Nokia Beta Labs have released a new version of the Ovi Calendar. Ovi Calendar is the online calendar service provided through Ovi.com; users can sync their phone to the calendar and vice versa using Ovi Sync. Calendar 1.6 features support for multiple calendars, and the sharing of these with other Ovi users.

By allowing multiple calendars, you can organise topics (such as school events, family dates, personal items, etc) and share them with others as required. It’s a feature of calendars offline and online, such as Google’s Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, so this could be portrayed not as a fascinating update, but a simple bringing it into line with everybody else.

Sharing calendars allows you to share a specific calendar and its entries (events, related notes and to-do lists) with other people. For example a family might have a shared calendar for planning family events, or a sports team might share an event to help schedule training and matches.

To start testing this, head to http://organiser.ovi.com/ in your browser, and you're asked to complete a quick survey to help the team gather feedback.

Nokia Beta Labs notes that:

"Now, we’ve decided to start small.  So for now, the beta release of Calendar with multiple calendars and sharing is available only on the web.  We do support mobile browsing, though, and you’ll be able to use Ovi Calendar 1.6 Beta with all your existing Ovi Calendar data."

Existing Symbian handsets do not support multiple calendars in the Calendar application; an upgraded or alternative application would be needed. It is unlikely that this will be developed.

However this multiple calendar support is introduced in Symbian^3. This means Symbian^3 handsets, such as the Nokia N8, will support multiple calendars.

As stated on the Beta Labs blog post:

"The Ovi Calendar 1.6 release has been designed to update the Calendar web experience. You can access this experience on your device by visiting http://organiser.ovi.mobi or visiting http://organiser.ovi.com on devices with a full html browser. (Note: The mobile web site allows for viewing of your calendar events, notes and to-do items only.)

 The ability to sync multiple calendars from the Ovi Calendar website to your device’s calendar application will be supported on upcoming Nokia devices, such as the new N8."

Symbian^3 also supports CalDAV, which is likely to be the mechanism for sharing calendar information between the phone and Nokia's Ovi services.