Yesterday, Ovi player 2.1 has been released, and according to the Ovi Blog, its strongly recommended that if you already use Ovi Player, that you update to this latest version due to it containing many bug fixes, and performance tweaks.

Unlike the last release of Nokia Ovi Player, this version comes as an optional update to you. But, it's absolutely recommended you all should upgrade to this latest version. Simply select ‘Check for updates…’ from the Help menu in Ovi Player. This will automatically download, install and launch the new software for you.

For this release, focus was to improve overall quality, performance and user experience. Based on users feedback, we have now resolved many critical defects, including the crash on start-up. Here's what the Ovi Blog say about this latest version..

So, what exactly is better?

• We have re-worked music downloads functionality to make it more reliable. You can now pause and restart downloads from the Nokia and Ovi Music stores. Ovi Player will automatically retry any failed downloads and will also preserve uncompleted downloads on application restart.
• With the latest Nokia Ovi Player you now can automatically import your music library from iTunes and all the manual playlists that you created in iTunes (however, iTunes DRM files and smart playlists will not be imported).
• We have also provided a new ‘Play’ control above column headers in detailed view. Simply click this button and all the containing tracks will be added to the Player Queue and played sequentially.
• There are new tooltips for tracks in the Playlists and Player Queue. These tooltips are visible when hovering over a track and will show you Artist, Album and Artwork for the track.
• We’ve made it easier to select the Music Store for your region (note that you will need a credit card for that region to purchase any tracks) and change the Proxy settings. Just hit F4 key and all this pops up in the Options dialogue window.
• The new version is more robust and memory efficient when compared to the previous version.
• Finally, we have also made it possible to hide the start-up screen, so you can carry on using other applications without being interfered by the Nokia Ovi Player.

Many of you may of already noticed Mobbler, the ever so popular last.fm Music Scrobbler now being available in the Ovi Store. 

I know that our very good friend Clinton Jeff, of ZOMGitsCJ noticed it, and wrote about it on his blog, and now we have the story behind how Mobbler made it to the Ovi Store, and is quite a success story. Below is a qute from Rod Burns from Symbian Horizon.

I wanted to highlight a real success story for the Symbian Horizon program. The Mobbler application (‘Mobbler – A Last.fm Radio Player and Scrobbler for Symbian’), is open source, free and developed by a community of volunteers. The application is already popular as an unsigned download but access to Symbian Signed and publishing in Ovi is a barrier because of their non-commercial status.

This limits the reach that they have. We tested and signed Mobbler through the Horizon program and published it on the Ovi store this week.

In the first 48 hours of being published the application has been downloaded almost 1500 times from all over the world including 116 in India, and downloads in unexpected countries like Tajikistan and Azerbaijan.

This is a great achievement and really shows why the Horizon publishing program is so worthwhile. We have not only made the guys at Mobbler happy but we now have a fantastic Last.fm player for Symbian which we can shout about in the same way Apple do about their third party applications. But even better, this one was created through the collaboration of our community.

The work does not stop here though and we hope to be able to provide a route to market for Mobbler in China through our relationship with China Mobile.

You can find Mobbler, in Ovi Store here, or simply fire up Ovi Store on your Nokia handset, and either search for Mobbler, or checkout new items. Although the application is free, you will need a last.fm account, which is also free depending where you are in the world, so please checkout the last.fm terms here.

This long awaited activity manager combines contacts, calendar and todos in a user friendly interface, giving you a more satisfying way to manage your life's activities.  DreamLife is visual, intuitive and clever, designed for users of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung or LG smartphones running Symbian S60.

Whether you are a small business owner, a professional or a parent, you will find DreamLife's features effective for organising and managing your busy schedule and network of contacts or that of your family's.  DreamLife's key benefits include:

• Easy to distinguish individual activities, conflicts, and free time slots from the innovative planner view
• Instant overview of your activities including details of appointments, todos, reminders, and anniversaries as well as event categories, status and attendees at a glance
• Organise your contacts and activities in a meaningful way using hierarchical categories
• Plan in the context of your day's activities while you enter new entries via the unique 2-pane activity editor
• Instant search of your contacts using global find, key match, sort or a combination
• View and use all your contact's information and notes on one screen, thanks to business card layout
• Powerful links between calendar and contacts let you attach and then jump to a contact from a calendar entry; you can also create new activities for contacts directly from the contacts list

More details, including download information can be found over at the DreamLife website here.

Thanks to Teo of Symbian Freak for the heads up.

Videos are still slowly flowing from both Ewan, and Rafe, (MIR & AAS) from their recent visit to Mobile World Congress which was held in Barcelona, Spain recently.  In this latest release, Rafe talks to The Symbian Foundation's Lee Williams whilst walking around the event. If you prefer to read the transcript of the talk between Rafe, and Lee, then head over to Rafe's coverage over on All About Symbian here.

If like me you discovered the latest release of the Mobile version (2.4 with account support) of Youtube was not available for your N97 when you entered m.youtube.com/app on your device, then do not fear, you no longer have to wait thanks to Symbian France for extracting the file for me, which can be found here. I can confirm it works perfectly on my N97.  Enjoy.!

This video almost slipped through the net, as I was trawling through my Reader the other day, and one of the videos I clicked to view was in fact dated over a week ago, so thought nothing of it, but then I kept seeing Symbian^3 reappearing in my reader, so investigated, and glad I did.  This is an actual live demo of Symbian^3, and has been posted by Phonedog.com's Youtube channel, and features David Rivas, VP of Technology Management at Nokia talking us through the various UI elements of Symbian^3.  Take a look below, and let us know what you think.

Thanks to ZOMGitsCJ for the heads up on this great news.  Youtube has now released a brand new Symbian Client, version, 2.4, and the long awaited sign in that we have been waiting for is finally here in this version, allowing you to sign into your Youtube account, offering more user focused control of your content, subscriptions, favorites, and more.  Quote from Youtube Blog below..

I noticed a few days ago now that Qik Premium was available whilst browsing Ovi Store contents, and being a regular user of their standard Qik application, I quicky purchased Qik Premium, however, Unknwon to me at the time, the purchase price of €5 Euros ($6.78 USD), is not only a localized price, but it is just for a year, and not an outright one-off payment. I thought I would give it a testing before writing my post here.

I mention localized pricing, because after I paid the €5 Euros for Qik Premium in Ovi Store, I started hearing on twitter from other fellow editors, and bloggers, that the very same application is available for less than half of what I paid in both the US, and Pakistan, with Ovi Store advertising Qik Premium for just $5 USD, and $2.75 USD. Here is a screenshot of my localized pricing for Qik Premium..