Nokia Beta Labs isn’t just there for the Symbian things in life. As well as pumping out bleeding edge S60 apps at what seems like a rate of twenty or so a day, Nokia have also released experimental PC software - usually novel takes on their synching apps or ways of controlling you phone from the desktop.
Nokias Music is at first glance a bit of a departure, given that it is an iTunes-like music player and organiser that lets you manage your digital music collection and hook up to a wide range of MP3 players. You can knock together playlists and rip CDs directly to connected devices.
Obviously, this primarily intended to e used with Nokia phones like the N81 and N95 but perhaps leaving things open will convince a few people to give a music-oriented smartphone a try - particularly when Nokia rolls out more phone-oriented features like Nokia Music Store integration.
Nokia Music PC Client is a 63MB download for Windows Vista and XP with service pack 2, available here.
Ever wanted to copy a file from your PC onto your phone, but don’t fancy the hassle of connecting via USB and fiddling around with a file manager?
If your phone supports wifi and you have a Windows XP machine, Miniserver could be just what you need.
Miniserver is - as its name might suggest - a mini webserver.
Install it on your PC and tell it the directories that you want to share and then simply use your phone’s wifi connection to browse to a specially-created web page where you can download files from the shared directory to your phone, or vice-versa.
As well as an XP PC you will need a working wifi router that both the PC and phone can connect to. The app will autodetect your PC’s network settings and tell you the address to which you need to point your phone’s browser.
Although the app can be configured to run automatically when your PC starts up, it doesn’t seem to have much in the way of security so I would recommend not sharing any sensitive files and only enabling it when you need to copy a file - at least until that version number climbs a little higher.
Nokia have released updates the firmware (the built-in software that runs the phone) to both the N81 and N95 8GB devices.
The N81 update provides improvements to Wi-Fi performance and management, memory handling and camera stability, while the N95 8GB receives bug fixes to Nokia Maps and the integrated web browser.
The updates can be downloaded using the Nokia Software Updater - or at least it can if you have access to a PC running either Windows 2000, XP or Vista. Mac and Linux users are out of luck, as are people who just don’t own a computer.
Aren’t Nokia always telling us that our phones are computers nowadays, anyway? As both phones have wireless internet access and 8 GB of storage, surely it should be possible to download this kind of update straight to the phone without a PC acting as middle-man?
