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
As a highly original New Year's present, Skype is sending vouchers to some of the clients who had paid for premium services (had balance) and been affected by the failure in December.
