Nokia Beta Labs is on a well-earned Christmas holiday. Back to office on 2 January. Looks like 2008 will be an exciting year for all us beta folks, as we are, again, planning to take the whole thing to the next level.
Heh.
Now, time to spend some quality-time with our loved ones. Peace on earth, etc.
Gizmo, the app for doing free* Internet calls and instant messaging, was just updated to 1.1.006. In my opinion, the most interesting new feature is the ability to search for Gizmo contacts - so that you finally have someone to talk with 
* = free, as in “use with WLAN or flat-fee data plan, or be prepared for huge data traffic charges - especially when abroad (you have heard the stories)”
Nokia Audiobooks was just updated, download here.
This was mainly a bug fix release, bigger changes and improvements in the pipeline…
Guest writer: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service. Download here.
Image: improved Nokia Channels user interface.
Dear all,
The “still alive after one week – hooray!” mark has been passed with Channels service and it has been an interesting journey along the way. First of all, the service has attracted now way over 4000 unique users from 115 countries and 350+ different networks. Secondly, every day roughly 400 different people enjoy the available publications. It is also quite interesting to point out that every day out of those 400 different users 60% are returning users – ie. they have used the service some other day before. So it seems like people do like to come back, at least as long as our service can perform and has NO bugs…
… which nicely brings us to the topic of suggestions and ideas from You!
On 10th of Dec Bogdan wrote us about increasing the number of service providers. On Monday this week we converted few channels from the existing Finland pilot to new production system. These channels include publications from Talentum media: Arvopaperi, Markkinointi&Mainonta (M&M), Talouselämä, Tekniikka&Talous (T&T), Tietoviikko (TiVi), Talentum.com.
On 10th of Dec kanta wrote about the too small font size. Well, a new system fonts based version of the service has been implemented supporting both non-latin characters (Arabic, Thai, Chinese etc.) based publications but also allowing user to choose between five different font sizes (smallest, small, normal, large, largest). This feature is built into the coming Beta4 release.
On 11th of Dev Petteri V wrote about the badly needed page up and page down keys (with a press of number two or eight respectively). This has also been implemented to Beta4 release.
On 17th of Dec kanta wrote how Channels can’t be closed from Task List. This was due to a pending removal of app having been set as a system task (disabling user to cancel/close the process). This has been fixed for Beta4.
In order to make the splash page more appealing, we have added some flowers to it too
Some new issues reported:
The incremental update is corrupting the data, ending up with duplicate/empty news categories and articles.
tt: To our understanding this must refer to issues seen in Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish feed). However, the abnormalities in the front page were not due to corrupted data but rather due to how the content feed was constructed on Helsingin Sanomat end. We have already been in touch with HS to correct the feed.
If content was downloaded text only, and then loading all content is switched on, perhaps the incremental download should be able to load the images also for already loaded text-only articles?
tt: This feature has been intentionally implemented with only future downloads in mind. I.e. in changing from “Load text only” to “Load all content” is designed not to “update” earlier loaded articles.
The ads interfere with the menu. The ad pops up and the ad link is followed when using and selecting an item from the menu.
tt: Known issue and being worked on.
Sorting headlines takes forever.
tt: Bear with this for a while. We have a much improved UI design/flow coming out in Beta5 together with background downloading+server sorting of headlines -> making instant entry to headlines view.
There should be more than 16 headlines shown.
tt: Yes, depends also on the “depth” of the content feed
The headlines view should be more compact. The full headline (or at least two-three lines) should always be seen without highlighting it. Remove the empty space and images and show more text.
tt: Let’s see what we can do about this. Available space for text is also controlled by physical screen size/dimension since platform fonts get rendered differently in different screens (they do not look the same nor do they consume the same space for same screen resolutions).
The order of the subsribed channels should be changeable, i.e. the order the tabs in My headlines and the order in My channels. So that the most used could be moved to first in the list, i.e. faster to use.
tt: This will be implemented in Beta5.
For some of Help the last lines of the text is not shown. Fix the incorrectly shown apostrophes as well.
tt: there could be a small bug here. Incorrect characters will get automatically fixed with system/unicode fonts.
So, this is the latest for Channels. We sincerely hope you keep on enjoying the service and stay tuned for the 1st of January Beta4 release: new publications coming live from Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and United Kingdom!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008
Yours,
-tatu t
Nokia is collecting feedback about our PC software, including the normal PC Suite and Nseries PC Suite. They asked me to promote the survey here, as they have noticed Beta Labs readers to have really valuable things to say.
Help us create better PC software: link to survey.
Beloved beta users, we just launched an interesting new Java application (or actually, application platform) called MUPE under Nokia Beta Labs.
For users:
MUPE is an emerging mobile playground to have fun with your friends. Just install the MUPE client to your phone, and start enjoying the growing collection of MUPE games and services.
For developers:
Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE) is an open source application platform for mobile multi-user context-aware applications. MUPE allows anyone to easily create their own mobile services, games and applications - only server side programming is required. Learn more from http://www.mupe.net.
MUPE is an open source project and it has been public for quite some time already, as Gorkem Ercan pointed out in Java for S60 blog last September. Now, however, it has matured into an official Nokia Beta Labs release, and we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Note: this is not (yet) a mainstream application development platform, like the ones promoted by Forum Nokia, and therefore the developer support is limited.
Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter was just updated, go and download the new version from here.
The team has done lots of improvements based on your feedback, but most importantly, the latest version includes a public API to allow 3rd party developers to create modifications and further improvements. I hope to see a vibrant community emerging around this app: end-user discussion happening here at Beta Labs, and development discussion at maemo.org. If this modus operandi works well, we’ll probably do the same thing with other future projects too.
One of the key guys behind the application wanted to personally address your feedback so far: (click for more) (more…)
Hereby, I announce the beta pilot (and feedback competition) of ad-powered Download! Client to be officially over.
The Download! team will now arrange a draw, and contact personally the lucky winner of the shiny new Nokia E65. If you wasn’t the one, better luck next time. Heh.
After Christmas holidays, we will share the key takeaways from your feedback, and I hope we’ll have an interesting debate about it…
I just had a 2H07 review meeting with my boss, and we were really satisfied. Nokia Beta Labs is rapidly gaining momentum: during the last 6 months, the application portfolio has grown ~200%, web and download statistics ~500%, and the amount of feedback ~1000%. Thanks everybody for your active participation!!
The boss made two questions, however, that I couldn’t answer: how large is our core beta user community? And who, in particular, have been the most valuable contributors?
Identifying this group of elite contributors would be important for several reasons, including:
I think we need some kind of karma system.
And I think it should consist of three components:
I have a dream about a system where the Nokia application owners, after reading your feedback, could rate it with a single click:
Consolidating the votes, we could generate a “karma database” of Beta Labs contributors, offer people with different karma levels different opportunities, and decide whom to listen and whom to ignore.
How does this sound? Does it make sense? And does somebody know what would be the easiest way to implement such system?
