To us, that sums up everything Nokia is doing, including today’s announcement. Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, is purchasing Plazes, the location-based social networking service based in Berlin.

Plazes, founded in 2005, lets people alert their friends about what they are doing and where they are — sort of Twitter and Loopt rolled into one. Users can subscribe to their friends, a group of friends, or to specific locations known as “Plazes.”

Updates can be done via plazes.com, by mobile phone and text messaging, or by a number of third-party applications using the Plazes’ API. And, we can expect, Plazes will be on millions of Nokia phones worldwide as soon as possible.

“Nokia is a perfect partner for us because they share our product vision and have the muscle to bring locative presence to hundreds of millions of people all over the world,” the Plazes team writes on its blog. “What better partner than Nokia for exploring innovative ways of connecting people?”

With Plazes and other recent acquisitions, Nokia is clearly connecting people through location-based services, maps, music communities, gaming, and — almost forgot — voice.

In 2006 Nokia purchased a mobile mapping company Gate5, also based in Berlin. Nokia followed that with the intent to buy Navteq, the world’s largest data mapping company. That $8 billion deal is expected to be completed soon. Other social networking and media companies purchased by Nokia include Twango, Enpocket, and Loudeye.

Nokia is busy with its own service development as well, including desktop-mobile portal Ovi, the Comes With Music initiative, an online music store, and the N-Gage gaming effort.

Imagine everything Nokia offers wrapped in a cuddly location-based, mapping, social network cloth where all of its users are connected to their interests and each other in the virtual and physical worlds at the same time.

Read more analysis on this story at last100

What’s coming is life profound. Put billions of sensors in cell phones - regardless of hardware, operating system, or carrier - and affect the way we understand traffic or the weather.

With continued advances in chipsets, accelerometers, compasses, we can change the way we interact virtually with the physical world around us. We can turn monthly cell phone bills, which are difficult to use beyond paying, into living information integrated into our working and personal lives and social networks.

“We’re just getting started,” said Bob iannucci, Nokia’s chief technology officer.

Iannucci, a computer industry veteran, feels like “I am kind of watching the same movie” as the mobile industry transforms itself from early hardware and software into technology deeply ingrained into our lives and the world around us.

In one example Iannucci discussed adding mobile sensors in cell phones that can detect any number of things — location and movement, barometric pressure and the weather around us, even our own personal health. What we will have in the near future are near-field communication, indoor positioning, and environmental analysis.

Iannucci mentioned a recent project involving Nokia, the world’s leading handset maker, and students from UC Berkeley. Nokia planted 100 N95 smartphones into 100 cars used by 150 students. These cell phone “probes” were able to measure real-time traffic.

Imagine if tens of thousands of data points from motorists in an area were collected, anonymized, uploaded to servers for aggregation and analysis, then pushed back to individual users. The phone, which already knows your route to work and your daily schedule, will be able to tell you that a traffic snarl is forming on the 405 and that you’ll never make your 9:30 meeting with a client in time — so here’s an alternate route.

In another example Iannucci noted that barometric sensors could be placed in cell phones — you can already buy sports watches from Suunto with weather sensors — that will monitor the environment around you. Include your data point with billions across the U.S. and the science of weather prediction undergoes a profound change.

“The ability to move information changes societies and livelihoods,” Iannucci said.

Cell phones can also impact the world around us in ways we cannot see, at least physically. Dean Terry, the director of the Mobile Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, demonstrated the use of mobile devices in augmented reality, or the ability of people to leave behind virtual artifacts like text, photos, video, avatars, and game clues for people to discover with their phones.

As an example, you can enter a building, view the lobby through your cell phone, and see messages and art pieces left behind by others for you to see and enjoy. Or, if you’re at a conference downtown, you can view a restaurant or bar through a mobile device and see comments made by other diners and patrons on food, service, atmosphere, anything they want to leave behind.

“Imagine what it would look like at the Washington Monument if people left behind their comments,” Terry said.

In a more practical, immediate example, Jason Devitt of Skydeck showed an example of data generated by your cell phone — the calls you make, to whom, when, how long — and how this information can be mixed with your address book and social network to become more dynamic.

See also: ReadWriteWeb's interview with Skydeck's Jason Devitt

“You can see who you talk to most frequently, who is most important to you, and you can drop out the noise,” Devitt said. “All friends are not equal. Some are more important than others.”

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

Top image taken from Augmented Reality: My Mobile Pet; Flickr video by Dean Terry

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

In the meantime, Apple announced the other day it will release “the iPhone software roadmap” on March 6. Many around the Web believe this will be the much-anticipated software developer kit (SDK), although there is speculation that it might be just a roadmap and that the actual SDK won’t be released until later in the Spring.

No matter when it’s released, the SDK is important because it will allow third-party developers to write specific applications for the phone, essentially giving it a “new” feeling — let’s call this one iPhone 1.5.

Taken together, iPhone 1.5 and iPhone 2.0 bring the future into focus, propelling Apple toward its oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of the year.

Third-party applications appeal to holdouts like the enterprise market who have been waiting for the additional functionality found on smartphones from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Research in Motion (Blackberry), among others.

Another set of holdouts are those who want the faster data capabilities of 3G networks, which is important to the overseas market. Assuming iPhone 2.0 is released early enough to impact sales, Apple should hit its mark of selling 10 million iPhones by year-end.

Reading between the lines, Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, hinted at this timing. The iPhone is already an “incredible accomplishment,” he told the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium Wednesday, but it has far more potential in the long term (Cook’s presentation).

“I need a bigger word than ‘enormous’ to describe it,” he said.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

“It’s not fair to laugh at the huge circuit boards: These are design prototypes and will of course be shrunk down to a fraction of this size,” Charlie Sorrel writes for the Wired’s gadget lab.

“But despite the fugly appearance, these Android phones are the buzz of the show. At the NEC booth, the guy pointed me straight past the other boards saying, ‘This one is the Android. That’s the only one anybody is interested in.’”

So, without further ado, here’s Android in all its, uh, splendor.

Getting started with Android

We began envisioning what a Gphone might look like and what features and functions it might have back in August. The picture became a bit clearer when Google announced the formation of the Open Handset Alliance and Android in early November, which is what chip makers, handset manufacturers, and third-party developers have been working with.

We didn’t see evidence of their labors at CES, the big consumer electronics show, in Las Vegas in January. It wasn’t the right venue to debut Android and Google-powered phones anyway.

The first real opportunity to show off Android progress is this week at MWC in Barcelona, where more than 50,000 attendees from every mobile company in the world in showing off its wares.

“Historically, the MWC conference has centered around the mobile operators,” wrote Richard Wong for Venture Beat, “as they have played their position as kinds of the mobile industry. The industry players, and other vendors, would line up to try to show their wares to any operator executive who would listen.,

“This year feels distinctly different. The operators are losing their status as the kingmakers — they no longer have dominant control of which technologies, services, and handsets consumers will see. Internet giants such as Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, along with Nokia, are all banging at the gate.”

Knocking the loudest this week has been Android.

Android on Display

Before we proceed, you might want to stop by engadget and thumb through its excellent photo gallery of Android images. It will give you an idea of what we’re talking about here.

Gizmodo provides a short video and an example of a engineering breadboard here. Wired has more close-up images of these giant, unsexy “phones” from chip makers Qualcomm and NEC Electronics as well as a video on YouTube. PhoneMag.com also has images and a video of Android in action on an existing touchscreen phone.

Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, Arm, and Texas Instruments all had Android prototypes in various forms of development on display.

Pete Sayer, of the IDG News Service [via Infoworld], best summed up what he saw. “The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket,” he wrote.

Texas Instruments ran Android on two devices showcasing different processors. These were some of the most polished prototypes shown, as you would expect from TI.

TI is a company that invests a great deal of resources to develop quality reference or proof-of-concept designs that demonstrate their chips in action (a strategy used successfully in the introduction of DLP products).

“We don’t do plastic,” a TI rep told Sayer.

The TI devices sported “one button access” to key applications such as Web browsing, email, messaging, and video. The devices, which include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, will also allow for the integration of different applications — a capability mostly limited to desktop computers. TI gave this example: a real estate agent could combine information from a database with mapping software to let customers easily locate properties on the go.

None of the big-name handset manufacturers had Google-powered phones on display, but Samsung and LG both said they will have Android devices available in early 2009.

Software Development on Android

Like hardware, software for Android was shown in various stages of development. “Right now the UI is clunky and slow,” Sorrel wrote for Wired, “but the fact that so many manufacturers are already on board means that Android is already a success.”

It will be a while before we see near-polished applications. Even so, TI’s Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager, told Sayer, “Android cuts that [14 to 18 month software development cycle] dramatically. It’s a disruptor.”

One application of note, a mobile game called WiFi Army, shows the potential of Android and “mashed-up” applications. WiFi Army is a first-person shooter currently in beta. It’s a mix of laser tag and the parlor game Assassin.

Players meet on the street using Google Maps and “shoot” each other with their phone cameras. Those with the highest number of “unique kills” earn points and bragging rights. Players can form teams, or “armies”, of up to 100 people. (Forbes.)

Garett Rogers at ZDNet looked at Android from a developer’s perspective, noting that the operating system itself “still feels very beta.” “As far as development goes, the API is relatively difficult to work with, especially with its sub-par documentation and a lack of really good examples,” he wrote.

Reactions to Android

So there you have it. Android is a bunch of crude prototypes, engineering breadboards, and promise.

Upon making his way to the Arm booth, Cliff Edwards of BusinessWeek was eager to get his hands on an Android device. “To my surprise,” he wrote, “no trumpets blared. No visions came to me. Not one lousy bit of drool escaped my lips. The software . . . was fast and responsive. It showed tight integration with Google applications such as email and Web search. But I couldn’t help but feel: ‘So What?’”

As Forbes notes, the Google phone is “not ready for prime time” — but who would expect it to be at this time? Its Hollywood debut is still months away.

Photo credits: Engadget and Wired.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.