Well the team at Nokia Beta Labs has been highly busy recently, and after releasing Nokia Image Exchange (of which I’m a big fan, but that’s for another post), they have graduated, updated, archived 3 other Beta Labs projects.
Enhanced Calculator updated and archived
The S40-Java based Enhanced Calculator, which started as a research project to see whether or not there was a need for a more developed calculator on S60, has been updated with a few minor bug fixes and is now compatible with the N96. The application has also been archived, meaning it won’t be developed any further, but the good news is that the Beta Labs teams “have now initiated a proper R&D project that should result in an improved built-in calculator for future Nokia devices”. Good news, and may I suggest you taking a look at cCalc and cCalcPro, the latter being my favorite calculator for the E71?
Communication Center graduated
Communication Center, which allows for a better Inbox and Contact management straight from your computer, with sending and receiving SMS, editing contacts separate from Outlook,… has just graduated. The initial goal of the application was to be finally implemented in PC Suite, and that’s where it is now, it has integrated the recent release of PC Suite v7.1.
Nokia Email graduates, Nokia Messaging launched
Nokia Email service has made it out of the beta phase, and is now fully recognized as Nokia Messaging v1 which you can download by creating an account here. The new version brings support for Yahoo! email addresses, Google Apps accounts, subfolders and IMAP emails, as well as a host of other improvements, which you can read about in the Beta Labs blog. Unfortunately, HTML support still isn’t there, an issue that the team recognizes and is working on. But other letdowns on my side are that:
- Hotmail inboxes still aren’t supported, which makes the application rather irrelevant for me, as I have one Gmail and one Hotmail inbox and I’m perfectly happy with the Gmail Java app.
- There is no sign of IM integration. When Nokia Messaging was announced during Nokia World, we were told that it would be an integrated communication tool for email AND Instant Messaging. I believe this is coming in other versions, but I’m rather disappointed that it’s not here now.
What do you think about these updates? Do you believe that some apps should have been developped more extensively before graduating (like Nokia Email) or are you content with the actual state of things?
