What’s up with Friend View!

Hi all! We are very grateful about all the feedback we’ve got during Friend View’s first three weeks of public experience in Beta Labs.

We have been reading feedback thoroughly and discussing it in the team. There have been many questions and we have been answering as many as possible, some through e-mail and some by replying to comments on the Beta Labs’ Blog and even in some other blogs. Unfortunately, it is not possible to answer to each and everyone, so through this new post we’ll try to clear some common concerns and questions that have arisen since Friend View’s Beta Labs launch.

Client update

A new S60 client has been released already. Updates should come automatically when you start the application on the phone.

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.

Web version improved

There is already a mobile version of www.friendview.nokia.com for downloading the client. 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.

Keep up with Friend View

We are working on more improvements and considering your ideas and requests. There is still a long way to go, and we’ll hope to keep hearing your comments to make Friend View more fun and interesting.

Let us hear from you!