With many people either picking up their new iPhone today, or upgrading their old iPhone to the new v2.0 firmware, plus updating iTunes to v7.7, we wondered what Nokia Symbian users would be doing.  Well, if you are keen on social networking, or location based services, then we suspect you’ll be installing the new Nokia Chat beta from Nokia Beta Labs.  It combines chat facilities with presence and location information, and nicely integrates it into the phone itself.  The only downside is that it uses a “Nokia account” for login, which means another new account, and another new set of friends to find and connect with.  This, we can only expect, was well through development when Nokia bought Plazes, and we hope in time Nokia link these two together; the client looks very good and is powerful, but it doesn’t need it’s own social network when it could use the existing Plazes network, or the existing Ovi networks.

If you want more information, and to download it to try out, head over to the Nokia Beta Labs website.

With this, some of Nokia’s recent company purchases, and with their slow roll out of Ovi services, it looks like Nokia may be in a position to rival Apple and Google for the provision of content as well as devices, although we suspect they’ve still got a way to go before they have all of the services neatly tied up and integrated together.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.