The first hint that Nokia was looking to change things up, came when you land in McCarran International Airport. After picking up your bags and on the way to the cab line, it was pretty hard to miss the Nokia kiosk and the free ride they were offering CES attendees to select hotels. Boarding the double decker bus, they passed around some smartphones for you to check out on the drive. How cool is that?

But the promotion didn’t stop there. Each day of the show, from 8:30 – 11:00 at each of the monorail stops, Nokia had some entertainment for passengers waiting to board the train. The dancers were taking turns showing off their moves as the crowd clapped and cheered them on. What I found most interesting with this campaign, is that there was no mention of Microsoft, Windows Phone, or even a picture of the phone. Just the catch phrase “The Amazing Everyday” and the familiar square tile look. Although, the later is only familiar to those of us who have used the OS. The crowd had a great time, and many an iPhone were used to record the event. I shot this video using my Windows Phone.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Hats off to Nokia for generating some good buzz and getting into people’s heads. Let’s see if they can keep it up, and if it will pay off for them.

The 800 will carry the North America 3G bands, allowing it to work on AT&T, or up here in Canada with Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Fido. At this point there is no word on pricing for the phone, however I would imagine that it would cost about the same as any premium unlocked device.

Nokia mentioned that this will be part of a “bundle”, but they wouldn’t say anymore about what that bundle may contain. This is Nokia’s carrier free device in North America, so I would guess that they are going to toss some extras in the box that the carriers don’t want to include in your subsidized phone. Maybe a dock, maybe a second battery, maybe a case or two?

As soon as we learn price and availability information, we’ll be posting it. So stay tuned.

Technology is always changing. There’s always something new coming around the next corner. Some of it is good and some of it, not so much. While 2011 was a great year with lots of really cool new gadgets and features being released, I’m really looking forward to what the next couple of years will bring. When you consider that 8 megapixel camera phones are becoming the norm, digital payment systems are on the edge of exploding, computers and tablets just keep getting smaller and thinner to the point where a pad of paper is now larger than most of the popular tablets on the market. Cool times!

PC World has posted their top 10 tech wins for 2011, and there’s some really awesome things in their list. Stuff like IBM’s Watson super computer that cleaned up on Jeopardy, and Microsoft’s Kinect game sensor for Xbox that kills Nintendo’s Wii that ruled the motion sensor gaming market.  Check out the full list and let us know your thoughts. Is there anything that you feel was missed, or something that shouldn’t be on the list? For me, the Kindle Fire may be a great alternative to the iPad, but I’m not sure if it would hold a spot on the top 10 for me.

(Source = PCWorld)

Grab your iPhone or Android device and point your browser to http://aka.ms/wpdemo. You’re looking at a demo site pre-loaded with contacts and details to give you the full experience. The site is smart enough to know if you’re hitting it from a Windows Phone, or from IE on your desktop. The demo loaded just fine for me on the Galaxy Tab, and on my iPhone 4. Although, at first it was a little slow to download. I’m sure that’s just related to the large volume of people hitting it. I also had to turn of Private Browsing on the iPhone’s Safari settings to get the page to finish loading.

Each of the live tiles on the home screen provides a quick sample tour of that element on the phone. A little blue circle provides you with an indication of where to tap next and what features are revealed. For example, tapping the Calendar walks you through how the experience of viewing and adding entries to the calendar on Windows Phone. Tapping on the Pictures hub will launch you into the pictures and show you how you can quickly share an image on Facebook.

Don’t be shy, grab your friends iPhone and take a tour of Windows Phone today!

Next week marks the 1 year anniversary of the launch of Kinect, and there is no question that Microsoft leap-frogged Nintendo’s motion sensor technology and changed the game entirely. Right from the start the development community took hold of the kinect and torn it apart only to build an amazing world around it. There has been no shortage of cool prototype applications that people have built around the Kinect sensor.

Microsoft is in the final stages of preparing their SDK (Software Development Kit) for the Kinect. This is expected to be released early in 2012 and bring a wave of custom development and commercial applications designed for the hands free world of Kinect.

There’s a new video from Microsoft showing what they are calling the Kinect Effect – this highlights how Kinect is being used to change more than just the gaming industry. Check it out below and let us know where you hope to see Kinect in 5 years time. You can also visit Microsoft’s Kinect Effect site for a more detailed understanding.

Watch this video on YouTube.

All of the specs for these phones are not yet known. However, we can tell you that the Focus Flash will have a 3.7 inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1.4 Ghz processor, 5 megapixel rear camera, and a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera. The Focus S will have a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Plus screen, 1.4 Ghz processor, an 8 megapixel camera, and a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera. The Focus S will also be just 8.5mm at it’s thinnest point and AT&T claims it’s 4G compatible.

If you’ve been watching the Samsung Galaxy line of devices, you may notice that the Samsung Focus S looks an awful lot like the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. We won’t be able to say for sure until see more hardware specs or have a chance to spend some real time with this device.

The first thing you need to be aware of, is that not everyone can load an application on their device that doesn’t come from the marketplace. In order to do this, the first thing you need to do is developer unlock the device. There are a ways to do this – the only official way is to signup for Microsoft’s developer program and along with that you will get the ability to developer unlock a few devices. To do this, you’ll need to pay a $100 registration fee to Microsoft. You can learn more about this, and sign up over at Create.MSDN.com.

So now you have a developer unlocked device, and you have your XAP file. Next, you’ll need the Windows Phone SDK too kit. This will provide you with the development environment needed to create new applications. While you may not be creating your own application, we need this SDK installed so we can gain access to the deployment tool. You can find the tools over on here. Download and install the SDK on your computer.

Now that you have the Windows Phone SDK installed, we can deploy that application to your device. First, connect your Windows Phone to your computer and allow the Zune software to do it’s thing. Once the sync is done, close the Zune application. Click Start and type “Application Deployment” (if you’re running Windows 7, otherwise it’s located under Start / Programs / Windows Phone Developer Tools / Application Deployment).

You will now be presented with the window above. Simply browse and select your XAP file. Make sure the Target is set to “Windows Phone Device” and not to the emulator. Then unlock your device by sliding up the lockscreen and entering your password – if you have a device password. Once unlocked, press the Deploy button and the XAP will be transferred to the device and installed. And – Presto! You’re off and running with your custom app on Windows Phone.

I’ve run into a couple issues with this procedure. It seems that Microsoft has a few bugs lingering in the software. If you do have any weird errors, try and correct whatever the error says is wrong. Also, try disconnecting the device, and then connect it again and allow the sync process to finish before closing Zune and launching the deployment tool. Finally, make sure the device is logged in and sitting at the Today / home screen.  Nothing major here – a little fiddling and you should be off to the races!

For our American readers, you’ll want to take note that to the changes coming to the US service. The Zune Music Pass will see a price drop to $9.99 a month and will no longer include 10 MP3s to keep each month. The current $14.99 package will no longer be available to new subscribers, but current subscribers can continue to use that service.

This is welcome news for Canadians that have been patiently waiting to take advantage of Zune on their Windows Phone, Xbox, and PCs. I’m very excited to finally have an alternative to the ugly and confusing iTunes service. Sadly, I don’t expect this will be usable for me, as the billing address on my Live account is locked to “United States” and Microsoft, after all these years, still refuses to understand that people do move between countries. Sorry, that’s not exactly true. The last time I talked with them, I was informed that they could change it if I moved between the US and Africa. Gee, thanks!

The other 2 devices are not updates to existing devices – the first one is the HTC Titan that we reported about last week, and the other is the Samsung Focus Flash. The Flash name would indicate that this is either a super fast phone, or that it’s a top end camera phone. However, neither of those are the case for the Focus Flash. In this case, they are delivering a light weight, entry level phone. The Flash will have 3.7 inch Super AMOLED screen, a 1.4 GHz processor, 5 megapixel camera and a unmentioned resolution for the front facing camera. AT&T does mention that it will be light on the pocketbook but still have all the power of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango).

The HTC Titan, as we’ve talked about before, will have a super large 4.7 inch screen, a 1.5 GHz processor, and a 8 megapixel rear camera with dual LED flash. While the press release stops here, a blog posting over on the Windows Phone team blog seems to indicate that there is some special and unique sauce coming on the AT&T version of the Titan. Brian Seitz writes “The AT&T version will be unique, but we’ll have to keep you in suspense for a while longer on what it looks like and final specs”. Speculation is that AT&T has increase the internal storage space to 32GB and/or included HTC’s new Dr Dre Beats offering with the device. Of course, it’s all speculation until we get word from HTC, AT&T, or Microsoft.

Let us know what you think of these new devices from AT&T. And what kind of special are you looing for on the HTC Titan device?