And so it begins… Nokia headhunters asked me to add this advertisement to Beta Labs front page:

Heh. I guess you have proved to be a lucrative group of people for targeted recruiting campaigns. I wish we would have already a formal Beta Labs reputation system in place…

More as this develops.

Ask, and ye shall receive. We just updated Nokia Communication Center, addressing many of the issues you raised:

• Lot’s of stability and performance fixes
• Contact names can be shown for messages

Also, we raised the bug-o-meter status to yellow:

Download here.

Thanks for your valuable feedback!!

Guest writer: Mark Wheatley, Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC

Welcome to Nokia Music!

Thanks checking out this Beta version of our new Nokia Music PC application.

While there is other music management software out there, we’ve made this application more focused on the needs of mobile users. That is why our first release concentrates on those features that will give real value to people who enjoy their music on the move.

We talked to many users during the product development phase and they told us they want to update the music on their mobile device more frequently than they do at the moment. Many of them find the process time consuming and difficult. We created Nokia Music with that in the forefront of our minds and made it possible to rip CDs directly to a connected device (just drag and drop the CD icon to your device – job done!) and move playlists you have created while out and about back to your PC collection.

The techies among us will be interested to know that Nokia Music is one of the first applications to take use Microsoft’s new WPF technology which in the future will allow us to introduce some cool and innovative enhancements in the coming months.

It was also important to us when creating Nokia Music to take a standards based approach. What does that mean? Well, we have not created any proprietary connection protocols or metadata models. This means that Nokia Music should function with any MTP-compliant device, whether it be a Nokia device or another brand MP3 player.

When you open Nokia Music, it will be hard to miss the ‘Store’ tab at the top. We’ve started rolling out Nokia Music Stores in many countries around the world and when a Store is launched in your country, you will see various new features being enabled that enhance the Nokia Music experience further. Things such as artwork retrieval and a recommendations feature. Unfortunately, this Beta version doesn’t support the Music Store features yet.

As this is a Beta release, there are a few issues still to be resolved as well as some performance improvements we would like to make. In the meantime, thank you for trying Nokia Music and please post as many comments and suggestions as you have time to make. I am especially interested to hear the what of features you would like to see introduced in future versions.

Thanks again for your time,

Mark Wheatley
Product Manager, Nokia Music for PC

Guest blogger: Ole Kirkeby, Nokia Step Counter team

Nokia Step Counter does what it says on the tin: it counts the number of steps you take by analyzing how you ’shake’ your phone. Since most people have their phone with them everywhere they go, it is natural to use the accelerometer in an S60 product to track your daily activity.

Most commercial step counters require you to attach the measuring device to your belt. We have made an effort to ensure that Nokia Step Counter is accurate regardless of how you carry your phone. It should work fine if you have it in a pocket of your clothing, or a handbag you wear over your shoulder. The most challenging case we are aware of is when you have the phone in your hand while walking because then you ’shake’ it in a way that is not representative of how your body’s center of gravity move!

We are particularly interested in feedback on two topics. The first is the accuracy of the step counter. Can you fool it so that it picks up false steps, for example while you are driving a car with an unforgiving suspension, or can you make it ignore real steps, for example while you are shifting sideways along the shelves in your local supermarket? The second is the feature set of the application. Would you like to see more statistics in graphical format? Or perhaps a more profound summary which goes beyond the obvious steps/calories/distance numbers?

Last, but not least, we would like to hear from women! How do you carry your phone around with you during the day? If you don’t have any pockets in your clothing, or a belt, is it an inconvenience to use a mobile phone as a step counter?

- Ole

Download here.

Known issues: (don’t worry, we’ll fix these)

• If you have the Activity Monitor from research.nokia.com on your phone, remove it before installing the Nokia Step Counter (added 12.05.2008)
• Height and weight must be entered in cm and kg regardless of whether Metric Units is chosen in Settings -> User
• If the scheduler is disabled and the Step Counter is run past midnight statistics might be incorrectly allocated to different days

Guest blogger: Victor Brilon, Internet Tablet Video Converter team.

Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter has been updated and we’re thrilled to bring you this latest version. This latest release includes several major updates, including:

• A version for OS X that’ll run on Tiger and Leopard on Intel and PPC platforms. This is our first release for the OS X platform, so we are eager to hear your feedback on how it could be improved
• The codecs for the Windows version have been updated and hopefully we’ve fixed the bugs that the community has reported to us
• The Developer API has been updated based on user feedback. It now supports Python, Perl, and Java as programming languages to access the API. We’re very interested in seeing what the community can cook up using this feature.

Download here.

Thanks to our great Internet Tablet community, we’ve made some really good changes to this software and we hope you like it as much as we do. Please report any bugs you find at https://bugs.maemo.org.

Thanks,
Victor

Guest blogger: Martin Ramsin.

The Maps 2.0 beta is getting close to graduate and has been updated today. A lot of bugs have been fixed and some new features have been added. More details on that soon…

Download here.

Thanks for all the comments so far. Your feedback is very valuable!!

/The Nokia Maps team

After successful Text Messenger beta pilot (also updated today), the team behind Nokia PC Suite got all excited about co-creating stuff together with you here at Beta Labs. Today, they released a sneak preview of the new simplified concept for managing messages and contacts in Nokia PC Suite. For the beta trial period, we call the concept Nokia Communication Center. Depending on your feedback during the beta trial, this will be soon integrated as part of standard Nokia PC Suite.

Download Nokia Communication Center here.

Key features:

• Create and send messages easily
• Receive, view, forward, and reply to messages as they arrive
• Compose multimedia messages effortlessly with easy access to the images on both PC and device
• Manage messages, and sort and group them to quickly find what you are looking for
• Display all your messages in a timeline
• Manage all the contacts stored on your device
• Add new contacts with ease
• Create contact cards complete with thumbnail images

What do you think about the concept?

Also, feel free to report any bugs you might bump into. You can contribute by sharing your thoughts at the comments section of this post, or privately using the feedback form.

(note to self: we really need to improve our feedback  systems. More about this later.)

Guest blogger: Antony Pranata, Nokia Location Tagger team.

I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is Location Tagger has just been updated. The bad news is this version will be the last update on Beta Labs. Instead, location tagging will be integrated into selected future Nokia devices.

What’s new in this release?

• Persistent log. Now when you exit the application, your list of images in your logs tab will not disappear. When you delete an image from the Gallery of File Manager, the item will also be removed from the logs tag.
• File renaming. There is additional option in the Settings menu to rename tagged file. The file name will be added _NLT as suffix. For example, if the original file name is image001.jpg, it will be renamed to image001_NLT.jpg. This feature will allow you to easily differentiate between tagged and non-tagged files.
• Get location from cache. As you may know from our last posting that Location Tagger tags pictures with the last known position in the last 1 hour. If there is no last known position, it will put pictures in the queue until time-out. We added a new feature that allows you to get location from GPS device’s cache.
• Optimization and some bug fixes. This new version should run relatively faster than the previous one.

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone for sending in their feedback about Nokia Location Tagger. It has been great reading through all comments and suggestions for improvement. And although we have not yet been able to fulfil every wish, we sure feel we have improved Nokia Location Tagger with your help since its initial beta release.

- Antony

—

Editor’s note: we will keep Nokia Location Tagger in active Beta Labs application list for two weeks, after which we will move it to the archive (or should we call this a graduate?). You can continue using it, but no need to send us feedback anymore. As Antony mentioned, the productized version keeps evolving as integrated part of Nokia devices, not as a standalone application. Thanks everyone for your contribution!!

- tommi

Click the image to see full-resolution screenshots.

Even though some of the more technology-savvy folks don’t understand why somebody would want a branded media service and a content discovery system in the world of open internet and RSS readers, Nokia Channels Headlines keeps going strong. Now, we have re-packaged and re-branded the concept as Nokia Headlines. Go try it and share us your thoughts!

Download Nokia Headlines here.

Note: you will lose your previous subscription list in the update, sorry…

Changelog:

New features:

1. New name and icon: Headlines
2. If the battery level drops below 14%, the intelligent content background updater stops automatically.
3. After reboot background updater starts automatically.
4. Publication content packages are stored to memory card when available.
5. Possibility to offer “preinstalled” publications.
6. Add content item added to Option menu in My content view.
7. Possibility to fetch advertisements from publisher’s own Ad serving platform.

Key fixes:

1. Memory leakage fixed when browsing back and forth on headline tabs.
2. Memory full notification fixed.
3. Minor UI fixes in All content and My content views.

This month, it was Nokia Channels team’s turn to nominate the Nokia Beta Labs Contributor of the Month, April 2008.

So I sent them an email, asking who has contributed most valuable insights for developing Nokia Channels. Judging from the brevity and speed of their reply, seems that it was an easy choice:

From: Mr. Nokia Channels
Sent: 28. huhtikuuta 2008 12:16
To: Vilkamo Tommi (Nokia-OCTO/Espoo)
Subject: RE: Beta Labs contributor of the month?

kanta!

Congratulations Kanta!! And many thanks for your brilliant and truly valuable insights. Now I feel like a moron for once suspecting you not to be in the target user group of Nokia Beta Labs… How wrong I was.

I will contact you personally via email, so that we can ship you the prize: Beta Labs coffee mug, one-of-a-kind, designed by yours truly.