Nokia 3310 to makes a comeback after 17years

Nokia will re-launch the 3310, perhaps the best-loved and most resilient phone in history

The phone, originally released in 2000 and in many ways beginning the modern age of mobiles, will be sold as a way of getting lots of battery life in a nearly indestructible body.

The new incarnation of the old 3310 will be sold for just €59, and so likely be pitched as a reliable second phone to people who fondly remember it the first time around. It will be revealed at Mobile World Congress later this month, according to leaker Evan Blass who first revealed the details.

It's still possible to buy the 3310 on Amazon, though only through its marketplace and not directly from the company itself. The Amazon listing describes a range of features, including a clock, calculator, the ability to store up to ten reminders and four games: Snake II, Pairs II, Space Impact, and Bantumi.

Snake was so well-loved that it's currently available for iPhone, Android and Windows phone users to download.

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The Nokia 3310 is coming back: Here's how to play Snake right now
That collection of features has led to it being branded as perhaps the most resilient and long-lasting phone ever made. The reputation has let it become the star of hundreds of memes, and even led people to crush it in a hydraulic press.

Nokia struggled to bring its brand into the smartphone era and ended up being sold to Microsoft. But since then it has targeted success by making new versions of old phones, including the Nokia 215, which costs $29 and lasts for 29 days.

Phones made under the Nokia brand are now sold by HMD Global, a Finnish company that bought the rights to the name. HMD will reveal other new mobiles – the Nokia 3, 5 and 6 – at the same MWC event.

Those other new phones wll be more like smartphones, but will retain much of the same low price.

9 Powerful Time-Saving Tips to Help Grow Your Brand on Instagram

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and around half of its user base (more than 300 million people) use it every day.
Brands on Instagram are also seeing huge amounts of engagement on Instagram. According to Forrester Research,  per-follower interaction rate is 2.3 percent- way above Facebook (0.2%) and Twitter (0.02%).
That all sounds incredible, right? But how do you find time to dedicate to growing your brand on Instagram? From planning and editing to posting and engaging with your followers, there’s a lot on your plate when it comes to Instagram marketing.

1. Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile

Thanks to the great amount of tools out there, social media management has become much easier than it was a few years ago. While Instagram still doesn’t allow publishing through its web application, there are many tools that allow you to create your Instagram posts on desktop first.

Creating Instagram posts on desktop can be a massive time saver. 

Here’s why:

1. Creating your graphics or editing your photos on your desktop can be much faster than doing so on your mobile.

2. Most Instagram scheduling tools save you from the hassle of transferring your graphics and photos from your desktop to your mobile.

With Buffer for Instagram.

2. Repost quickly with permission

A study by marketing startup, Crowdtap, and the global research company, Ipsos, found that user-generated content is 35 percent more memorable and 50 percent more trusted than traditional and non-user-generated media

A typical way of reposting an image after asking for permission looks something like this:
1. Take a screenshot on your mobile
2. Crop away everything apart from the image
3. Copy and paste or type out the caption
4. Add your own caption
5. Finally, publish the user-generated content

3. Plan the layout of your gallery

Instead of thinking about what you want to post every day on the day itself, a good approach might be to plan your posts with your overall social media strategy in mind.
Also, Instagram is becoming a curated platform where businesses and individuals only post their best photos according to specific themes instead of every photo they take. So, it’s important to have a well-curated and consistent profile gallery.
the themes we chose for our Instagram account are:
• User-generated content
• Digital nomad lifestyle
• Productivity and motivation
Knowing these in mind allows us to plan how we want our gallery to look like. Hope our gallery is giving off these vibes!

4. Use tools to separate content creation and engagement

One of the most common productivity advice is to do one thing at a time.

A research by New York University business professor, Sophie Leroy, discovered that there’s a cost to switching your attention from one task to another — even if the switch is brief. Whenever our brains switch to a new task, the old task leaves an “attention residue” that reduces our cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time.

Multitasking actually cause us to take a longer time to complete all the tasks because our brains have to constantly switch between those tasks.

5. Create a week’s worth of posts in one go

Batching is a popular time management technique that aims to maximize concentration and increase productivity. The idea is to do similar tasks that require similar resources together.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, experimented with a day when he forced himself to batch tasks

6. Schedule time to engage

Another task you can batch is responding and engaging with others on Instagram. By batching them and scheduling the time to do that, you gain control over your schedule instead of being dictated by notifications

Here’s what you can try:

• Turn off notifications for your Instagram account.

• Schedule 30 minutes to an hour on your calendar every day to reply to comments, like, and comment on your followers’ posts.

• You could also schedule up to a few sessions like this in a day if you want to have a faster response time on Instagram.

7. Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note

After analyzing over 65,000 social media posts for their study on hashtags

However, typing nine or more hashtags every time you want to publish a post can be very time-consuming. A solution is to create a few sets of commonly used hashtags for different themes in an Evernote note or your preferred note-taking app.

8. Use the same filter and/or edits

Here’s another trick to help you save time and create a consistent profile gallery: use the same filter and/or edits for most — or even all — your images.

A lot of the time spent on publishing an Instagram post is usually spent on editing the image. By using the same filter and/or edits for every image, you can drastically reduce the editing time. This not only saves you time but also helps to keep your Instagram posts consistent.

If you use a photo editing application on your desktop like Lightroom, you can save a filter and the edits as a custom template.

If you prefer to edit your photos on your mobile, apps like VSCO or Instagram itself allows you to rearrange the filters and toolkits so that the most commonly used options

9. Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)

Your Instagram posts don’t have to exist on Instagram only, and that’s the same for your other social media content.

Instead of re-creating new content for each social media platform, you could repurpose your posts on other platforms for Instagram and vice versa. This increases the impact of your content and saves you time from creating new content.

Over to you

And that’s the nine time-saving Instagram marketing tips to help you achieve results for your business with less time and effort. As a recap, here are the nine tips:

1. Create Instagram posts on desktop instead of mobile

2. Repost quickly with permission

3. Plan how you want your gallery to look like

4. Use a tool to separate content creation and engagement

5. Create a week’s worth of posts at a go

6. Schedule time to engage

7. Prepare commonly used hashtags in an Evernote note

8. Use the same filter and edits

9. Repurpose posts on other platforms for Instagram (and vice versa)

Kudi to make it easier to pay bills in places where internet access is limited

Making payments and sending money to friends and family in Nigeria can be cumbersome. Y Combinator-backed Kudi, which recently launched in Nigeria, is aiming to make it easier for people to pay bills and pay each other via messaging. At its core, Kudi is a chatbot, which lives inside Facebook Messenger and eventually Skype, that helps you transfer money, buy airtime for your phone, pay bills and stay on top of your accounts.

Although it’s possible to pay TV, energy and cell phone bills online in Nigeria, only 39 percent of the population in Nigeria has access to the internet, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center report. For comparison’s sake, more than 80 percent of the population in the U.S. and 94 percent of the population in South Korea has access to the internet. What that means for a lot of people in Nigeria is that they’ll need to physically go somewhere to pay their bills.

Since Kudi is part of Facebook’s Free Basics, it doesn’t cost any data to use. To send a payment to someone via Kudi, all you need is someone’s phone number.

Unlike other money transfer services in Nigeria, people who use Kudi don’t have to pay any fees when transferring money to bank accounts. Kudi, however, does charge a convenience fee  for bill payments. So far, $15,000 worth of transactions have been made through Kudi and it’s grown 125 percent week over week in revenue.

Kudi is not the only startup trying to fix the payments problem in Nigeria. Paga, perhaps one of the more well-known payments startup in the country, combines online payments with offline components. To date, the startup has raised $13 million in venture funding. There’s also KongaPay, a mobile app for paying bills and buying both products online and in person. But Kudi seems to be well aware of the competition.

“A few services have tried mobile apps but consumers are tired of installing and figuring out new apps,” Kudi co-founder Pelumi Aboluwarin told TechCrunch. “Some aren’t even that sophisticated to handle the nuances that accompany every new mobile app and will rather stick with those they already use. Messaging on the other hand is a more compelling interface as it works for people across generations. This is because everyone understood messaging right from the days of SMS and chat apps have been the most successful apps on the continent.”

After Kudi finishes participating in Y Combinator, the plan is to raise money and then expand to Kenya and Ghana.

How to protect your WhatsApp account with two-step verification

WhatsApp is giving you the option to add an extra layer of security to your account with two-step verification.

WhatsApp already encrypts conversations and does all it can to ensure your data stays private. The new two-step verification feature will make it harder for other people to access your account.

Two-step verification adds an extra step when you log in to WhatsApp. First the service will send you a random passcode when you sign in, then you'll need to enter a six-digit passcode.

Users will have to enter a six-digit passcode every time they register their phone number with WhatsApp again. So, for example, if you get a new phone but keep the same SIM card and number.

WhatsApp’s implementation isn’t like two-factor authentication with Google or Facebook, which generates a code with an app or sends one via text. You’ll have to remember your WhatsApp passcode, or you can set up a backup email, which will allow you to disable two-factor on your account if you ever forget your six-digit passcode. You can also disable two-factor from within the app, without a passcode.

To turn on two-step verification, open the app and then go to Settings > Account > Two-Step Verification.

Select Enable, then enter a six-digit code when prompted. You'll also need to enter an email address for WhatsApp to use should you forget your passcode.

If you choose not to enter an email address and forget your passcode, WhatsApp will lock you out of your account for seven days. After those seven days, WhatsApp will let you reauthorize your number without the passcode, but any messages sent to you during those seven days will remain undelivered.

In other words, make the passcode something you can remember, and enter an email address in case you forget it.

IPhone 8 rumour round up: price and reviews

2017 is the year the iPhone gets a major upgrade. We already know about its radical redesign, but now there are further details on what could be its most significant new feature - and the additional cost it brings…

The source is none other than KGI Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo (famously dubbed “the best Apple AAPL -0.22% analyst on the planet”). In a new report obtained by 9to5Mac, Kuo says Apple will finally introduce wireless charging across its upcoming iPhone ranges. This will double up with fast wired charging, which I exclusively revealed last month.

Furthermore Kuo reiterated that there will be three new iPhones in 2017: two incremental ‘iPhone 7S’ upgrades and an all new OLED iPhone 8 / iPhone X introduced to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone.

The downside? Kuo says the introduction of wireless charging will lead to price hikes.

He claims the reason for this is the wireless charging component inside the phones which creates a lot of heat and Apple has had to add a new graphite layer to protect the 3D Touch sensor behind the screen. He adds that Apple has additional thermal challenges with the iPhone X as well because the swap to an ‘All Glass’ design reduces heat dissipation compared to aluminium.

Kuo says these measures mean end users won’t feel the increased heat, but the combination of the new graphite layer and 3D Touch module (which is 30-50% more expensive) will push the iPhone range over the $1,000 price point for the first time. This higher price point is backed up by an independent report from FastCompany yesterday which cited “a source with knowledge of Apple’s plans”.

Performance

Last year, tech website DigiTimes published a report that suggested that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) had recently begun taping out design for Apple’s A11 chipset on a 10nm FinFET process.  The report suggested that the iPhone model launching in 2017 is scheduled to sport the aforementioned processor.

Camera

According to a report by The Korea Economic Daily, Apple is working with LG Innotek to develop a camera module that is compatible with 3D technology.

“Apple is now studying how to apply its 3D camera technology into LG Innotek’s smartphone camera. Since LG Innotek also has its own 3D camera and related technologies, such joint efforts will likely to bear fruit in sometime within next year,” the report read.

What To Think?

I’d argue there are two sides to this news. Firstly that Apple appears to be going all out to bring the Wow Factor back to the iPhone range after sticking with essentially the same external design for three generations.

If the company succeeds, a $1,000 price point is unlikely to keep committed Apple fans away and it will also see US prices catch up with some of the price hikes Apple made in other countries with the launch of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus last year. Apple’s eye wateringly expensive new MacBook Pro range also shows the company isn’t scared to increase prices if it thinks the products are worth it.

The flip side is wireless charging cases already allow users who want this functionality to add it while not adding cost for those who don’t. On top of this 3D Touch, the driving reason behind the price hike, continues to divide opinion. Fans use it extensively, but others forget it even exists given the lack of any clear indication showing what is and isn’t 3D Touch enabled. Apple really needs to address this in iOS 11.

Either way the pressure for Apple to perform in 2017 has stepped up after Galaxy S8 leaks revealed Samsung is also planning a significant smartphone redesign and Google will be back with a second generation of its impressive (but woefully understocked) Pixel and Pixel XL. The stakes have never been higher and I suspect neither have the prices…

IPhone 8 to come with wireless charger and it will cost more

We're still a long way from September, which is when new iPhones are traditionally unveiled, but the rumors keep coming thick and fast. The latest speculation adds a new twist to a feature that's been talked about before: wireless charging.

According to a new report from Macotakara, citing sources inside Apple's Asian operations, wireless charging is only going to appear on the most expensive iPhone 8, and you're going to need to buy a separate adapter on top of the cost of the phone.

That contradicts what other analysts have said - that all three 2017 iPhones will come with wireless charging. Based on the anonymous tipsters speaking to Macotakara, you'll need to fork out for the most expensive iPhone and then purchase another adapter if you want to charge your Apple smartphone without wires.

An Apple rumor a day

There are a few other nuggets of information to be had from the Macotakara report. Apparently the new phones won't come with a 3.5mm-to-Lightning port adapter, as the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus did, so you're going to have to think seriously about upgrading your wired headphones.

The new article also floats the idea of a 5-inch iPhone being added to the line-up this year, and again that's something we've heard before. Several sources have now indicated that there are going to be three iPhones to pick from in 2017, with one possibly being a 'special edition' release to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the device's launch.

Of course it's still early days for the next generation of iPhones and we've got another eight months to wait before Apple shows us what it's working on. If you're holding out for wireless charging though, you might want to start saving up.