An update on Nokia Friend View

Nokia Nokia

by Clinton Jeff | on November 27th, 2008 | 0 comments

The team over at Nokia Beta Labs just posted a huge article on what’s new with Nokia’s Friend View application.

First of all, yes, there’s an update available already. You can either re-download it from the Friend View download site or start up your Friend View application on your device, and let it check for the update.

Whats new with this update :

This update has some small fixes, probably not very visible to many but meaningful nevertheless. Some fixes were requested by our users, as e.g. supporting T9 and adding the same zoom keys as Nokia Maps for E71 & E90, among others.

They’ve also answered a lot of questions and concerns that were going around about Friend View :-

In regard to Maps and 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.

In regard to Location and 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.

While this is all well and good, I still think they need a couple basics to work out properly. Atleast a blog embeddable widget’s. Hopefully something neat and simple like the Twitter widget, and not slow/flash like the Jaiku one. Compatibility with Ping.fm would be nice. A Facebook app ?

We could always hope.

-Teh Cj

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Author Description

Clinton Jeff

Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories. Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus