Breaking news:

“Nokia today announced the long awaited arrival of the Nokia N97 Mini in South Africa” and the good news fringsters is that we already supports this sexy new device.

Sporting new homescreen widgets, this slim device packs 8GB of storage, a tilting 3.2 inch touch display and full QWERTY keyboard all within a 14.2mm thin frame.”

As with many of the latest Nokia smart phones the N97mini sports the new free to download and use Ovi Maps, which now works on the device without needing an internet connection.

Oh and for those of you thinking that Ovi Maps is the new mapping kid on the block, think again! “Ovi Maps covers more than 180 countries with car and pedestrian navigation for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries.” Todate they have only mapped 27.6 million kilometers of the earths roads and Nokia also claims to have sold in excess of 80 million GPS enabled handsets so far. Not bad if I may say so myself.

Anyway for for a better understanding of the N97mini and Ovi Maps see the video below.

Ps. see if you can spot your favourite mobile app in the video.

Until next time..

The fring team

A few weeks ago fring and Nokia Ovi announced a joint competition celebrating fring’s launch on the Ovi Store.

The response has been amazing- close to a thousand fringsters around the world have sent in their pictures with their old phones and a reason why THEY deserve to win Nokia’s slick new touch-screened N97 mini. Some stories were touching, some were purely amusing and at the end of the process- 3 winners were chosen!

And the winners areeeee… (drum roll)

Thank you all for taking part and congratulations to the winners. Runners up have been published on the competition’s wall of fame so check out if you’re there!

Keep following our blogs, Twitter, Facebook page and Newsletters for new product updates, details of future fring competitions and other interesting surprises coming very soon.

Happy holidays,
The fringTEAM

The Nokia Calling All Innovators Africa challenge has come to an end and a HUGE fringing shoutout to the winners.

Nokia received over 125 submissions from Africa for the developer challenge and after much deliberation the top 10 winners have been announced this evening at the Mobile Monday event in Johannesburg.

As reported earlier, your local fring blogger submitted an application into the challenge and I am happy to say I took 4th place for the worlds first free mobi guide to snakes of South Africa.

Top ten winners and recipients of the Judge’s Choice Award:

1^st – Afridoctor by 20fourlabs

2^nd – That Roach Game by Breakdesign

3^rd – Sasol e.Birds by Coolideas

4^th – MrSNAKE by Simon Botes

5^th – Thumbtribe widget by Thumbtribe

6^th – LiveMobile by LiveMobile

7^th – Countdown 2010 by Christian Reeve

8^th – Surfing Safari by Aqua Online

9^th – Turn Left at the Barrel by Turn Left at the Giraffe

10^th – Mall-Buddy by Paul Hinrichsen

A big word of thanks to Nokia and Mobile Monday for pushing mobile development in Africa.

Back in May, Nokia announced the release of its much- anticipated application store- the Ovi Store. Ovi provides tens of millions of Nokia users worldwide with easy access to a whole lot of downloadable goodies from the Ovi website and WAP site as well as Nokia N97 users, on which Ovi is already pre-installed.

fring’s updated version has just been launched on the Ovi and we are looking forward to test out this new service ourselves. As you recall, the N97 is also already supported by fring’s latest 3.40 version so the lucky one’s who already managed to get your hands on the N97 can start enjoying the very social fring 3.4 and a whole lot of other apps from Ovi right away.