I don’t know about you, but this time of year seems to be especially crazy as we race to finish our end-of-year work projects, gear up for the holidays and then try to schedule time for some much-needed rest and relaxation. We can’t add more hours to the day but we can make the best of the time available and Ovi has some apps in Store that can help you make the most of your time.

I haven’t used a traditional bedside clock or a watch in years. I use my mobile as an anytime/anywhere clock. It’s the sole timepiece in my house outside of the clock on my microwave. When traveling and staying in hotels, my mobile and my alarm clock are right there with me in one convenient package. Try Night Stand Touch by Offscreen Technologies Ltd., available for Nokia’s touch devices, including the Nokia N97, the N97 Mini and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. 

 World clocks, scheduled weather reports and real-time flight alerts from 350 airlines are just a few reasons that WorldMate 2009 by MobiMate is the #1 Travel app for Nokia S60 phones. I’ve been traveling with WorldMate for years now. With WorldMate, you can set your home city and keep track of the time in up to 4 additional cities. Let’s say you’re flying from Dallas to Helsinki via London and doing a return trip through New York. That’s 4 time zones and trust me; you’ll want to keep on top of the time changes. The Weathercaster is also a handy feature. Schedule a morning or evening weather report and you’re sure to know whether you’ll need a coat when you arrive at your destination. Flight Alerts are a Gold Service feature, but it’s well worth the extra cost and really saves time when you need those updates on the fly. I have this app on my Nokia N97 and it’s available for a wide range of S60 touch and non-touch devices.          

You’ve put in the time and worked up a sweat but not sure if your workout has got you pumped enough? Try the Heart Rate Monitor by Pico Brothers Ltd. Just tap the screen a few times in synch with your pulse and your heart rate shows up instantly. Works like a charm. Check out this quick video introduction to see just how easy it is to use. This app is available for touch devices such as the Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. 

They say time waits for no man and I think it’s fair to say that no man or woman wants to wait for long downloads. If high speed access to mobile content is what you are after then try Mobile Download Accelerator by 1000CHI Software. The app can be set to operate on your device in the background or on a one-off basis to speed up specific download sessions while saving battery life. This Java app is available for Nokia Series 40 and S60 non-touch and touch devices like my Nokia N97. 

I used to consider myself a chess master. But now, I could use some practice and a timer to help with some quick thinking. With Chess Clock Touch by Offscreen, you can set the timer for yourself and your opponent. You can also set the waiting delay and pause the close. This app is available for S60 5^th Edition (Nokia N97 and 5800 XpressMusic) and S60 3.2 devices (including Nokia E72, E52 and N86 8MP).

Go ahead! Browse the Store and put time on your side with these great apps. http://store.ovi.com

And be sure to let us know of any cool apps you’ve discovered as well. 

Best – Eric

Hi, I’m Meenakshi. I look after product management for Mail and Chat. The Mail team is happy to have this opportunity to communicate with the global Ovi community. Maybe you’re a Mail user. Or maybe not—yet. In either case, we’ll be keeping you informed of new features in each Ovi Mail release, as well as tips, ideas, and great stories that we hear from our customers.

More than 2 million people use Mail on their phones and on the web. It’s easy to set up and easy to use.  And with recent web Mail update, it’s even easier to use. No matter what page you’re on, the navigation menu in the left column stays the same—so you always know exactly where to find what you’re looking for. Sounds simple but we think you’ll find this change quite useful.

We’ve also added support for four new languages: Thai, Simplified Chinese (PRC), Russian, and Finnish. If you’re ready to start emailing in one of the new languages, go to mail.ovi.com, choose Language, and make your selection. 

What’s that? You don’t already have a free ovi.com email address? You can create one right now on your Nokia phone—and leave the PC out of the picture entirely. You’ll also be pleased to discover that the credentials you use for Mail work for all other Ovi services. Sign up for you@ovi.com. It’s that simple.

 We’d love to hear your feedback about Mail. Add your thoughts to the comments.

Meenakshi

We will be making updates to the Store that will require us to take the service offline for approximately one hour tonight, from 8 – 9 PM EST. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll resume Store and Publish services as soon as possible!
Sincerely,

The Store Team

 For all those music lovers out there, I’ve got some good  news. It’s called Nokia Ovi Player. While not entirely new, I think there are some things you’re going like about this software.

Ovi Player is the new name for the earlier Nokia Music application. Ovi Player is not a ground-up rebuild of Nokia Music, but it does contain some new features that will make it even easier to use.

 Ovi Player contains some new views to help you navigate and enjoy your music collection. The ‘recently added’ view is used by many people as a way of keeping track of their new music. This enhanced view shows your recently added music grouped by albums together with cover art. In addition, the introduction of a ‘filter column’ on the detailed view will also help you browse your music collection more easily.

 We’ve also redesigned the player controls to be more compact and to offer a more responsive volume control and track position selector.

Ovi Player is compatible with all existing Nokia Music Stores.  When viewing Nokia Music Store using Ovi Player, the ‘music queue’ is now retractable to allow the best possible browsing experience. The queue is retracted by default but can be exposed by hovering over a simple arrow control.

 When getting new music, the download progress is now displayed in a consolidated ‘progress panel’ at the bottom of the application. This panel also lets you monitor your device music transfer status.

 As well as containing numerous defect fixes and some performance enhancements, this is the first version of our application to fully support Windows 7.

We’re confident that this is by far the best version of our application yet. We hope you and the millions of other active users continue to enjoy it as we work on the next round of improvements. So give it a try and let us know what you think below.  http://music.nokia.com/download

Mark

We here at Ovi love our fans. And they love our Historical Ovi Tweets! A couple of weeks back we started hearing rumors that there are “fan tweets” going around the interwebs, and whaddyaknow: the rumors were true!

We also found out that we are apparently quite famous in the Philippine blogosphere, as an organization called the Pinoy Expat Blog Awards (PEBA) has not only made an Ovi by Nokia promo video (we’ll post that as well here soon!), but launched an entire Historical Ovi Tweets competition! We here at Historical Ovi Tweets HQ (i.e. my couch) have watched new Ovi fan tweets pop up almost daily for the past couple of weeks, and we figured it’s only right we post some of them here, as they just look so cool!

So, let’s get started!

The first one is from artemis070829 who sent this one directly to us. It features the noted chessmaster Emanuel Lasker (and his nemesis Wilhelm Steinitz), and we just thought it was hilarious Thanks, artemis070829, your tweet will be made into a T-shirt and shipped to you shortly!!

The next one is actually made by yours truly, but it was featured at HistoricalTweets.com a while back, and a commentor by the name of Anusha made such a great suggestion for an alternative text that we just had to feature it here:

Love it! Then we have the PEBA bloggers as well. Since it was sort of a competition, we chose the winner (which, by the way, was so hard since the tweets were all so friggin’ good!) and it is….

The superb Cyrano de Bergerac tweet (click!!) from NEBZ of Isla de Nebz! Congrats, NEBZ! Your tweet will also be made into a T-shirt and sent to you!

Another fantastic fan tweet comes from Reymos of “My World is Getting Smaller Every Day” in the form of Michelangelo’s David (click!!), who came in second and will also get his tweet made into a T-shirt (congrats, Reymos!).

Other cool fan art comes from AZEL of Panunumbalik ng Ulirat in the form of David and Aphrodite (click!!)…

The super funny “Scream” tweet (click!!) from the Pope of Palipasan…

…and Lady Liberty’s tweet (click!!) from the DETH of Minddeth!

We would just like to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who made and submitted their tweets!! Have YOU already sent us your own Historical Ovi Tweet?

Have you already submitted your potentially prize-winning entry to the InnOviate competition? If not, then get on it STAT! If you don’t yet know what this InnOviate thing is all about, here’s a quick lowdown:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So basically we want you to grab a friend to hold the camera (or whatever needs holding), make a video, photo, recording, blog post etc. on you using (or misusing!) an app, ringtone, wallpaper or anything you can find in Store in an innovative way and submit your entry here.

You have until Friday November 6th 2009, so be quick! The prizes for the winning entry are pretty good too… you get to choose two items from the following products: Nokia N97, Nokia N97 Mini, Nokia N900 and Nokia BH-905!

Get creative!

This week’s Tweet post features not one, but two historical characters! In our first tweet of the week, musical wünderkind Mozart discusses ring tones and Ovi with his long-time homeboy, Joseph Haydn:

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And in the second one, Beethoven in his usual shy manner admits he loves Lady Gaga (and Ovi):

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I’m pleased to share the news that we’ve made redownloading of premium content available for Store users. Redownloading is as simple as it sounds – it lets Ovi Store users, who previously purchased and downloaded content to their device, to redownload, recover, and restore the content in the event that something happens to it. Think of it as content insurance.

Every day, millions of users from more than 180 countries, using a wide range of Nokia devices have discovered, purchased, and downloaded cool new apps and games, like Shazam, Gravity, and Pac-Man (my personal favorite) from the Store. They use these apps and games to enhance their lives—to discover new music, to stay in touch with their friends and followers, or to simply entertain themselves and pass the time by playing a classic arcade game. However, as with any digital content, there is the risk of loss or breakage. Was the file downloaded properly? Did you lose your network connection while downloading? Was the content accidentally deleted? Did a software update render the content incompatible? Did you reset your device? All of these events can occur, and can make it challenging for you to enjoy the wide range of apps, games, ringtones, podcasts, and video clips from Ovi Store.

With this latest Store release, we’ve added a simple way for you to restore content that you purchased and downloaded through Store to your device. We take very seriously the fulfillment of content that is acquired through the Store, and while we can’t prevent certain events that may cause damage or the loss of content, we can make it easier for you to re-acquire it. Please watch this short tutorial below to learn more about how to redownload previously purchased content.

As the tutorial explains, if you use the Store through our mobile client application, you’ll be required to upgrade to the newest version on S60 devices—look for version 1.5(387) or higher—and on Series 40 devices—look for version 1.6.1 or higher—to take advantage of redownloading. The latest version of Ovi store for S60 devices is rolling out now while the Series 40 version will begin rolling out at the end of this week. If you receive a prompt to update your client, please accept it!

If you shop the Store through our mobile web site at store.ovi.com on your Nokia mobile browser, the feature is enabled today.

And regardless of how you shop the Store, we will honor purchases made before this new version, so if you purchased the BlockGO game in August and it didn’t download properly, give it another shot by visiting the My Stuff section of the store.

We hope content redownloading will improve the way you use and enjoy content acquired through the Store by providing a simple, easy, and no-hassle way to make you and your content whole again.

- Michael

PS: We also updated our search experience, making it easier to access what you’re looking for across our entire content catalog. We highly value your feedback, so let us know what you think.

Confession time: Files is my favorite Ovi service. It really is. I know you’re supposed to love all your kids equally, but I’m only human! A lesser known fact about me is that I’m actually still in school (HSE all the way, woot!) and Files pretty much got me through the recent writing of my master’s thesis. So I thank you for that, Files.

Anyway, back to the post. Sun Tzu (below) is of course known for writing the very famous book “The Art of War”, which tackled the issues of military strategy and management of conflicts. He was also a heroic general for the ancient Chinese king Helü of Wu who reportedly won many battles with Sun Tzu’s help. But enough about that guy: the real reason I wanted to make a post about Sun Tzu was, of course, so that I could post this:

Click! (SFW, albeit a bit disturbing)

Now, my life is complete.

Oh right, here’s this week’s Tweet!

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