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: 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

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

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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.

We just had a cup of coffee with Ykä Huhtala and Jussi Kaasinen, the dynamic duo behind Nokia Sports Tracker. Or actually, it was a latte, as we were humbly celebrating our story being picked up by BusinessWeek in the article How Nokia Users Drive Innovation (good one!!).

This is good. The Sports Tracker success case and BusinessWeek’s blessing gives our user-driven-innovation approach a truckload of credibility, hopefully facilitating the whole Nokia transformation.

Anyway, as the discussion rambled on, Ykä raised a question… Does anybody know who has created this YouTube video?

It’s a nice marketing video about Sprorts Tracker, filmed in Curacao - the beautiful island where I happened to spend my honeymoon two years ago. The Sports Tracker team would like to get a high-quality version of this video for marketing purposes, but strangely enough, nobody seems to know who has created it.

Dear LazyWeb: if you have a clue, please drop us an email.

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

My Mobile Site widgets has been just updated to version 1.1. It has the same architecture as 1.0 enhanced with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC). We corrected and enhanced the existing widgets and added some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. We show also information about other mymobilesite.net users (Free/Busy information). This feature demonstrates the potential in the remote access provided by the Mobile Web Server.

New features and changes:

• Single Login, UI allignements, Windows installer for widgets,
• JSON-RPC between phone and PC
• Enhanced access rights handling
• New Calendar widget with Free/busy information
• SMS widget: New SMS information, delete SMS, drag and drop support
• Picture widget: Save, Rotate, Send image as MMS
• Small fixes in Call widget

What do you think?

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

Quick note: Gizmo for S60 was updated to v.1.1.013. (no change log available, sorry)

Also, the project just got a new product manager. The original one - lovely young lady who prefers to stay anonymous - is heading for new challenges*, and she asked me to publish this note:

Hi people! I would like to send you chocolate and flowers but instead I write a short boring note

I want to sincerely thank you for all your time and effort with Gizmo. You have had a great impact for developing the application but also our way of working. I also want to thank Tommi for the great work. Hope to meet you soon again in Beta Labs.

Ms Productmanager on behalf of the whole team

* = this is not a definite goodbye, as she liked you so much that she might come back with a cool new Beta Labs launch later this year…

There’s a competition that some of you might be interested:

Sign up for the Mobile Web Server Challenge and get a chance to win one of several prizes and an opportunity to show your winning contribution on the Mobile Web Server forums!

In nutshell:

• Your contribution: knowledge articles and/or software development
• Deadline: May 30, 2008
• Eligibility: some requirements, read the details carefully
• Prizes: Nokia Nseries devices and Ovi service vouchers

Good stuff. Details here.

If this works, it might make sense to arrange similar competitions in other areas too…

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

Sorry for the late post. I’m a typical developer who Tommi wrote about. I need to train/educate myself to treat public discussion with higher priority.

So what were the conclusions of My Mobile Site widgets trial?

• It seems that you like the concept of lightweight PC-Phone applications and this is a great platform to experiment with it.
• User feedbacks are very versatile. For example most of the feedbacks said that Signal widget is almost useless. But then someone wrote that he lives in the country side, and signal quality is a big problem there. So Signal widget is very useful for him.
• SMS widget was rated as most useful by far. The attention around the Text messenger Vista gadget proves this also.
• Tiny features around messaging like search capability was highly valued.
• Several feedbacks requested enhancements in UI, usability and more customization opportunities. We will try to do our best to correct them.

What’s next?

• The 1.1 release is under development. Basically we keep the 1.0 architecture with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC).
• We correct and enhance the existing widgets and add some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. To show what the potential is in the remote access through Mobile Web Server we will show information about other mymobilesite.net users also.

I raised the question about the ultimate desktop widget platform, but it seems that this is a hard issue currently. Honestly I don’t now the solution yet, but I will write down some thoughts in the Forum Nokia wiki. (Soon, I promise!)