If we wrote about a blog during the week of its sixth birthday, you could be forgiven for thinking we’d planned it that way. We didn’t, but I’m going to pretend we did as we introduce this week’s featured blog. Please reach for the high notes in a rousing international rendition of Happy Birthday for this week’s Blog Star: MyNokiaBlog.com.
What is it?
In their words, it’s a “random, informal Nokia blog … rants, reviews, suggestions and applications.” In our words, that makes it a great place to get the rundown on what industrial strength Nokia users are thinking, saying and speculating about the latest Nokia gear.
Who runs it?
The me in MyNokiaBlog is Jay Montano, a Manchester UK based medical student (and Nokia Connects MVC judge) who was born in the Philippines and grew up in South Wales. Soon after launch, Jay was joined by a steady stream of other contributors.
What we love about it
First thing to wow you is MyNokiaBlog’s daily output – with six or more posts going online most days, covering news, gossip, speculation, product interaction and more. In his birthday celebration post, Jay writes that he started the blog “as an outlet to pool together my random Nokia ramblings that were overloading the forums.” Seriously, Jay – you’ve made it so much more than “random Nokia ramblings.”
But where does this “random, informal” side of things come in. You see it firsthand in their videos. You’ll find standard video fare, such as unboxings, but you’ll also find lots of real world usage – from clips of drummers, buskers and marching bands to a visit to our flagship store in Helsinki.
One of my favourite videos makes the preposterous sounding move of pitting the image definition of a phone camera (the Nokia Lumia 1020) against that of a professional quality DSLR (the Canon EOS 60D). Place your bets now as to which one you think might have come out on top. I’ll give you a clue – the 60D put in a valiant effort, but…
We love the tutorials that Jay and co have posted over the years. Some cover the sort of things you only ever do a handful of times in a smartphone’s lifetime, like removing the SIM tray, while others look at more frequent tasks like back up and restore.
You’d expect reviews written by tech lovers who know their products inside and out to be in depth and reader friendly. The reviews on MyNokiaBlog totally live up to that expectation. But the review that really jumped out at me was quietly titled Living with: Lumia 920, by Netherlands contributor Harangue. “In the world of mobile phones,” it starts, “we live from leak to announcement to review … we seldom hear about how a phone behaves on the long run.”
It’s the long run that Harangue writes about here. This is six months of living with the Nokia Lumia 920 – from its styling and how it has worn physically, to battery life and how firmware updates have improved performance. This isn’t a feature review based on a few hours of usage – it’s a lifestyle review based on how a phone has fitted into the author’s life. It would awesome to see more posts like this, on MyNokiaBlog and elsewhere.
What’s its stand out feature?
Our favourite part of the blog is their Concept section where they bring together ideas from their own contributors and from around the web – tweaks, ideas and new designs for what they call My Dream Nokia. You’ll find concepts for an 8” Nokia ‘phablet’, a Nokia Lumia 1080 – even a luxury leather and gold Nokia Lumia 1030. It’s awesome to see so much Nokia inspired creativity. Their most recent Dream Nokia was #98. There’s just one more to go before their centenary post. I have a hunch it’ll be a big one.
Hooking up beyond the blog
You’ve seen their YouTube channel already. MyNokiaBlog also has a great Facebook page and Twitter feed – but do click through and say hi to the authors on their own Twitter feeds. You’ll find their Twitter handles in the author blurb on each article.
Finally, let’s head back to that birthday celebration post – I’ll let Jay’s words sign us out: “together as a community of Nokia fans, we will always have something Nokia related to keep nattering on about.” I can’t say fairer than that. Can you?