Nokia Beta Labs Working Overtime, Many Applications Updated + Nokia Image Exchange

Not letting the holidays slow them down, the fellas over at Nokia Beta Labs have been extremely busy pumping out updates after updates before the new year. Because of my lack of time I haven't been able to try out all these updates, but I'll at least let you know what's been going on over there. Read more to see the updates...

Conversation Application - Threaded SMS

Conversation is an add-on application that allows you to follow your communication with contacts as streams of conversations, which it organizes, based on individual contacts. The application also makes it very easy to reply to received messages and continue an ongoing conversation with the contact.

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Nokia Audio Books

For client UI, there are some small but nice improvements. You can now enable normal clock in UI view, so there is no need to do any task switching to go to idle screen to look what time it is. This has been sometimes irritating because at least I am using my phone also as a clock and have to check time many times when using audiobook client. Also sleep timer is improved and you can now set it for different time intervals. You also get status display showing in minutes, how much you have time left in sleep timer. Also if you have book with length more than 24 hours, the UI is now displaying the time correctly. At least in Finland, there are many good books with duration of 24 hours or even more. In English markets, unfortunately books are too often butchered to abridged versions of couple of hours, which should be capital crime.

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Step Counter - For Exercise

Our first update of the Nokia Step Counter, which was originally released on May 9th 2008, offers two significant improvements frequently requested by users on the Beta Labs blog: better power management and support for some new S60 products. Here is a list of the new features.

* Support for the following S60 products: N95, N95 8GB, N82, N93i, 6210, N79, N85, N96
* Export of step data in CSV format (in Diary, select Options -> Export To File)
* Sound notifications (in Settings, General, Sound Notification. Use your own alert sounds by replacing alertsteps.aac and alerttarget.aac in E:/StepCounter/AlertSounds)

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Nokia Email Service Graduates, Now Part Of Nokia Messaging

Here are the highlights of this release:
* Support for Yahoo! Mail
* Support for more Nokia S60 phones
* Support for up to ten email addresses
* Support for subfolders for IMAP email accounts
* Support for Google Apps hosted email and other vanity domain email addresses
* Flagged messages will automatically become starred messages in Gmail
* More intuitive inbox navigation via a discoverable control bar
* Faster opening of inbox
* Sent email will be synced to your webmail’s sent folder for all email addresses

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Enhanced Calculator Updated, Archived

We have now made the final update to Enhanced Calculator for S60. Some minor issues have been fixed - including the compatibility issue with Nokia N96. Hope you enjoy it!

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Nokia Image Exchange - A New Way To View Photos

This is experimental, and something I've yet to install. As soon as I have time this new application will be on my device, hopefully this afternoon.

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 and a corresponding web-service. Image Exchange explores user experience when the mobile phone is enabled with an always-on data connection and utilizes existing contact information as a basis for social networking.

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That's most of the recent stuff. Check out www.nokia.com/betalabs for more.

Have you tried out any of these new or updated applications?

Like I said I'm particularly interested in Nokia Image Exchange. I would love to see a small review in the comments below if any of you have already tried it.

And lastly... HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you!