What’s Cool About Nokia Headlines
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.
Personally I like it, but hate the menus. The ’settings’ section is one of those ones where you don’t know if it’s showing you what the setting is currently, or what the setting will be when you select it. Horrible.
Why Podcasting shouldn’t automatically start downloading Podcasts at startup?
(a) Mobile bandwitdh is very, very expensive in most of the world. I only want Podcasting to download when I’m at a Wifi point.
(b) There was a bug where Podcasting would (intelligently) change the download location from memory card to phone memory if the memory card wasn’t detected at startup. S60 does not operate well with big fat unfinished MP3s taking up space in main memory.
@Hannes - which is why it should be a user setting. If you’re in an area that doesn’t offer cheap mobile bandwidth, you could easily disable it (perhaps disabled by default?)
Here in my country I get 50GB per month of bandwidth at HSDPA speeds for about 7 US Dollars a month. Is that considered cheap? In any case I can hardly use up 10GB, so things like Nokia Headlines help me get the most out of my plan.
It’s handy to d/l stuff via WiFi at home, and then have something to read on the go without extra data charges. But why no Canadian news, AND WHAT’S WITH THE ADS?!!