Nokia releases Nokia Xpress Beta app for Lumia phones

After the announcement of Nokia's new flagship phone last month – the Lumia 920 – the company now aims to improve its older Lumia smartphones further. Nokia has released the beta version of its new Nokia Xpress app for Lumia smartphones running on Windows Phone 7. According to a post on Nokia’s Beta Labs blog, the app enables you to view web-based content the way you would read a magazine. Nokia has released a video that explains some of the features of the app.h

The Nokia Xpress app compresses the data you download while you are using it, thus greatly reducing data usage. This is especially useful for those who have caps on their data plans. The app also allows you to store any page you have viewed and view it later when you don’t have access to a data connection. Another feature is SkyDrive integration. The app enables you to save to SkyDrive, videos and other forms of content that you view in the app, without downloading it separately for SkyDrive. The videos can then be downloaded on to any device with SkyDrive.

The Nokia Xpress Beta app enables you to set up feeds for your most-visited sites. It also automatically places livetiles to sites you frequent on the homes creen. Another major feature is one-click language translations for viewing websites that are normally in a foreign language.

Nokia releases the beta for Nokia Xpress for Lumia

Recently, the technical specifications, price and a photo of the Nokia Lumia 510 were leaked. According to a report by GSMArena, the website that received the leaked photo of the Lumia 510, “We first heard about the Lumia 510 last month, in a leak that revealed that the low-end smartphone would sport a 4-inch display, have 4 GB of internal memory, and run on just 256 MB of RAM. Those specs have just been confirmed by our own source, who also sent us the picture above and hinted that the initial price will be $150. The Lumia 510 is aimed at targeting the entry-level smartphone market, and will likely start in China where smartphone ownership has nearly tripled since 2010.” The website mentions that the handset could be launched across the globe by early 2013.

There is no word yet on the operating system the Lumia 510 handset will run on, but given its previous track record, Microsoft has managed to run Windows Phone 7.5 on handsets featuring 256MB of RAM. So this could be the OS used on this yet unannounced entry level smartphone.

When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8, the company also announced Windows Phone 7.8 which is a sort of ‘value pack’ for existing Windows Phone devices and not Windows Phone 8. All handsets running WP 7.5 or Mango will be upgradeable to WP 7.8, and one of the new features that the update brings with it is the new customisable home screen from WP 8.