Presents from Finnish Santa!

Lo and behold, loyal Nokia customer! Ovi Suite 3 is out!

New and improved are in v3.0.0.284:

- Direct download of songs from Ovi Music
- Greater ease in managing and downloading street maps
- Improved syncing of contacts
- Fresh Home view offering new and updated content from your device
- Splendid full-screen view of photos and videos
- Export of messages for storing and easy viewing on the computer

At the very same time, download of Nokia Photos app is blocked.
New customers have to use Ovi Suite only.
Download of the new version cannot be blocked, it is mandatory for existing Ovi Suite users.
Pre-existing Nokia Photos 1.6.434 is not removed neither blocked. It would still work.

Unfortunately, Photos part of the Suite is not improved with the famous "Timeline" view that was there in Lifeblog and Nokia Photos apps.

One prominent change in v3 of Ovi Suite is the "product placement" of the Ovi services and shops - the music and apps are recommended now at the home page of the app, taking up most space (that was previously used by your stuff). That's quite understandable, and can be useful.

One can separately browse and manage data on the phone and in the Suite. While this gives more flexibility, this can confuse a novice user.

Quite interesting is the new "competition for the customer" between Microsoft's Winows 7 and the Nokia PC Suite. Once you connect a phone in PC Suite mode, a Windows dialog pops up, inviting you to use the built-in features like media sync, files browser or the image transfer.

Nokia Maps can detect if the phone application is running - and it intructs you to close the Maps on the phone, but it cannot detect if you closed the app, and there's no F5/Refresh button; one should switch to another part of Ovi Suite and back to Maps in order to resolve this little stalemate.

Share feature is not improved much, in fact, the most noticeable is the action to download your Share library - this only confirms speculations that Nokia might outsource that Share part of Ovi to someone (yahoo! we're looking for talents!)

Another bug I noticed is that Software Update shows number 3 on the icon, but there is only one app on my phone wanting to be updated (Python, which I don't want).
The number itself might not be correct, it works just as and indicator for you to look there. UPDATE - the number reflected two not-installed apps, they are not visible in updates, but are offered for installation at the home page. A little misleading, that number is...

The Music view is improved, now more resembling Apple's iTunes with the album art inline along the song list. This shows efficient use of the horizontal display dimensions. Generally Nokia Ovi Suite is good at that, better than Microsoft Office.
If only they could fit the Timeline view for media...

All in all, it's a decent update and a timely release for the New Year's holidays.
I only hope that nokians did not have to spend all the Christmas time at work preparing and polishing it!..

Now that have all eggs in one basket, let's see more speedy and astonishing improvements! Thank you Finnish Santa!

Happy New Year to all!!!

Cheers
SZ

Goodbye to Nokia Photos?

For some reason, there's no Photo Service advertised or visible anymore at Ovi.com.

Access via Nokia Photos PC app and Ovi Share and Ovi Suite still works.

What happened?

UPDATE: The photos may go to Y! Flickr.

Lifeblog vs. Nokia Photos

It had been circulating in the back of my mind for quite some time - the thought of "who's the winner?" kind - between the Nokia Photos and the Nokia Lifeblog, to both which I gave my kudos in a previous post.
But time passed, and newer versions of both products appeared, each striving (quite independently, it seemed so) to "grow wings" and become PC-man's definitive iPhoto replacement...
So... in the blue corner (and on your Nokia phone!)... the Nokia LifeBlog!



Blue ribbon, silver scroller... toolbox buttons in the upper part.
It can sync to your device, get all the juice out on to a PC, and then you have the full digital life cycle - Backup, Restore, Upload to Web (blog), display, use geo-tags etc. On a side note - the uploader stopped working with this blog.

In the red corner - the Nokia Photos!



Grey ribbon, blue scroller... toolbox buttons in the lower part.
It can ... sync to your device (using the same on-device lifeblog support), get all your content (SMS, MMS, Text Notes - but strangely enough - not from the "Notes" phone application, photos, videos, audio clips - again, not yet from the Recorder phone app, web posts) and then again - you have all the same "Rip/Burn/Mix/Upload" features found in the Lifeblog.

So what's different?
Well, apparently those two programs keep their data separate. I mean it.
Unless you're not careful enough, you may end up with two separate incomplete sets of your phone-produced media-content. Did I say "phone-produced"? Not quite so. You do not have to have a Nokia phone to use those programs. Each one of them allows you to import media from PC and use all the niceties for free! Try it, if you haven't.

Also of some interest are the filtering capabilities in both programs:

I looked pretty hard last time to find it, but I finally managed - inconveniently hidden inside the Tag Manager button are the filters:



With nPhoto (as somebody quite properly dubbed it) - life is easier and the filters are found in a pull-down menu in the right upper end of window:




As you can see from my filters, my usage pattern tend to be more text-biased for LifeBlog and nPhoto for photos. Simply because nPhoto has the button for slideshow, in LifeBlog I have to dig inside menus.

Unfortunately, you cannot control which type of media goes to which program.
From my findings, LifeBlog seems more tolerant and resilient to sync failures. Once I had a notebook battery go down when syncing with lifeblog. And after that the nPhoto began to report failures on some "stuck items" during each sync.
One sync with lifeblog - and the "missing" items came through, and voila - no more errors in nPhoto.

Finally, as much as I would love the LifeBlog moniker, Nokia decided otherwise.
And the winner is.... Nokia Photos.

They seem to have silently given LifeBlog a boot.

Now, if you go to www.nokia.com/lifeblog you will be redirected to the nPhoto site.
(probably, some links from my old post won't work right, but what can I do)

What issues do I see with such decision?
Just one. The brand awareness.

Yes, I can readily believe that nPhoto will have all the LifeBlog features and a nice UI to boast, but what about LifeBlog brand, dear Nokia Product Management???




The LifeBlog name is imprinted in devices and printed manuals, Nokia device owners will surely be looking to get it working.



It is so convenient to use Lifeblog in the phone because you simply see EVERYTHING - all you text/graphic/video/mms media is there on the timeline!

This is a unique offering in the mobile world, even iPhone cannot do that - mix everything in a simple cleanly-navigated time-based line.

Why this offering is so badly under-presented to potential customers is beyond me!
It's usability is also overwhelmingly undervalued.

A simple excersize for Nokia to do:

1) assign LifeBlog to the right soft key by default on the N-series
2) see LifeBlog usage grow and grow, along with a mindshare for good UI from Nokia

The word "Lifeblog" more accurately describes the multi-media capabilities of this media jukebox.

"Photos" just don't go well with what the program does.
It's not a Photoshop.
And what about "Videos", "Messages" and "Weblogs"?

"Photos" just sounds bland.

A wiser solution would be to announce "Lifeblog 3.0", and say it's based on "the best of the two programs" and have it based, in fact, on nPhoto, if you chose so...

Please remember, some [printed, firmware] names just can't be changed.

Please set the customer free of the confusion.

It also would have been a great achievement if Notes and Sound Recordings could have finally been flawlessly synced to a PC.

Classic PC Suite has issues with Notes sync; fumbling with Device Browser for Sound Recordings is so indignifying...