And the most valuable contributor of Nokia Beta Labs in October 2007 is... Max Waterman!!!

Yay!!!

Justification: Max's brilliant idea for using 2D barcodes to point directly to application downloads. While we haven't implemented this to Nokia Beta Labs website yet, many others have already embraced Max's idea - see for example here and here.

Prize: the official Nokia Beta Labs teddy bear, wearing a white t-shirt with a barcode pointing at Nokia Beta Labs website.

Max: please send me (tommi dot vilkamo at gmail dot com) the address where to ship the bear!

A honourable mention for October 2007 contribution goes to Bogdan Galiceanu for his active contribution and insightful feedback (suggested by Device Status team). Thanks Bogdan - keep it up and you might also win a fancy teddy bear some day.

Previous winners:
September '07: Ed from eseries.org
August '07: Stefan Constantinescu

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

The brand-new 4.0 version of Nokia's Search application just became available for download for a number of handsets based on S60 3rd Edition FP1 (N76, N95, E51, 5700, 6110, 6121, 6290). Try it, it's really good - I was especially impressed by the results that get updated while you are still typing your search term.

Steve Litchfield adds an important note:

Installation note: you'll have to go into App Mgr and delete EVERY instance of 'Search' - if your N95 is like mine, there will be several entries! After this, Search v4 will finally install 8-)

The same thing happened to me. Couldn't install the new version 4.0 before uninstalling all the old Search related items using the Application Manager. But now it works like a charm.

Forum Nokia Community site has been updated, good work!!

All you developers, go check it out, and send your feedback to Ron and other folks behind the site:

Let us know what you think at Forum.Feedback@nokia.com or just respond to this blog. I want to emphasize how much this is YOUR community and it is YOUR opinions that matter the most to us. We want your feedback in order to make this the most enjoyable developer community on the internet. We did not let marketing have any say so in the Lobby, we designed it for developers, not the suits or pointy haired bosses.

The WidSets upgrade yesterday from beta to real service seems to have gone well. Congratulations!!

I guess it's time for to set up a "graduates" section somewhere under Beta Labs...

If you haven't tried WidSets yet, you should. And even if you did try it sometime in the past, you should try it again now. The service has evolved fast, and the widget library - including the "Explore" widget discovery system - starts to look really good.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Note from our Device Status team:

Hi, nice to get so much feedback from you! Now we start to provide also Device Status SISX application as a separate download for those users without Microsoft Windows based PCs. We originally decided to bundle distribution of PC and device application together, to make installation to device little bit easier. But based on your feedback, we start to provide alternative :) Keep those comments coming!

Download available here.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Yay! They included us in today's press release, in addition to being part of Tero Ojanperä's keynote speech in “The Way We Live Next” event.

I heard your comments were shown live on stage. Let me ask if I could publish some video clips from the event...

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Quick note: Conversation application just became compatible with Nokia Eseries devices. If you have Nokia E60, E61 or E70, you need to update your SW to the latest version (3.0633.09.04) to make it work.

Have fun and keep the feedback coming!!

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Note: this is a LazyWeb question for Nokia people only. Others, please ignore.

We are thinking about adding closed* beta testing opportunity to Nokia Beta Labs, in addition to the current open/public betas. In practice, Beta Labs would offer an easy-to-use beta management tool, and a recruiting channel for an exceptionally insightful user community. In simple cases, if everything goes well, it might not cost you anything extra.

Please send me an email if you are interested.

* = a closed beta is available only to a select few users, and the SW distribution and feedback system happens behind firewalls.

Update: umm... seems that I wasn't clear enough. This post was intended for Nokia R&D teams, not for Nokia users. Thanks for all volunteers, but currently, Nokia doesn't do closed beta tests through Beta Labs. I just wanted to change all that. I'll let you know whether this idea flies or not.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Now, this is going to be a bit ugly... But I'm singing happily "Don't worry, be crappy", as Guy Kawasaki famously put it, and doing it anyway. Feel free to hate me - please don't blame Nokia.

Ladies and gents, let me introduce the new version of Nokia Beta Labs website. Thank you all, once again, for your feedback!

It is still very much incomplete and plainly broken in some parts, and we have dozens (hundreds?) of items to do before it's ready (layouts, human-understandable permalinks, rss feeds, search, sorting, ratings & feedback system, etc, etc). But we decided to publish it anyway, so that we would have time to iterate it a bit before Tero Ojanperä's grand demo next week. Nokia.com is going to the dark side of the moon during the Q3 results publishing period, and we couldn't afford to wait until the site updates would become possible again.

Please help us prioritize our ToDo list, and maybe fill in the gaps: what would be the top-3 most important items that you would want us to implement/fix first?

Ps. Nokia Beta Labs blog will be transferred from blogs.s60.com/tommi to www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog during the next week or so.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Jukka just announced in his Mobile Web Server blog that they just released the new version.

New features:
Chat - communicate with your friends
Presence - share your status
New languages: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish

Other improvements:
Python for S60 version 1.4.1
Improved snapshot camera - take better advantage of device camera capabilities
General stability improvements
WebDAV performance improvements

Go try it and send your feedback to the development team! Write your thoughts either publicly to Jukka's blog entry or privately using the web form.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

We got an interesting comment to the Share Online 3.0 feedback form:

It would be great if you could include a qr-code so we can quickly get the sis file's url into the phone, instead of having to transfer it to the PC first.

You mean like this?

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.
Instructions: if you have a barcode reader application installed, point it at the barcodes above. With some monitor types, reading the code from the screen is a bit difficult. For me, having a cheap LCD display, it worked like a charm.

Interesting idea, and a nice way to promote 2D barcode usage! What do you think, would this be useful or just annoying clutter?

Quick note: Nokia Mobile Codes beta adds support for creating QR codes, in addition to Data Matrix.

I believe these two are the main alternatives to emerge as de-facto standards for 2D barcodes. Nokia barcode reader is able to read both.

Bonus links: Data Matrix and QR Code on Wikipedia.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Having problems with your device, or with connecting it with your PC? Or would you just be interested to explore what your device is truly made of? Go and download Nokia Device Status 1.1

Nokia Device Status is a self-diagnosis tool that allows you to collect detailed system information both from your PC and your S60 device. Your current device configuration and phone settings are presented in a detailed summary, which you can use to determine the exact cause, if you run into problems.

Device Status 1.1 is the first public release of this piece of software. Technically it's quite mature, but as a concept still under development. Right now, the development team is evaluating different options how to make it useful for mainstream users, and how to integrate it effectively with customer care systems.

Share your thoughts!

The team very much wants to hear your feedback. How do you like it? Where would you like to use it - are there some unexpected use cases that we haven't fully grasped? Is there some additional information you would need collected? And of course, please tell us if you find any bugs such as information you believe to be incorrect.

As always, write you thoughts either privately to the Device Status feedback form, or publicly to the comments section of this post.

Thanks everyone!!

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

I took the pic last week and uploaded it to Flickr with Share Online 3.0. Click the image to see the resulting page.

Let me introduce the latest version of our fancy media sharing app: Share Online 3.0.

Key features:

Go try it and tell us what you think!

Download here.

How do you like it? How could we improve it? What is great, what should be improved, what should be abandoned?

Write your thoughts either (a) to the feedback form or (b) to the comments section of this post. As always, the R&D team is listening.

Note: at this point, the R&D team wanted to highlight only N73 and N95 as compatible devices, and only Flickr as compatible service. Other devices and services work too - but be prepared for possible glitches here and there.

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.

Folks, I need some help. Our Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanperä would be willing to promote beta culture and Nokia Beta Labs in a big event this month.

Would you want to be a part of his show?

If so, please write below short testimonials: what do you think about Nokia Beta Labs? Why do you like it? Why would you recommend it to your friends or co-workers? What is the greatest thing about it?

Two rules: (1) write authentically as your true self, and (2) keep it short.

I'll forward the best 10 testimonials directly to Mr.Ojanperä and the people helping him with the slides. No guarantees about will they use these at the presentation. It's their call.

Of course, you can also write what you hate about beta labs, that's good input for us too. But for Mr.Ojanperä's presentation, we need some happy customers :-)

Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.