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.

Guest blogger: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service

Dear Beta Enthusiasts,

We are now please to distribute the latest of the Channels service – namely the Beta5 – which incorporates some significant new features as well as a simplified user interface.

First of all, the experience takes you directly into the tab view where All headlines is the starting point. We have added for you the Editorial channel as default, but you may subscribe to more content by selecting Add content from the options menu or by navigating left to the My contents tab and clicking the Add content button.

Furthermore, we have added an intelligent mechanism that updates the subscribed contents automatically on the background. Without the Channels application running, installed WiFi Internet connections are tried first and when one is available and working full contents get updated. If WiFi is not available, only headline titles get updated using selected Internet connection. When Channels application is running selected Internet connection is always used for background updates. User may turn the background update off by selecting Options -> Settings -> Update content off.

What comes to YOU, our dear users, we have been very pleased to see you coming from all over the world. For the past three “beta” months about half of you have come from Europe, but other parts of the world such as India (about 13%), South-East Asia Pacific (about 11%), North and Latin America (abt 12%) and Middle East Africa (about 8%) have also been well represented. The service has had about 3500 unique users monthly and page views reached over 30000 in March.

Looking forward to provide you more publications – we got a Comics channel coming – and yet a better experience!

Thanks for your support
-tatu

Guest writer: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service. Download here.

Image: improved Nokia Channels user interface.

Dear all,

The “still alive after one week – hooray!” mark has been passed with Channels service and it has been an interesting journey along the way. First of all, the service has attracted now way over 4000 unique users from 115 countries and 350+ different networks. Secondly, every day roughly 400 different people enjoy the available publications. It is also quite interesting to point out that every day out of those 400 different users 60% are returning users – ie. they have used the service some other day before. So it seems like people do like to come back, at least as long as our service can perform and has NO bugs…

… which nicely brings us to the topic of suggestions and ideas from You!

On 10th of Dec Bogdan wrote us about increasing the number of service providers. On Monday this week we converted few channels from the existing Finland pilot to new production system. These channels include publications from Talentum media: Arvopaperi, Markkinointi&Mainonta (M&M), Talouselämä, Tekniikka&Talous (T&T), Tietoviikko (TiVi), Talentum.com.

On 10th of Dec kanta wrote about the too small font size. Well, a new system fonts based version of the service has been implemented supporting both non-latin characters (Arabic, Thai, Chinese etc.) based publications but also allowing user to choose between five different font sizes (smallest, small, normal, large, largest). This feature is built into the coming Beta4 release.

On 11th of Dev Petteri V wrote about the badly needed page up and page down keys (with a press of number two or eight respectively). This has also been implemented to Beta4 release.

On 17th of Dec kanta wrote how Channels can’t be closed from Task List. This was due to a pending removal of app having been set as a system task (disabling user to cancel/close the process). This has been fixed for Beta4.

In order to make the splash page more appealing, we have added some flowers to it too

Some new issues reported:

The incremental update is corrupting the data, ending up with duplicate/empty news categories and articles.
tt: To our understanding this must refer to issues seen in Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish feed). However, the abnormalities in the front page were not due to corrupted data but rather due to how the content feed was constructed on Helsingin Sanomat end. We have already been in touch with HS to correct the feed.

If content was downloaded text only, and then loading all content is switched on, perhaps the incremental download should be able to load the images also for already loaded text-only articles?
tt: This feature has been intentionally implemented with only future downloads in mind. I.e. in changing from “Load text only” to “Load all content” is designed not to “update” earlier loaded articles.

The ads interfere with the menu. The ad pops up and the ad link is followed when using and selecting an item from the menu.
tt: Known issue and being worked on.

Sorting headlines takes forever.
tt: Bear with this for a while. We have a much improved UI design/flow coming out in Beta5 together with background downloading+server sorting of headlines -> making instant entry to headlines view.

There should be more than 16 headlines shown.
tt: Yes, depends also on the “depth” of the content feed

The headlines view should be more compact. The full headline (or at least two-three lines) should always be seen without highlighting it. Remove the empty space and images and show more text.
tt: Let’s see what we can do about this. Available space for text is also controlled by physical screen size/dimension since platform fonts get rendered differently in different screens (they do not look the same nor do they consume the same space for same screen resolutions).

The order of the subsribed channels should be changeable, i.e. the order the tabs in My headlines and the order in My channels. So that the most used could be moved to first in the list, i.e. faster to use.
tt: This will be implemented in Beta5.

For some of Help the last lines of the text is not shown. Fix the incorrectly shown apostrophes as well.
tt: there could be a small bug here. Incorrect characters will get automatically fixed with system/unicode fonts.

So, this is the latest for Channels. We sincerely hope you keep on enjoying the service and stay tuned for the 1st of January Beta4 release: new publications coming live from Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and United Kingdom!

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008

Yours,
-tatu t

The chieftain of our Channels team replied to your feedback:

Dear Bloggers,

I am very delighted to read your comments about our Channels Beta3 service release. Throughout this project our intention has been to create a world class mobile media experience with superb content and great features, so we are extremely happy to see ALL of your comments, criticism and improvement ideas alike.

Within the first 24hours we have been truly amazed on the reception of this service. Some people have already put videos on the rotation feature in YouTube and many more have been writing about the service on blogs. Furthermore, we have seen over 1700 people from about 100 countries and more than 330 different carrier networks to take it into use – worldwide. Thanks for your support and interest! This is just awesome Naturally this puts a lot of pressure on us to meet up with your needs and wishes.

Let me quickly comment on a few things that have already been brought up:

** “the first page is ugly as hell (”stop following the news etc”). change it!”
tt: This will disappear from the final product. Until then the splash will provide you some information about the beta release you are currently using. But, of course we could try to make it a bit more appealing for Beta4

** i don’t like the fact that donwload bar is hiding.
tt: This is actually a bit of a bug, and we will put this on our fix list.

** why help files weren’t “embedded” in the installation file
tt: We are waiting to receive our final UI translations for 48 different languages, including help texts. Whether we include all help texts in the basic SIS or have just English there and let the other languages be downloaded when in need still needs to be decided.

** I don’t understand where this application fits.
tt: This is a very good point. From media consumption perspective it should fit exactly for that - to consume media on the mobile. Who knows, in the near future the application (icon) may completely disappear leaving us just the media brands visible! Or what do you think..??

** …useful but still looks ugly
tt: As said above, the application’s user interface may become “obsolete” but media interfaces will always remain. As with many things in life, also UIs have a limited life span and will need to be refurbished from time-to-time with something more contemporary and fresh.

** The only suggestion I can make right now is something you’ve clearly already planned: add more service providers.
tt: Point taken!

** The font is too small in the new version
tt: We are moving towards using system fonts and introducing Unicode support (bringing support for Arabic, Thai, etc). I guess it would be a nice feature for the user to be able to change font size on the fly…

** …I initially hoped Channels would be was a proper RSS reader with a built-in RSS feeds catalog
tt: This is an interesting comment. Dont you feel WidSets and other (pure) RSS readers already fill this space well enough? Our vision has been that branded media feeds in Channels should have much more content and be more comprehensive than just news headlines.

** …doesn’t take advantage of E90 internal display.
tt: This is a tricky one! We have utilised the E90 screen size but not to the maximum, true. Currently in the E90 internal display we copy a “double” screen mode using the same graphical components used with high resolution S60 devices such as N80, E60 and E70. But I agree, it would be nice to utilise more of the internal screen for content display. This is something we will most likely have to investigate further!

** Very clumsy and slow scrolling, far from being smooth.
tt: PetteriV, can you send us feedback directly through the feedback button and tell what terminal where
you using. We have worked on this a lot and made many improvements along the way. But much could still be done – agree.

** Page up/down badly needed (maybe 2 and 8 keys like in Opera Mini?)
tt: This is good idea. We will take it into our feature roadmap!

** The popping ad is really irritating and confusing.
tt: There are few reasons for the “pop-up” ad, one being the fact that we need to show and retrieve them while reading stored content. Hence it may be that an ad has not arrived due to latencies on networks when the actual content is already drawn on the screen – or even withdrawn from the screen. So, we need to find ways to detach the ads from the actual content. And this is by the way it is done in physical papers too, ads are always in their own columns separated from the actual article texts. But, we need to finetune how the ads appear! Let’s see how they feel after that.

** Iconifying the display layout.
tt: Rajesh, could you elaborate more this idea of yours via the feedback button.

** An option to turn off the auto-rotate would be nice.
tt: This is already implemented. Go to main carousel and choose Options > Rotate screen off.

** .. how much memory your downloaded papers are using..
tt: Yes, we have a framework of memory management in plans.

What comes to general and immediate crashes and bugs please report these to email: channels.support@nokia.com. We will work hard to iron those out

Once again, many Thanks too all of You who spent the time to drop a few lines to us.
yours, -tatu

Despite all the talk about web stuff (insert your favorete zibblr/dibblr/gibblr service here) revolutionizing the media world, there’s something inherent about traditional media brands such as New York Times or Helsingin Sanomat that I just love.

Therefore, I’m delighted to announce that we have launched a new, personal media service called Channels at Nokia Beta Labs:

Through Channels, international and local branded publishers provide you advertising paid daily news, sports and entertainment optimized for mobile devices. You can access your favorite publications via WiFi of GSM, and read either online or offline.

Channels is the new version of the existing Kanavat service that has been piloted in Finland since late 2005. This new international service provides significant improvements to the user interface, makes the content catalogue global and adds on pleasant advertising experience - so that you can enjoy the service for FREE.

The service is very easy to take into use. No registration needed.

In the coming weeks, new features and new publications will be added to the service. This will happen automatically and does not require any action from you. We are open to improvement suggestions and new ideas - please give us feedback!

As always, please send your feedback either (1) privately to the feedback form, (2) publicly to the comments section of this post, or (3) by writing your thoughts at your own blog - just remember to link back. The development team is listening.

Bonus feature: as a sign of things to come, the team has made the screen rotate automatically, depending on how you are holding your device. Note that this works only on latest devices with built-in accelerometer such as N95.