Life Tools Gets Ready To Roll: Nokia's rural drive is underway with its Life Tools service completing the pilot stage in Maharashtra. It is set to launch commercially across the country in June. In November, the company had announced that Reuters Market Light will supply the content on agriculture - weather, prices and availability of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and prevailing market prices for the produce. (More on Reuters Market Light here and here. Life Tools' education service, powered by mobile VAS firm EnableM, will help mobile users learn English, improve their general knowledge, display results of national examinations and offer career advice. Entertainment offers ringtones, trivia, astrological predictions (by another mobile VAS firm OnMobile), cricket scores and what the product brochure calls "the latest news in your region". If news will be localised, then up to which level - how will Nokia filter news to only bring that which is relevant to a village? NLT originally supported only Marathi, Hindi and English but now also supports Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu. Also, content in local languages is fine, but what about content in local dialects? Loan For Handsets: Nokia has tied up with Hyderabad-based SKS Microfinance, which has 653 branches to drive sales in rural India. SKS will offer loans to handset buyers. Nokia is also launching marketing and servicing vehicles such as the ‘showrooms on wheels’ and ‘Rural care on the go’ to cover the hinterlands. More at Business Line. Buy N-Gage Games Now In India: Nokia…
