Nokia Notifications is the latest release from the ever-busy Beta Labs. It is an attempt to unify the various notification systems that your phone uses to let you know when something needs your attention. Read on to find out how well it works in our Nokia Notifications review.
This kind of unified notification engine has been in vogue lately, with desktop versions like Growl for the Mac and Android's 'windowshade' notification tray leading the way on the mobile front. What the Beta Labs team have realised is that such a system is badly needed on S60 phones.
Currently, any notifications (such as incoming SMS messages or missed calls) are displayed as modal dialog boxes that must be reacted to before you can carry on using the phone. You either have to acknowledge them - in which case they go away - or dismiss them - in which case they typically turn into tiny icons at the top of the screen.
Nokia Notifications takes a different approach. Sitting on your homescreen as a widget, Notifications intercepts the system-level notifications messages before they display on your screen and aggregates them into the widget. Instead of a series of interrupting dialog boxes you get one clean, clear widget bar with a speech bubble (which serves as a message counter) and a list of unattended notifications.
You still get an audible alert (depending on your profile settings) but are no longer required to attend to the notification when it comes in. Tapping on the widget brings up a list of queued notifications, or 'events' as the widget sometimes refers to them. It is interesting to not that just selecting an event from the list doesn't mark it as 'read' - you have to manually delete it from the list. The widget is aware of the state of your inbox, though, so if you ignore it and just open your messages manually it will update itself to remove any read SMS.
The whole thing is very simple, and already works pretty seamlessly with S60 5th Edition. We would have liked the option to open up contact info from the widget, and perhaps some better filtering options. Really though, the biggest problem is that the system is so neatly done you wish you could get other apps to use it - opening up the Notifications API to (e.g.) Twitter clients or other location-based services would be really handy and cut out the need for other, less elegant homescreen widgets.
We think Nokia are really on to something here and look forward to Notifications evolving into an integral part of S60.
Details
Price: Free
Size: 221 KB
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