And the most valuable contributor of Nokia Beta Labs in October 2007 is… Max Waterman!!!
Yay!!!
Justification: Max’s brilliant idea for using 2D barcodes to point directly to application downloads. While we haven’t implemented this to Nokia Beta Labs website yet, many others have already embraced Max’s idea - see for example here and here.
Prize: the official Nokia Beta Labs teddy bear, wearing a white t-shirt with a barcode pointing at Nokia Beta Labs website.
Max: please send me (tommi dot vilkamo at gmail dot com) the address where to ship the bear!
A honourable mention for October 2007 contribution goes to Bogdan Galiceanu for his active contribution and insightful feedback (suggested by Device Status team). Thanks Bogdan - keep it up and you might also win a fancy teddy bear some day.
Previous winners:
September ‘07: Ed from eseries.org
August ‘07: Stefan Constantinescu
The WidSets upgrade yesterday from beta to real service seems to have gone well. Congratulations!!
I guess it’s time for to set up a “graduates” section somewhere under Beta Labs…
If you haven’t tried WidSets yet, you should. And even if you did try it sometime in the past, you should try it again now. The service has evolved fast, and the widget library - including the “Explore” widget discovery system - starts to look really good.
Note: Nokia Beta Labs blog is currently being moved from http://blogs.s60.com/tommi to here i.e. http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog. We are still in the middle of transition, and the new blog doesn’t work properly yet (for example, RSS is missing and linking doesn’t work properly either way). But don’t worry, we’ll fix this soon.
Please use the old blog until further notice.
Sorry for inconvenience.
Note from our Device Status team:
Hi, nice to get so much feedback from you! Now we start to provide also Device Status SISX application as a separate download for those users without Microsoft Windows based PCs. We originally decided to bundle distribution of PC and device application together, to make installation to device little bit easier. But based on your feedback, we start to provide alternative 
Keep those comments coming!
Download available here.
Yay! They included us in today’s press release, in addition to being part of Tero Ojanperä’s keynote speech in “The Way We Live Next” event.
I heard your comments were shown live on stage. Let me ask if I could publish some video clips from the event…
Quick note: Conversation application just became compatible with Nokia Eseries devices. If you have Nokia E60, E61 or E70, you need to update your SW to the latest version (3.0633.09.04) to make it work.
Have fun and keep the feedback coming!!
Note: this is a LazyWeb question for Nokia people only. Others, please ignore.
We are thinking about adding closed* beta testing opportunity to Nokia Beta Labs, in addition to the current open/public betas. In practice, Beta Labs would offer an easy-to-use beta management tool, and a recruiting channel for an exceptionally insightful user community. In simple cases, if everything goes well, it might not cost you anything extra.
Please send me an email if you are interested.
* = a closed beta is available only to a select few users, and the SW distribution and feedback system happens behind firewalls.
Update: umm… seems that I wasn’t clear enough. This post was intended for Nokia R&D teams, not for Nokia users. Thanks for all volunteers, but currently, Nokia doesn’t do closed beta tests through Beta Labs. I just wanted to change all that. I’ll let you know whether this idea flies or not.
Now, this is going to be a bit ugly… But I’m singing happily “Don’t worry, be crappy”, as Guy Kawasaki famously put it, and doing it anyway. Feel free to hate me - please don’t blame Nokia.
Ladies and gents, let me introduce the new version of Nokia Beta Labs website. Thank you all, once again, for your feedback!
It is still very much incomplete and plainly broken in some parts, and we have dozens (hundreds?) of items to do before it’s ready (layouts, human-understandable permalinks, rss feeds, search, sorting, ratings & feedback system, etc, etc). But we decided to publish it anyway, so that we would have time to iterate it a bit before Tero Ojanperä’s grand demo next week. Nokia.com is going to the dark side of the moon during the Q3 results publishing period, and we couldn’t afford to wait until the site updates would become possible again.
Please help us prioritize our ToDo list, and maybe fill in the gaps: what would be the top-3 most important items that you would want us to implement/fix first?
Ps. Nokia Beta Labs blog will be transferred from blogs.s60.com/tommi to www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog during the next week or so.
Jukka just announced in his Mobile Web Server blog that they just released the new version.
New features:
Chat - communicate with your friends
Presence - share your status
New languages: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish
Other improvements:
Python for S60 version 1.4.1
Improved snapshot camera - take better advantage of device camera capabilities
General stability improvements
WebDAV performance improvements
Go try it and send your feedback to the development team! Write your thoughts either publicly to Jukka’s blog entry or privately using the web form.
We got an interesting comment to the Share Online 3.0 feedback form:
It would be great if you could include a qr-code so we can quickly get the sis file’s url into the phone, instead of having to transfer it to the PC first.
You mean like this?
Instructions: if you have a barcode reader application installed, point it at the barcodes above. With some monitor types, reading the code from the screen is a bit difficult. For me, having a cheap LCD display, it worked like a charm.
Interesting idea, and a nice way to promote 2D barcode usage! What do you think, would this be useful or just annoying clutter?
