Nokia has released Nokia Chat, an IM application on steroids.
Nokia Chat is an IM application which lets you share your status and your geographical location with your friends.
Nokia Chat is based on XMPP/Jabber the open standard IM protocol behind Google Talk and a number of other IM communities. This makes Nokia Chat compatible/interoperable with Google Talk and other Jabber based communities. (more…)
UPDATED below the fold
Wow - I am very, very impressed! I have just taken Nokia Sports Tracker Beta for a quick spin and this new service, functionality and strategic direction has left me speechless.
Let's start with a recap. Nokia Sports Tracker was released in March this year. It was released as stand alone application to be used with a Nokia device with built in GPS or with an external GPS receiver. I covered this excellent application many times on the blog.
The application tracks a variety of sports activities and measures the distance, speed, time etc and present the data in form of a workout sunnary. The data could be exported and used with a map application to track your activities. From the very start I was impressed by the application and the passion and dedication displayed by the team of people behind the application.
They were quick to listen to feedback and released new versions and new features with an impressive speed. However, for the past few months it's been rather quiet from the Nokia Sports Tracker team.
Now I understand. They have been hard at work perfecting the next logical step - exactly aligned with Nokia's Ovi annoucement - services!
Nokia Sports Tracker Beta is the name of the online service (graciously free of charge- thanks for that Nokia) for the Nokia Sports Tracker application.
Some of the highlights of the service:
You start with creating a free user account either from Nokia Sports Tracker Beta or directly from the application which can be dowloaded from here.
Earlier this week Nokia launched a new brand, Ovi, marking the company's entrance in to the endless area of Internet Services.
Ovi, meaning "door" in Finnish, will be the umbrella brand and destination to get access to Nokia's Internet Services. Two new services were introduced, Music and Games, in addition to the existing Nokia Map offering - Smart2Go.
The services will be available directly from Nokia devices and/or via a PC. There is a great presentation and more information about these services from Nokia: Go Play press site.
I think the new brand and focus on services makes perfect sense. Nokia can leverage the enormous distributing power they have by being the number one handset manufacturer in the world churning out tens of millions of devices.
The new services will be rolled out over the next 6-9 months, I can't wait.
The Nokia: Go Play launch party was amazing! great music, abundance of food, drinks and many, many interesting people. More photos from the party on my Flickr.
