NokiaBetaLabs

It provides a community experience entirely on your mobile phone without any dependency on the PC or Internet.  As long as your phone supports SMS you are ready to go! To experience it, download the Java client from this site. If your device is not yet supported or if you are on a non-Nokia device you can still experience the service using the plain SMS interface.

During the beta trial, this service is only available to users in India and English is the only language supported at this time.

Features

With Conversations you can communicate simultaneously with up to ten people by sending a single message, similar to instant messaging.  This feature is ideal for short conversations with friends, family, and co-workers (like coordinating a weekend plan or checking how their day is going).

With Streams, you can broadcast messages to your subscribed followers and, likewise, view messages from all people you subscribe to.  This feature is intended to create channels for community building and following a topic (e.g. career tips, hyper-local news) or a person (e.g. fan group for a Bollywood star).

Some of the other features are:

• Does not require a user account; the service uses your mobile number to identify you
• No fee for usage, costs only standard SMS rate (even when sending to multiple people)
• UX designed to simplify the messaging experience
• Plain SMS interface for users that don’t have the client or use a non-Nokia phone
• Integrated with your phone’s address book
• Allows users to share their current location (only in certain locations in beta)

Compatibility and availability

Mobile Communities has been tested extensively on Nokia 5130, 7210 and 2700 and is available for similar S40 devices with screen resolution 240x320 pixels such as Nokia X3, 7100, 6500, 3120 and 2730 etc.  While functionality is supported for all Nokia devices (such as E63, E71 and E72), user experience may be broken due to unsupported resolution; support for additional devices and resolutions is on its way.  However, support for touch devices will be available in a later version of the product.

Additional details about Conversations and Streams are available in the More Info section. Download instructions, FAQs and known issues are available in the Download & Installation section