The busy bees over at Nokia Beta Labs have released an updated version of yet another PC program to assist your Nokia smartphone. We already have PC Suite, Nseries PC Suite, Ovi Suite, and this one Nokia Photos.

Nokia photos is a great tool to keep track of everything you snap from your device or any other device, but like all the other PC programs that Nokia releases its memory hungry and will easily bog down an older computer. If you have a fast computer than you don't have much to worry about.

What is Nokia Photos Exactly?

Nokia Photos 1.5 can now import pictures and videos from any S60 device, digital camera, memory stick as well as from your hard disk. If you have an Nseries phone, you can do even more with Nokia Photos: for example, you can load your device with tons of content from your PC. Nokia Photos converts videos to the right format so that they play in your device. It can also shrink pictures to the screen resolution so that they do not take up too much space on your phone. This way you can carry thousands of pictures with you all the time. Newer devices like N78 and N96 understand tags, albums and other organization in Nokia Photos and display them in the Photos application on the phone.

I think that feature is great I wonder what video formats it supports.

What About Maps and Geotagged Photos?

You can visualize your geotagged pictures on the new map view. You can also manually position any picture or video on the map to geotag it. We use technology from Nokia Maps so you can do the same things that are familiar to you in your phone like searching for cities, addresses and places of interest as well as saving your favorite places.

Awesome, it's about time Nokia gives us a reason to geotag photos besides Google Maps, Flickr, and Sportstracker.

And Of Course, It Works With Ovi

Apart from the evident Ovi look and feel, you will find that it is much easier to setup Nokia Photos to share your media on Ovi. And, of course, Ovi can understand your geotagged pictures and videos and show them on a map if you choose so.

Want to learn more? Check out Nokia Beta Labs to download the program and make sure you leave the fellas over there your feedback.

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It's been a busy morning for Nokia Beta Labs. They've brought a few updates to some of the applications they've already had, and introduced us to the new Nokia Communication Center which I have quickly fell in love with.

Nokia Communication Center
First off I'll start with Nokia Communication Center. If you've already tried out the Nokia Beta Labs program called PC Phone than you might find this redundant. Even I first questioned why they would do this. Well I've never really liked PC Phone I couldn't get it to work properly and the need for a web browser was kind of a downfall. What Nokia Communicator will eventually be is a add on to Nokia PC Suite. Managing contacts and messages has never been easier. Sure I showed you guys a few weeks ago how PC Suite currently allows you to view and reply to text messages, but that was miniature compared to this new program. What I like about Communication Center is it has all your texts and MMS messages folders including the outbox and sent messages. You can reply to, forward and send new messages all from this program.You also have a place to manage your contacts which comes in handy.

Key features:

• Create and send messages easily
• Receive, view, forward, and reply to messages as they arrive
• Compose multimedia messages effortlessly with easy access to the images on both PC and device
• Manage messages, and sort and group them to quickly find what you are looking for
• Display all your messages in a timeline
• Manage all the contacts stored on your device
• Add new contacts with ease
• Create contact cards complete with thumbnail images

Right now the program is a separate install from PC Suite. It's not yet integrated. I actually think this is a great solution for managing my phone at work. I don't think it's necessary to install the full PC Suite at work, but Nokia Communicator is all I need. It's only a 7mb installation so it won't take up very much memory. Now at work I hardly even need to touch my phone, since most people know to text me rather than call me during work hours. If you have a bluetooth adapter or blue tooth built into your computer it just makes life that much easier. Keep in mind this program is in testing mode right now and you might find a few quarks. If you do head over to Nokia Beta Labs and let them know your issue so they can fix it in the next version. This is the whole point of Beta Labs. Click here to try out Nokia Communication Center. Update: Looks like you need to have PC Suite installed as well, the latest version in fact. So my idea about having only this program installed on my work computer is useless unless I want to install the full pc suite.

Location Tagger
Location Tagger Beta has been updated for the last time. Reason being is it will be integrated into most new Nseries phones that have yet to be released. The Nokia N82 has location tagging built in since the latest firmware update, but other than that all other Nokia smartphones need this separate application. If you haven't tried it yet, Location Tagger allows you to automatically add the GPS location of each photo you take to the file so that you can add it to a map on Flickr or Google. Here is an example of me using Location Tagger for my day at Disneyland.

New in this release:

• Persistent log. Now when you exit the application, your list of images in your logs tab will not disappear. When you delete an image from the Gallery of File Manager, the item will also be removed from the logs tag.
• File renaming. There is additional option in the Settings menu to rename tagged file. The file name will be added _NLT as suffix. For example, if the original file name is image001.jpg, it will be renamed to image001_NLT.jpg. This feature will allow you to easily differentiate between tagged and non-tagged files.
• Get location from cache. As you may know from our last posting that Location Tagger tags pictures with the last known position in the last 1 hour. If there is no last known position, it will put pictures in the queue until time-out. We added a new feature that allows you to get location from GPS device’s cache.
• Optimization and some bug fixes. This new version should run relatively faster than the previous one.

Click here to download or learn about Location Tagger.

A Few More Updates From Beta Labs
Nokia Channels has been rebranded and reloaded. It is now called Nokia Headlines. I've never been too interested in this application but hey you can click here to check it out. Why not its free.

Nokia Text Messenger, a lighter version of the new Communication Center has been updated. It's only for Vista though, so if you have Vista it might be worth a try.

Do you find any of these beta applications useful? Do you like what Nokia is doing with Beta Labs? I think it's great they have this program allowing users to check out new applications before they are considered stable and final. It gives us a way to add feedback for the developers.

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Nokia PC Suite has been updated a few weeks ago and it sure is a dandy. The new version is 6.86.9.0 and brings a few welcome additions.

You can now view text messages and reply to text messages all from your computer. You can also view calendar entries, but you can't add or delete any. Hopefully they implement this in the future.

Just because of these two new features I have found myself using PC Suite more. And you can also connect your phone to PC Suite via bluetooth so you won't need any wires.

I have also found myself using the Photo Transfer tool in PC Suite a lot more. Older versions used to crash my computer, but this one is working a lot more smoothly.

Click here to download the latest version of Nokia PC Suite. That link is for North Americans, you can browse around the site for European versions as well.

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