New Nokia Maps Loader 2.0 Beta - Buy Navigation and City Guides From Your PC!

The fellas over at Nokia Beta Labs have a new PC program to help enhance your Nokia Maps experience with your N82. It allows you to purchase navigation and city guides directly from your PC. You can preview different navigation methods such as Driving, Walking, etc. before you make a purchase.

From Beta Labs,

Selecting “Guides” will let you browse through City Guides and Multimedia Guides from all over the world. Selecting one will show you information on the contents and you can download them directly to your device. It has never been so easy to find the right guide for your destination!

Also new in this program is the ability to connect several devices...

Nokia says,

New connection mode
Map Loader 2.0 now supports PC Suite connections. This means that you can connect several devices over USB or Bluetooth connection. Mass storage mode is also supported for older Nokia Maps versions and memory cards. In mass storage mode the new “Services” tab will not be available and Map Loader 2.0 will behave like Map Loader 1.x. On startup, a popup will show connected devices and will let you choose the drive/device to use. Make sure you have the latest PC Suite installed (http://www.nokia.com/pcsuite).

Keep in mind this new program is still in beta and may have bugs. Nokia is so kind to put this out their for us to try before it's ready so we can give them our personal feedback. If you try this out and have problems or suggestions be sure to leave them comments on their blog.

For more information, check out Nokia Beta Labs.

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Using The N82's Data Connection To Connect My Laptop To The Web

One of the three jobs I have involves lots of down time and sitting around while not getting paid. Pretty much I have to wait sometimes up to 2 hours a day just to have the opportunity to work and on occasion I have to go back home without a job and wait for the next day. The job is really good pay when you actually get a chance to work, so in the long run it's worth it.

Besides the reasons, during this down time I thought it would be a good idea to get some work done here on the blog and on some of my other side projects. Right now I'm sitting in my car using my N82's data connection to connect my laptop to the world wide web. To do this I have two choices. Either tether my phone to the laptop via Nokia PC Suite or use the popular application JoikuSpot to transform my phone into a Wifi hotspot.

I decided to use the first method. I might be wrong, but I think Wifi would use more battery than over a data cable. Saving battery life is crucial for me since my car charger is broken.

Steps to tethering your Nokia N82 data connection with your computer:

1) Start Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Connect your phone to PC Suite with your data cable or bluetooth.

2) Once connected, click on the 3rd icon in top row of PC Suite, it says Connect To Internet. You will then be presented with the One Touch Access window.

3) The first time I tried to connect it failed. I had to go into the settings and select AT&T United States and Nokia N82 USB as the modem. After that click connect and everything should work fine and connect.



Of course the N82 doesn't have North American 3g bands so I'm relying on an Edge connection. It's a really slow connection, but not painfully slow. I'm still able to get the basic stuff done. If you try loading a large website or downloading a file over 1mb it's not even worth it. I've found that the Opera browser renders websites much faster than Firefox so when I'm tethering I prefer using Opera. Times like this I really wish we had 3g on the N82 in North America. This would make this phone almost perfect in my eyes. You might not want to try this if you don't have an unlimited data plan with your carrier, and even AT&T has stipulations saying you can't do this with their unlimited data plan. Try At Your Own Risk. But they haven't said anything as long as you don't use it on a daily basis or download huge mp3s and movies. I've been doing this for years no and have never heard a complaint from Cingular or ATT. Also keep in mindwhen a call comes through the connection is interrupted because Edge can't stream voice and data at the same time.

Tip: Make sure you don't have any background processes on your computer that might be using the internet. A few programs I had open in my System Tray were checking for updates on their servers, includines Windows Update. It's best to disable these so that you don't use data thats not needed.

Overall I'm happy with my experience tethering the internet from my N82 to the computer. The ease of use is amazing and it's such a breeze to setup and convenient.

Have you tried tethering with your Nokia N82? If you have any questions feel free to ask.

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Nokia PC Suite Updated With PC Based Text Messaging & Calendar Viewing

Nokia PC Suite has been updated a few weeks ago and it sure is a dandy. The new version is 6.86.9.0 and brings a few welcome additions. Just to clear things up before you read on this isn't the Nseries PC Suite that probably came with your phone, this the standard Nokia PC Suite. I find this program runs faster and smoother, especially on older computers with less RAM. I prefer this version over the Nseries version.

You can now view text messages and reply to text messages all from your computer, making it easy to type out texts on the fly instead of picking up your phone. You can also view calendar entries, but you can't add or delete any. Hopefully they implement this in the future.

Just because of these two new features I have found myself using PC Suite more. And you can also connect your phone to PC Suite via bluetooth so you won't need any wires. File transfers, internet connections, text messages, everything works over bluetooth. Very handy I think.

I have also found myself using the Photo Transfer tool in PC Suite a lot more. Older versions used to crash my computer, but this one is working a lot more smoothly.

Click here to download the latest version of Nokia PC Suite. That link is for North Americans, you can browse around the site for European versions as well.

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