27 November 2008

What's Up With
Nokia's Friend View Service!?

God folks from over at Nokia Beta Labs have published a huge Friend View’s post in which they are trying to clear some common concerns and questions that have arisen since Friend View’s Beta Labs launch.

First of all, a new S60 client has been released already. Updates should come automatically when you start the application on the phone. This update brings some minor bug fixes that are probably not very visible to many but meaningful nevertheless. Some fixes were requested by users, as e.g. supporting T9 and adding the same zoom keys as Nokia Maps for E71 & E90, among others.

The web version (www.friendview.nokia.com) is improved as well and now, when you go to our home page from your S60 browser you’ll be able to instantly download and install Friend View to your phone. Since last week we’ve also done some small fixes in the web UI in general.

FAQ & concerns

Maps & Cache: Friend View does cache maps in your phone’s memory card, so they are not downloaded more than once (unless you clear the cache yourself). There sometimes can be some slowness of the previously cached maps shown on screen, and this has led to a possible misconception about the loading of maps.

Also, as some of you have noticed, we’re following the Sports Tracker look-and-feel in order to share map content.

Our map content cache is shared with this version of Sports Tracker. This is the reason why Friend View maps are different than Nokia Maps, which may be on your phone already.

Location & Standby: If you have Location Sharing ON, your GPS (precise location) or Network-based (approximate location) are updated to the server and shared with your friends periodically. And while Friend View is in the background (or standby mode), your location is still updated but this happens less often.

In this way your phone saves battery. So far, Friend View does not load information from the server while it is kept in the background, it only updates again when it comes to foreground (a blinking icon on top-left corner indicates searching network) . Your location might seem old , when the application comes from background to foreground, until the foreground application re-acquires your position from GPS or network based location.