Note: I’ve been running it since it was released here and have not came across most of the bugs mentioned!

To be honest this is the day-to-day “Grunt” work you have to do and put up with as a beta tester!

What you think should be an “Alpha” in your eyes may be an acceptable “Beta” candidate to a larger organisation. There is only so much they can do before the get “Tunnel Vision”.

I’ve worked in program design and testing for a small company and I know it’s easy to get a set of test that you think puts a program through it’s paces but it’s not until you let it out in the real world where you find the bugs that you didn’t see.

There is only so much a group of designers can test on a program, they need to release it to a larger group of testers who are not so blinded by the code.

If you really think all the people here are innovators who are willing to give all their time and skills to improve your products, the first thing you should do is to hire them to get the product done as efficiently and fast as possible. You would get pretty darn impressive and innovative products out, something to really kick your competitors butt with.

However - sorry to break your dreamworld - most of the people here are just normal users of your phones, people who are looking for any interesting applications to run and take the most out of their (expensive) phones. For those people, Beta == more features. Like many people have said and referred to Gmail, the word Beta has ages ago lost the meaning which you use it for.

Especially Maps must be getting the attention of a lots of ordinary people, since you advertise the 2.0 Beta on the Nokia Maps home page. But ordinary people don’t tolerate bugs. Especially from a big company like Nokia. It just hurts your public image to release junk.

It just isn’t your (paying) customers’ job to do your job, i.e. find and fix the bugs. Hire some experienced software professionals (if you can find some) and finish the product internally before releasing to the public. Your customers will be happy, which makes your company happy, too.

You make a good point, though. Sometimes, people don’t understand the beta nature of this website and get upset about lower quality and incompleteness. I hope the traffic lights will help reduce the confusion.