Nokia Beta Labs. which offers often useful, bleeding edge applications and services for Nokia phones finally has a mobile site. It used to be a pain navigating the full version of Beta Labs with a mobile browser, even a capable one like the WebKit based browser on S60 3rd editon (and a couple of S40) models. With the “Services” browser on mainstream Nokia handsets, forget about it!

The new mobile site is very complete and highly usable. It has the Beta Labs Blog, Forums and a catalog of current, “archived” and “graduated” Beta Laps apps going back to 2007. There are download links for all the active and most of the archived apps that have a mobile component.

On thing that’s annoying though is the way that graduated mobile apps are presented on the Beta labs site. There is plenty of information about them but no easy way to download them. They should all be available from other Nokia channels – so why not include a link to the appropriate mobile friendly download page or tell us to use the Nokia Download application or whatever the drill is.

Other than the graduated apps problem this is a nicely done, easy to navigate and genuinely useful site. It looks like it was built in-house at Nokia rather than being handed off to a third party too. I hope the same team that created Beta Labs Mobile is involved with the soon to be released mobile web version (for S40 phones) of the Ovi store.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Technology/Mobile/Downloads

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 4 “Good”

Mobile Link: betalabs.nokia.com