Nokia N900, Maemo, MeeGo, WRT, QT and Trends

Ok, I was at Nokia Innovation day held at Jalan Ampang (management house) on 5 April 2010.

It was fun to meet up with some old tech nerds that I have known for years. And these people are still doing programming. That's good to hear.

The event was kicked off pretty much on time and I think the co-organizers Nokia and MDec organized it well, thumbs up!

Just a quick appreciation about the speakers from Nokia APAC team.
  • Gary Chan (Developer Relations Manager for Forum Nokia APAC) is really a great speaker and I like his English. He has got good blend of styles and charisma.
  • Glen Cha (Head of Product Management, Singapore , Malaysia and Brunei) is more humble and exhibits some comedic acts. It works well too.
  • Nicholas Foo (Head of Technical services and consultancy, APAC) is much more mature and requires serious attention. He speaks equally well and usually straight to the point.

Let's go straight to the point.

Nokia realy admitted that they are late into the game of mobile apps.

All of us understood that culture of developing mobile apps and allow users to not just download but pay for it via the 'AppStore' or in Nokia sense the OVI store is the current gold rush for software developers.

Bear in mind, the software business is a tough one. It is not easy to get users to buy software these days. And it is all about trends.

So, Nokia understood that to compete well in this culture where iPhone seems to lead, they have to create something similar.

For your information, 4 billion people have mobile devices while 1.3 billion out of it are using Nokias. In the smart phone category, 43% are Nokia follow Blackberry, Apple, Android and Microsoft.

And there are 450 million mobile internet users which translates to 1 in 4 people in total.

Thus, to get the ball rolling, Nokia announced it as company strategy since the past 2 years to make mobile application development as the pillar of focus for the company. Nokia realized that this is the culture and is the gold rush for developers and hence it is a good blend.

So, they created a totally new software platform roadmap.
  • Services level : OVI services
  • Apps level: Web runtime (WRT), QT(Native runtime)
  • Platform level: Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo
In short, there will be just three operation systems (Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo) and developers only need to learn two types of programming; WRT and QT.

WRT offers a way to develop apps for Nokia phone using standard web based technology like HTML, AJAX, Javascript and etc. And these apps are called Widgets.

QT offers a way to harness the power of the devices, hence it is suitable for games.

For your information, QT is just like Java and Nokia just recently acquired.

I can understand the reason they do that, that is to do-away with Java and create for Nokia a so-called Nokia Java. This is important in order to fight against competition and also in many ways, is beneficial to the economy.

More surprisingly is that they are also making QT open source.

To add more to on-going excitements, on 27 Jan 2010, Nokia also announced the availability of OVI Maps with free navigational capabilities for free. What this means is that if you buy the latest Nokia smart phones, you will get free GPRS for life. What a great way to kill competitors ?

Actually, the reason behind it is to empower developers, just like 'Facebook Connect' which allows developers to connect to so many Facebook users (as data), OVI Maps via it APIs will allow developers to reach users (as data), particularly useful for LBS (Location Based) application.

In other words, Nokia is just about to start a revolution which everybody can be online for 24 hours for the rest of our lives, because you can be tracked anywhere in the world.

To kick start this uncharted territory, Nokia has just recently launched the N900. A fully multi-tasking smart phone with built-in QT runtime.

This is a gold rush for software developers and your first gold site is myPrize.

Comments

james said…
Forum Nokia announces a technical workshop to learn how to create WRT and know more about QT in Sydney, Australia on 11th May, 2010. Great opportunity for mobile developers.
Checkout: http://www.codeofpartnership.com/home.html
Thanks
TheRohan said…
Just came across this fantastic Java ME training course intended for experienced and intermediate developers interested in adding connectivity features to an MIDP application.
This course includes five lectures with incentive lab exercises. The lectures cover Networking, Wireless Messaging API 2.0, Location API, Bluetooth API for Java ME, and Web Services.
Download it here http://bit.ly/b6wgwi
Its great guys, check it out!!