NokiaBetaLabs

Nokia Bots updated, new location-aware Contact Bot added

Greetings from the Nokia Bots team!

We've been pleased to see all the buzz generated by Nokia Bots in the Beta Labs community, and are very exited about your feedback and many, many great suggestions. Thank you all!

We went through all the ideas, and after a careful evaluation picked the ones that we think will take Nokia Bots a big step ahead. After a couple of months of hard work, it is now time to give something back: a new release, which includes a new location-aware Contact Bot, developed based on Nokia Beta Labs user feedback.

Contact Bot is an adaptive contacts bar for your homescreen. It learns your most frequently called contacts in a similar manner as Shortcut Bot learns your most frequently used apps. This Bot was suggested by many Beta Labs users, and we think it is a great idea already as such! However, there's another treat in the new Contact Bot, which only appears after a few days of use: we made it learn your "home" and "work" places. This takes Nokia Bots to a whole another level, as now it is not only what you do with your phone that gets learned, but also where it all happens. Also this location-awareness was suggested by you, and we are very exited to hear your feedback.

So do try it out, and report back to us what you think. Please remember - as the whole Nokia Bots concept - the location-awareness is still experimental, and we would very much like to hear your experiences on how well it captures your places. We can already see many great opportunities with learned locations, and this is our first step to that direction.

Another much requested feature was support for more phone models. Due to high demand we made a thorough analysis on this topic, but in the end we were unanimous on the results: due to many technical limitations of the homescreen implementations, Nokia Bots cannot be reasonably ported to other current Symbian touch screen phones. Also the option of not using homescreen widget based user interface was examined, but we were not satisfied at all with the user experience of pop-up style of notifications. Therefore we decided to concentrate our efforts in taking Nokia Bots functionality further with a new Bot. This is not good news to many of you, but hope you understand.

The new Nokia Bots release is available for downloads immediately, so spread the news and if you've got a Nokia N97 or N97 Mini in your pocket, try it out now yourself!

Regards,

Ari, on behalf of the Nokia Bots team