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Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 40 words per minute. The application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more.



Swype and Nokia have been hard at work to deliver a limited beta release to Nokia S60 5th edition device owners.  Your feedback will be valuable to us in the coming weeks, and we are especially interested in how well Swype interfaces with the many types of applications you use every day. While you’re at it, feel free to take a crack at the world record, which was recently broken (again!) with Swype.

Swype is currently supported on the Nokia N97, N97mini, X6, 5800, and 5230. Over the coming months Swype will be expanding to a wider range of devices as part of ongoing development so stay tuned.

Check out the official Swype for Symbian page for download information as well as Swypeinc.com for news, tips and instructional videos.

Happy Swyping!
-Peter @ Swype Inc

We knew that announcing the closure of Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta would not be easy news to break…and your comments from the past week made it clear.

This is the unfortunate nature of the work we do in Beta Labs. Sometimes the products we create do not make it to commercial release. It’s the nature of the test environment.

While we are in no way “getting out” of the mobile social networking business by focusing on the N8 and some great functionality that is coming, we do understand that you may have an N97, or a 5800, or other Nokia device. Our only answer is to refer you to the Facebook client and invite you to continue to follow our evolution in this space.

Please understand that the reason we cannot continue free services such as the previous Social Networks client is because our strategy needs to adapt to the changing landscape. We need to concentrate our engineering efforts on the high-quality core services that our consumers want. Sometimes we cannot maintain momentum on some services, even when they are hugely popular, out of the need to maximize our own resources and deliver something even better further down the line. Ramping down the previous Nokia Messaging for Social client isn’t a reflection of our dissatisfaction with the service, it’s a learning experience that helps us focus on future critical offerings.

Changing the way people connect and innovating with mobile social experiences are what we do. We invite you to continue to be a part of it, and your comments and insight will continue to make it better.

Nokia Messaging Team

Download Ovi Store Facebook client:
http://apps.store.ovi.com/r/Nokia_social1
http://apps.store.ovi.com/r/Nokia_social

Written by Kari Pulli, Nokia Fellow and the head of the Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging research team at NRC Palo Alto.

Cameras are unfortunately not as adaptable as the human eye, and in situations where there is either too much or too little light, it’s not easy, or often not even possible to capture images that would give the viewer a similar experience as the person that saw the situation with her own eyes. However, by taking several images with different image settings and then combining the input images into a single new image it is possible to capture better images.

Nokia Research Center Palo Alto has developed two new applications to address these problems. A new camera control architecture and API created jointly by Nokia and Stanford University (http://fcam.garage.maemo.org) is a key enabler for these applications.

The HDR Capture application is meant for situations with too much light, especially when the background is bright (e.g., sky) and the foreground has less light (e.g., a person). Using normal camera to capture a single image would typically lead to a black silhouette of the person with a nice sky in the background. HDR Capture measures the brightness of the scene, captures 1-3 images as the user presses the capture button, and combines them into a single image that should show details of both the bright and dark areas.

Another problematic situation is when there just isn’t enough light. If you take an image with short exposure time, the result is a noisy image. However, if you extend the exposure time, the output is often blurry. With Lowlight Assistant the camera captures two images, one short (probably noisy) and one long (probably blurry), and automatically combines the images to a new image that hopefully has the sharpness of the short exposure and the better colors of the long exposure. The user can evaluate a small area of the image to see whether the quality is sufficient. If it is, the combined image is processed in the background, otherwise the user can try again.

These applications are experimental betas and we are currently evaluating how to take them further. So if you’re interested, download the apps and let us know what you think.

The time has come that we conclude our trial period here at Beta Labs for the new Nokia.com BETA site. We want to thank those of you that spent time actively talking with us & testing the site. We received some great comments and observations and have used all feedback in our on-going developments.

It was quite a challenge to analyze the comments but it is clear that we definitely have some challenges ahead of us. 'Simplicity' was the main descriptive word dominating a lot of the feedback given – clean, crisp design & lots of space. It seems that we are definitely on track in this space but we still have many hurdles to leap over moving forward. There were quite many comments about the user experience, lack of user engagement & lack of content. Some of you struggled to navigate smoothly on the site due to technical reasons & some outlined that it wasn’t clear where to go & what our purpose was. Many of you commented on lack of content & engagement & the Nokia “blue” colour scheme brought mixed feelings – some like & some dislike & thought it was a little cold or conservative.

In a nutshell, most agreed that the clean crisp design was definitely a step in the right direction but that there was a lack of content richness and engagement! We are definitely aware of the lack of content & one of our big action items in the coming months is to focus on creating content that is engaging, deep & interactive. When we launch the full Ireland site there will still be room to grow but we hope you will feel a little different towards the content then. We can certainly promise that there will be a lot more engaging and interactive content both for products, services and for our solutions overall. Content is an on-going process & so is site search… Both of these are being developed & will be optimized on an ongoing basis…

In closing this Beta Labs forum, we can definitely promise that all your comments have been taken on board & we really hope that you’ll continue to pop in & support us moving forward. While we love positive feedback, we can only learn from negative feedback as well.

So stay tuned & thanks again for spending this time with us in this important stage of our development!

Many Thanks,

Nokia.com Team

P.S. the beta site is still live @ http://beta.nokia.ie and you can continue sharing your feedback through an easy to use survey integrated into the homepage & product pages. Look forward to seeing you there…

We’re now closing the Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta trial. In practice this means that the feedback forums at Nokia Beta Labs won’t be actively monitored and Nokia Messaging for Social Networks will be taken out of the list of active beta trials. Please note with the discontinuation of the Beta program you will no longer have access to the Nokia Messaging for Social Networks service.

If you are interested, alternative versions of the Facebook client are available in Ovi Store.

We appreciate your constructive commentary on the service. There were many great suggestions for improvements to the client. While there are no plans to further develop this particular client, your feedback has helped with the prioritization of features for the commercial release of an integrated Social experience on Symbian^3 devices beginning with Nokia N8.

Some of the key capabilities are:

• Social Contacts: Your contacts and social networks are now linked in your phonebook
• View your latest social activities from Facebook and Twitter all in one place
• Share your current location or points of interest with your favorite social networks

Thanks to all of you who used the service and gave us your valuable feedback, we value your support!

- The Nokia Messaging team

Ever since we launched Nokia Bots in March it's been interesting to follow the feedback that's been coming in regarding these smart widgets.  Much of the early feedback was about the overall concept and suggestions for new bots (like the Contacts bot that was added in June) while later feedback focuses more on the operation of the individual bots.

A quick scan of the forums suggests that much of the feedback on the individual bots centers around two or three bots (I won't say which), while the others have received far less feedback.  That got us wondering: Are you submitting feedback to make the bots you like even better, or are you directing feedback to the ones you don't care for to bring them up to the same level as the others?

Let's find out together with the following poll:

We'll reveal the results a bit later.

- John, Community Facilitator @ Nokia Beta Labs

Written by Leena Oiva, Nokia Green Explorer

The time has come to conclude the Nokia Beta Labs trial of Nokia Green Explorer. We want to thank those that spent time testing the service and provided comments! All feedback is extremely valuable and we have been using it when concepting the next release, which we plan to make available during the autumn.

Until then you can continue to use the Nokia Green Explorer service at www.ovi.com/greenexplorer.

If you're new to Green Explorer, you can use our directory of green destinations to plan your travel abroad and discover eco-friendly locations on your own doorstep.  You can also read our articles for inspiring tips and advice on living green and travelling clean.

Let's all tip our hats to thewinchester, who has been selected our Contributor of the Month for July 2010.  We appreciate his commitment to user experience and user interface issues, his attention to detail in his forum contributions, and his constructive attitude when participating in our trials. 

Congratulations and thank you, thewinchester!  We've got a fleece to send along to you as a token of appreciation.

- John, Community Facilitator @ Nokia Beta Labs

PS - Remember that all of you can influence who gets selected each month by rating each others' posts as "helpful".

Written by Sameer Goel, Product Manager for Nokia Mobile Communities

Our sincere thanks for the support the beta community has provided us. We really value the feedback you provided us and we are making the appropriate changes to further improve Nokia Mobile Communities for users in India.

We are releasing a new version for you all to try with the following changes included:

• Simplified registration flow
• Share streams as well as specific posts
• View posts for a specific stream
• Receive search results directly on the stream wall
• User settings to control charge notifications, location sharing and message history added
• Some bug fixes

To try it you will need to completely uninstall the previous version and install the new one afresh as underlying data structures have changed. This may cause you to lose old chat messages and stream posts, but the app will synchronize your conversation groups and subscribed / created streams so that any new activity on either is not impacted.

Unfortunately addition of features to Streams has negatively impacted performance which we are actively working on to fix; but we hope that your experience will not be severely impacted.

Please check out the full list of features and supported devices and download this updated Beta app now.  India users with GPRS can also message nmc to 55555 to receive the download link directly to your phone.

We look forward to your feedback in the forums!

Thank you in advance!

On behalf of Nokia Mobile Communities team,
Sameer Goel, Product Manager

Written by Anand Prabhu-Desai, Nokia Listings team

For many people in emerging markets accessing information to secure a job or locate goods and services in their local area is a difficult task.  Nokia Listings (now in beta) has been developed for the purpose of making this process of connecting buyers and sellers (or employers and job seekers) as simple as possible.

It is a well-known fact that the majority (60%+) of the hiring and consumer-to-consumer transactions, like apartment rentals, in emerging markets currently occur via word-of-mouth or through middlemen who charge a hefty commission for their services. Our goal is to bring the benefits of a digital marketplace to users of basic mobile phones (Series 40) without GPRS connections.  The application therefore is fully functional on both SMS and GPRS.

Nokia Listings is designed for three major categories of listings:

1.    Buy & Sell – Find or post items for sale
2.    Jobs – Find or post a job
3.    Local Services – Access or advertise services such as auto repairs, driver services, plumbers, etc.

Additionally, there's no explicit registration needed, listings are geo-coded so that the user is able to find the services nearest to his/her place, and users have the ability to call or SMS the other party through the application and forward listings via SMS to their friends.

During this beta trial, the service is only available to users in India.  We are currently testing a limited content set and will be expanding across India in the near future. While the app will work on all Nokia devices that support Java, we’ve optimized the application for Series 40 phones.

Please check out the full list of features and supported devices and download the application.  We look forward to your feedback in the forums!

We’re excited to introduce the Ovi Browser beta for Series 40 phones to help meet the needs of mobile Internet users in emerging markets and around the world.  We believe users of Series 40 should be entitled to rich web browsing experiences like those of smartphones, but without the same price tag.

The Ovi Browser is powered by patented Internet compression technology that delivers advanced web pages to your phone. The result is that pages show up quicker than ever, plus over the air data is reduced by up to 90%. Beyond performance, the browser includes an innovative user interface that makes it easy to access your favourite content directly from the start page without having to hunt through menus.

Ovi Browser is available as a beta download for popular Nokia Series 40 phones including: 2700 Classic, 2730 Classic, 3120 Classic, 3600 Slide, 5130 XpressMusic, 5220 Xpressmusic, 5310 XpressMusic, 5330 Mobile TV Edition, 5330 Xpressmusic, 5610, 6300i, 6303, 6500 Slide, 6500 Classic, 6600 Slide, 6700 Classic, 7210 Supernova, 7900 Prism and X3.

Keep in mind that this is a beta release, but you’ll see improvements coming as we prepare for a commercial release early next year.  We’re in the process now of building up our global infrastructure to provide the best possible speed, performance, and reliability for millions of users.  We’ll also be adding features to improve local search and personalization and extending support for more local languages and markets.

Download Ovi Browser beta version by going to http://browser.ovi.com on your current mobile browser and follow @ovibynokia on Twitter for tips and updates.  Share your feedback by going to Options > Feedback within Ovi Browser or in the Nokia Beta Labs forum.  Let us know what you think about the beta, and what needs to improve before the launch.

Thanks! 
The Ovi Browser Team

We have now reached the end of the Ovi Calendar 1.6 beta trial period.  Thanks to all those who participated in this trial.  We received great feedback from you.  Ovi Calendar 1.6 went live at the end of July and a lot of your feedback has gone into strengthening the commercial launch offering and in shaping future releases.

If you have been actively using Ovi Calendar 1.6 beta, the cut over to the live service will be seamless to you.  All of your data will stay intact and you can continue to use all of the same cool calendar features you have come to rely on in the same URL that you have gotten used to. However, the Beta Labs pages and forum will be moved out of active status.  Likewise, any support requests should now go to through normal customer service.

Thanks again for your support and continue to use Ovi Calendar 1.6 with shared calendar, to-dos and notes capabilities at http://calendar.ovi.com.

- Radhika Sarang (On behalf of the Calendar team)

The folks at Nokia Conversations have just released the long-awaited sketches of the "ultimate" concept device (dubbed the Nokia U) developed within the Design by Community project.  Created by Nokia designers, the three sketches incorporate the suggestions gathered and voted on over the past months.

Now it's time to vote again!  Which one catches your eye and deserves to be made into a 3D render?

Hop over to Nokia Conversations to compare the sketches, remind yourself of the specs, and - of course - vote for your favorite!

Conversation was released at Nokia Beta Labs in November 2007 as an experimental prototype for organizing your messages into streams according to contact.  It immediately proved to be popular and continued to get a steady amount of interest and feedback over time.

The team added support for more devices and then more after that, although - as was noted - the intention was more to pilot this kind of messaging experience rather than productize this as a stand-alone application.  Since this beta trial began, a Conversation-like messaging experience can already be seen in Ovi Suite, in Maemo/Nokia N900, and in the forthcoming Nokia N8.  (See the video below @1:54-@3:12 for a preview of what it will look like.)

Given that development of the standalone app has virtually ended, though, we feel it's time to close the Conversation experimental beta trial.  Keeping a trial and forum open without matching levels of development and feedback responsiveness would be doing a disservice to you.

Thanks for your support and contribution to this trial, and apologies for any disappointment this causes.

Moi,

Ovi Contacts was introduced to betalabs some 18 months ago. Since then, the beta client alone has been downloaded close to 300 000 times, and it has over 2400 followers in betalabs, who have posted thousands of insightful feedback posts. Quite a remarkable contribution to Ovi Contacts development! Now it is time to say thank you and mark a notable milestone as Ovi Contacts graduates from betalabs.

The commercial Ovi Contacts client is available for compatible S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and S60 5th Edition devices through software update, as well as pre-installed with new devices. You can also download the latest client to your device through your mobile browser at http://contacts.ovi.com/dist/app.

It is also time to look forward. Today, we provide two applications that let you access the Ovi Chat service: Ovi Contacts and Nokia Messaging Chat. Not only is this confusing to you, our users, but also inefficient for us. To consolidate our offerings, we will focus future development efforts on the Nokia Messaging Chat application, which provides access to multiple popular IM communities, including Ovi Chat.

To further improve the Nokia Messaging Chat experience, we are looking at including some of the features that made Ovi Contacts so unique among IM solutions, as well as cross-community features that will benefit users of all of our IM communities, and the addition of even more IM communities. For the development work, we will utilize the experience gained from Ovi Contacts development, as well as the valuable feedback that you have already provided for Ovi Contacts here in betalabs. We also invite you to provide any feedback about what Ovi Contacts features you would like to see incorporated into the Nokia Messaging Chat application.

Having had the privilege to work with one of the most followed, used, and discussed applications in betalabs, I would like to express the warmest thank you to all of you who have contributed to Ovi Contacts development.

Cheers,
Anni
On behalf of the Ovi Contacts team

There are approximately 50 Million internet users and over 400 Million mobile phone users in India.  Similar numbers exist for other emerging markets as well.  Majority of this user base do not use smart-phones and neither do they have internet access.  How do you get this large set of users to communicate and share information with their friends, family and co-workers with ease and at an affordable price?

Nokia Mobile Communities is our attempt to provide a complete communities experience to the aforesaid users on the mobile phone without a dependency on the web or PC. The product has two main flavors – Conversations and Streams. Conversations, is ideal for short group chats with your social network (like coordinating when to meet for a movie or to occasionally check how things are going).  Streams, helps create channels for community building and following a topic (e.g. career tips, hyper-local news) or a person (e.g. fan group for a Bollywood star).

During this beta trial, the service is only available to users in India.  While the app will work on all Nokia devices that support Java, we’ve optimized the application for S40 phones with 240x320 screen resolution.  Keeping the Indian context in mind, presently SMS is the bearer of communication for the service to reduce cost to the user.  A simple-SMS interface is also supported, especially for non-Nokia devices.

We request you to don the hat of the ‘common man’ in India with limited disposable income and no Internet access when you use and evaluate the service.  Think about the connectivity and devices they have and whether this app will (or will not) meet their requirements.  Is it easy and intuitive for your parents, siblings (perhaps in another city) or even your domestic help to use?  We can always add support for high-end devices, but primary aim is to offer the best user experience to the average Joe.

Please check out the full list of features and supported devices and download this Beta app now.  We look forward to your feedback in the forums!

Thank you in advance!

On behalf of Nokia Mobile Communities team,

Sameer Goel
Product Manager

Please join me in congratulating ARJWright for being selected as our Contributor of the Month for June 2010.  He's been a long-time contributor at Nokia Beta Labs, and - as evidenced by his contributions throughout June - has a knack for making insightful suggestions and building upon the ideas of others.

Thank you, ARJWright!  In honor of this, we'd like to send you a small token of appreciation - this light windbreaker.

- John, Community Facilitator @ Nokia Beta Labs

PS - Remember that all of you can influence who gets selected each month by rating each others' posts as "helpful".

The first stage of the renewal of nokia.com is in beta.  As you can imagine, this is a big task for Nokia but we are incredibly excited to share this with you and hear your thoughts.

As always, beta means that this is our baseline for the future and we still have lots of work to do. For one, we are lacking support & software pages. Content within the product & service pages is at a bare minimum, but as you can see and judge, we have a renewed look and we like it.

In a few months when we launch the complete site to Ireland, there will be much more content, all areas of the site will exist but for now, we are looking for your initial input. Additional projects are underway to improve the future of the Nokia search platform and metadata models to give you the best and most accurate results to your search queries but once again, these things take time.

Now we’re looking to strike up some interesting discussions with you, the Nokia Beta Labs community. Not about pixel issues, browser issues or lack of content & imagery, but what are your thoughts overall both from a conceptual, strategic, creative & technical perspective? Please be open and constructive.

The more interesting your comments are, the more we will try to bring some thoughts and answers to the table. And feel free to throw in suggestions about what you think the future should be for Nokia.com.

- The Nokia.com team

We’re now closing the Nokia Easy Meet beta trial as we have met all of our planned research goals on this project and are preparing to move on to the “next generation” of mobile collaboration and sharing.

In practice this means that the feedback forums at Nokia Beta Labs won’t be actively monitored and Easy Meet will be taken out of the list of active beta trials.  However, you can continue to use the Easy Meet service “as is” at http://easymeet.nokia.com.

During the trial we studied Easy Meet in several different contexts, including understanding the system’s ability to scale with thousands of people holding meetings while sharing content such as PowerPoint decks, images and documents.  We also worked on optimizing the mobile display and experience as well as maximizing mobile battery life and minimizing data usage.

Interestingly, we found that most of you (over 70%) were sharing photo images, rather than PowerPoint slide decks and documents.  This surprised us.  (We had expected that PowerPoint would be more popular.)  We also found that meetings became larger (participant-wise) and longer over time.  Finally, we heard from many of you about features that you wanted to add, including Ovi account single sign-on support and video sharing.

We listened to your feedback and are happy to report that we are planning to conduct a follow-on pilot later this year that adds the much requested video support and several other new features!  Stay tuned in the second half of 2010 for more announcements on the timing of this upcoming pilot.

Thanks to all of you who used the service and gave us your valuable feedback!    We really appreciate your support!

Umesh Chandra
on behalf of the Mobile Business Solutions Team
Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto

Greetings from the Nokia Software Updater team!

Today we have a new release of Nokia Software Updater to share with the Nokia Beta Labs community.  Our previous update addressed Windows 7 support, improved USB connectivity, and What’s New release notes.  Today’s release includes device application updates and improvements in the user experience.



Note that this release candidate is still in the development phase, and the plan is to keep the trial ongoing until the end of August. We will release updates here based on the feedback we receive (critical improvements will be prioritized), but would also like to gather improvement ideas for future releases.   We would like to hear especially if you have any problems with updating the device applications.

Try it out and let us know how you like it!

Petri
Nokia Software Updater