Through the years, Nokia has developed and evolved the S60 operating system into a platform that embraces mobile convergence. Furthermore, Nokia has gone beyond its device manufacturer roots, delivering mobile services and solutions that revolve around the S60 platform. One such portal that comes to mind is Nokia Beta Labs, a portal that houses applications developed by Nokia and optimized for Nokia devices.

To put things into perspective, Nokia Beta Labs is actually a community driven site. Maintained by the Nokia development team, readers are able to visit Nokia Beta Labs and check out what’s cooking in the Nokia Beta Labs via its Blog section. Hosting applications that are both currently in the Beta (yes, it ain’t called Nokia Beta Labs for nothing) stages and its completed stage, or nicknamed as Graduates by the Nokia team, Nokia Beta Labs allows you to download these applications optimized for your S60 device, test it on the go, and even leave valuable feedback for the development team to take note of and improve upon.

Applications are typically segmented into three main categories under Nokia Beta Labs: Archive, Beta and Graduate. As you might have surmised, applications that fall under the Archive section are no longer developed by the team, though some archived applications are still available for download. Removed applications, more often than not, are due to product developments that hard codes the software straight into the hardware. One such example is the Location Tagger application, which acts as a separate geo-tagging application to enter GPS location in the EXIF data of your photos. The location tagging functionality, as explained by Nokia, has now been productized, and thus will not be further developed as a standalone application.

What you’ll be interested in, is the Beta and Graduate sections which houses applications that are good to go on your S60 device. Within the Beta section, you’ll notice an indicator beside each application. This would be the progress bar, which determines the level of development on the application, ranging from an early release (as represented by a red bug), to a yellow spanner which defines the application has some known issues and finally a green star that places the application as almost completed.

Let’s take a quick tour at the Beta section first, giving you a quick overview of the numerous applications available. For one, there’s the Conversation app that groups all messages from one contact into a single thread, akin to what you experience on instant messaging programs such as Windows Live Messenger. Practical applications are also available, such as the Wellness Diary and Sports Tracker that works in tandem by allowing you to keep track of health data such as weight, your exercise regime in your calendar and the number of steps taken which is reflected by the Sports Tracker.

Remote accessing your Nokia device is also possible if you were to try out the Mobile Web Server app. By having an internet connection tagged to your Nokia device with the Mobile Web Server app running, you can access your device’s contacts, calendar and also send SMS to contacts on your device via a PC web browser. There are also more niche applications designed for Internet Tablet devices such as the Nokia N810. Applications include a Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter, which as its name suggests, converts video files to a suitable format for your Nokia Internet Tablet for you to view on the go.

We move onwards to the Graduates section, and as you guessed it, these apps are fully compatible with your Nokia devices. Familiar applications such as Share Online 3.0 and Widsets have been covered previously in our earlier articles. Other rolled out applications that have been certified ready would include features that would be a bundled application with newer devices such as Nokia Maps 2.0, or integrated into existing applications such as the Nokia Communication Center which can be found within the latest Nokia PC Suite.

To date, the plethora of applications for the S60 platform, available on Nokia Beta Labs, is only a small percentage of what you can find on the internet. S60 developers are hard at work building and coding applications that sees and fulfills the need of the consumer. Tapping upon the open source nature of the S60 platform, Forum Nokia also plays a big part in gathering innovators and showcasing their applications to a global audience, thus it’s as much a software race as it is a hardware race in the bid to gain dominance in the mobile device market. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, as we’ll be seeing greater service lineups from Nokia, especially so with the graduation of its Nokia Music PC Client in preparation of an upcoming music download service from the Nokia Music Store.