After almost a year of operation, the contacts in Ovi Mail and Ovi Contacts have finally been officially merged, with Ovi Mail 2.0, according to a Beta Labs post this morning. The overlaps between Ovi Mail, Nokia Messaging and Ovi Sync have always been somewhat grey, so at least this clears up one loose end. Some quotes and links below.

Here's a typical use case (from the Beta Labs post):

Save a contact and view it from your device:

1. User opens an email from a friend in Ovi Mail on the web and sends a reply back
2. Ovi Mail shows a dialog box asking if he wants to add the person to his address book.  User says yes and fills in the entries and clicks on ‘Add contact’
3. Within a few minutes, the new contact appears in Ovi Contacts on the web because Ovi Mail now is integrated with Ovi Contacts
4. User decides to sync his phone to get the newly added contact on his phone. User can either initiate a sync from device or from Ovi Contacts on the web to sync his contacts
5. After the sync completes, user views the Phonebook on the device and the name of the friend and the newly added email address appear in the Phonebook on the phone

Also launched with Ovi Mail 2.0 is Arabic support. Over 280 Million people use Arabic as their first language. This was a challenging feature to implement, apparently, considering the fact that it’s a right-to-left language and the Ovi Mail UI had to be changed to support this orientation.

The Ovi Mail team invite you to "Please try it out at mail.ovi.com or on your device and let us know what you think here at Nokia Beta Labs."