CES will start off at 8.30 a.m. on January 8th in Las Vegas! And I am here in Mumbai, halfway across the world, lamenting at my inability to attend this event.

My predictions for the Nokia at CES:

• Nokia announces the “affordable” E61i business smartphone, a successor to the E61.
• Nokia announces the release of a firmware patch upgrade which will add A2DP to the Nokia N91. (far fetched, i know :D)
• Nokia demos the E65i and the E90 business smartphones.

Steve Litchfield from AllaboutSymbian has posted some essential tricks and tweaks for your new symbian smartphone. Pimping your smartphone sure is fun. Here are my additions to the list:

• If your network doesn’t support 3G, then go to Tools->Settings->Network and change network mode to GSM.
• If your phone has wi-fi, go to Tools->Settings->Connection->WirelessLAN and set its availability to “never”. This gives some significant boost to your battery life.
• My additions to the task list: MWeather, Tasky and S60 Internet Radio (requires wi-fi or unlimited data plan if u plan to use it for long periods)
• Office-related utilities: Quickoffice viewers for Word (buy to unlock editing functions), Powerpoint and Excel files, Adobe PDF reader. Using the BT keyboard with these can make life quite easy when you have to make to quick edits on the go.
• Nanika Metro and Google Maps (needs internet connection) for quick directions.
• My choice of 3rd party software: Profimail, Smartmovie, Papyrus.
• Games: I only need Tetris.

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year! Thank you for all the support!