At the 2010 Geneva Motor Show, Nokia has announced its partnership with the automotive industry to introduce ‘Terminal Mode’. Terminal Mode is being proposed as an industry standard to connect all smartphones that adopt it, not just Nokia smartphones, to support in-car infotainment systems. Nokia believes it should be easy to share information and content between your smartphone and other devices you use everyday such as your PC and the web. This way it is easy to keep everything synchronized and ensure you always have access to the things you love, such as your music, and the services you use, such as navigation, whenever and wherever you need them.
The Nokia Beta Labs have just announced that Ovi Mail has been updated to v2.0, and now uses the same address book as Ovi Contacts. You can view, edit, delete or create contacts from Ovi Contacts or Ovi Mail, and the changes will be reflected in both services. The Ovi umbrella is becoming more and more what Nokia wanted, a converged services solution for all Nokia users, which is great for the end user. With this new announcement you can also now sync your device phonebook with both Ovi Contacts and Ovi Mail.
LCG Slick for Symbian has recently been uptaded to v0.60. Slick is a messenger application for mobile phones and allows you to chat with your friends though various online messaging services. This new updated version of Slick now supports Facebook chat, along with a few more cool features. Check out the rest of the details after the jump.
The Nokia Research Centre has just recently showcased a fascinating new Explore and Share service, that gives them a new way of selling and delivering services at retail. The demonstration shows how a consumer can download Nokia content like music or videos directly onto a device easily with this novel technology. The file transfer of a music album took less than ten seconds. Very impressive indeed. Now its just a matter of squeezing this technology into the device so consumers can do the same at home. Video after the jump.
The Nokia Messaging team have been hard at work over this Winter, and have today announced that the third and final update of the Winter 2010 updates is complete. To begin with the client was updated for S60 5th Edition devices. This update was available as Nokia Messaging 10.2 in the Software Update application last week. Later, there was a significant update that changed the way emails were stored on the device, which was automatically pushed into Nokia Messaging 10.2. The final update sees Nokia Messaging automatically consolidate accounts when the user adds an email address that belongs to another Nokia Messaging account. Nokia Messaging now always aligns the Nokia Messaging password with the Email Service Provider (ESP) password. Read on to find out more about each of the updates.
The Nokia Ovi Suite version 2.1.0.87 has been released for existing Nokia Ovi Suite users. The new update contains many improvements, bug fixes and brings some cool new features. The Nokia Beta Labs started distributing the update to Nokia Ovi Suite last week, and so many of you may already have the latest release. Some new features include ovi.com contacts sync, video transfer and playback and device application updates. There is also support for Mozilla Thunderbird in contacts sync. There has also been a lot work put into increase the general performance of the suite.
With a great user experience, an aggressive global rollout plan and a focus on local relevance, Nokia felt that it was time to commend some of the key milestones the Nokia services have achieved. Taking a look at some of the Ovi services, there has already been more than three million Ovi Maps downloaded to date, the average person using Comes With Music downloads 500 free songs in the first few weeks of using the service, which would cost about EUR 450 from iTunes, and the Ovi Store experiences more than one million downloads a day. Nokia also highlighted the success of its Messaging, Money and Life Tools services. Check out the full press release after the break.
Google Maps for Mobile has recently been updated to v4.0 and brings along support for Google Buzz, a social networking service launched yesterday by Google. Buzz is Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, combined and bundled with you Gmail account, you can pretty much do everything you can on these existing services. Although the Buzz application is not currently supported for S60, you can still utilize the Buzz layer in Google Maps v4.0. Check out a quick video tutorial of Google Buzz after the break.
The Nokia Beta Labs have released an update to the Nokia Messaging for Social Networks beta. This is the first update for the application which now supports Symbian S40 handsets. There are also many bug fixes to improve the client’s performance, and the following minor feature enhancements:
Facebook: Upload photos to selected album
Facebook: Timestamp improvement
Twitter: Direct message
Twitter: Post with Location
Twitter: View profile of people you are following and posted tweets
Twitter: View own profile and posted tweets
Twitter: Mark as Favorite
Check out the video demo of Nokia Messaging for Social Networks after the break.
It is now coming up to the two week mark since the launch of the new version of Ovi Maps for Mobile and Nokia has proudly announced that there has already been over 1.4 million downloads of the application. The one million mark was reached just one week after the launch. According to Anssi, Executive Vice President at Nokia, The download rate is averaging at one download per second. This is a tremendous feat considering that its currently only supported on a limited number of handsets.
