Somewhat ironic in the light of Nokia's imminent partnership with Microsoft to produce Windows Phone phones ("joining an ecosystem"), figures have been released showing that Nokia's Ovi Store revenues (much of which was from Symbian-based smartphones) were up 719% year on year and ahead of the Google Android Market. More stats below.
One of the implications of Friday's announcements was that in Nokia drastically reducing further development of the Symbian OS and ecosystem, the future of Qt, its next-gen development platform, was also put into doubt. After all, it's argued, Windows Phone has its own tool-chain and Qt simply isn't needed. Daniel Kihlberg, one of the top guys at Nokia's Qt division, has responded to the uncertainty with a rallying article, of which some quotes are copied below.
At a Strategy and Financial Briefing, which takes place at 10 am GMT on February 11th Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is expected to outline his vision for the future strategy of the company. Rafe will be reporting live from Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel, London, where the event is taking place. You can follow our live coverage using this story or via our Twitter accounts (@aas and @allaboutmeego).
Without word of mouth, the success of an application depends on getting into an App store, and making it easy to find. The approval process of application stores is a frequently complained about issue in the developer world, and the Ovi Store is not immune from these complaints. Therefore, if you are a developer looking to get into the Ovi Store, there are a few things you should bear in mind... Read on to find out.
Nokia has released its Q4 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €884 million (down 23% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €12.65 billion (up 6% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €1090 million, up 10% from Q3. Margins in devices and services were 11.3% (down 4.1% YoY and up 0.9% QoQ).
Nokia sold more than 5 million Symbian^3 devices. Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were up, at 28.3 million, compared with 20.8 million units in Q3 2009 (up 36% YoY) and compared with 26.5 million units in Q3 2010 (up 7%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 31%, down 6% sequentially and 9% year on year, due to the overall smartphone market growth, estimated up by a huge 63% YoY. [Post updated with extra charts and quotes]
Nokia today announced the release of the Qt 1.1 SDK Technology Preview. The new SDK, based on Qt 4.7, is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the previous Qt SDK. The release gives developers an early opportunity to familiarise themselves with the next version of the SDK. A key theme of the release is to allow developers to easily get started with Qt Quick development on Symbian, Maemo 5 and the desktop. The new SDK also makes it easier for Symbian developers to use native APIs in their code.
As part of the current North American Calling All Innovators competition, Nokia have published 18 training videos for developing in the Qt framework. Due to high demand for entrants to the competition, Nokia (partnered by AT&T) have extended their deadline for entry to the 31st of March 2011. There are many prizes up for grabs, ranging from a top prize of $250K (US) with $2M in marketing for the winning applications, to a wide range of smaller cash prizes, and there are also 500 Nokia phones up for grabs too. Entrants are asked to develop their applications in Qt for the N8, and to that end, the previously mentioned training videos are available to help developers get started.
Developers looking to experiment with the latest Qt Mobility API should direct their attention to Nokia's Qt Labs, where a technology preview release of Qt Mobility 1.2 was announced during the Christmas break. The primary focus of the 1.2 release is delivering backend support for MeeGo. However, there are also some new features, which will be of interest to both MeeGo and Symbian developers. A beta release of Qt Mobility 1.2 will follow this technology preview at the end of January.
Nokia has just announced that interested parties can now make requests (by email) for FTP logins for its hosted Symbian Foundation content. This information includes: source code of the current Symbian platform, documentation, and PDK's. This has been announced via the new Symbian blog (hosted by Nokia) at symbian.nokia.com. The blog post also reports that Nokia is working to make more available via the Symbian website. It also encourages Symbian developers to look at its sister site Forum Nokia for information about current development frameworks, C++ and Qt.
A recent post of the Nokia Beta Labs blog indicates that Nokia will be discontinuing its augmented reality test-bed application - Nokia Point and Find. However it goes onto say that the underlying augmented reality (and visual search) technology will be incorporated into "the future of key experiences like Maps and Search". The technology may also become available to third party developers, presumably through a service API or similar provision.
As part of the Symbian Foundation's transition to a licensing only organisation the majority of the Symbian Foundation websites closed today. Together with the departure of the majority of the remaining staff, today marks the end of major operations by the Symbian Foundation. Of course, the Symbian platform will continue under the guidance of Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative 'direct and open model'. Some comments below.
Over on A List Apart, Peter-Paul Koch is taking a closer look at one of the current key elements of the modern smartphone, the web browser. Pulling numbers from the Stat-Counter Service, he not only points out that the leading browser is Opera, but that Nokia’s web-kit effort is sitting nicely on 17% of the global market, compared to Opera and Safari on 22% and Blackberry on 19%. Android, by comparison, is on 11%. What does that mean for website designers?
Tomi Ahonen has been an industry commentator on the smartphone for a long time (and we’ve linked to a fair number of his pieces) but his recent article about "Some Symbian Sanity" (and a fair bit about MeeGo) is not only a long and in-depth look at Nokia’s strategy, but goes over many reasons why Nokia are far from out of the smartphone game.
Quaintly described in the press release as "now available on flat pieces of dead trees", Tamoggemon Software, based in Germany, has written a book which "takes C++ programmers and transforms them into lean and mean Symbian coding machines". The book covers all Symbian versions from S60 3rd Edition onwards and covers Ovi Store and Symbian Signed - the only catch is that the book's only available in German so far - the writers are looking for an English language publisher. Photo and a link below.
Orange Wednesdays is the first of a series of 'Signature Applications' produced by Orange UK, using Qt to build for Nokia devices, and there's a fascinating interview with Mark Sage and Rafel Uddin of Orange Labs UK, talking about the app's development, about the use of Qt, the differences Symbian^3 brings to the table and the way private APIs are being replaced by the use of official, public Qt APIs.