Just couple of minutes ago Nokia Betalabs announce the graduation of  Nokia Ovi Contacts from beta stage of 18 months.

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With Ovi Contacts, you can let your friends know what you are doing and where you are. You can also check your friends’ status messages to see what your friends are up to. Ovi Contacts is all about keeping in touch with people who matter.

If you have used Nokia Chat you will find Ovi Contacts mobile application familiar. Key features: (note: supported features depend on the platform)

• Presence: Let your friends know if you are available, busy or on the phone. Check your friends’ availability.
• Enhanced presence: You can share – or hide – your favorite places with your friends. You can also let your friends know what you are listening to.
• Chat: Get in touch with your friends with chat. Convey your messages with emotions and share your location on the map via chat.

Bits from Betalabs Blog:

It is also time to look forward. Today, we provide two applications that let you access the Ovi Chat service: Ovi Contacts and Nokia Messaging Chat. Not only is this confusing to you, our users, but also inefficient for us. To consolidate our offerings, we will focus future development efforts on the Nokia Messaging Chat application, which provides access to multiple popular IM communities, including Ovi Chat.

To further improve the Nokia Messaging Chat experience, we are looking at including some of the features that made Ovi Contacts so unique among IM solutions, as well as cross-community features that will benefit users of all of our IM communities, and the addition of even more IM communities. For the development work, we will utilize the experience gained from Ovi Contacts development, as well as the valuable feedback that you have already provided for Ovi Contacts here in betalabs. We also invite you to provide any feedback about what Ovi Contacts features you would like to see incorporated into the Nokia Messaging Chat application.

The commercial Ovi Contacts client is available for compatible S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and S60 5th Edition devices through software update, as well as pre-installed with new devices. You can also download the latest client to your device through your mobile browser at http://contacts.ovi.com/dist/app.