Seven men plus four continents plus a very big pile of phones equals this week’s brilliant Blog Star. Please give a globally connected welcome to Unleash the Phones.
What is it?
Unleash the Phones is a hub of expert updates and analysis on the world of mobile devices and the apps and accessories that make them fly. It’s stuffed full of news, features, reviews and videos with a real international depth. As well as Windows Phone there are top level sections devoted to Android and IOS. It boasts a cool 1.5 million unique monthly visitors – a number that I think is well earned.
Who runs it?
Unleash the Phones was founded by New Delhi based Clinton Jeff. One of the recently appointed MVC judges, he makes regular appearances in the Indian technology press and media. He shared his thoughts with us about music on the Nokia Lumia 800 when we interviewed him on the London Eye in 2010 and he even plays a one second bit part in this ad for the N8 from the same year (check out the onscreen Facebook friends feed 15 seconds in). Clinton is joined on Unleash the Phones by a team of six senior writers from across four continents.
What we love about it
To steal their own words, Unleash the Phones is “experienced and generally awesome”. What that amounts to is a group of writers who are totally passionate about mobile. They have a great enough understanding of technology to satisfy even the most niche needs – but they also write with a clarity and personality that reaches out to a broader consumer readership too.
We love that Unleash the Phones isn’t just a Nokia blog. It’s all things mobile technology, whatever shape they might take. Some of its writers are big Nokia users (of course we can’t help feeling a bit tingly that four of its seven writers keep Nokia in their pockets), while others lean towards other brands. That makes it a great place to see competing products side by side, and occasionally head to head.
On their video page you can catch up on 45 episodes of UnleashTheVideo, the team’s video rundown of the latest news and views from the mobile world. And Saturday evening saw the launch of their all new UnleashTV – a weekly video podcast run as a live Google Hangout. In this first episode, they talk about the Nokia Lumia 1020, among other things.
We love that the team doesn’t just look at phones from their own expert perspective – in fact they completely recognise the need to look at things from a less expert perspective too. Here’s a great example of that – The Parent Experiment, where writer Aatif Sumar blogged about his own mother’s in depth views on the Nokia Lumia 620.
And no blog should be without lines like this to make it come alive: “I still can’t stop looking at this cute little beauty…like a Zombie phone which simply refuses to die.” Magnificent. That was Yash Masheshwari writing about the awesome design and battery life of the Nokia Asha 501.
What’s its stand out feature?
Best of all though, Unleash the Phones has a fantastically connected global feel. With writers posting from India, Singapore, Australia, US and UK, there’s a great sense of an international mobile technology community in action here. It’s the continent spanning similarities that stand out, not the differences – what makes our mobile expectations, needs and desires the same. I don’t know about you but I find that pretty powerful.
Hooking up beyond the blog
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Plus – but to really get to know the guys individually you can find all their Twitter accounts here.
But here’s something cool to think about. Unleash the Phones spans four continents – connecting news, views and perspectives from thousands of miles apart. What do you think are the most incredible opportunities that mobile technology has delivered to help bring people together? Across continents? Across towns? Across families?
Image credit: Clinton Jeff