PR1.2 has one of few last features I was working on before departing: face recognition. Nice work of my teammates in Gallery: if you activate face recognition, there will be small bubbles with question marks on faces without assigned contacts in pictures (Gallery shows them if you tap the picture). Pressing the question mark will bring a dialog to enter the name or select a contact. If face recognition algorithm "sees" a similar face with already assigned contact, it suggests the name. Once selected, names are shown near the faces. One can browse pictures by assigned names as well. All in all, use is simple and natural.

When pictures are shared to Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa, the names and face regions optionally transferred as well, you can select per-picture whether this information would be shared. Privacy and different settings around face recognition are available in Gallery's settings page.

The face recognition API should allow easy integration for other applications and you are not limited to associate contacts only. The algorithm is Nokia proprietary and is on par or better than what's available on the market, depending on lightning and face conditions, of course.