For your efforts, navio1973, we'll give you a choice:

• Behind door no. 1 is a 1-year maps license for Ovi Maps. In case you don't have any use for such lisence,
• behind door no. 2 is a Super Secret Surprise Prize.

Congratulations!

Which door will you open, navio1973?

Here we go again -  this autumn's Here and now update.

Many thanks to Here and now users for all your feedback. Based on that we were finally able to solve the nasty wrong location problem that had us puzzled for quite a while. You can read the story in the forum if you are into technical details.

Also based on your feedback, the client now checks whether Here and now was started from the browser bookmark or from the application grid. On exit it returns to the browser bookmarks only if it was started from the browser. This was supposed to be in the summer release already, but it was left out due to a human error.

This release also fixes some bugs including one that is actually only visible when there are three or more previews. Which is nice, because we have just released two new services:

• Movies listing your favourite flicks nearby (OK, it also shows the ones you do not care about)
• Restaurants showing the fine dining possibilities around you (if they happen to be in the Guide - try it and you'll know what I mean)

Download the updated Here and now and please keep the feedback coming. New developments will be based on that.

On behalf of the Here and now team,

Pekka Rissanen

What if you lost your phone? How would you find it? Would your data be lost or were you clever enough to back it up? Is it a pain switching to a new phone because your settings and content are left behind?

Image: "Fish ate my Nokia phone". Source: The Sun

We want to understand what you do to protect yourself and how important the issue of sudden phone and data loss is to you. This brief survey is looking for the consumer view on how consumers protect themselves.

Currently Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 supports exactly 142 different device models from Nokia (over 200, if you count in all different variants). Lots of issues found by you have been incorporated into product during the development.

This is good opportunity for us in Nokia Ovi Suite team to thank you for your efforts. We’ve masses of feedback and feature suggestions from you available and we’re consolidating that feedback, what could be done in future Nokia Ovi Suite versions.

What comes to next versions of Nokia Ovi Suite? Our developers are already heavily working towards next Nokia Ovi Suite releases and our hope is, that we will get some new features and improvements available for you in coming months as new Beta releases.

Cheers, Samuli
 

Ovi Lifecasting really appreciates your feedback and as a token of appreciation Beta Labs rewards you with genuine Nokia Kontio rubber boots!

(click the image for more details)

It's autumn again, and the rains have certainly started at least here in Finland. If you were to encounter similar weather, then you definitely need a pair of these modern remnants from Nokia's past.

For those interested, I recommend reading the story of Nokia Footwear.

Share your favourite places with the world. You had a great evening in a nice restaurant or visited a beautiful exhibition and want to share the location with your friends? Know a great bar or club in your city? You can now create a place on Ovi Maps and share your favourite places with the world.

Ovi Maps is open to everyone, everywhere. You can now use Ovi Maps on any browser and any operating system for your PC or Mac. We now also have a limited functionality version of Ovi Maps available for Chrome, Opera, Linux browsers and everything else. We are working to bring the full rich functionality of the plugin Ovi Maps version to all browsers in the future.

Discover and share Good Things http://maps.ovi.com/goodthings

A Good Thing is anything cool you want to share with the world. Found a funky new hangout that no one knows about? Heard about a gig, flash mob or club night, and want to spread the word? Add it to Ovi Maps, and let everyone in on the fun. If you live in London, you even have the chance to glorify your Good Thing to the whole world by nominating it to be displayed on the giant signpost. 

The need for speed

We have been working hard on getting Ovi Maps running quicker and smoother for everyone, and we have made some improvements in this area. We still have more work to do, but we're moving in the right direction.

We hope you like this latest version of Ovi Maps for web. Head over to maps.ovi.com and check it out!

Cheers

Will - Ovi Maps team

Many of you have asked for S60 setup support for Ovi Mail and we’re happy to introduce it today. We just made the “Ovi Mail Setup” application available in Beta Labs for a wide range of S60 devices (see Download and Installation for supported devices).

What it is
This application allows you to sign-up for an Ovi Mail account directly from your S60 device. Or if you already have an Ovi account it will provision Ovi Mail and configure the email client on the device. And it installs a handy icon in the Installations folder for easy access to Ovi Mail.

What it isn’t
This is not an email client. You will continue using the existing email client on your device. If you’re already successfully using Ovi Mail on your device you don’t need to install this.

Webmail
We have also silently launched an update to our webmail interface. We have simplified the navigation on the left and made it more consistent from page to page. And we’re trying to keep up with the global expansion of Ovi Mail and have added 4 additional languages: Thai, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Finnish. Go to https://mail.ovi.com to see these changes.

We’re looking forward to your feedback on “Ovi Mail Setup”.

 - Dave

Hi all! As many of you know, Nokia Audiobooks has been a semi-official side-project of mine, something that I created two years ago just for fun, and for the sheer love of audiobooks. Lately, however, I have grown too busy to improve and maintain the app properly, so I thought it would be fair to call it a day and officially announce the project as archived (we left it available "as is"). Thanks for all of you who were kind enough to send feedback!!

Anyway, some of my colleagues have an interesting project ongoing in a related area, with potential goodies for you in the future pipeline. So all you book-lovers: please take this audiobook survey, and help them make the right decisions!! Also, note that we'll draw 3x$50 Amazon.com gift cards among the respondents.

[UPDATE: survey closed]

Thanks once again,

 - Janne

Now that we are getting closer to the "final" release, please take this Ovi Suite 2.0 beta user experience survey!!

We would like to hear your opinions about the new “voice guidance with street names” (TTS – Text to Speech) for Ovi Maps^Beta for mobile. Please help us improve this feature by completing the survey and also the opportunity to win one of 10 Nokia BH-503 Bluetooth Stereo Headsets!

The survey is now closed

Thanks to those who participated – We’ll be contacting the winners of the headsets shortly.

Many thanks,

Maps Team

Hey there,

It's been a while since we've written about the progress of Ovi Contacts client development here in the Beta Labs, so it is about time we give an update.

What has kept us busy over the last few months has been our effort to  get Ovi Contacts functionality ready to the software packages that ship in the devices right from the factory. We've successfully deployed Ovi Contacts to a variety of S60 devices and Series 40 products too and as you may have noticed it made it to the N900 as well. We're hoping that this is effort that will show its value over time, as you'll find more and more people to chat with.

The N900 chat also enables you to share your whereabouts in the status message. The way it is done in N900 is slightly more versatile from the S60 app version: it automatically resolves the street name for the place you are in, even if you have not stored the place name as a landmark. What do you think, is this a better solution for location sharing in your status, or did you prefer the way we have in the S60 app?

Related to the S60 app development, I should say that we just recently  made an updated version available of the app for 5800 XpressMusic and N97 (as some of you already noticed in the discussion forums ;-)). The new version of Ovi Contacts is much more stable, as quite a few early problems that we had have now been solved. Furthermore, this software release also contains a feature that has been long-waited and requested by most of the Beta Labs actives: more descriptive friend  invitation pop-up. In the new pop-up you can see who is the person behind the Nokia account username (i.e. firstname, lastname and profile image are visible to your friend who receives the invitation).

Looking through the comments in the discussion forums one thing is easy to pick up: quite a few of the people have been expressing their feelings about the product name, that it should be something else than "Ovi Contacts". We do have to take this seriously, as so far we've been only delivering fairly little contact management features and mostly the Ovi Contacts feature set has been focused on connecting via status updates and instant messages. To set this right, I'd like to throw the ball on to your side: to deliver on the Ovi Contacts, what should be the next 3 features we incorporate in to the app? We'll have to figure out a price of some kind for the best proposal, but regardless if you'll get the price or not, we truly value your input.

Thanks in advance!

-Kristian

Hi, we’re getting closer to final release of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 and started to push new update release of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta for you today. So, make sure, that you keep using or start up Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta and check for updates. If you don’t have Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta yet installed – you can download it from here. This release is important for us, as we are closing final release and we want to hear your feedback. If you have written previous error reports, please confirm that does it work now.

One thing that we’ve specially improved in this Beta version is photos sync, getting photos from device to Nokia Ovi Suite works now in much more reliable fashion. Let us know, if you find any problems in photos sync anymore with this Beta update. Also, we’ve continued work with performance, bug fixing and stability. Tell us how the Beta update went and did update work for example in office environment.

You, Beta Labs community, have helped us a lot in getting product into shape by providing tons of valuable feedback for us and we hope that you continue this with future Nokia Ovi Suite versions as well. And you keep us busy by providing improvement ideas :)

Thanks, Samuli

Hi all! Let me introduce you to the Nokia Braille Reader. We here at Nokia, and our partners as well, have been thinking of how to do something concrete about accessibility for quite some while. And now, our new Nokia Braille Reader application gives SMS for the blind and visually impaired. It captures received SMS messages and brings them to the foreground for reading using Braille and tactile feedback. The application was concepted together with actual users and researchers focusing on the topic, and we are now happy to show the first experimental version of the concept. We hope to get your comments and feedback so this application could be truly optimized to your use. We also want to share our enthusiasm in creating innovations for you and with you.

 - Roope

Fixed in this update:

• Conversion will avoid situations where disk space might go below critical level
• MIDlets are converted to internal mass storage if possible
• MIDlet with large RMS can be started
• MIDlets can access memory card root folder
• Support all Nokia specific JAD attributes

Minor changes:

• Updates to eSWT widgets
• Minor changes to bluetooth
• Reduced the amount of debug logging, which should give minor performance improvement

Know issues:

• Phone may become slow or unresponsive if it runs out of disk space on C-drive.
  Please ensure that C-drive will have at least 10MB of free disk space before installation.
• SSL connection does not work in all phones
  Nokia 5800 firmware version needs to be at least V21.0.017
• Backup and restore does not work for MIDlets on memory card
• Nokia specific globalindicators extension API  is not supported
• Please re-boot your device after installing the new version of JRT

- Nokia Java Runtime team

Hello,

The Nokia Messaging team is pleased to announce version 2.0 of the IM Beta! We’re adding support for the E71 and E63 devices as well as support for the Google Talk community. Nokia Messaging offers a desktop-like IM experience on your Nokia device. You can stay in contact with your friends across multiple communities, easily switch between and save conversations and login invisibly. We continue to add support for more devices and communities in all parts of Nokia Messaging. We welcome your feedback in the discussion forums here on BetaLabs.

Thanks, The Nokia Messaging team

Let's see if we have improved from the previous round:

Update: poll closed.

"cricfancy has been very active in finding more details about errors in Nokia Ovi Suite and has helped us a lot in improving the product."

So, congratulations cricfancy! For your efforts, we will send you Nokia MD 4 mini speakers! (Read a review at Symbian-Addict)

Once again, congratulations! Hope you enjoy them!

Hi all. Today is good time to open Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta, if you have that already installed. You will get new Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta package and can start using that. If you don’t have an old Beta installed, just download our latest build from the download page.

Our team is following the Beta Labs discussion very closely, quality engineers analyzing error reports, trying to follow through error cases and asking more information about errors, if needed. Please update your error reports: if somebody asks for more information, try to give that. Now, try again with updated Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 Beta and check if your error is fixed and report that back. Product managers follow feedback and suggestions and try to drive those to implementation or future releases of Nokia Ovi Suite. Your feedback counts and here are a couple of examples:

• You asked support for application installation and that’s now working. Try double clicking your device application (.jar, .sisx) in PC and you should get your apps easily into device. This works great also, when downloading apps from web.
• In performance side, we’ve done lots of work related to memory consumption and trying to optimize load times. We hope to hear your feedback, please write your comments in this discussion thread
• We hope to hear also your comments about photos and music sync, lots of error fixes have been made and also performance should better compared to older Beta, you can comment that in this discussion thread

Hello,

The Nokia Messaging team is pleased to announce the Social Messaging beta! This new client is the start of what will become the multi-community social networking client. As a part of Nokia Messaging, we expect operators to offer email, IM and in the future, mobile social networking all for one fixed low price. If you aren’t using the email or IM with Nokia Messaging, be sure to visit the email site and the E75 IM Beta to set up email and IM on your Nokia device. We continue to add support for more devices and communities in all parts of Nokia Messaging.

This is an early preview release straight from the Messaging labs. Today you get a chance to help us decide the features you like and the features you need. We know that this is an early release and we have a lot more planned but in the spirit of community involvement, help us drive our client forward and do even more today than you can from your desktop. We’ve included a new feature for adding your actual location to your status update, letting your friends click and see where you are with Ovi Maps. We will be expanding support for more devices and deeper feature support over the coming weeks and months, so please check back at BetaLabs for more releases.

Some of the highlights:

• Contextual homescreen widget – jump directly into posts to comment
• Post your thoughts and photos from the camera or gallery
• Share your current location in a post or in a message using Ovi Maps; view friends’ location
• Support for the Nokia N97 and Nokia 6700 classic, with more device support coming

We know you will want support for more devices, features and communities, but the question for today is, “What do you want in a mobile social messaging experience?” Please feel free to write comments on this post, in the discussion forums and follow Nokia Messaging on Twitter. We’re looking forward to working with you to create the best social messaging experience available for any platform!

Thanks for your feedback,
The Nokia Messaging team