Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi

I have also the opportunity to introduce my application by myself on the Beta Labs blog. Thanks to Tommi also from me. With my colleagues I have been working on this application in close cooperation with Nokia Mobile Web Server team (thanks to Jukka Eklund and others for their support). Thanks also to those guys outside the world who participated in our closed beta-trial and gave us many useful feedbacks. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My Mobile Site widgets is an application building fully on top of Mobile Web Server technology. That’s why we call it an extension. This application is in practice a set of smaller applications running on the PC. They are desktop widgets run by Yahoo! Widgets engine and they show information about the phone and provide access to some mobile features like SMS sending on the PC desktop. On the mobile side Mobile Web Server serves the requests of the widgets using some tiny Python scripts.

Our goal was to nicely integrate the mobile phone into the user’s “desktop experience” and utilize the current coexistence of PC and mobile phone. Desktop widgets give a nice opportunity to show you relevant information in a polite way while you are using your PC and allow you to use the good UI capabilities of the PC (bigger keyboard and screen) for mobile related features.

With these widgets we also wanted to demonstrate another way of using Mobile Web Server platform. This platform gives everyone the opportunity to implement such applications without deep S60 knowledge. If you are interested, then go to the wiki, learn how to develop them and start to implement your own widgets.

So have fun with it and let us know how you like it: What was the most/least useful widget? Were there any annoying usability issues? What features are you missing? What kind of new widgets would you like to see? How do you like Yahoo! Widgets? Currently that seems to be one of the most popular engines, but if there are good reasons then we can experiment with other engines too.

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata, one of the primary forces behind Nokia Location Tagger

First of all, I would like to thank Tommi for giving me an opportunity to be his guest blogger. My name is Antony Pranata. I am currently working as a software engineer at Nokia. Some of you may already know me as the Screenshot guy or S60Tips.com blogger.

Why am I blogging here? Tommi has an idea of letting the team who develop the beta application to “talk” directly to the public. That’s the reason why I am here. I am part of the team who develop the Nokia Location Tagger application (thanks to Maarten) that we launched today.

That’s for the introduction part. Now, let’s talk about business.

Today, we proudly announce a new application for Nokia Beta Labs, Nokia Location Tagger. What is it all about? Nokia Location Tagger is a small application running on “selected” S60 3rd devices that allows you to tag pictures captured from Camera application with geographical coordinates from GPS. The tagging process itself is sometimes called geotagging or geocoding (see also this article at Wikipedia). Technically, the location information is stored in the EXIF header of your pictures (.jpg file).

What can we do with the tagged pictures? You can upload them to the photo sharing sites, such as Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa Web, so that your friends know where the pictures were taken. If you want to keep them private on your PC, some photo organizer applications, such as Picasa (combined with Google Earth), are able to display location information. Please read the instructions at Nokia Location Tagger web page.

Just to give you a little bit of background, location tagging is planned to be a seamlessly integrated part of Nokia experience. Before we reach that point, we decided to release a standalone application to give you a sneak preview. We would like to hear your thoughts already now. What do you think about the product? Do you have any problems using it? What features do you want to have? Even if you don’t like it, please also tell us.

Note that Nokia Location Tagger will not be the final solution of Nokia experience. In the future, we will be “integrating” the user interface of location tagging into Camera and Gallery applications (no longer as a standalone application).

Enjoy tagging your pictures!

Yay! Share Online 3.0 beta just got updated, now versions available for:
- Nokia N95 / N82
- Nokia N76 / N81
- Nokia N73

Download here.

Last November, we decided to temporarily withdraw the S60 3.1 version (N95 etc.) of the popular Conversation application from Beta Labs, as some people reported SMS sending problems. This issue has now been fixed, and the app is again available for download.

Thanks for your patience!

Note: please don’t expect heroic development efforts or productisation for this application. This was a pilot project about a different kind of messaging experience, and as such, I think it has served its purpose really well. Thanks everybody for your feedback!!

Jukka just announced that the new beta release 1.2. of Mobile Web Server.

Full news here.

The long-awaited (yes, we heard you) E61 version of Nokia Sports Tracker beta is finally available for download.

Release notes here.

Go get it, tiger.

 Ps. if you find yourself too lazy for sports stuff, you can also try it while sailing or flying around.

Quick note: we just updated Nseries PC Suite 2.0 beta - download here.

Improvements all over the place.

Note: if you have an old version installed, please uninstall it manually before installing this new one.

We just updated Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter, the application for converting videos to Nokia Internet Tablets.

Main change: it now supports Microsoft Windows Vista. Yay!!

Other changes include:
- Misc UI, cosmetic, and functional issues fixed
- New output video codecs for even better video quality
- New input video codecs supported

New known issues:
- Copying files to your Tablet using Vista is slower than it should be
- Errors can occur when cache size is exceeded

We just updated Nokia PC Phone, the (surprisingly?) most popular Beta Labs app of the month, to version 1.2. 2078. As you can see from the release notes, this third public release was mostly about bug fixes.

Download here

Watch Nokia PC Phone demo

Thanks to your feedback, Nokia PC Phone is getting increasingly mature. Go try it!!

As you might have noticed, our Beta Labs initiative keeps growing fast, and it’s becoming an increasingly important playground for both Nokia and the lead-user community. In total, there are hundreds of Nokia stakeholders and thousands of active beta users involved, but operationally, it has been just a one-man team = yours truly.

Ah… So many opportunities, so little time.

As it happens, we need hire someone to help take this monster, once again, to the next level. We haven’t defined the role clearly yet, but in the early discussions, we quickly came to a conclusion that this would be an excellent growth opportunity for a curious and passionate master’s thesis worker in Helsinki area Finland.

Currently, we’re thinking something like:
- 50% hands-on work: helping me to run Beta Labs
- 50% master’s thesis: figuring out the right ways (and wrong ways) of doing beta trials and co-creation in the web age.

If this works, can’t really think of a better opportunity. In addition, should be a fun ride.

Stay tuned.