Steve Litchfield writes at All About Symbian:

It’s not every day that you get direct feedback from the team behind a major manufacturer’s software project. Following on from my Maps 2.0 preview, Nokia got in touch, answering some of my criticisms and giving more information about the future of the product. What’s going to be added next to Maps, how to plan routes for free, why the satellite images aren’t quite there yet, integration with Location Tagger and a future web-based map sync tool, it’s all covered.

Nice.

I loved Steve’s comprehensive preview, but even more, I love the fact that our Maps team truly listened - and took time to talk back. I think we have a big and hairy win-win thing going on here.

In an ultra-agile way, Nokia Text Messenger for Windows Vista has now been updated to 0.0.9.0.

Changelog: improved recipient selection and maturity improvements.

Thanks for all the bug reports and improvement suggestions you have sent us!

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata from Nokia Location Tagger team.

Hello everyone. We are back with the updated Nokia Location Tagger. What’s new?

• Support more devices. There were reports from the previous version that it does not work on many non-Nseries devices. This version should work on most S60 3rd Edition devices. Please let us know if it doesn’t work on your specific device/firmware. Note that you can use Nokia LD-4W if your device does not have built-in GPS module.
• Improved usability. Many of you mentioned that GPS takes some time to lock and sometimes you miss the moment. There are two improvements in this version.
  • If there is no GPS signal when you capture a picture, it will be tagged with the last known good position in the last 1 hour. The previous version uses 10 minutes only.
  • If there is no last known good position in the last 1 hour, the picture will be put in a queue until timeout. You can set the timeout value from the Settings menu. If your device is able to lock the position before timeout, all pictures in the queue will be tagged with this new position.
• Added “Show on map” feature. You can now select Options | Show on map menu from the Logs tab to show the location of the picture on Nokia Maps. This feature works only on S60 3rd FP1 devices with Nokia Maps installed, such as Nokia N95.
• Many bug fixes. We have fixed a nasty bug that may drain your battery very fast in certain situations.

We have also created a new Flickr group for Nokia Location Tagger. If you have great pictures that you want to share with other users, feel free to join the group and share your pictures.

One more thing, as mentioned by Kevin from S60 Multimedia blog, location tagging will be integrated on Nokia N82 soon. Anyway, we will leave Nokia Location Tagger available at Beta Labs to support other devices.

Link: Nokia Location Tagger at Beta Labs.

Nokia Wellness Diary was updated to 1.14. Changelog:

• Spanish version
• 4 new variables added (blood glucose, waist, alcohol and tobacco consumption)
• Imperial units support

Nokia Text Messenger was updated to 0.0.8.1. Changelog:

• Sidebar crashed when connection was lost to the phone
• Contact database is updated when first time opening the gadget
• Several performance and stability fixes
• SMS sending is possible when the inbox is empty
• PCCS version check removed from the installation

Note: I suggest waiting until tomorrow. The team just found an additional minor issue, and tries to release a fix by this evening.

Hereby, we’ll declare Share Online 3.0 as graduated. The beta period is over, and the app (the same version as we released under Beta Labs on 25 January) is available for the masses at Nokia Sharing and Blogging website. Hurrah!!

What’s new, is that the application now supports - in addition to Flickr and Vox - a brand new-service Share on Ovi in following countries:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South-Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, U.S.A., Venezuela, Vietnam.

Thanks everybody for your contribution!

Here’s a small - but really nice - treat for Windows Vista users (about 15% of Beta Labs visitors). Nokia Text Messenger is a Windows Vista gadget, with which you can view your latest SMS messages, and send new ones, conveniently from your Windows Vista sidebar.

It should work on all Nokia devices compatible with PC Suite. Just make sure you have 6.85 or later installed.

In case you are wondering about overlaps in Beta Labs application list, we are investigating different approaches for marrying your phone with your PC, including Nokia PC Phone, My Mobile Site Widgets, and now Nokia Text Messenger. What do you think about the latest approach?

Here’s a wild (and not-fully-thought-out) idea: would you want to become the video star of Nokia Beta Labs?

The thing is, it would be fun and useful to add explanatory videos to all Beta Labs application pages. Nothing too fancy, just something that would help people decide whether something is worth a try. Of course, we could hire professional scriptwriters and actors and to do the videos, but given the nature of this site, somehow it wouldn’t feel right. An honest word from a fellow user might be better for everyone.

If you are interested:
1. Pick your favorite Beta Labs application
2. Shoot a 1min explanatory (engaging! fun! interesting!) video about it. For example, record a N95 screencast with TV-out.
3. Upload your video somewhere, and send the video link to the comments section of this post
4. Tell your “price”: is fame, exclusive previews, and exclusive access to Nokia development teams enough, or what would you want in return? Of course, you can also tell this later privately. If possible, however, I’d prefer to keep cash out of the relationship, in order to maintain certain level of integrity.

If we get good candidates, let’s vote for the best: 50% user votes + 50% Nokia votes.

Heh.

Below some examples about what other companies have done:
Example 1 by Google product managers
Example 2 by Google and Common Craft
Example 3 by Apple
Example 4 by Nokia product managers
Example 5 by S60 online marketing

Guest blogger: Martin Ramsin from Nokia Maps team.

It’s been a week since the release of Nokia Maps 2.0 Beta and the team has been busy demoing the new features on Mobile World Congress in Barcelona but now we are back and listening to you.

Thank you each and every one of you for sending feedback. Both positive and negative feedback is more than welcome. We are eagerly reading your comments as it will help us improve our application. Here are some answers for the questions & comments. Please keep on commenting, we are continuing to monitor this page for further feedback, improvement ideas, errors and comments :).

The application works in S60 3rd edition feature pack 1 onwards. You can check the 3rd ed FP1 devices from this link.

The UI errors which are visible in E90 will be fixed, no doubt about that. Sorry for not putting it under the known problems. The “not on road” issue in Drive is another one that we are fixing. Map tutorial and traffic feature will be available in the final release.

The route planning feature is not gone. You can in fact make a route with multiple stopovers - this is new in Nokia Maps 2.0. Just select a location, press the joystick and select Add -> to route. You can add other stopovers from the Options-menu. Another way is to go to Favorites – Routes and create a new route from there…

If you experienced that a license purchased with previous version of Maps is no longer working it is probably due to a bug in the application but the license is not lost. Try to do an update (Options – Extras – Drive&Walk – Select the region – Options – Update) or in worst case install the official version of Nokia Maps at maps.nokia.com.

The list of purchasable navigation regions will grow in the final release. There will also be larger navigation regions available by then.

As mentioned earlier we have new map data available for Nokia Maps 2.0. Be sure you have the latest map data when using the walk feature since there are much more pedestrian pathways, for example through city parks, for many cities. Use the new Map Loader to update the maps.

We will go thru all your ideas how to improve the Nokia Maps application user interface. Thank you once again for the valuable feedback :).

Nokia Maps team

Folks, I have some good news, and some bad news.

• Good news: Nokia Beta Labs traffic quadrupled this week. Yay!!
• Bad news: people have started complaining that we at Nokia (especially me) don’t respond to feedback as actively as we used to.

If you wonder why, there’s a really simple explanation: the current Beta Labs feedback and conversation system doesn’t scale too well. In the Linux world, there’s an old saying that “Linus doesn’t scale”, meaning that Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux kernel, can’t deal with everything and everyone in the Linux community. As it happens, I don’t scale either, in the Beta Labs context. We need to figure out something new.

So how should we solve this problem?

In addition to deploying new tools, I can see two alternatives:
- bring the middlemen back (wrong solution, I believe)
- get rid of the last one (gee, this just might work!)

The proposal in pictures:

How does this sound?

Please note that most Nokia development teams have been focusing on their day-job, developing cool stuff for you. Typically they don’t have enough experience or resources for whole-heartedly engaging in public dialogue with the beta user community (= 1% of the most passionate Nokia users). Therefore, even if everybody would love the idea, it will probably take some time before everything works flawlessly. I hope you can bear with us, and accept the fact that Nokia will not reply to most of your comments. But trust me, we are listening.