Another in my series of developer interviews has just been published at Nokia Conversations. This time I was chatting to Sebastian Brannstrom, creator of Podcatcher but also (for the purposes of this interview) looking at his new hit app, CoverUp, which retrieves album art for your music files on Symbian smartphones. In the chat, he talked about the app, the challenges he faced and the tools he used, especially Qt.
Nokia's Ovi Store recently recorded 7.62 million downloads in a single day. This follows on from June's announcement that Ovi Store was averaging more than 6 million downloads a day. The greater than expected jump between June and July is primarily due to the "removal of the registration and log-in requirement for free items in the mobile web channel".
Here's another in my series of interviews with some of the top developers and marketeers in the Symbian (and wider mobile) world. In this case, Jake Levant, from Fring, chatting about fring’s creation, its development, the philosophy behind its programming teams – and fring’s future.
Over at Nokia Conversations, I've been (ahem) moonlighting, in this case interviewing Tom Ojala, CEO and co-founder of Joiku, based in Finland, the makers of JoikuSpot, a software utility that shares your 3G data signal with other devices using WiFi (‘commonly referred to these days as ‘tethering’). See below for a quote and a link to the full article.
Yesterday Nokia released Qt Quick components 1.0 for Symbian, a UI component (widget) set for Qt Quick application developers and designers. The set provides a ready made set of QML based UI building blocks, that are designed to have the same look and feel as the standard (native) UI. The 40+ components cover the major UI elements including toolbars, buttons, sliders, lists, dialogs and many more.
Following on from last week's episode, which focused on roaming, here is the ninth episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This week episodes focuses on Nokia; we look at its current situation and consider what next for Nokia? 361 Degrees is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian.
Nokia's Ovi Store is continuing to grow at a rapid pace; it recently passed the 6 million downloads per day mark and now contains more than 48,000 content items, with approximately 1,000 news items being added each week. Symbian phones make up approximately 75% of the downloads (4.5 million), with Series 40 accounting for most of the remaining downloads (1.5 million). A total of 1.8 billion content items have been downloaded since June 2009.
The Qt Labs Developer Blog has just announced an update to the Qt SDK. In a case of good timing, the Qt team have released Qt Creator 2.2.1, which is mainly a bug fix release, at the same time as integrating support for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Support for MeeGo Harmattan comes on the day that the N9 was announced at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore. Read on for more details.
Nokia made a number of important announcements today at its Nokia Connection event in Singapore. The Nokia N9, a MeeGo Harmattan smartphone, was announced. Equally important was the announcement that Qt would be at the core of bringing applications to the next billion users, indicating that Nokia intends to bring Qt to its mobile phone devices. Nokia also announced three new Touch and Type Series 40 devices.
At today's Nokia Connection event in Singapore Stephen Elop, Nokia's CEO, announced that the Symbian Anna software update for the Nokia N8, C7, C6-01 and E7 would start shipping in new devices in July and would be available for all existing device owners to download by the end of August. He also announced that, over the next 12 months, Nokia intends to bring 10 new Symbian based smartphones to the market.
Nokia has re-branded its developer portal brand from Forum Nokia to Nokia Developer. At the same time the website has been redesigned, with an aim of making it easier to understand and navigate. The site operates overs six major areas: design, develop, distribute, devices, resources and community. Nokia Developer continues to support four key technologies: Java (Series 40), Web (Series 40 and Symbian), Qt (Symbian) and Windows Phone.
Here's an interesting one. Nokia and SPB are working together to bring a client for the popular Russian social network, VKontakte, to Symbian handsets. The network, spookily reminiscent of Facebook, has all the features you would expect, including personal pages, privacy controls, photo and video hosting, groups, comments... and now SPB are bringing that to the handset.
Offscreen Technologies has announced the release of its in-house integrated development environment (IDE), free of cost to anyone who wishes to use it. Named Origo, it can be downloaded from origo.offscr.com, along with various guides and further information on its use. Origo allows users to write once and automatically package their application for Symbian^3, S60 5th Edition, S60 3rd Edition, Maemo 5 and Windows Phone 7. Offscreen Technologies Ltd. states that it has published over 150 applications, and has had over 70 million downloads via the Ovi Store.
In an interview with the Nokia Conversations blog, China Edition, Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, said that "software updates to Symbian devices are expected until at least 2016", and that there is " a long history still to be paved for Symbian in the future". While Nokia has previously made it clear that Symbian investment would continue, the 2016 date is a definitive statement and may be further in the future than some have anticipated.
Yesterday Microsoft offered the media a preview of Mango, the next release of the Windows Phone platform. The release will deliver more than 500 new features, with an emphasis on communication, apps and the Internet. Mango will also see wider language support, the addition of 1500 APIs for developers and significant performance improvements. Mango is scheduled to arrive in the autumn and will be the version that Nokia uses on its first Windows Phone devices, scheduled to appear in 2012 in quantity.