Recently, over at the Nokia Beta Labs, Nokia Channels was updated and renamed to Nokia Headlines. Personally, I’ve no use for the application. You can check it out here, it offers a branded content discovery system and allows you to get news from media outlets such as the New York Times, the Sun, and Medeo, right on your handset. I get plenty of news through Google Reader, but like my mom taught me, “don’t knock it till you’ve tried it“, so if you haven’t, go check it out anyways, it might be something you like.
So while Headlines isn’t for me, I saw a few things that I’m REALLY impressed with, and I hope that Nokia, S60, and other teams can pull these features out and apply them to a few other existing applications.
The first is that Nokia Headlines offers an intelligent background updater that keeps track of your battery life. If your battery level drops below 14%, it stops downloading new content, automatically. This is nothing short of BRILLIANT. If I’m out and about, and only have 14% of my battery, I’m pretty sure the last thing I’d like to drain my battery on is download New York Times content. Further to this point, I’d like to see S60 incorporate some power-saving techniques, in the future. Why not dim my screen when my battery’s low? Of course, this does *not* need to be implemented unless it’s a user-configurable feature, much like the current Profiles. Don’t just start shutting stuff off willy-nilly when my battery’s low.
The second feature that Nokia Headlines needs to share *is* the background updater, with autostart. When you reboot your phone, it automatically starts up and checks for new content, and downloads anything that’s new. Why doesn’t the Nokia Podcasting application do this? It’s the same type application as Nokia Headlines – content aggregator – so why can’t Podcasting automatically boot up with the phone and start checking for new content? What about the feeds feature in the web browser (does anyone use that?)?
What do you think? Would you like your device to be able to make changes to your setting based on current power level, and change them back when the battery gets charged? What about the background updater for Podcasting? What other applications do you think that’d be useful for?
I wonder if the Podcasting team has been chatting with the Headlines team yet? They should be.
