Archive for 'Nokia Beta Labs'

If you didn’t know already, Nokia PC Suite will eventually be removed from service, and replaced with Ovi Suite, so now is a good time to get yourselves accustomed to Ovi Suite 2.1, and help the Nokia Beta Labs team develop it further, improve your user experience, and even suggest new features which you may feel would benefit yourself, and other Nokia Users.

Please don’t let the earlier releases of Ovi Suite put you off, its come a long way since those early resoureful days, and now as already mentioned, this is your chance to shape Ovi Suite just how you want it.

Nokia Beta Labs have opened up Ovi Suite 2.1 to everyone in an open Beta, and this is a step to shape Ovi Suite how the users want it to work for them.  Here is a short list of what the new Ovi Suite offers for now.

• Support for syncing contacts with Ovi.com, so now you can easily keep your contacts safe in Ovi.com
• Support for syncing videos from device to Nokia Ovi Suite, video playback and transferring videos from Nokia Ovi Suite to device
• Updating device applications and distributing new device applications  (same feature as in devices “Software update” application)
• Windows 7 support
• Support for syncing contacts with Mozilla Thunderbird
• New languages (Hindi, American English and Ukrainian)
• Extended device support
• Performance improvements
• Improving overall product quality and stability, for example in sync 

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Earlier today, Nokia Beta Labs was taken offline for some much needed maintenance, and its now back online, and looking very fresh, and really user centric, giving many options for users of the site to rate items, keep track of their feeds/subscriptions, contribute, and thank members for helpful contributions, and more, including even following your favorite applications, so as and when they get an update, you will know about it right away! 

Head over to the Nokia Beta Labs right now, and check the new look for yourself, I’m sure you will be happy with what you see.  Like anything new, it may take several minutes to find your way around, but navigating through the site is quite straight forward really.

Well done to all at Nokia Beta Labs for this great makeover, its really come a long way since its first airing.

Since Nokia Beta Labs last update of Ovi Contacts, some issues were raised up in the Beta Labs forums, these have now been fixed, so here’s one more update: a new and better release of Ovi Contacts for S60 3rd Edition FP2 and S60 5th Edition products.

To name a few from the long list of solved issues, here’s a few worth mentioning:

    * Send file was working only from chat view, not from the friend list before, but now it works
    * Issues with Cyrilic and Scandinavian letters were fixed (you may have seen these as broken letters in the friend list)
    * E-mail field in ‘My profile’ didn’t accept “-” character is fixed, as reported by deekay304 in the forum
    * Corrupted pics in personal and friends profile are fixed, as reported by lebb53 in the forum

Also something that was highly requested by many Spanish speaking Beta Labs readers, was that we should put the download up to Beta Labs in a way that it contains all languages supported. Now it should. Download options are available here. More details after the break.

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Nokia Beta Labs have just this minute announced a brand new service.  Nokia Image Space.  You may of seen this service shown off sometime ago here.  If you have Flickr account and a supported Nokia phone, you can get your content contextualized easily. Apart from geotagging from GPS, the photos will have full orientation information in the metadata. Checkout the video demo below to get an idea what this new service can do for you. You can head over to the actual Image Space site by following this url imagespace.nokia.com/beta

This allows spatial browsing of photos. Photos from different Image Space users are contextually linked between each other. This creates a better understanding of the place you are browsing. It is a solution for showing a new view to your photos, as well as to those from your friends and other people.

Nokia Beta Labs are looking for participants for an upcoming User Case Study they are carrying out mid-January in the Helsinki area. They are specifically looking for Social Networking activists who use Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and  Del.icio.us on a daily basis.  Now, while I myself fit the criteria of using these services daily, sadly Im a five hour train journey away from Helsinki, I would of loved to have taken part.

Participants will get to visit Nokia Research Centre Ruoholahti office, and get to checkout what they have in store for a couple of hours, and for your time, they will award you with a voucher that you can redeem at any Nokia Store for Nokia goddies.

What’s expected from you

The primary criteria is that you actively use social networking services or social media websites, and, more specifically, you:

    * Own account(s) on two or more of the following services: Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Last.fm.
    * Have 20 contacts (the people you are following) or more on the services.
    * Own and use the account(s) for more than 1 month already by now.
    * Use the service(s) at least several times a week, including your pc, your mobile, or other devices.

Contact us to participate

If you are interested, please contact us by email (yanqing.cui@nokia.com) or phone (050 482 4320). We are ready to answer other questions you may have

This is your chance to make a direct impact on the way Nokia Beta Labs perform, and offer various content to YOU, the Nokia User.  

Tell them how they are doing by taking this survey! The results are extremely important to the team at Beta Labs and will have a direct impact on their work – and thus quite directly affects you as well.

It won’t take long to answer, and they promise to share the results afterwards. The survey has about 10-15 mandatory multiple choice questions and one optional open ended question. It should not take you more than 5 minutes to answer.

Handwriting Calculator was released in Beta Labs back in December 2008. Since then the application was downloaded a staggering 140,000 times from Beta Labs and 293,000 times from Ovi Store.

The Beta Labs team have also received masses of feedback, including comments and suggestions on the user interface of the application as well as handwriting samples. All of these encouraged them to continuously improve the performance and user experience of the application further.

The whole team over at Nokia Beta labs wish to give sincere thanks to all those customers who sent in their valuable feedback. It is this feedback that helped the team achieve their latest version of Handwriting Calculator.

You may have noticed that the application has been preloaded in Nokia N97 and Nokia 5530 XpressMusic in the greater China markets since June 2009. And the application is also available for download from Ovi Store ever since July 2009.

Given these milestones, the Beta Labs team decided to change the status of this beta to “graduated”.

The Nokia Beta Labs team have recently updated thier Ovi Mail application, and have added a setup client for S60, making is really simple to set up your new Ovi Mail directly from your device.  If you have already set up an Ovi mail account, you do not need this client.

What it is
This application allows you to sign-up for an Ovi Mail account directly from your S60 device. Or if you already have an Ovi account it will provision Ovi Mail and configure the email client on the device. And it installs a handy icon in the Installations folder for easy access to Ovi Mail.

What it isn’t
This is not an email client. You will continue using the existing email client on your device. If you’re already successfully using Ovi Mail on your device you don’t need to install this.

Webmail
Simplified navigation on the left and made it more consistent from page to page, trying to keep up with the global expansion of Ovi Mail and have added 4 additional languages: Thai, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Finnish. Go to https://mail.ovi.com to see these changes.  More infomation here.

Quite a while ago, Janne Vainio from the Nokia Beta Labs team released an application called Audio Books, and although this application was released just for fun, it has been taken quite seriously by many Audio Book fans.  Sadly, today Janne Vainio has announced on the Nokia Beta Labs site, that this application will now be shelved, and left as is.  Here’s what Janne has said…

Hi all! As many of you know, Nokia Audiobooks has been a semi-official side-project of mine, something that I created two years ago just for fun, and for the sheer love of audiobooks. Lately, however, I have grown too busy to improve and maintain the app properly, so I thought it would be fair to call it a day and officially announce the project as archived (we left it available “as is”). Thanks for all of you who were kind enough to send feedback!!

Its not all doom and gloom though, as Janne goes on to tell us about a survey Nokia Beta Labs are holding, and for taking part in this survey, you stand the chance of winning a $50 Amazon.giftcard.  There are three up for grabs, so all you Audio Book lovers, head over to the Nokia Beta Labs site right now, and take this survey for your chance of bagging a Amazon giftcard worth $50.!

Nokia Braille Reader.  Now this is something I like to read about more often, and I personally take a strong interest in this type of application having a blind member of the family, and also having a couple of friends who are also visually impaired.

I think its great for the Nokia Beta Labs team to have got together with both Tampere University, and the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired, to bring this really useful application to peoples lives using Nokia devices.  Our sight is something that is quite easily taken for granted.  If you know someone who is blind, or visually impaired, then please introduce them to this application, and help get it up and running for them on their device by explaining what it has to offer for them.

Nokia Braille Reader gives SMS for the blind and visually impaired. It captures received SMS messages and brings them to the foreground for reading using Braille and tactile feedback.  Further information, device compatability, and download instructions can be found here on The Nokia Beta Labs page.