Nokia Beta Labs spring cleaned and psyched about Ovi Store

GLOBAL – There’s been a bunch of activity over at Nokia Beta Labs this week, with a couple of fresh app updates and some significant stuff being laid to rest. But it’s all good, and this particular Beta Labs spring clean marks a milestone moment as we begin to spy swarms of exciting apps buzzing over the horizon with the imminent arrival of Nokia’s upcoming Ovi Store.

Read on to find out more about what’s been happening this week over at Nokia Beta Labs.
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Symbian Smartphone Show: browser battles go mobile

LONDON, England – The Internet browser wars have been escalating of late, with Google’s Chrome mixing it up with Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on the desktop front. But things are becoming just as heated when it comes to the mobile Internet, with Mozilla and Opera releasing new browsers not just in the same week, but on the same day.

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Jeppe – is this the new face of home video chat?

HELSINKi, Finland – This morning I came across an unusual new character in the Nokia corridors – a wheeled home video conferencing robot called Jeppe. It’s the latest creation to emerge from the Nokia Research Centre Smart Spaces lab, a place where the teams focus on researching innovative solutions to how devices and services talk to each other, and applications such as remotely managing our homes or tracking our general well-being using “smart environments”. In this instance, the Jeppe prototype is a new experiment that explores how we might accept a different breed of video communication in our homes that’s more compelling and breaks the mould of the traditional PC/webcam scenario.

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Exploring the Linux learning curve

BERLIN, Germany – Mentioning Nokia and Linux in the same breath has been somewhat taboo recently. Especially since the merest utterance has previously led to false speculations on Nokia’s future mobile platform focus, which clearly remains Symbian, although Linux and open-source clearly have a role to play (a Linux-based system, Maemo, forms the backbone of Nokia’s N810 and N800 Internet Tablets). This is something that Nokia’s head of software, Ari Jaaksi, openly delved into at the Handsets World event in Berlin earlier this week. However, what is clear is that there are some nerve-striking challenges that need to be openly addressed.