Active Contributor

Any Beta Labs community member can earn the Active Contributor badge by - you guessed it - being active on the site!  Giving feedback, commenting to others' threads, and rating the helpfulness of others' posts all contribute to your reputation as an Active Contributor.  You'll get the badge if your activity over the past six months is over a certain threshhold, and it's likely that if you have one of the three badges already mentioned you'll get this one too.

Top Contributor

Beta Labs community members earn the Top Contributor badge when they are active on the site AND valued by others.  Helpful ratings on posts and comments as well as selections of posts by admins to the Editors' Picks contribute to your reputation as a Top Contributor.  Like with the Active Contributor badge, you'll get the badge if your reputation over the past six months is over a certain threshhold.  The reputation system is still pretty new, though, so we do expect many more Top Contributor badges to be given out in the coming months.

Contributor of the Month

To identify those that have been specially awarded for their valuable contribution.

Staff

To identify posts and responses from development teams.

As before these badges appear on any comment you make at the site and in your Profile.  We hope these badges serve as a way for contributors and development teams to more easily identify and recognize those that are putting in time and effort to make Nokia Beta Labs a thriving community.  So do continue to be active and remember to rate others' posts and comments as helpful if you want to give them some reputation points (or unhelpful if you want to discourage a particular kind of comment).

Lastly, a big thanks goes out to all our Active and Top Contributors!

- John, Community Facilitator @ Nokia Beta Labs

So now let's congratulate maximilian.schleiss as the contributor of the month for February!  He's been especially active in giving useful feedback to Custom Dictionary and to Beta Labs itself after we updated the site.

With spring weather just around the corner, we'll send you a fleece jacket as a token of our appreciation.

Congratulations!

-  John, Community Facilitator @ Nokia Beta Labs

- Daniel
Gig Finder team

The following use case is now supported with the changes in Ovi Mail 2.0:

Save a contact and view from device:

1. User opens an email from a friend in Ovi Mail on the web and sends a reply back
2. Ovi Mail shows a dialog box asking if he wants to add the person to his address book.  User says yes and fills in the entries and clicks on ‘Add contact’
3. Within a few minutes, the new contact appears in Ovi Contacts on the web because Ovi Mail now is integrated with Ovi Contacts
4. User decides to sync his phone to get the newly added contact on his phone. User can either initiate a sync from device or from Ovi Contacts on the web to sync his contacts
5. After the sync completes, user views the Phonebook on the device and the name of the friend and the newly added email address appear in the Phonebook on the phone

Ovi Mail 2.0 also comes with Arabic support to help customers in Arabic-speaking countries view their Ovi Mail account in Arabic. Over 280 Million people use Arabic as their first language. This was a challenging feature to implement considering the fact that it’s a right-to-left language and the Ovi Mail UI had to be changed to support this orientation.

Please try it out at mail.ovi.com or on your device and let us know what you think here at Nokia Beta Labs.

- Hem
Product Manager for Ovi Mail

• add people to your People menu
• set a screen name from your mobile
• search through your images in grid layout (touch UI version)

Due to the amount of images that get published every day, we thought it would be nice to be able to see public images from just certain people without the need to wade through the whole public image stream. As a result, we've now added the possibility to add people to your People menu. Simply click "Add to People" on a person's image and the images he/she publishes later on appear directly under his/her screen name in your People menu. This feature is available via both the mobile and web interfaces.

As only people who have set their screen name (a nickname that is visible to anybody) can be added to People menu, new clients also include a way to set your screen name from your mobile. This feature is found from the options menu under "Account Information" -> "Set screen name...".

The touch UI version also sees the return of a search grid so you can see an overview of your shots. The search view is accessible via the main menu as well as via the volume down key in image browsing mode.

We hope you enjoy these improvements.  Let us know what you think.

On behalf of Nokia Image Exchange team,

Janne Kaasalainen

Hi all,

We are pleased to introduce you to the new Beta release of Ovi Maps for mobile (v3.04) and have made a few tweaks to improve the performance and positioning.

Download the new Ovi Maps^Beta for mobile (v3.04) from Nokia Beta Labs and please let us know what you think in the discussion forums and surveys.

Many thanks and enjoy the new release!

Kee
Ovi Maps team

Nokia Sofware Updater Beta received magnificent support at Beta Labs. During the trial period we received valuable feedback through the discussion forum and our reporting systems. Between the first beta version 2.4.3 and the latest updated 2.4.5 version we have been able to significantly improve USB connection issues.

I would like to thank you for your support in making the update experience better for millions of users.

We have made the latest version of Nokia Software Updater available at http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate, and this means that the application has now graduated from Nokia Beta Labs.

- Mikko

Hello,

We have now included a new version of Nokia Software Updater. This version 2.4.5 contains corrections to issues you have reported in the Beta Labs feedback forum and also improvements we have worked on during this time. We have focused on the USB connectivity and I would like to highlight that the improvements are related to phone detection and application installation process, the update process itself is at the same good level as in the current public Nokia Software Updater. Try this Beta and give us your valuable feedback. We will be waiting!

Cheers,

Mikko

Hi all, we started yesterday deployment of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1.0.87 as web update for existing Nokia Ovi Suite users – our recommendation is, that when you see update notification in Nokia Ovi Suite about this new release, you go ahead and proceed to update into latest version, it contains many new improvements, bug fixes and features. We started distribution of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1.0.87 last week from Nokia Ovi Suite web pages so you might have already this latest Nokia Ovi Suite released.

We hope that you find use for new features in Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1, for example ovi.com contacts sync, video transfer and playback and device application updates. I’m also happy, that many users have noticed our support for Mozilla Thunderbird in contacts sync. We’ve put also effort into improving performance of the Nokia Ovi Suite, so you should see improvements in that area. Obviously, these improvements are something, that we continue working on.

Thanks for everybody for participating into this round of Nokia Ovi Suite Beta testing, your contributions are very important for us and we’re looking forward for your help in future Nokia Ovi Suite Betas. Our teams are again in full speed for new development and there’s many interesting things ongoing. For example, many of us are now working with their shiny new silver laptops :)

Cheers,

Nokia Ovi Suite team

BR, Samuli

We are trying a new approach, by which we aim to improve the service Beta Labs provides for all. And we are doing this with the help of the community.

Based on their activity history, we've selected a few users and empowered them with tools to help clean up the forum as it is getting more and more messy. What these users are able to do is:

1. Join threads, such as duplicates, together
2. Move misplaced content to the right place (e.g. changing a discussion to a bugreport)
3. Hide content like spam, illegal, offensive and other site-terms-breaking content. This is to be used very cautiously.
4. And of course flag content for admins to take a look at, like everybody else.

Additionally, quite a large amount of you very active users now have the ability to suggest such actions to be taken by admins.

So why are we doing this?

The reason we are doing tis is to make the service better – for you users as well as the development teams. We want to help other users, and we want to help development teams. The community has grown so large and the forum is getting so messy that both the members and the development teams are having a bit of hard time.

Guidelines

These are the guidelines the cleaning up will follow:

• It is to be done to help the community, to help individual users and to help the development teams.
• the site terms give guides on what kind of content we explicitly do not permit
• If you’re unsure what to do, you should flag the issue for admins, and they’ll get back to you
• Hide content cautiously (usually better to leave it if you’re unsure)
• Better to do a bit too little of moderation than a bit too much
• Again, we do this to help the community, to clean up things that are not in Beta Labs’ scope, to move things in their right places and so on.

What do you think?

Let's have a quick poll:

Hi,

Don’t you hate when you have the new phone in your hands which you know is full of all kinds of capabilities and rich features, but those application names and icons are just not telling what they actually do?

We have come up with an idea that what if you tell the phone what you are feeling at the moment – you feel Energetic, Lucky, Lonely, Happy, Hungry, Bored, Lost, Caring or Creative… and then the phone suggest few things you could do with it? Not showing all the possibilities at once, but the things that relate what you are thinking of at the moment. To study the idea further we have developed small application, Nokia Feel, for you.

Try it and tell us how you feel, and we put your ideas in to good use.

 - Roope

Hi!

We've been working on a new way to get feedback from you guys. We now have the capability to send you follow-up emails or SMS messages about the betas you've downloaded. As we wish to respect your free choice, we'd rather send the follow-up messages to only those of you who welcome them.

So kindly edit your profile, accept to be contacted and choose your preferred way for follow-ups. And you can of course opt out at any time.

Cheers,
Beta Labs crew

S40 support, bug fixes to improve client performance, and minor feature enhancements:

• Facebook – Upload photos to selected album
• Facebook – Timestamp improvement
• Twitter – Direct message
• Twitter – Post with Location
• Twitter – View  profile of people you are following and posted tweets
• Twitter – View own profile and posted tweets
• Twitter – Mark as Favorite

Learn more and download: Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta

Written by Tommi Vilkamo, Manager of Nokia Beta Labs

Once again, it is time to nominate the Beta Labs Contributor of the Month. This time, we sorted the list of registered Beta Labs users - more than 140000 already - in terms of how many of their comments had been marked as "helpful" by the community and "starred" by the Nokia staff. Among the leaderboard list (we won't show this in public because this is not a competition), there were mostly usual suspects. Thanks for sticking around, truly appreciated! But also, there were some new friends, including our new winner, luisfelipeperez:

Congrats!! While some of our Nokia colleagues found your tone of voice a bit hostile, you do write good stuff. As your prize, you'll get a Eva Solo Tea Brewer Gift Set, engraved with Nokia logo and all. Hope you like it!

 - tommi

P.s. there is a known issue with Luis's profile page, to be fixed

P.p.s. this tradition has lasted for more than 2 years by now. Let's have a quick poll:

We are pleased to present to you a new experimental application called Nokia Diagnostics. Our intention is to create a solution for helping millions of Nokia users diagnose, troubleshoot, and configure their devices with ease on their own. We believe that exposing this idea to the Beta Labs community and sharing this application prototype would help us realise just that.

With Nokia Diagnostics, you can diagnose, troubleshoot and configure your device using five different tests:

• Network Coverage test. You can get all the network related information and detect offline status & SIM card presence.
• Internet Connectivity test. Perform a real-time Internet connectivity test and identify the setting with which you can have a seamless internet access.
• Battery Charger test. Check if your device charges properly with the charger connected.
• Loudspeaker, Earpiece test. Check your loudspeaker & earpiece functionality.

Please download the application (requires login), try it out on your device, and post your feedback at Beta Labs. In particular, we are interested in hearing about other diagnostic tests you would expect to see in such an application.

Happy diagnosing...

- Ravi

We are pleased to publish Nokia Custom Dictionary on Beta Labs to share with the community and gather feedback. We designed this experimental application to address the wish that many S60 users have had: to be able to edit the list of words used by the phone for text prediction and transfer it between phones. 

Nokia Custom Dictionary does exactly that, and we’ve also given you the chance to import words from a text file.  This means you can quickly “teach” your phone commonly used words or even create specific word lists to be shared among a like-minded community, for example in the medical domain.

As with any beta launch, the application is not yet perfect. There are some known incompatibilities with some of the older S60 3rd edition devices. There might also be the odd functional or usability issue. We hope that with our enthusiastic Beta Labs community, we can uncover these teething problems together.

Please download the application (requires login) and share your feedback with us. We are eager to know if you find this application useful and how we can improve it further. Thanks in advance.

- Sethu

Written by Samuli Ylinen from Nokia Ovi Suite team

Hi and thanks for continuing support for Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1 Beta testing. We’ve processed lots of feedback coming from you, categorized those to different areas, studied and fixed many errors, added many new ideas into backlog. Now we’re ready to give you updated Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1 Beta release, where many of reported error reports are fixed. Many of your suggestions are under evaluation by our team for future Nokia Ovi Suite releases.

• Fixed for Thunderbird 3.0 support, now you can choose Thunderbird 3.0 for contacts sync in Nokia Ovi Suite
• Fixes for multiple crash errors detected during Beta testing, for example related to maps view and calendar sync
• Improvements in overall Nokia Ovi Suite stability
• Many fixes to sync reliability
• Fixes issues related to ovi.com contacts sync (automatic sync option for contacts didn’t work properly)
• Improved checking for new software updates and other fixes to software updater features
• Fixes to video support, improvements into video support stability
• Fix for SIS application installation (double clicking SIS now works properly and starts installation procedure into device)
• Many fixes to Nokia Ovi Suite UI localizations (languages)

Download updated Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1 Beta. Then proceed to test the updated Beta and try out issues which you have previously reported as errors. Hopefully you can write to discussion entries comments, did your error report get fixed. If error is still happening, we recommend you to report error through feedback form again.

Remember also to report feedback using Nokia Ovi Suite, we appreciate all feedback coming for us. You need to grow Nokia Ovi Suite UI bit larger, so that you can see feedback question widget inside Nokia Ovi Suite. We show these feedback question widgets regularly.

Cheers, Nokia Ovi Suite team

We previously launched a pre-Beta touch version of Nokia Image Exchange. This unfortunately had some issues that needed immediate attention. Today we have released fixes that should make the application more stable. Also included is some UI polish.

Likewise, the non-touch version is receiving update as well, also to address found issues.

Nokia Image Exchange is an experimental imaging service to make browsing and sharing images fun and easy. It aims to provide a seamless integration of a mobile image gallery application and a corresponding web-service. Nokia Image Exchange explores the possibilities of the mobile phone when it is enabled with always-on data connection and utilizes existing contact information as a basis for social networking.

Nokia Image Exchange for S60 touch is available for downloading at imageexchange.nokia.com. The touch version has been tested on Nokia 5530, 5800 Xpress Music, N97 and X6. Nokia Image Exchange is also available for other devices (S60 non-touch, S40) via Ovi Store. These versions are more mature and as of now offer more features.

On behalf of Nokia Image Exchange team,
Janne Kaasalainen

You can download Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1 Beta (sign in to access) and check the overview as well as “known issues” and FAQ for more information.

As you can see from screenshot, we’ve included way to send feedback directly from Nokia Ovi Suite for us. We will be asking questions and surveys through Nokia Ovi Suite from time to time, so we’re hoping to hear feedback from you often. So don't be suprised, if you see these questions coming out.

We’ve worked with many different things for Nokia Ovi Suite 2.1, but I try to summarize here biggest new items:

• support for syncing contacts with ovi.com, so now you can easily keep your contacts safe in ovi.com
• support for syncing videos from device to Nokia Ovi Suite, video playback and transferring videos from Nokia Ovi Suite to device
• updating device applications and distributing new device applications  (same feature as in devices “Software update” application)
• Windows 7 support
• support for syncing contacts with Mozilla Thunderbird
• new languages (Hindi, American English and Ukrainian)
• extended device support
• performance improvements
• improving overall product quality and stability, for example in sync

Lots of new features are obviously based on feedback for previous Nokia Ovi Suite release. I know that there’s huge list of new features, which you’re interested and  we’ve huge amount things ongoing and try to release new stuff for you guys every two-three months.  For those that have asked about Nokia Ovi Suite for Mac, I can say that we're working on it and Nokia Beta Labs folks will be the first ones to try it.

Cheers,
Samuli and rest of Nokia Ovi Suite team