There’s a Facebook group called Windows Phone Fans East Africa (Join this Fan Page) and the guy who runs it, Latiff, decided to put up some prices of the Lumia around Nairobi and the different kinds of offers linked back to the Lumia smartphone that was launched in Nairobi a few months back and runs Microsoft’s flagship Operating System, Windows Phone 8 on premium hardware from Nokia.

You can find the cheapest Nokia Lumia from these places below:

Read more »

London

For those who have not been lucky enough to interact with Kenneth Oyolla, more popularly known as Ken from Kenya, he is the humble chap who headed Nokia as GM for East and Southern Africa up till sometime in January of 2012. He now holds the higher role of Global Head of Market Activation for Mobile Phones and sits in a big office all the way in London.

I had a chat with Ken on phone a while back and felt compelled to ask him how he’s coping with the new environment so I did a nice Q&A with him. Here’s what he had to say:

Juuchini: How has the shift been from local office to global office? What is your experience so far? What has changed?

Kenneth Oyolla: I see my move to from regional general management to global as two sides of the same coin. On one side you have a big team to manage that looks after a smaller region whilst on the other side you have a smaller team of specialist to manage that look after a global business. Whilst as General Manager “your word is the law” and goes and you bet your job on your decisions, in global you have a lot of matrix relationships to manage and you have to hone your rapport building skills as well as influencing skills to achieve your goals. You also have to contend with different time zones like the call I have to take weekly with teams in Sydney because there is a 12hour time difference. Different cultures also kick in when you have to deal with Chinese, Indian, European and American colleagues as well as the complexity of dealing with virtual teams using technology like video conference and Halo. Read more »

Local apps on Ovi store have increased from just two in April 2010 to over 40 in January 2011.

The number of mobile applications on the Ovi Store has grown by over 1600 (%) percent in the last eight months indicating a sharp increase in demand for local content and rising interest from developers in Kenya.

Fresh statistics from Nokia indicate that Kenyan apps have increased tremendously from just two in April 2010 to over 40 in January 2011.

Interestingly, Kenyan applications are not only increasing in volume and quality- the content they carry is also broadening, enabling a larger number mobile phone users to interact, transact and learn more from the Ovi Store.

“The Ovi Store now has apps with content ranging from news and job offers to social media and mobile commerce. These are interesting times for developers and application users in Kenya and trends continue to change every day,” said Kenneth Oyolla, General Manager, Nokia, East & Southern Africa. Read more »