In a nutshell:

Juggle your phone’s contacts and messages from your PC.

What’s it good for?

Composing elaborate MMS messages and updating contacts without wearing your thumbs out on your Nok’s keypad.

Judgement time...

Let’s get this out of the way first: Nokia Communication Center doesn’t really do anything new. Got the latest version of Nokia PC Suite installed on your computer? Then pretty much all of its functions are already covered by the Phone Browser, Text Message Editor, Contacts Editor and Multimedia Factory tools. What Communication Center does is replace all of these with one unified tool.

The app is carved into two main sections: contacts and messages. The former is pretty straightforward - sync your mobile with Communication Center and your contacts list will pop up. You can then edit or remove existing contacts, or add new ones, before re-syncing with your mobile. Alternatively, right-clicking a contact brings up a pop-up menu that lets you send them a message or email via PC Suite.

The messages section is slightly more complex - but not by much. Again, sync your mobile and your SMS and MMS messages will pour out into a big list. Here you can delete what you don’t want, save attachments to your PC and so on. It’s simple stuff, but useful - and what’s even better is the ability to create SMS and MMS messages in the app, then send them via your mobile. This means you can quickly type out long texts, or create elaborate slideshow MMS messages (with music!) without having to fiddle about on your mobile’s keypad.

So while there’s nothing really revolutionary here, we’d say Communication Centre is a worthwhile download for anyone who regularly syncs their Nok with PC Suite - it lets you manage your contacts and messages, doing in seconds what it would take minutes to do on your phone.

One more thing worth noting is that Communication Center is currently an early beta, and as such there are bags of bugs and issues that need ironing out. We experienced a couple of crashes and Nokia Beta Labs does warn downloaders about potential weirdness/stuff not working properly. The idea behind releasing this unfinished version is that feedback from users (check our story from last week) will decide whether these tools make it into a future edition of PC Suite.