Friends, let me introduce a really promising new beta concept called Nokia PC Phone:

Nokia PC Phone is an experimental service that gives you a possibility to use your mobile phone with your Web Browser. You can call, text and manage contacts from your phone.
…
Nokia PC phone is a browser extension/plug-in and it works with Firefox 2.x. Internet Explorer 7.x will be supported soon.

Download here.

The team behind Nokia PC Phone is small but ultra-entrepreneurial one. I guess it’s not too extravagant to say that the fate of the whole concept will be largely determined by your feedback and the market adoption during the next few months.

So use your opportunity well.. How do you like this first version? What do you think we should do next, to make it mind-blowingly amazing?

Ps. please forgive us for all the typos and occasional bad grammar in web pages… We’ll fix those in due course.

Pps. we are using a less scalable download infrastructure this time. Please be patient (and do tell us) if you experience slow download speeds.

The chieftain of our Channels team replied to your feedback:

Dear Bloggers,

I am very delighted to read your comments about our Channels Beta3 service release. Throughout this project our intention has been to create a world class mobile media experience with superb content and great features, so we are extremely happy to see ALL of your comments, criticism and improvement ideas alike.

Within the first 24hours we have been truly amazed on the reception of this service. Some people have already put videos on the rotation feature in YouTube and many more have been writing about the service on blogs. Furthermore, we have seen over 1700 people from about 100 countries and more than 330 different carrier networks to take it into use – worldwide. Thanks for your support and interest! This is just awesome Naturally this puts a lot of pressure on us to meet up with your needs and wishes.

Let me quickly comment on a few things that have already been brought up:

** “the first page is ugly as hell (”stop following the news etc”). change it!”
tt: This will disappear from the final product. Until then the splash will provide you some information about the beta release you are currently using. But, of course we could try to make it a bit more appealing for Beta4

** i don’t like the fact that donwload bar is hiding.
tt: This is actually a bit of a bug, and we will put this on our fix list.

** why help files weren’t “embedded” in the installation file
tt: We are waiting to receive our final UI translations for 48 different languages, including help texts. Whether we include all help texts in the basic SIS or have just English there and let the other languages be downloaded when in need still needs to be decided.

** I don’t understand where this application fits.
tt: This is a very good point. From media consumption perspective it should fit exactly for that - to consume media on the mobile. Who knows, in the near future the application (icon) may completely disappear leaving us just the media brands visible! Or what do you think..??

** …useful but still looks ugly
tt: As said above, the application’s user interface may become “obsolete” but media interfaces will always remain. As with many things in life, also UIs have a limited life span and will need to be refurbished from time-to-time with something more contemporary and fresh.

** The only suggestion I can make right now is something you’ve clearly already planned: add more service providers.
tt: Point taken!

** The font is too small in the new version
tt: We are moving towards using system fonts and introducing Unicode support (bringing support for Arabic, Thai, etc). I guess it would be a nice feature for the user to be able to change font size on the fly…

** …I initially hoped Channels would be was a proper RSS reader with a built-in RSS feeds catalog
tt: This is an interesting comment. Dont you feel WidSets and other (pure) RSS readers already fill this space well enough? Our vision has been that branded media feeds in Channels should have much more content and be more comprehensive than just news headlines.

** …doesn’t take advantage of E90 internal display.
tt: This is a tricky one! We have utilised the E90 screen size but not to the maximum, true. Currently in the E90 internal display we copy a “double” screen mode using the same graphical components used with high resolution S60 devices such as N80, E60 and E70. But I agree, it would be nice to utilise more of the internal screen for content display. This is something we will most likely have to investigate further!

** Very clumsy and slow scrolling, far from being smooth.
tt: PetteriV, can you send us feedback directly through the feedback button and tell what terminal where
you using. We have worked on this a lot and made many improvements along the way. But much could still be done – agree.

** Page up/down badly needed (maybe 2 and 8 keys like in Opera Mini?)
tt: This is good idea. We will take it into our feature roadmap!

** The popping ad is really irritating and confusing.
tt: There are few reasons for the “pop-up” ad, one being the fact that we need to show and retrieve them while reading stored content. Hence it may be that an ad has not arrived due to latencies on networks when the actual content is already drawn on the screen – or even withdrawn from the screen. So, we need to find ways to detach the ads from the actual content. And this is by the way it is done in physical papers too, ads are always in their own columns separated from the actual article texts. But, we need to finetune how the ads appear! Let’s see how they feel after that.

** Iconifying the display layout.
tt: Rajesh, could you elaborate more this idea of yours via the feedback button.

** An option to turn off the auto-rotate would be nice.
tt: This is already implemented. Go to main carousel and choose Options > Rotate screen off.

** .. how much memory your downloaded papers are using..
tt: Yes, we have a framework of memory management in plans.

What comes to general and immediate crashes and bugs please report these to email: channels.support@nokia.com. We will work hard to iron those out

Once again, many Thanks too all of You who spent the time to drop a few lines to us.
yours, -tatu

Quick note: we just made a minor update to Download! for PC:

• a couple of annoying bugs fixed
• support all standard S60 languages added (hence the 4 installation packages for different regions)

Overview of the app:

Download! for PC enables you to discover mobile content using a PC. When you connect your mobile device to the PC, Download! for PC automatically synchronises with the corresponding software on your device. This makes it easy for you to find, download and manage content that is compatible with your device.

Despite all the talk about web stuff (insert your favorete zibblr/dibblr/gibblr service here) revolutionizing the media world, there’s something inherent about traditional media brands such as New York Times or Helsingin Sanomat that I just love.

Therefore, I’m delighted to announce that we have launched a new, personal media service called Channels at Nokia Beta Labs:

Through Channels, international and local branded publishers provide you advertising paid daily news, sports and entertainment optimized for mobile devices. You can access your favorite publications via WiFi of GSM, and read either online or offline.

Channels is the new version of the existing Kanavat service that has been piloted in Finland since late 2005. This new international service provides significant improvements to the user interface, makes the content catalogue global and adds on pleasant advertising experience - so that you can enjoy the service for FREE.

The service is very easy to take into use. No registration needed.

In the coming weeks, new features and new publications will be added to the service. This will happen automatically and does not require any action from you. We are open to improvement suggestions and new ideas - please give us feedback!

As always, please send your feedback either (1) privately to the feedback form, (2) publicly to the comments section of this post, or (3) by writing your thoughts at your own blog - just remember to link back. The development team is listening.

Bonus feature: as a sign of things to come, the team has made the screen rotate automatically, depending on how you are holding your device. Note that this works only on latest devices with built-in accelerometer such as N95.

Yesterday, Nokia officially announced:

Discover and listen to radio shows broadcasted over the internet with the Nokia Internet Radio service now available. The application can be downloaded for free from http://www.nokia.com/internetradio and will also be embedded in upcoming Nokia S60 3rd edition devices.

It’s really good, go try it!! (warning: be very careful with data transfer charges)

As the app is still in beta, you might wonder: why isn’t it included under Beta Labs?

Well, it was a conscious decision. Nokia Internet Radio is very mature as a “beta” already, and therefore your feedback wouldn’t have had as big of an impact as with other Beta Labs applications. In essence, the case is similar to Nokia Multimedia Transfer 1.2 Beta for Mac, which we didn’t include to Beta Labs website either.

At Beta Labs, we promise you a chance for seeing your suggestions come to life. And I believe we shouldn’t dilute this promise by including too mature items. Of course, I’m happy to post a quick link to such items, with some juicy insider info, through this blog.

What do you think, does this approach sound fair?

Ps. regarding Nokia Internet Radio compatibility, see the heated debate in All About Symbian, tamed by Mr.Litchfield’s enlightened guess: On the compatibility issue, I think it’s a case of “we’ve tested it on these devices, others may not work (yet)”