The next best thing to a crystal ball

Imagine this scenario: Tina urgently needs an explanation of one slide of a presentation document, and only John and Mark can help her. Looking at her phone, she sees that John is in a plane, and Mark is in a meeting and requests people to send an SMS rather than call. Psychic? Well, that's the idea behind presence.

What to like about presence

Avoid calling someone when they're in the middle of something! Presence information could include just about anything, but some of the common elements may be availability, location, call and connection status, current activity, and the capabilities of your device (useful if you're about to send an MMS to a phone that doesn't support it!).

See what you can do with Presence

There are two ways to retrieve the presence information of someone in your presence network: by subscription or by one-time request. If you subscribe, any changes in the other person's presence info are immediately updated on your phone, as long as you're connected to a mobile data network (GPRS). Or you can just do a one-time update whenever you need to.

More on how presence works

Nokia phones supporting presence