This week Nokia Beta Labs announced that they have updated both the Ovi Contacts to v1.5 and Ovi Calendar to v1.6. Ovi Contacts v1.5 is mainly a graphic face-lift of the service but also includes some performance tweaks. Ovi Calendar v1.6 finally brings multiple calendars to your Nokia S60 handset. In this day and age, multiple calendars have become more of a necessity than a nice feature, and so it is great that Nokia have decided to implement this into the service. Although it would be even better if these services were completed pronto and final versions were released. You can find more details on both these services after the break, and as always, beta software is usually only available for a limited number of devices.

Nokia Messaging for Social Networks is a developmental branch of Nokia’s extremely competent, Nokia Messaging Service. With Messaging for Social Networks, Nokia has implemented a great solution connecting both Twitter and Facebook to the Nokia Messaging Client. You can view posts, update your status and comment on messages directly from the application, and as it’s currently still in the Beta phase, more social networks will gradually become available. Check out the video preview after the break, where Nokia demos the different features that are built into this converged solution/application.

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.

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.

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.

The Nokia Beta Labs have released a great new toll for S60 5th Editiondevices. Nokia Diagnostics is a new experimental application that makes it easy to diagnose and troubleshoot situations on your mobile phone by running various tests. “Our intention is to create a solution for helping millions of Nokia users diagnose, troubleshoot, and configure their devices with ease on their own. We believe that exposing this idea to the Beta Labs community and sharing this application prototype would help us realise just that.” Check out the video tutorial after the break. You can download Nokia Diagnostics from our S60 5th Edition applications download page.

The Nokia Beta Labs have just announced a new experimental application for S60 users to edit the list of words used by the phone for text prediction and transfer it between phones. Nokia Custom Dictionary gives you the chance to import words from a text file. This means you can quickly “teach” your phone commonly used words or even create specific word lists to be shared among a like-minded community, for example in the medical domain. Check out the video demo after the break.