While the rest of the world woke up at 1am to go camp out at Best Buy in the hopes of saving $200 on a new HDTV, our friends in Nokia’s Ovi Services department were apparently busy, releasing updates for both Ovi Contacts and Ovi Maps. The updates bring a few new features, as well as improved performance on phones like the Nokia N97.
Ovi Contacts now supports file transfers to your contacts, so you can send pictures, documents, or pretty much anything else directly to your friends. They’ve also improved on the compression, which works to conserve your battery life and data transfer. The user experience is being continually tweaked, too, and now includes 3 shortcuts to quickly see your friend’s profile, start a chat, or add a buddy. To get this new update, you’ll need to head over to the Beta Labs page and download directly there – the http://contacts/ovi.com/dist/app link will still feed you the older version, for now.
Ovi Maps has also been updated to v3.1.09 wk44, though it’s not entirely clear what’s changed. Most likely there are just a few small fixes here and there. It seems as though this update is only available through the Software Update on your phone – the Beta Labs page for Ovi Maps Beta is still offering me an older variant.
It’s odd to me that services such as Ovi Mail, Ovi Contacts, and Ovi Maps are constantly getting updated, whereas Ovi Sync *still* can’t seem to handle my N97 without creating multiple duplicate entries, and Ovi Files still doesn’t let me upload files directly from my phone. Do you use many Ovi services on a normal basis?
