Everyone handles their each individual email account differently, so it is vitally important that the user is given as much choice of how they perform tasks as is humanely possible.  Without forgetting to ensure the UI is simple yet effective, and also throw in support for a whole host of the most popular email handlers.

This is where this video from the Nokia Messaging Team comes in useful (there is also an accompanying blog post).  Whilst we must remember that the client possibly still isn’t completely finished, it still looks pretty nice to me.

From the start Nokia Messaging has in built support for Ovi Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and Mail for Exchange along with a manual setup for any other particular host.

There is kinetic scrolling throughout the application, rich HTML fucntionality and support for up to 10 homescreen widgets.  You will also be pleased to see the multi-touch elements of the capacitive touchscreen on the N8 has been utilised, with pinch to zoom within the email content.

Also a new feature which has been added is remote contact lookup directly from the server on Gmail and Hotmail.

So go ahead and watch the video below, and see what is coming on the Nokia N8.

Do you think of what you have seen in the new Nokia Messaging client for the N8?  Anything they have missed out?

Let us know in the comments or via Twitter @thenokianetwork

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Whilst you may not think that the title of the post is overly interesting, it is rather important nonetheless.

Application development is where all the money is right now, and vendor wars are won and lost on the amount of applications they have in their respective stores.

The Ovi Store, which is Nokia’s version, is lagging behind somewhat, and Nokia are working to address this.

Some great news for this has just became available, that as of yesterday, 16th August, the Symbian signing process has been made free by Nokia.  Of course your first question is going to be ‘What’s the catch?’.  Well the catch is that they are only going to be providing the free Symbian Signing for applications that are submitted to the Ovi Store.  Your application, must also be able to stand up to scrutiny.

Whilst this will no doubt upset some, it’s actually very fair, as some developers will try to sell their applications outside of the Ovi ecosystem to undercut it.

The Symbian Signing process used to take around four weeks and cost $215.  As of today, it is free, and only takes around 2 weeks.  Full details can be found here.

This really is great news, and is a very positive step for both Nokia and the Ovi Store.  Lets just hope the quality assurance side to the signing process is not bypassed in any way to help speed up the process, or else this will have a detrimental effect.

Do you think this reduction in cost will be welcomed by developers?

Let us know in the comments or via Twitter @thenokianetwork

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Yes, you read the title correctly folks, I have the new version of Ovi Map, Version 3.03 installed on my Nokia N86 8MP.  After the press release and announcement event this morning, of the free navigation included with the new Ovi Maps, us N86 owners were left dejected after realising that our beloved devices had been left out in the cold by Nokia.

Well, I have some good news for you, I have just downloaded and installed the E52 version of Ovi Maps, available from http://maps.nokia.com/explore-services/ovi-maps and I can confirm it is working fine so far.  You will need to download the actual SIS file, and not get the text message download or else it won’t work.

You do need at least 20MB free of internal memory on the C: though, so a good way of freeing up some valuable space, is to clear the cache in your browser, and uninstall any applications that you don’t use anymore.

I’ll report back if I find any problems soon.

Of course, don’t do this if you are worried of the consequences of it possibly bricking your phone, and also make sure you do a backup beforehand.

Let us know any feedback in the comments.

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Follow me on Twitter: @steverowlands

Nokia Beta Labs today released a new version of the Nokia Software Updater, which adds in Windows 7 support, and also improves the connectivity on the USB interface.

Another nice added gesture, is a “What’s New” feature, so when you have new firmware available to download to your device, it will tell you what changes you should notice once you have updated.

It always seemed like a bit of a joke to us Windows 7 users that Nokia was taking so long to add Windows 7 support to the Nokia Software Updater application, but I’m glad that it is now filtering through.

Remember though, that this is only a BETA release, so don’t use it unless you are happy with the possible consequences of an inappropriate bug here or there.

Nokia do say on their Beta Labs Blog though, that they don’t expect to see this software stay in BETA form for much more than a couple of weeks, so you may be just as well to wait for the official release.

I’m just downloading and installing it now, so will report back if I notice any glaring problems.  The installation has started though, so I’m happy that it is happy that I’ve got Windows 7.

Have you found any problems?  Let us know in the comments, or shoot me an email steve@thenokianetwork.com

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Ovi has just released it “Must have app of the year awards” results, broken down into 9 categories, as submitted by Forum Nokia.  Users have been voting on their chosen winner for the last couple of weeks, and now the winners are being announced.

Ovi have put up a great looking web page to announce the winners, and for them to bask in a little bit of pseudo red carpet treatment.

Head over to the Ovi site to check out the winners for yourself, or just click through here to find out instead….

Here are the categories, and the winning applications:

• Music – Winner: Shazam
• Social Networking – Winner: NimBuzz
• Twitter – Winner: Gravity
• City Guides and Mapping – Winner: Worldmate 2009
• Photo or Video – Winner: Nokia Photo Browser
• Entertainment – Winner: SPB TV
• News & Info – Winner: AccuWeather
• Game – Winner: MicroPool
• Utilities – Winner: Vlingo

So, what do you think of the results?  Do you disagree with any of them?

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There is a great application for Symbian devices called JoikuSpot produced by JoikuSoft.  What JoikuSpot does, is connect to your mobile phones 3G or 2G data connection, and then creates a WiFi hotspot, to share that connection.  Always remember to have a data plan on your mobile account though, or else data charges will soon mount up!

A great example of a use case for this is if you have a Symbian device and an iPod Touch.  When you are outside of WiFi coverage for your iPod Touch, just fire up JoikuSpot, connect to the WiFi hotspot that it creates, and you can then surf and browse the internet, iTunes store or whatever via your 3G connection.  You could even make VOIP calls from your iPod using the connection!

What causes me to write this post, is that under normal circumstances, even taking how brilliant JoikuSpot is, it’s difficult to recommend because of the price.  Ordinarily it retails at 25 Euros which is very expensive for an application, especially given the exchange rate of the UK pound to the Euro at the present time.

However, for a limited period, JoikuSpot is being offered, direct from the developers website for a bargain 7 Euros!  This really is a great price for this application considering it’s full RRP.

If you have been meaning to buy JoikuSpot for a while, then now is your best time to do so.

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Out of the box with most Nokia phones of recent times, there is generally two ways getting your emails delivered straight to your device.  The first is by using the standard S60 Messaging application, which is designed primarily for SMS messages.  To this end, HTML email is not supported, and it is usually quite a pain to setup a mailbox from scratch.

The more recent solution for S60 handsets is to use Nokia Messaging.  This is a much more well rounded email experience.  It supports HTML, is very easy to setup and provides a certain amount of eye candy.  The problem with Nokia Messaging is one of reliability.  Some Nokia phones do not experience any problems at all, whilst others seem to have very frequent outages, with seemingly no support or explanations from Nokia.  One caveat though, is that Nokia Messaging is still in Beta form, and that can be used as the excuse everytime.

However, if you are an email fanatic, and must get your emails instantly, or have ever seen how a Blackberry handles email, neither of the two Nokia solutions are satisfactory.

This is where Emoze steps in.

Now, there are two different flavours of Emoze, and this write up is centred around the Basic version, and not the Pro one.  Although I’m sure functionality is generally the same between both, just with extra features on the Pro version.  You can download Emoze either by visiting their website, where you can recieve an SMS link, or download the installer file to your PC.  Alternatively, visit m.emoze.com in your phones browser.

What Emoze does, is add a mailbox to the standard S60 Messaging application.  How this differs mainly to doing it manually, is that it is very easy to setup, and it supports HTML.

I have got Emoze setup with my Gmail account, and on the whole it performs admirably.  Performance is excellent, and generally delivers mail to my N86 even before it shows up on my Gmail webpage.  Integration throughout the operating system is also very good.  For instance, if I want to email one of the photo’s I have taken with my N86, I simply chose ‘Send’ from the photo menu, select my Emoze mailbox, and it will then create a new email, and attach the photo.

Another great feature, that is often overlooked is synchronisation of your contacts and calendar items.  Not only is this functionality useful on a day to day basis, it is also imperative in case your phone gets lost, stolen or malfunctions.  The integration with Google Calendar is fantastic, and works flawlessly.  Google Contacts is a bit more of a mixed bag.  Generally, not because of Emoze, but because the way Google handles it’s contacts is not entirely straight forward.  After the initial contact sync, in which all contacts both within Google, and on the phone are just merged, it took me a fair amount of time to sort them all out into some sort of order.  Hopefully though, after my hour or so of housekeeping, my contacts should now be fine.  All I would advise, is to make sure you do a backup first using PC Suite.

There is some way to go for Emoze before it can be recognised as one of the great email applications for S60, but luckily, nothing too major for the team to worry about.  I came across a few small bugs and annoyances, which I shall just run through now, but none of them are show-stoppers, and I will most definitely be using Emoze as my preferred mailbox weapon of choice for the foreseeable future.

HTML email is somewhat hit and miss.  I would say on average about 30% of HTML emails come through as plain text with a link to the web page version.  This may be something to do with the original way the email was built, I don’t know.  However, when a HTML email does show up properly, once you have scroll down, it doesn’t like scrolling back up.  That may just be a simple bug.

The other problem I found was when using my phone in offline mode.  If Emoze is still running in the background, it does not seem to be able to recognise that the phone is in offline mode, and starts beeping every do often to inform you that it cannot connect to mailbox.  The easy way around this is to simply close the Emoze background application.

Other than that though Emoze truly does ‘just work’.  It has been 100% reliable, and I can completely depend on it to deliver my critical mail.  For this, I would highly recommend it.  The basic version is great, and has awesome functionality considering it is completely free to use.  The Pro version comes in at a very reasonable 5 Euros per 6 months, and gets a whole host of extra features such as multiple mailboxes.  You can check this out HERE.

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Below you will find a short video (apologies for the croaky voice, I’m recovering from a heavy cold!) to show you Emoze working on a Nokia N86. HD version is available if you view this video direct on YouTube.

Nimbuzz is a social media hub style application for many mobile devices, but is particularly nice for your Symbian device.  It is not just reserved for high end Nokia devices, it works on many of the lower tier phones too.

Nimbuzz already had support for services such as MSN Messenger, GTalk, Facebook, and a whole stack of other niceties such as VOIP calls.

These days, any social media client, is running at the back of the crowd if it doesn’t have support for the hipsters using Twitter, but I’m glad to report that Nimbuzz have now fixed that anomaly in their artillery in Version 2.02 for Symbian devices.

The release came by way of a post on the Nimbuzz blog, and they even have a helpful YouTube video to show you what on offer.

The application is a fairly lightweight (for the functionality anyway) 1.25MB, and requires a few clicks to get it going on your device.  If you haven’t already got a Nimbuzz account, you will need to go through a fairly lengthy sign up process, which got a little tiresome if I’m honest.  I would prefer just to be able to login to the Twitter client using just my Twitter credentials.

However, once you are installed, and signed in all seems to run very well, and have a relatively nice and simple to use interface.  If you have used Gravity on Symbian, you will feel right at home.  It’s just not quite as slick.

To get started straight away with Nimbuzz, and remember it’s FREE, click for the download page. Or, it is available in the Ovi Store

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Nokia have today made the latest update to the Python language for S60, Version 2.0, available via the built in Software Update application.

The Python for S60 is Nokia’s port of the Python programming language, and allows core access to many of the features of S60 handsets.  Lots more information is available in the WIKI.

Whilst there seems to be no official word of the release of Version 2.0 for S60 devices, the update showed up as available on my Nokia N86.  As you can see, the update is just over 4MB in size, and takes only a few seconds to install.  Check back for more updates to this as they become available.

Is it available for your handset?  Let us know in the comments.

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Nokia’s built in mapping and navigation software, Ovi Maps, has had a small update to V3.01 09wk44 b01.  Whatever that means.

Anyway, from spending a little time having a look round, there doesn’t seem any amazing new functionality so I’m presuming the update will have been a few bug updates.

This update was available on my N86, so I’m not sure which other devices will have the update available.  At least it’s nice to know the Ovi Maps team haven’t given up on Symbian 3rd Edition just yet, as it was seeming like they were concentrating on 5th Edition only for a while.

To check if this update is available to you, just open up the SW Update application on your device, and wait for it to refresh the list.

It should show up as “Maps 3.1″.  Download and install from here is easy, but make sure you are connected to WiFi or have a data plan, or else you will get stung for a 5MB download.

Has you device been left out of the update?  Let us know in the comments.

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[Hat Tip to AAS]