because this is a browser based solution, it should work in every phone that has browser.

I really like this service, especially because I don't need to stand in front of the info board if I'm looking some store etc. The concept is easy to copy and use in any shopping centre or fare and this way offer good user experience to visitors.

Disclaimer: Nordea is participating to the trial and I have also been involved but thoughts mentioned above are my own.

Little help for power problems

I believe everyone have had some issues with their phone's power consumption. In today's smartphones the situation is even worse, because you can use lots of their features simultaneously and this way use even more power. For me it is quite normal to browse, use Nokia Email, listen to music and navigate at the same time. When you add here calling, taking pictures, writing SMSs etc. you'll soon find yourself in situation where you would really need to use the phone but the battery is dead.

I've managed to run to these kinds of problems with my Nokia N96 quite often and started thinking of buying an extra battery, just like in my digital camera. Unfortunately there are some problems having two different batteries, for example charging and changing the battery when you need to switch your phone off. Due to these problems I decided to struggle with one battery.

Today I ran to a little helper called DC-11, which enables you to charge your phone wherever you are.

Picture 1. Nokia DC-11 gives you an extra boost.

After charging DC-11 I noticed that my N96 switched itself to power saving mode which means that battery is about to die relatively soon. I plugged in DC-11 and was able to move freely, make calls etc. and after about 2 hours the battery of N96 was full.

DC-11 is a really handy and small gadget that helps you before the batteries get better and power consumption lower.