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New era of Nokia Beta Labs begins

By Mike on 13 January 2009

GLOBAL – This month will see Nokia Beta Labs grow into an even more engaging and collaborative R&D beast with the switch over to its redesigned, restructured and refocussed beta website.

When we spoke to Nokia Beta Labs chief Tommi Vilkamo back in August 2008, he gave us an insight into the plans for this new site, and by the looks of the beta version those plans are beginning to manifest into reality.

Read on for more details on what the new version of Beta Labs has to offer.

According to the Beta Labs team the plan is to switch off the old site and launch the new beta labs site at some point this month. But Tommi and the team have already granted anyone access to visit the new Beta Labs offering.

With a much greater emphasis on the social networking side of things, highlights include dynamic popularity lists, a newly launched forum, and advanced filtering of content – you can now find apps according to how highly rated they are by the Beta Labs community, filter by how technically mature an application is, search by name or simple release date. Plus, you can filter apps by tags relating to categories such as a Games and Entertainment or Sharing, as well as platform, including S60 or S40, and production status (experimental or pre-commercial).

The new Beta Labs site has made it easy to find apps that have graduated from beta as well as other archived apps. Also, you can sign into the site and add your comments, ratings and feedback using your Nokia Account details.

I’ve only spent 30 minutes playing with the new site, but it’s immediately more engaging than the previous version and promises to trigger heaps more interaction and will undoubtedly help swell the Beta Labs community to an even greater scale.

The Beta Labs team are keen as always to get your feedback, so I’d recommend giving it a click and posting your thoughts on the new Beta Labs forum.

We know from having spoken to Tommi that there are more Beta Labs plans in the pipeline, but for the moment this is certainly an exciting start.

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