Last week we caught wind that Rovio was going to unveil a new game called Angry Birds Magic at WIMA this week. The kicker is that the new version of the game made use of NFC in some creative way. As it turns out, it’s not all that creative.

In a nutshell, it’s Angry Birds. Again. With the same birds being flung at the same pigs in exactly the same way. The difference is that Angry Birds Magic — which will come pre-installed on the Nokia C7 and should be made available for other Symbian phones — will only grant you access to the first five levels out of the box. To unlock the next set of five levels you have to find an NFC-equipped Nokia friend and tap phones. Upon doing so you get five more stages. Want to unlock the next five? You’ll need yet another NFC-touting friend. And so on and so forth. If you have no friends with NFC-equipped Nokias, apparently they’re going to toss around random NFC tags around town for you to find instead.

That’s pretty lame. As far as I can tell there are no multiplayer capabilities through the NFC, no exchange of high scores, or anything like that. That’s a shame. If this is the future of “social gaming,” I’m not sure I want any part of it.

[Read]

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Anyone who has ever played with a remote-control car has dreamed of this moment. Forget about those tiny 1/18 scale models. What if you could drive a real deal BMW down the road using nothing but your smartphone? That’s the dream that has been realized by a couple of keeners.

An Jiaxuan teamed up with one of his buddies to outfit a brand new BMW (yes, the real car) with the ability to be remotely controlled using a specially designed app for the Nokia C7 smartphone. Remember that the C7 uses the same Symbian^3 platform as the Nokia N8, so you could likely do the same thing with that device too. You know, if you had the same kind of hackery skills as An Jiaxuan.

What’s crazy is that they were able to achieve this feat in just 20 days of programming and testing. They started out with trying to remotely control a little toy, then an air conditioner, then the room lights, then a DSLR camera, and ultimately the full-sized BMW.

Better still, they were able to confuse the heck out of a traffic cop trying to write the “driver” of the red BMW a ticket… only to see that there was no one in the driver’s seat at all.

[My Nokia Blog via Symbian World]

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Nokia C6-01 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

The good news is that Nokia is still the number one smartphone company in the world. The bad news is that it is steadily losing market share. Hoping to reverse that trend, Nokia announced three new Symbian^3 smartphones today: the Nokia E7, Nokia C6-01, and Nokia C7.

Nokia E7 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

Let’s start with the most exciting of the three. The Nokia E7 features a 4-inch touchscreen display with “ClearBlack technology” for improved outdoor visibility, as well as a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support. For the business-minded, the E7 also comes with an 8MP camera, 16GB internal memory, HDMI-out, Dolby Digital Plus, 720p video recording, and a mere 13.6mm profile. It’s set to launch for 495 Euro during Q4 2010.

Nokia C7 Symbian S^3 Smartphone

Moving further down the scale, we find the Nokia C6 (currently listed as the C6-01) and the Nokia C7. Both come with Symbian^3 and touchscreens, but no hardware keyboards. The C7 has a 3.5-inch AMOLED screen, 8MP camera, 8GB memory, 720p video, and a 325 Euro price point. Look for it before the end of the year.

The cheapest of the bunch at 260 Euro before taxes, the Nokia C6-01 rocks a 3.2-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 8MP camera, ClearBlack technology, microSD slot, and up to 17 days of standby. It’s set to ship before the end of the year too.

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