Nokia releases Point & Find, updates Nokia Messaging

Nokia launched their new Point & Find service into beta today and updated Nokia Messaging to support Windows Live Hotmail. Point & Find allows you to snap a photo of something and be directed to relevant information and content.

The beta of Point & Find is available in the UK and US and is focused on movies but the service will expand into other fields and countries. Nokia see this as a way for stores and companies to launch campaigns and promotions by giving easy access to information on products and services.

Nokia has offered support for embedding data into barcodes for a while now - Nokia Mobile Codes lets you generate either a Datamatrix or QR code with link, text or business card info embedded into it.

Point & Find takes this a step further. With it you can shoot a photo of a movie poster and be directed to content like the trailer, reviews and even info on the closest theaters showing the movie, taking advantage of the GPS capabilities of the phones.

As a fallback, there's a category specific text search in case you have nothing handy to photograph. It can also recognize barcodes so you can scan the barcode of a product and get product reviews and other info.

The other bit of news that came out of Espoo is that Nokia's push email service - Nokia Messaging - has added support for Windows Live Hotmail in addition to the already supported Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and AOL Mail.

Nokia Messaging push email service is currently free and supports 19 Nokia devices and gives you access to up to 10 email accounts. Nokia 5800 is not supported yet, that will happen in May. Nokia E75 will become the first device with the application preinstalled and it will probably be found on future devices as well.