GLOBAL – The good folk at Digia have been busy working on our new Nokia Conversations app over the last few weeks and we thought it would be a good idea to share some of the latest screenshots. Progress has been pretty good, but there’s lots more to be done before we’re happy to put it up on the Ovi Store.

The first screen is the app’s home screen. It’s intended to show the current highlights on the site, in a similar fashion to the carousel at the top of the home page on the web site. It won’t slide automatically, though. Instead you can slide through the top stories using your finger, which seems to us to be an action that’s particularly comfortable and satisfying on a mobile phone.

The second picture is the more familiar list view – we decided to also show the number of Facebook likes, since that is often a good indicator of which stories people liked the most. We pondered Tweets as well, but that’s harder to get reliable figures for (Tweetmeme on the site only shows part of the story). The list automatically loads more items from the site as you scroll down – a good compromise between speed/bandwidth and usability concerns.

In the next two screens, we show the article view. We’re intending to add a bit more colour here and the featured images, but including too many pictures obviously slows things down quite a bit. Used over WiFi, it’s fine, of course, but we’re also testing it on 3G, too. Being able to control the text size is definitely a key piece of usability. While people using the app on a 4-inch Nokia E7 won’t have any trouble at the default size, people using a C6-01 may well want to boost it up a little. And, of course, not everyone has 20-20 vision.

So looking good so far, but there’s plenty more still to come. We’ll share the next updates as they arrive. What are your thoughts on the best balance between features/attractiveness and the use of bandwidth?