Do more with your Nokia or Samsung S60 phone!

Most new n-series phones ship with a GPS chip onboard. Currently, this list includes Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N78, Nokia N82, E71, E66 and the Nokia navigator series phones like the 6110 and the 6210. The GPS chip will help in pinpointing your current GPS locations. There are several wonderful applications available on the S60 platform, which
make use of the built-in GPS. Most widely used GPS application is the Nokia Maps, which will help you navigate in most countries of the world. The free version of Nokia maps can display your current locations and will also help you identify points of interest like restaurants, hotels, malls and hospitals. With a paid upgrade, you can get turn-by-turn directions while driving or even when walking.

There are lots of other mapping applications like the Google Maps, which can also make use of the in-built GPS chip. Apart from navigation, there are plenty of fun applications, which can use the location services. Nokia Sports Tracker is a very useful application for fitness freaks. When you are exercising (jogging, cycling etc.,) it can show information like your speed, pace distance traveled etc., It can even plot all this information on a map so that you can analyze your route on your PC once you get back home.

Another interesting use of the onboard GPS is its ability to geo-tag photos. That means, whenever you take a photo, the camera automatically embeds the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude information) on the photograph itself. The advantage? Even after 15 years, you will still be able to tell where exactly you shot that great photograph! More on this in the camera section below.

For a list of free GPS enabled applications for your S60 phone, click here.

Now, you may be wondering if you can use these applications with a Nokia S60 phone which does not have a GPS chip? Yes you can! For this to work, all you need is an external GPS receiver, which you can pair with your S60 phone. These external receivers are becoming cheaper by the day. You should be able to get one for about $50.  See below for a selection of these external receivers from Amazon. You can buy the one that fits your needs.

Once you have paired an external Bluetooth receiver, all location based applications will start receiving the GPS coordinates from this module and you can use these apps the same way you use them on a handset which has a built-in GPS receiver.

Nokia N-Series phones have outstanding cameras built-in. Phones like the Nokia N95, N82 and N96 have brilliant 5 megapixel cameras which rival the quality of pictures taken by stand alone digital cameras. These camera phones have high quality Carl-Zeiss optics, with some models like the N82 even coming with Xenon flash, which provides great quality photos in low light conditions.

What differentiates the N-Series phones from ordinary digital cameras is their ability to easily upload the pictures taken on your phone to photo sharing sites like Flickr or even Nokia's own Ovi service. Nokia provides an application called Share Online, which helps you upload the photos automatically as and when they are taken. A much more sophisticated third party application is called the Shozu, which apart from geo-tagging also helps you do mobile blogging with your recently taken pictures.

With N series phones you can make great videos as well, which is something not even possible on the Apple iPhone.

For some sample taken with Nokia N95, click here. You will be surprised by the quality of pictures shown there!

All Nokia N Series and S60 phones come with great video and audio players. In terms of audio quality, they rival the iPhone and iPod. Music management is also easy as they work with the standard Windows Media Player on your PC and iTunes on your Mac. What is even more interesting is that Nokia has a music store from where you can buy music directly on your S60 phone! The Nokia Music store is available for several European countries and is expanding fast to other countries of the World. Apart from MP3 and AAC, the music player on S60 phones also support WMV, so you never need to convert music from one format to other. For people who like open standards, there is even an Ogg Vorbis player as well! The latest N series phones also support eAAC+ format which reproduces top quality music at very low bitrates. You can store double the music on your phone with no loss of quality using eAAC+. You can read this article on how to achieve this in a single click!

What I like most about the Nokia N series music player is its excellent search capabilities. Just start typing the name of the song and voila, the file is bang in front of you. No need to wade through Albums, Artists, playlists etc.,

Similarly, the Video players on these phones also support several formats. For those having a large collection of DiVX movies, there is an official DiVX player as well. It is recommended to scale the movies to 320x240 resolution so that the file size can be reduced. This will help you carry more movies on your SD card/internal memory.

Speaking of file size, the n-series phones come with external memory slots and/or huge built-in memory like the N95/N81 8GB. The upcoming N96 has 16 GB of internal memory along with an external memory card slot for virtually unlimited memory.

This is where the Nokia N series phones trump every other phone in the market - their excellent web browsing capabilities. The S60 browser is based on the same code base that is shared by Apple Safari mobile and desktop browsers. Also called as the mini-map browser, it brings you the same desktop quality browsing to your mobile phone. Unlike the Apple iPhone, the latest N Series phones support Flash, which means almost all content on the internet will display properly on your S60 phone. You can even view YouTube website (not the mobile optimized version) on your phone. If you are planning to buy an S60 phone primarily for internet and email usage, I would recommend purchasing one with a larger screen like the Nokia N95 8GB, the Nokia E71 or the upcoming Nokia Tube or the N96.

The built-in Email client is also very capable with support for POP/IMAP and multiple accounts. If you are a business user, there is even a BlackBerry client available for E series phones. There is also an Exchange client called Mail for Exchange which is available for most N-Series phones. If you are a MobileMe user, you can even configure your MobileMe account on your Nokia phone. Detailed instructions here.

As we have seen, the N Series phones are very powerful - no wonder Nokia markets them as Multimedia Computers - whether you are a content creator or consumer or a business user, the S60 phones are something which can become an integral part of your digital life.